I don’t remember my father’s voice anymore. Sometimes, I remember the words he told or might have told me. But the voice is gone. It was thirty years ago that I last heard his voice. Also the look of him is gone from my memory. I know how he looked like and his pictures scattered in my apartment and hidden in my wallet remind me of the very handsome man he used to be. But these pictures are static and two-dimensional. Sometimes, after waking up I know I saw him and maybe even talked to him in my dreams but I don’t remember anymore when I am awake. Other time, taking a tram in my home city I thought I caught his sight walking down the street, but I didn’t need to jump out of the tram to follow him, since I knew that he was somewhere unreachable to the living.
Once, when I was visiting in Lyon with my professor and fellow assistants from the University I worked at that time, some of us went to a brasserie for breakfast. And then I heard it. I heard my father’s voice coming from a man standing about five meters in front of me. He was standing with his back to me, being almost of my stature and even seeming to be a couple of centimeters smaller than me now, as I know my father was. This man was chatting merrily in French with his friends or colleagues, just as my father often did when I, aged from six to nine years, was with him and my mother in Algeria. These were the truest and sharpest memories saved somewhere very, very deep, that this complete stranger unbeknownst to him dug out and presented to me. For a moment, I was tempted by my curiosity to walk and look into that man’s face. But I decided against it. You are right to assume that I didn’t want the disappointment of this man not being my father to spoil that magic moment of hearing his voice.
I still don’t remember his voice and neither his looks when I try to recall them. When they come, then they come unexpectedly and they are given to me by the living. It is as if my father is pouring magical rain drops of his looks and sounds on various people. And these drops glitter in the sun of his love to me and my love to him making me recognize these little drops of his being.
And now there is a very special person in my life who brings me three-dimensional memories of my father that no pictures, I have, have ever captured. These visual memories are so true and so vivid and they fill me with endless love and happiness of being my father’s daughter.
This special person giving me such enormous gifts of memories of my father is my son. And when I think that I passed this to my son, I realize that through all my life I bear the gifts from my parents, from my father, both in my looks and in my soul.