This face had some message for me … it was making some demand … appeared to know me as a mother, as if its eyes had been fixed on me my whole life …
The candle on her cardboard altar sputters, wavers, suddenly flares. She looks up into the eyes of the Lady. No longer a sketch but the icon itself floods her memory. Baba’s hand made those eyes. Baba’s hand knew the light which cuts through winter-dark.
In the dark of a winter night she dreams of a man, a man tall and slim who walks at her side. Who turns to her and smiles in a way which seems familiar. A beautiful man, he has luminous skin. Dark but aglow. He is older in years, yet seeming to exist in a sort-of ageless ever-now. She can’t explain it, it’s just how she feels.
After some silent nights spent walking, he speaks with her, explains the rules of their liaison – gradual, it must be, like the slow dance of a courtship newly engaged.
We can walk together, he says, but not touch till we reach the other side. He seems to think she needs a chaperone but as none appears, asks if she is willing to try it alone. Perhaps he can manage but isn’t quite sure.
This is my first time too, he confides.
Swift is the crossing. Breath in, breath out. On a busy sidewalk in a place of swirled colours, he draws her to him and she doesn’t resist. He leans back against a wall, opens his shirt, takes her hand, and brings it to his chest. She touches honey-brown skin, dark downy hair. She touches him. And buries her face in the solidity of his return, her ear to his breathing heart.
A promise made is a promise kept, no matter how many centuries shuttle hence and forth. Still she is amazed.
I did a bit of reading, he shrugs. And asked around the old hands.
He shows her the ring still wedded to his finger.
Yes, she understands the logic. The promise attached to the ring and the ring attached to the earth. Forged of rock and metal, it is an embodied artefact.
She tries to take the logic further and wake herself from the dream.
But he shakes his head. It doesn’t work like that, Ki-. While a slow tear slips from her eye.
Shhhh, he hushes, his voice the river’s song. And wipes the tear away. I’ll be back. You know that now.
She watches him fade to shadow, melt away to mist-risen, and wakes slowly, hand held to the place he had touched, no tear veiling her cheek.
Our work is drawing to a close, our watching work no longer required. For he has come. And will stay. Beyond her winter-dark.
Beyond Siege
One
What I think you need is a holiday, said Tobias.
Holiday. The word had not figured in her vocabulary for years. Either there immersed or here immersed, in a slow plod of days-marked-days-passed, her body, mind, all, had marched to the functional, a refrain known by heart:
This is all she is – tss-tst
This is all she is – tss-tst
This is all she is – tss-tst
(One time fill: Repeat at will)
This is all she is – tss-tst –
She rattled her head to dislodge the beat. Perhaps he was right – a holiday to jump-start step-change, removed from the everyday to restore a belief in fantasy.
Yes, she said, without thinking further. Yes.
The last time she’d been on holiday – it must have been the summer of ’91. When she and Samir –
She breathed deep, took the memory further – a visit to Split and further up the coast to the Istrian beaches collided with war in Croatia. They suffered before we did, she thought, no irony lost in repeat performance. And in homage to their suffering we went to a Greek island instead.
Crete, yes. They rented a car, visited secluded villages, picnicked in meadows by abandoned farmhouses, wandered olive groves and citrus orchards in a rustic hinterland, admired frescoes in medieval churches, visited the museum in Heraklion, bought a book on iconography for Baba.
Yes, she remembered it all. They spent nights beneath a sky awash with stars reflected in the mirror of the sea. Clear nights, where the moon, once risen, plumbed ocean depths to emerge atop the crest of shore-bound waves.
What if we’ve got it wrong, she said during a late night walk to the lip of rock above the cove. What if it’s all back to front and the universe is actually the sea and the sea up there in space? So that each day we’re going for a swim in space.
She worked through the proposition and said: I float, I’m weightless in the water, gravity doesn’t bear me to the ocean floor. Beneath the surface there’s no air to breathe. I could just as easily be out there, a speck in the universe, rather than a speck here. So perhaps here is really there, and there is really here! She nuzzled into his shoulder.
