Introspection II

In the autumn of 1969, late one afternoon at the Sukhumi train station, a 72-year-old, blue-eyed woman is sitting on a bench. Shortly after, a man of similar age, also with blue eyes, comes and sits on the bench across from her. They gaze at each other for a while. Then, the man approaches the woman and politely asks in the Abkhaz language, "Are you Tsikyrba Tabs?" The woman, struggling to speak this language she hasn't heard for over fifty years, replies, "Yes, and you must be my brother." I was seven years old when I heard this story, and it was impossible for me to comprehend the emotional weight felt by two siblings reuniting after fifty-two years. The years of the "Belle Époque," a happy childhood, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution, and having to flee to Turkey with her husband when she was just a young girl and newly wed, leaving her entire family behind. I wonder how long it took her to talk about those fifty-two years-during which she was separated from her siblings and family, never hearing a word from them-when she finally reunited with her brother. I wonder how she managed to tell him about World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, World War II, her children, losing her husband at a very young age and being left a widow with two children, and her grandchildren... Tsikyrba Tabs, that is, Ms. Zekiye, my maternal grandmother.