Papa Georgio (21 page)

So she had made a memorial for him there, piling stones into a rough cairn, slipping between them our letters and messages of love to him and twisting round it a line of coloured prayer flags, their colours bright against the snow. ‘As if they were cuddling him,’ she said. With more stones she pinned down the remains of Daddy’s back-pack next to it (the socks, she brought home with her) and with pebbles she arranged his initials, P.J.A. in the snow. She had taken lots of photos of it to give to everyone, and she gave me one which she had put in a frame.

I sat in the dusk, above the camp, in the sultry air. There were no fireflies tonight and the air seemed still and calm, except for a few gnats shimmering in front of me. I stared and stared at the picture, thinking about Daddy and his mountain and the fierce goddess Kanche, who had taken my father to add to her treasure house. But no - I knew it wasn’t like that. There was no goddess collecting gold and silver, corn and sacred books: just Daddy and the ice and rock and wind, and he now the treasure of his beautiful, harsh mountain.

Inside the frame, along the bottom of the picture, Mum had slipped a finger’s width of paper with two lines of verse typed on it. She told me she had left these words on Daddy’s grave, along with our messages of love:

‘Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glint on snow.’

When I read these words over and over I felt the full bucket in me overflow and I cried and cried from deep inside, until tears were dripping down on to my knees. I let the breeze dry my cheeks, and sat there for a long time, until it was too dark to read anything at all.

Stiffly I got up, pressing the picture to my chest and for the last time I walked down the path through the camp from my special hiding place. I wanted warmth and light, to be back in our caravan, which for now, was home. And I wanted to see my Grandpa. My Papa Georgio.