Or there’s no here or there, Samir pointed out. Only is. He stretched out on the grass and sighed. In the end does it matter?
No, she laughed and smoothed the hair from his forehead to kiss away his disinterest.
Yes, a fine memory of holiday. Freed from the everyday, freed for speculation, wonderment anew at the things about. But –
I’d love to take a holiday, she said to Tobias, but I don’t have enough money saved.
His eyes twinkled. Something stirred behind but nothing she could make out.
Surely you have enough money for food over the next week or two.
Well, yes, of course. But that’s entirely different. A holiday –
Perhaps your finances could stretch to a train fare? A bus ticket?
What? I suppose so.
She furrowed her brow, narrowed her eyes. What is this? Are you making fun of poverty? She thumped a book down on the desk. If I say I don’t have enough money for a holiday, then I –
Alright-alright, he said, holding up a hand. My charade is too obscure. He smiled gently, reeled her back in.
I have a small cottage in the province of Ticino down on our border with Italy, he explained. I plan to visit next weekend, open the house up after the winter, tend the garden, that sort of thing. If you would care to join me, I could show you the ins and outs of the house, the village and region and you could stay on for a week or two.
What about the shop?
Oh, he chortled. I’m sure I can manage on my own for a fortnight. But you need to see the place first. It’s very remote, very silent. Perhaps it won’t suit you.
He said she’d need hiking boots and a good warm waterproof. The Mediterranean side of the Alps was still steep mountain country, granite-slashed, escarpment-rich, and with high snow-capped peaks.
They closed the shop early the following Friday and joined the weekend exodus out of the city. Towns glided smoothly past, motorway exits to odd-named locations flashed once and were gone. The lush green of freshly-dunged meadows stayed longer in her mind, fields of wildflowers a study in gentle living. Soon enough the tunnel approached, the cutting through the chain of the Alps that had conquered the massif once and for all.
Come on, said Tobias, as the next exit loomed. We will pretend we still relish the journey and take the pass, and arrive in the south the old-fashioned way rather than burrowing toward it like blinded moles.
Peaks surrounded them like successive waves in a jagged blanket. Kisha saw the sword of Zeus carve narrow valleys with a sideways flick, gouge southward strokes for the flight of rivers and heard the water’s sigh spring from deep in the mountains: Take me home, home to the sea.
DH Lawrence journeyed this way, Tobias was saying. Can you imagine? He walked it! And when he reached the pass and saw the south, he immediately felt its Mediterranean Stimmung – its voice.
She stared out the car window. Nothing looked the same in the Swiss south. All was stone. The houses and barns – roofs of stone, walls of stone, floors of stone. Stone. All stone. But they couldn’t eat stone. So terraces were laid, crops sown, all edged with sturdy stone walls.
The village was perched above the valley road, high over a fjord-thin lake. They took a path up past the church, between high walls draped in mossy shadows
, sunlit ferns. He showed her the plaque honouring a famous writer. They stood beneath a gnarled chestnut dedicated to a renowned poet. He told her about all the creative souls who had exiled themselves to this place, to sit in silence, catch the whispers of the wind.
They call this place a Dichter Dorf, a poets’ village, he said.
Which is why you came?
He inclined his head. I suppose so. Even though I’m a humble bookseller – a reader, not a writer.
There can’t be one without the other.
True. This seems to be a place which demands respect for artistic pursuit – an engagement with the aesthetic, regardless of form.
A spirit, you mean?
Yes, he said eagerly. Do you feel it?
She didn’t answer. How to describe the gathering dusk, the misted veil she slipped through once the churchyard was forded? How to acknowledge the echo of boots on cobbles as she climbed the stone steps, each foot placed firmly, solidly, audibly after the other along a path’s slow unfurl? How to explain the stab to her heart when his cottage appeared – Casa della Madonna, he said – and she saw the imprint of fresco on the wall beside the door, how she almost cried aloud at the thought of Baba’s fireside?
