THE PHOTOGRAPH

« THE PHOTOGRAPH In my father's room, there was a small tray with some medicine on it and nothing else.

It was a neat room, no sign of human disorder.

Where bad he lived his life? Where were the traces of the things he had valued? Then 1 saw the photograph.

It was a poor example of tbat art, in colouring dun (1), in deli­ neation soft.

But it was the only picture on his walls.

None of his sons, no picture of his wife.

There were no photographs of his store, of his stocks, of the National City Bank, or his collection of Oriental Rugs and Carpets.

Or of his card­ playing cronies (2).

None of them, none of us, meant that much to him.

But this photograph did.

The subject was Mount Aergius, the great symmetrical snow­ capped mountain which stands over my father's town in Anatolia, the place of his birth.

Aergius, the lofty, clean, perfect moon­ tain.

Here it was, now, the magnet of whatever longing my father still bad aching within him, the one image of love on the old man's waU.

The mountain represented in that photograph seemed to be demanding some judgment of me, some verdict.

What do you think, it seemed to say, what do you really think? And if 1 bad been forced to answer and give a verdict at that moment, 1 would have bad to say that 1 thought the whole passage of my family to this country bad been a failure, not the country's fault perhaps, but the inevitable result of the time and the spirit in the air in those days.

The symbols of affluence gained bad ( 1) Dun = dull greyish-brown.

(2) Cronies = chums,friends.. »