It was not long after the war—and just saying after the war places himin history, the one that countsthe progress of time as seismicshifts, as the partitioning of beforeand after, as if history unfurlsa taut chain that surveys the distancefrom one point on the landscapeto the boundary of anotherwhile everything else falls to the sidelike small pebbles along a rock-facebound to nothing but the abyssof unrecorded intimacies, dark and spaciousas those tunnels the imagination buildsfrom pools of ink. My father leansover a page, his brown handbound to the binding of a bookand the book a white fog from whichsteps forth a man wandering alonealong a country path and walking, walkingall day long the endless length of a fieldin search of what the resistance of a wind alonecould teach him—the type of man who,possessed by vagrant passions, becomes the manhe reads about in a book, and so is alsomy father standing up from a twin cotin a small room with an even smaller suitcaseand wandering into a field he walks all day longagainst a wind that smells of the Welsh seauntil weak-kneed and parched with thirsthe stops for water in a churchyard.This is before I am a point of viewin history, before he becomes a householdbound, like any man, to that war betweenself-clouding sorrow and vague ambition.It is the month of Chaitra. The beginningof a new year. Everywhere in the fieldfluttering around him, nameless as the impulsethat first led him here, the bright and strangecrowd of yellow flowers called daffodils.