It is still, she volunteered at last.
The German word – Die Stille – had found seamless translation in this place of language pure.
Tobias’ eyes crinkled into a smile. It’s what they all wrote – here they found Die Stille, that which quiets body, mind, soul, that which inspires and frees us for creative exploration. We cannot create in noise, with distraction. All senses must be quieted, so that what lies beneath can be called forth.
He showed her to her room, the one built into the attic with its tiny balcony, iron-railed. She looked out onto the heavy granite roofs of village houses below, the church tower with its terracotta clock face. Beyond, on the far side of the valley, were thick-forested slopes sheeting the ridge and a peak called Ruscada, her sturdy backbone snow-covered, while beside her, high above the village itself, a jagged peak – della Croce – watched over his frescoed Madonna.
Over bowls of minestrone, eaten on their laps before the fire, he saw how she observed the Madonna statue in her deep-red niche.
You know, I’m not particularly religious, he said, but she belongs to the house, like the fresco on the wall. It’s a part of the spirit of this place, of pious devotion to the will of a higher power, regardless of what I personally make of such cultural anachronisms. Who am I, an interloper brought up on Enlightenment thinking, to challenge such commitment? I owe these traditions my respect if not my believing devotion.
Nevertheless, he chuckled, stirring his soup, I’m not totally immune to her effect. It never fails to gladden my heart to round the corner and be welcomed home by her gentle face on my wall.
Kisha opened her mouth to speak. She wanted to tell of Baba and her belief in the icon – to heal, to listen, to transform. She wanted to tell how it calmed her to think of Baba’s faith when nothing else could calm her. She wanted to tell, to explain that she felt this cottage was like a container, a repository of similar calmness. Just being in this space, cocooned in the strength and silence of stone, seemed to bring her home to Baba’s quiet certainty in the ways of the universe.
She wanted to tell, she truly wanted to. And her mouth stayed open long as she wondered how to begin this journey to tell the everything of her existence. The scaffolding she had constructed was all wrong. It would have to be taken down and dismantled, with much banging, hammering and shattering of iron, and begun again.
She wanted to tell, but couldn’t. So placed a spoonful of soup into her open mouth.
Two
Kisha woke to the sound of activity downstairs, the fire being lit, kettle on the stove. Looked out to a blue-painted sky, a white-topped mountain, deep green forests and steel-belted ridges. Slowly, very slowly, she extracted herself from the view to smells of fresh-brewed coffee, chestnut honey, and burnt toast.
Never mind, she said. Under butter it won’t look quite so black.
He had already planned their day. We’ll head up to the end of the valley – I’d like to show you the baths.
It was a slow journey along the ribbon of road which hugged the valley wall hundreds of metres above a whitewater gorge. They left the car at the village on the border and continued on foot to the ruins of a medieval thermal on the Italian side of the river.
The bathing tubs were carved from granite, water flowed from a spring deep in the mountain. Hit by two avalanches earlier in the century, no one had thought it wise to invest in restoration. Nevertheless, some hikers arrived by another path and quickly stripped in the chill air before submerging into the sole remaining warm pool.
They picnicked by the river. Tobias spread fresh goat’s cheese onto olive bread while a half bottle of merlot cooled in the stream. The path doesn’t end at the border, he said, pointing up the valley. This has been a well-trod route for centuries. And he showed her a gravestone dating from the early 1940s – a boy of only 22.
I thought Switzerland was neutral? she said between bites.
Yes, which meant we were a place of asylum for those fleeing war. This lad was a Partisan escaping Mussolini’s Fascists, but not as lucky as some – Nazis shot him even though he had already crossed onto Swiss soil.
She didn’t break the rhythm of her chewing at this news, but wondered vaguely what had happened to her moral outrage gene as she listened to a distant cuckoo – after the koo, always the cuck, over and over. Did it ever tire of being a metronome? Time stopped or slowed or hiccupped, but all of a sudden her wine was finished.
