The Taste of Translation

  Veils part to hasten her journey between heaven and earth and she is tugged back to stand before the framed board. There can be no mistake. It is Baba’s St George, red-robed, astride a white horse, lance at the ready for the black demon at his feet.

  Where did you get this? The voice which emerges is not her own. Deep, guttural, the growl rises from low in the gut, from a peat bog of festering past.

  The icon seller looks up, taken aback. The voice has filled the room, swept freshness from the air. His chair squeaks in protest as he rises and crosses territory to where it lurks.

  Ah yes, he squints. St George. Serbian Orthodox. Probably 18th century – they didn’t do much beaten metalwork before then.

  Kisha clears her throat, tries again. Did you acquire it yourself or through a third party?

  Again the squint at the icon before he turns to survey her high Slavic cheekbones. I would need to check my records. Are you interested in it?

  She nods, not trusting the voice from within.

  Just a moment.

  A pause in the script, a space opened by his departure, a silence in which her thoughts freefall. What would she do with this knowledge? This – any – knowledge? What?

  Yes, he says into the space, receipt book open, a sweaty leather tome in the palm of his hand. Yes, a sad story. He closes the book with finality. The Balkans indeed is a sad story.

  She looks expectantly into the space, the dark which grows lighter the longer she waits, as if for dawn to break. Staring into the smudged horizon, she discerns change, a thin gap widens and cautiously she waits, between day and night, between one and the other, between what was and what will be.

  A man came into the gallery one day, he says, widening the gap. Over two years ago according to the record. Apparently he was part of the peacekeeping mission in Sarajevo, and he came to have several icons valued. It seems people sold them in the struggle to survive or to pay the price for papers to escape. Of course, he shrugs, it’s always possible they were stolen from a church. A lot of looting went on as I understand.

  He coughs. I remember him saying he had no idea what they were worth, just that he had paid what people asked, said it turned his stomach to see how others haggled. Their bellies were warm at night.

  Well, he sighed, his good turn was returned tenfold as the saying goes. This St George is quite a stunning piece of art.

  You said he had several?

  Yes but the others were in very poor condition, just small scraps of wood. Worthless, really. No more than souvenirs.

  Kisha nods, turns away. The ever-percolating bile rises as she sees again the run-down street stalls and Samir’s outrage, the newspaper headlines accusing UN forces of abusing their privileges. She swallows the past, the fate of St George overriding all memory.

  You know nothing more?

  No. He looks her full in the face and admits: Sometimes I don’t want to know. I only want to hear enough to convince myself the story is genuine, that I am not in receipt of stolen goods or such. A bitter laugh shakes his frame as he turns away. But who ever knows the truth?

  I need to know, she thinks. Then –

  Do you still have the contact details for this peacekeeper?

  Of course. That’s my insurance if the law comes knocking.

  Would you be willing to give me that information?

  He hesitates –

  Please!

  A tremulous arc crosses time and space. She drops her voice to a whisper and says into the intersect: I would like to buy it.

  This new voice catches her by surprise but it too has come from somewhere, arising from somewhere deeper than a fetid peat bog.

  He looks at her sharply. It’s very expensive.

  She waits for the price to enter the space, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. Will you keep it for me – on deposit?

  Herr Bueller sighs. Think about it. A young girl like you? If you still want it in a week, we will discuss terms.

  She sat up late that night at the kitchen table with pen, paper, and the meagre account of her savings. Had been saving up to escape, but from what? A place, a time, a memory, an inheritance? She bit her fingernails down to the quick but nothing added up – on paper, in her head.

  The only place anything made sense was her heart, a place which said: He needs to come home. You cannot leave him homeless, stateless, lonely and alone.

  She didn’t wait a week, went back next day, received the peacekeeper’s address in return – a Frenchman working in Geneva.

  These details are very old, Herr Bueller warned. He could have moved on since then.

  Her hand shook, but she dialled the number and a receptionist answered. Yes, he still worked there. No, he wasn’t available now.

