Remember Me
I have just returned from Athens after a substantial clearance of my parents’ flat.
I unearthed documents spanning more than a century of family history: sepia portraits of sober ancestors; grandparents’ birth certificates on yellowing, flimsy paper; my mother’s daily diaries recording household expenses and bills; postcards and birthday cards from a long-dead uncle who emigrated to Colombia in the late 50s and did not return to Greece for more than three decades.
Among the documents I found a friendship album belonging to my grandmother Sofia Roukounaki neé Papamanoli, who then lived in the town of Ismailia, Egypt. The earliest entries are dated 1925 (when she was 14 years old) written in French and Greek by her sister, cousins and friends, and the latest, undated entries seem to have been made well into the late 30s: one is by my mother, probably of primary school age, who registers her presence with a cliché doggerel verse in Greek:
Σκέφτομαι, ξανασκέπτομαι, δεν ξέρω τι να γράψω
Στο τέλος δεν μού έμεινε παρά να υπογράψω
Ι think and think again, I can’t think of what to write
Until finally I can only sign off here
Playfully but also timidly, as if worried she might be told off, she pencilled this on the paper lining of the front cover:
Whoever loves her more than me, let her write on the previous page
Similar motifs dominate all entries: images of flowers, professions of eternal affection, wishes for a good future without grief and sadness, and requests for the writer not to be forgotten. I am humbled by this object that has served its purpose: not to be forgotten, to leave a trace in this world, to transcend time. I feel a close affinity with the writers of these entries, as with all writers, whether they write a daily journal, a last will and testament or a novel. We all feel the inexorable flow of time, but are determined to stick a post in the river bed, to show that we have been here.