The Tattered Throne

As I sat down, miles and miles away from home, trotting through my memoir and trudging from shore to shore, hoping to find one of the muses that I adore to face my darkest fear: that of filling a page and not to bore, I found an old scribble I wrote during the peaceful days of yore a decade before the war.

The memory itself had almost vanished, or rather I had probably banished it along with most of the memories that I deplore. I thought then to abort the mission for who would choose to leave heaven towards hell to explore? Yet the staring empty page brought me more terror than I could endure. So, I embarked on my journey, and through the hellish rabbit hole I jumped as I have never done before, and so I began to read.

I visited my grandfather today, a stern man who lived for a better half of a century. But contrary to men of his age, though, he is stubbornly erect and sure-footed like one of these rare and ancient evergreen oaks. He seems to have hacked through life and ageing, relying on cold showers, audacity, and mild cynicism.

My grandfather lives in a house full of contradictions but surprisingly suitable for its current dweller. The house was built more than 600 hundred years ago. One has only to glance at this monstrosity to understand the entire history of the region where I live. It has been built during the Byzantine era next to an ancient ruin that people claim to have been an edifice of Jupiter, the Roman god. Later in the house journey, the Byzantine Christian mosaic that adorned the living room had been stripped down of its icons and re-embellished to satisfy its new Turkish suiters. Then, centuries later, it was stripped down again and remodelled to serve its new pragmatic English masters. Its English journey did not last long though, and the property has been sold, for a very generous amount I have been told, to an Ashkenazic merchant, whom, with haste and after a very brief occupation, had sold the house to my grandfather 60 years ago costing him everything he had.

My grandfather’s presence amidst this historical symphony added to its complexity. He fought in two great wars on two different sides: not because of his lack of fidelity but because of the treacherous pendulum of fate and the greedy iron fist of his masters. His career as a fighter did not stop there though, when empires collapsed, he sought independence and earned his freedom with blood, eye, and hammer. But the worst enemy of all was lurking in the back yard, and the freedom that my grandfather sought and achieved was yet again stolen by civil war.

In the lull between wars, he marched towards new frontiers. He studied in English schools and earned a degree in journalism, and with that, he fought injustice and won, then earned a generous time in prison. And amidst all the struggle imposed by fellow men, he still had to wrestle with life and hunger, so he worked on society’s fringes, smuggling weapons to revolutionaries nurturing in return both his family and ideology.

Like my grandfather’s life, his house experienced a lot of transformations. New rooms had been annexed, demolished, rebuilt, and repurposed multiple times. Its central room had colonnades, mosaic, Arabic scripture, English furniture, a mezuzah, and, perhaps the most noticeable of all lying majestically in the middle of the room, is a simple old straw chair held together by ribbons of tattered cloth.

My grandfather called the tattered chair his throne and was reserved for him all the time, in fact, nobody dared to sit on the chair not only because we knew that it was reserved for him but of fear of breaking it apart.

Today, my grandfather’s fight with life has ended. And as I stood in his empty throne room, I could not but notice the ironic meaning of this absurd inheritance. I will never be able to know for sure though. His journey was as rich and as chaotic as the ancient house, but he perhaps felt as simple and fragile as his straw wooden chair.

All is lost now but for the woe, yet here I sit again but now with awe, and with hope renewed that my past would show me the way and help the words flow.