  Can I call back?

  Yes.

  When?

  In an hour. Your name?

  He won’t know who I am.

  I need your name and what business you have.

  Kisha Mirvic, she recited. Sarajevo.

  Her hand shook more when she called the second time.

  Saturday, he agreed. The café near the station.

  The train rushed past farms, hills, valleys, lakeshores and mountainscapes in its requisite three hours. She found the café, sat at a table, ordered coffee, lit a cigarette. Chewed nails which had nothing left to chew.

  Miss Mirvic?

  He had been sitting nearby, closeted behind a newspaper.

  Forgive me, he said, extending a gloved hand, but I’m usually quite wary when someone mentions Sarajevo.

  They exchanged pleasantries, remained guarded, circled the obvious. He would only say he’d left as a medical evacuee.

  My hands were severely burned, he said.

  To her questions, he gave the same answers as the gallery owner.

  But can you remember the St George? She described its features. I can’t imagine you found it on a market stall.

  He took a small notebook from his pocket, leafed through pages of photographs of different artefacts. Do you mean this one? he pointed.

  Yes!

  He turned the page. This is where I bought it.

  Kisha looked into the face of a grimy ragged crone squatting by the side of a muddy track. A cloth-covered cardboard box displayed her few meagre items, including St George.

  Oh my God!

  Patrons turned from their pastries, books, conversations, while her wide eyes searched the man’s scarred face.

  I always keep a record, he said. I don’t want to be accused of being something I’m not. I paid double what she asked. She was starving.

  He turned away, fixed his eyes on a passing tram.

  We were on our way back from the airport with a shipment. There was no way she would have made it to the distribution point, no way she would have been able to stand in line for hours. She was much too frail.

  Kisha hiccupped, sniffed, blind to the tracks her tears cleaved.

  There was another, he said.

  The next jolt.

  It was hidden inside her shawl.

  He turned back from the window. I offered her more, but she wouldn’t show me. Just hugged it to her breast like armour.

  He stirred the dregs of his coffee. I did what I could, gave her money, gave her food. She was so grateful, said it would help protect the lady. He shook his head, took a last sip of cold coffee. Poor thing was delusional.

  No. No.

  And she is gone. From here to there. From now to then. From Baba to Azra. From home to home.

  Two

  She rides the bus in from the airport, doesn’t know where to look – at the shattered remnants without or within? Nothing hides scars, not even the glass and steel of the brand new and re-built, mirrored panels reflecting pain onto pain at every turn.

  Is it intentional? she wonders. A by-product of transition? Or merely poor architectural design?

  Flying in, she had looked out on green hills, fields, small villages. Gentle spaces, the
ones of longer-than memory. Till the gash to the mouth, white gravestones a hillside-wide. Heart-slashed, no warning of turbulence ahead, it brought her hard back to where she’d been, to where she’d come. And it continued when she spotted the Hercules on the runway apron awaiting its clearance to leave – the flash of orange light, the slow grind of propellers.

  Now she sits on the bus and tears still prick, but she doesn’t turn away from what she sees, listens to the voice which keeps her steady.

  Easy, it says. Go easy.

  She walks along Vaso Miskin which will probably be renamed like everything else, forging new identity from the debris of old, and passes the place where she cradled Baba’s head. The shell craters have been inked in red enamel. Sarajevo Roses, they are called.

  She crosses the market which suffered a worse fate after she’d left. When she’d been there, but still here – numb in a foreign land around the centre’s television set with her drop-ins, weeping, keening, sight fixed on the haiku forming in her head.

  Barbecued fresh meat –

  Crackling and sizzling

  Human served today.

  No. She won’t let memories distract her from task, lets the past wash and lap her shore, surrenders to the ocean’s breath – in-out, in-out – and asks Hesse to steady her nerves:

  Magic exists in each beginning to protect and nurture the life within.

