There is a cutting from a newspaper in our house, in a plastic folder, from June 1994. Nine lines and no photograph. It is about my father, who was nineteen then, and about a fire in a two-storey house on our street.
What happened is not complicated. Smoke came out of a window at about two in the afternoon. There was a child of four in the back room, alone, because her mother had gone to the shop at the corner for bread and had been talking to somebody for six minutes. My father went in through the kitchen door with a wet coat over his head, and he came out with her.
The last line of the cutting says this: He said that he was not afraid.
He has been correcting that sentence for thirty years, to anybody who brings it up, in exactly the same words.
"I told the man from the paper that I had been very afraid," he says. "I said that my hands were shaking in the yard afterwards and that I had not thought about anything at all. He wrote something else."
I asked him once why it matters. He was mending a chair at the time and he did not look up.
He said that a man who is not afraid teaches nobody anything. He said that every boy on our street had read that line, and that every one of them had understood from it that you have to be a special kind of person to go through a kitchen door.
"And that is a lie," he said. "I was an ordinary frightened boy of nineteen. That is the useful part. They printed the useless part."
The girl is thirty-five now. She teaches chemistry in Nurafshon and she has two sons, and she comes with a cake every June, which my father finds embarrassing and my mother does not.
Last summer my cousin put the cutting on the internet, and about four thousand people read it, and the comments repeated the same nine lines back to us with hearts under them.
My father asked me to write something under it. I did, in one line, and I did not change a word of what he gave me:
He says that he was afraid, that he is still afraid of fire, and that he went in anyway, and he would like the second part printed this time.