The SuitcaseIt lay wide open on the table; a challenge which they could not face rationally. The case was neither big enough to hold the absolute essentials nor small enough for them to decide that it would hold only the playthings of memory. An ordinary brown suitcase, worn out by the years but which from one moment to the next took on the significance of an ark, without having similar dimensions…
They kept filling and emptying it, each time according to different criteria: now they packed “basic necessities”: clothes, underwear, sheets, utensils, for the first difficult weeks of adaptation. Then the “mementos”, as they called them: photographs of the children and their parents, letters, pictures and embroideries which they associated with the happy and tragic moments of the thirty years