  She closes her eyes to the memories of massacre, climbs Hesse’s steps, aged and well-trod even before he found Die Stille. And now she too places one foot in front of the other, settles each into the soft-worn grooves of centuries of wayfarers, each of whom had a story.

  Kisha not the first to trip on the steps, to stumble on a climb long and hard. Not the first to be slapped in the face and sent tumbling back down into the pit. But she begins again, each time recalling the fern fronds and shy flowers that edge her staircase, the damp mossy crevasses that fringe her path, the wisteria that spills over like a curtain of beads.

  Eyes closed, all this she sees, and footsteps in the shadows she hears. As he walks with her, step by step, tread by tread. T-tap. T-tap. T-tap.

  At the café by the river, she sits in the sun, orders coffee from a boy in an apron and looks over to where a second waiter is busy at another table. His face is fuller now, but the hair just as shaggy, which he unconsciously sweeps out of his eyes on his way over.

  You made it after all, he grins.

  She lights a cigarette, sits back and smiles, hair dark amber in the sun.

  Three

  Can you do it? she asked the stonemason, handing him the short text.

  Of course, he said, pursing his lips to the handwritten page. When’s the memorial?

  She shook her head. Nothing big. Just a few friends – next Friday I thought.

  Alright. He called to his apprentice. Go with her.

  They left the small workshop on the edge of Bascarsija, crossed the bridge at the Library ruin, and climbed the steep hill of Alifakovac, up marble-edged steps to the cemetery where he lay. The boy dawdled, chewed gum, kicked a stone. The day was warm, June, and the sun hot overhead.

  She wended her way through the graves. Some had headstones pointing the way to paradise but most were marked by the simple wooden paddles and hurried scratched names of wartime destitution.

  Here, she called, pointing to Samir’s patch of earth, his mound smoothed, weathered. Indeed, the whole place had become a meadow with undulating hills and dales, all green, save for the paddles, grey-worn, hiding in the long grass, and the occasional marble slab, stark-white and pure.

  Friday. She stood beside the fresh-made headstone on a perfect blue-skied day and looked into the memory of when they had lain him in the grave. It didn’t disturb the peace of the moment, in fact was part of the moment and she unlocked the container in which the memory lay and said:

  See? See what it has become, this place? See who we have become?

  Her memory slipped out of its catalogue drawer, came and stood beside her and looked around the small group. Nada and Kasim, hands held, heads bowed, her growing belly a shared life in-between. Marko, Miki, Jasmina and Haris. Plato and Susu, Farid skipping a day of school.

  Kisha read the gravestone epitaph aloud, explained how she had forgotten the texts of Basho until these last months when a chance encounter had brought her home to an old friend. And short speech at end, she fell silent at the sight of a sea of death which had become a hillside meadow.

  Nada shifted the silence, took her hand and said: Come on. Time for a coffee.

  It’s OK, you go ahead. I’ll catch up.

  Her eyes followed their progress down the steep path of smooth steps, Nada with a hand under her belly, the other on Kasim’s shoulder, the others slowly behind. And she sat down beside him at last.

  Here he lay in the shade of a young linden that someone had planted, some family or other whose loved one slept nearby, a young linden which would one day grow tall. The cool of hillside breeze lifted its leaves, and in its song, its gentle rustle, she could hear the contented sighs of those it shaded.

  Now she heard further, to the cathedral bells chime the hour, to the muezzin’s call to midday prayer, to the trams rumbling along Obala, the complaint of their wheels at the Library turn. She could hear all the city, see all the city, from here as clearly as this young tree – a young tree whose roots threaded underground, through, down, across and around the bones, the flesh of the dead returned to earth. She followed their journey, saw how tightly the dead were woven into the shared sustenance of a single tree, Samir peaceably, meditatively performing his task. In death, in dust, growing new life.

  She took the letter from her bag, opened it, laid it in her lap, flattened bent edges. Yellowed and blotchy from the watermarks of time, after so many years, indeed it was time. Her memory was ready, her self settled and calm, they would read it together. It would be alright.

