by Milton Johanides

Created on: February 23, 2011

The people Sogdashi Offwerki described in his tiny kingdom in Africa were Christians, staunch converts from a nineteenth century mission, steely British evangelists. But I wondered what version of the gospels they had been taught, since it didn’t marry with any notion of Christianity I was familiar with. Draughty domed churches in North London and inaccessible bearded priests who offered the back of their hand for a reverent kiss were all I knew about faith. The only practical application of religion I was familiar with was my mother’s neurotic visions and prophetic dreams. They left me depressed.

Bad premonitions had run in the family. When I was thirteen, two years after granddad had left us to return to Cyprus, mum dreamt that the old man had fallen down the stairs. Alone in the village and getting more absent-minded by the day, he had tried to negotiate the old stone steps leading from his bedroom down to the kitchen, had tripped and fallen twelve feet to the bottom. In her dream, mum arrived in time to hold him in her arms, kneeling beside his old broken body at the bottom step, listening to him complain about the cold before he finally passed away, his last breath a spluttered cough.

“Forgive me my errant and wayward life,” was all he said before he died.

A couple of days later the letter arrived from Cyprus, true enough, with the little blue “par avion” sticker that so often meant bad news from the village. It told us that granddad had had an accident, exactly as mum had seen it in her dream and on exactly the same night (I checked the date a hundred times). Getting up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water in that house so full of memories for him, he had tripped at the top of the stairs and fallen to the bottom. It was my uncle Andreas, mum’s brother who still lived in Cyprus, who found him lying there. He told us in the letter that the old man had muttered several names, no doubt girls he had known (I wondered which of them had come to his mind at the end), but that his final words were exactly as mum had stated.

“Forgive me my errant and wayward life.”

To Soggy this form of guilty pleading for one’s soul was foreign and unfamiliar. His form of Christianity allowed for no guilt, no remorse and no limits. I wondered what mum would have made of the Christians Soggy described, who prayed very early each morning to the one true Lord and spent the evenings enjoying communal love-ins.

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