It’s time we walked up the hill, he said.
After an hour’s steady climb, Tobias pointed to a farmhouse on the ridge.
They offer soup, he said. And more of that delicious cheese.
They crossed a meadow through a flock of long-horned goats with tufted beards and Kisha squinted at a Sentieri marker beside the barn which offered five alternate routes.
Which way home? she said.
All ways could be the right way. Some just take a little longer than others.
She stared into the cryptic hole he’d cleaved wide from a simple question.
Or, he continued, we could take none of the paths and be like the medieval Zen master who said: Having no destination, I am never lost.
She took a vertiginous step into the void but he grabbed her arm and smiled serenely.
Come on, he said. Low blood sugar. I think you need that soup.
There were things Tobias seemed to understand without knowing, like the books in his cottage which offered Sentieri markers to her journey, like the small anecdotes he told into a space within her reach.
I once read of a Cambodian monk who brought hope to refugees displaced by the Khmer Rouge, he said now over soup. All he did was walk through the forests and jungles on what he called pilgrimages of truth. Through each village he passed, he chanted: Hate can never be appeased by hate; hate can only be appeased by love. He built hut-temples in the refugee camps, handed out photocopies of the Buddha’s message of love. Such a simple thing but most difficult in the circumstances.
But not impossible, she pointed out, revisiting Baba’s dying advice.
No indeed, he said. Most difficult, but certainly not impossible.
You have Basho here, she said, looking through the books on his shelf.
Oh, you like haiku? He sipped his wine. I find it an absolute delight. It commands no more than the length of a breath yet requires complete commitment to observation.
He came over to the shelf and pulled down another volume. In a way, this place helps me understand the principle behind the form, he said. Solitude grants me the peace of mind to witness nature’s hush and translate it into a brief assemblage of words. I like the thought that haiku captures an image and frames it for future contemplation. Much like a work of art.
He paused, smiled. Basho said it’s abou
t learning to listen as things speak for themselves. At the very least it does wonders for my memory.
Memory. Yes. The last haiku penned there.
Another day of nothing –
Except death and pain,
Flesh shredded by steel.
The first one noted here.
People on the tram –
Bored summer voices betray
Nice lives of nothing.
None had followed on a path she had no wish to follow. Yet thought now about the memories she wanted to re-witness – the view from her attic bed, for instance, and began to re-read Basho’s Narrow Road to kick-start her pilgrimage.
Kisha walked past tablets of stone, past Hesse aphorisms in the museum of his Ticinese home:
A poet’s duty is not to show the way but above all to awaken yearning … I attempted to find out and to say what is common to all religious creeds and all forms of human devotion, which is above all national differences, and which can be believed and revered by every race and every individual.
She read the lines, felt tears well. It didn’t help us in Sarajevo, she told her mentoring spirit. We were poor innocent fools whose yearning was awakened, who believed as you did. We sat and read your books while ignorant pigs split our world, wrought chasms between kin, bulldozed our feeble cries for peace.
Are you OK? Tobias found her in front of a faded photograph of the writer in his favourite gardening hat, wide flannels and a beatific smile.
Sorry, she mumbled. Need some fresh air.
She went down to the courtyard where a trickling fountain soothed raw nerves. Knulp the tortoise munched lettuce at her side and after a time wandered off on a route as meandering as his namesake’s, as seemingly aimless as hers, but at peace, content in a world populated by hutch, bowl of water, dish of lettuce – small miracles which appeared whether asked for or not. And so Knulp plodded on, each footfall measured, counted. Of one, two, three and four, before the ring song began again.
The journey itself is home, said Basho.
Tobias looked out a window of the tower museum to where she sat chatting to an oblivious tortoise. It was the season of snow-melt and her progress would be slow, he knew. As intermittent as Pizzo Ruscada’s dislodging ice cap, weather-dependent, some days cooler or cloudier. Yet on others, like now in Hesse’s home, a wide warm sun sent rivulets rushing over the lip of the peak.