  Dearest Ki-

  I know I said I would never write such a letter. I know I made fun of your letter (whatever happened to it, by the way?), but light fun, you know that – just so we wouldn’t remark the grim reaper standing too close beside the mattress in the hall, his scythe sharpened, his rattly breath obscured by the sound of the river or explosions or any other of a million sounds (except birdsong, I know, the birds all flown) that we would rather admit than his own prophetic presence. So yes, I know I said what I said, but here is clear evidence to the contrary.

  The feeling, the compulsion to write this letter only came up recently, unexpectedly at that. Perhaps because the days stay bleak when we expect – no, desperately will! – spring to arrive. Our hopes may be lifted by brighter mornings, later sunsets, but she’s still a way off, flouncing her coloured skirts in another marketplace, giddily dancing to some lusty pastoral symphony – at a friendlier latitude, a gentler altitude, in an altogether more amenable place, I’m sure. So the days stay bleak and we wait, steeped in views of bare hills and gunmetal grey skies. Maybe our melancholy even turns to fear. Oh no! we think. Spring won’t be able to break the siege – the conspiracy is complete, seasonal rites are doomed in Sarajevo this year!

  I guess you can hear my sigh from wherever you are reading this. I guess you know I sit in the gloom, no kandilo lit, and think these morbid thoughts. So why commit them to paper? Because I dream that one day when all this is over, we can open this letter together and laugh at my silly thoughts on a cold March morning that the siege could submerge us in winter-dark forever.

  So why am I still writing if I think we’ll open this letter together some time in the future? Simply to cover the other possibility – that you open it alone, because I have an idea for the epitaph on my grave. See, I was looking through your book of haiku. You know the one – Basho’s. And as he wandered across his land, wrote his little gems, I wandered through my thoughts. Strangely, we both arrived at the same place – a battlefield from an earlier time, its scars all but hidden. Who knows how long it took the seasons to s
tart up again after the endless winter of pain he wrote about? But they did, for this is the poem he came up with:

  Summer grasses –

  All that remains

  Of warriors’ dreams.

  Do you remember the day you showed me that haiku? Do you? It was a moment in time and I missed it. But today I was given a second chance and suddenly my melancholy is gone. Suddenly I see beyond. This will end some day. And all that will remain is a memory (for a while), a history book (for longer) but more permanently, Basho’s summer grasses. In all the millennia of setting suns, rising moons, seasons coming, going, births, deaths, loves lost and found, this is only a brief interlude, a slight hiccup in the flow. Our dear Chetniks are simply an intermezzo performance. How sadly, sadly deluded they are, and how blissfully, blissfully relieved I am.

  Yours. Ever.

  S.

  She sat by the grave half-smothered in meadow blossom, looked up at the epitaph etched in fine swirled script, wondered how long till it too would be cloaked by tall grasses. And, re-folding the letter, she kissed its crumpled hide, placed it back into her bag.

  Once, she remembered, Samir had said how well she knew him, as if from the inside out. Proof when no proof was needed in the shade of a young linden tree.

  See? he said, nudging her arm.

  Alright, she replied. Alright, it’s true.

  She laid her head on his shoulder and shared a moment of energy translated to matter before his smoky shadow melted back into her heart.

  Four

  Kisha walks down to the water’s edge, to the make-shift camp re-formed at Ilidja where Azra lies on a rickety lounge staring into the folds of river.

  She’s been waiting for you to come, her daughter says as they cross the field toward a line of young poplars along the riverbank, replanted on the site of their sacrificed brothers. She’s been waiting for you to come so she can leave.

  I know, she sighs. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. And shrugs. I guess I’m not as good at reading the signs as you are.

  Lydia smiles, tucks her arm through Kisha’s. Once you trust, the signs come harder, faster. She laughs. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up! We could all do with a bit of Azra’s stamina.