A wasted arm rises in greeting, and she kneels beside the lounge, kisses the withered cheek of a gnarled fruit tree, the hand which holds hers twig-thin, nothing more than skin and bone.
Here you are at last, she smiles. Come, greet the Lady. She’s been waiting such a long time. She unwraps the shawl in her lap and sunlight leaps from silver.
She had forgotten the eyes, the singular beauty of her eyes. What do you hide behind your mask? Demian had asked. But the thought flips on to another memory – how she studied the walls of a tiny chapel in Crete, torch held to a fresco’s face.
Look at the eyes, Samir! she’d said. Don’t you think they’re like Baba’s Lady?
Her bright-eyed eagerness met a teasing reply. Next you’ll tell me you’re going to study art history and prepare detail treatises on iconographic writing through the ages!
She returns from reverie to stroke Azra’s hand and trace a finger over the Lady’s silver plating. It is chipped, cracked, its lustre tarnished and stained. But still whole, still brimful of light.
You know so much about the ways of the world, Azra.
There isn’t much to know, child.
But how does it work? The magic?
Shhhh, she hushes. No questions. There are no answers. Just trust that it is as it is and the way will open, you’ll see. Now take the Lady home, child. She’s been waiting such a long time.
Kisha nods and starts to rise, but Azra suddenly clutches her arm. I almost forgot, she says. How’s that pretty man of yours?
She opens her mouth to speak but the Gypsy has already taken up her hand to hear the news herself.
Ah, she squints. How lovely. Gives her hand a generous squeeze. You’ve made it through this nasty business together.
But –
She turns the hand this way and that. And you’ll always be together! Good, very good.
Kisha laughs, shakes her head. Are you sure you don’t need glasses?
Fading eyes twinkle. Love, child! What always was always will be. No silly Chetnik can kill love. Now let an old lady rest. Baba’s waiting.
She cradles Azra in her arms, smoothes her hair and hears her deep sleeping breaths drop to a whisper, drop again.
Till her next waking hello. In time.
Five
They sit around a café table in the park by the river. Marko hops over every now and then for a cigarette and a chat between customers.
Plato nudges Kisha and points out a sweet-faced girl beneath the sole surviving plane tree hugging the riverbank. She’s always here, drinking coffee after coffee just to see his smile.
Next time Marko arrives –
Go on, ask her out before the poor girl goes bankrupt.
Or ODs on caffeine, Susu laughs from beside the carousel where Farid has enjoyed his umpteenth ride.
Here, says Kisha, drawing a gift out of her bag. See if this will entertain you at the table for a while.
She passes him a small bottle of bubble mixture sourced from a supermarket shelf. He glows with delight, unscrews the lid, draws out the plastic stick which finishes in a perfect O, and blows his first string of bubbles straight across the table. Soapsuds explode into random cups.
Bravo! Marko cheers. More sales!
Kisha watches a small boy’s joy repeated over, and over again. As his parents clap and laugh, as Nada pats her belly, as Kasim’s kiss brushes her cheek.
Each time a perfect O encircled by angels’ wings lifts heavenward toward its perfect end. And she finds herself scribbling haiku in her head to honour this particular still point in a turning world. Observing at finger click, at shutter speed, a moment frozen in space and time.
A boy’s sweet bubble
Holds so many rainbow dreams
In an empty bowl.
Six
She stands at the window of the bookseller’s shop, stands there as she has all the years until now looking in on a tableau marked serene. Sees it not as at the beginning but as they have transformed it over time, complete with second chair, a low table beside, reading lamp a little removed and a leafy fig bringing life to still life. All bathed in the glow of old books loved long.
Tobias has company, it seems. She can’t see the other man, his back is toward her. But still she taps the window glass to announce her homecoming, and smiles wide to see his energetic wave. The man turns at the noise, Herr Bueller in his long black beard.
What a coincidence! he says. I just popped in with St G.
Her joy hits a wall. That’s not what we agreed. I don’t have the money.
Yes, yes. But I’m heading off for a while, you see? Time to put everything into storage, go and see the rest of the world before it runs away.
George has a home now, he continues as if it’s a truth self-evident in a courtroom of law. I can’t put him in a box when he’s got someone to go to.
But –
Tobias exits the discussion stage-right. I’ll make tea, he proposes to no one in particular.
We’ll talk money when I get back, Herr Bueller suggests. I’m sure you’ll be here when I return.
Which is when?
He throws his hands up toward heaven. Well how am I supposed to know?
Her brain feels as if it has been tumble-turned in a washing machine one too many times. Too much, too sudden. But she sits him down, steadies herself, returns to the moment, and says:
I want to show you something.
The Lady rests on the table before them. Her silence envelopes the room.
Extraordinary, he whispers after a more-than-lengthy pause.
You can see how she’s damaged, Kisha says. Is there a chance to restore her?
Herr Bueller shrugs. Either that or take her back to the original.
What does that mean?
He fixes her with a benign expression. It means we rip this silly silver off.
What?
She is back in the washing machine, stunned by the Swiss Army knife he retrieves from a pocket – never leave home without one, he says – to prise shell from pearl. A delicate operation, he talks all the while.
The bas relief is late in any case, 19th century I’d hazard a guess. They took to doing a riza in silver or sometimes gold to preserve the icon, leaving the faces and hands exposed to enable veneration. It’s better to shed the skin, have a look at what’s underneath. Give her a new cloak if you think it’s worthwhile.
She holds her breath. Fear rises in her throat. What if he ruins her? Loses her light? How could she ever look into those eyes again? Into Baba’s memory, Azra’s?
Metal on metal, a tinkling fall to floor. A small coin, dislodged from hibernation, rolls free which she retrieves without acknowledgement.
Ah, but wait.
Extraordinary, he breathes.
The Lady lies naked within their sight, an explosion of highly-coloured egg tempera freed of her humbling corset.
Cretan, most certainly. There’s a look of 14th or 15th century about it, but I can’t date it for sure. Unusual though, this Melkite touch.
This what?
His finger hovers over the surface of thick-lacquered wood, sketching in space what his words describe.
The faces on Melkite icons weren’t angular like the Greeks or Russians produced. Everything was more rounded, more realistic. More natural, don’t you think? And the skin colour, eyes. He shakes his head. Definitely Middle-eastern.
He shakes his head again and frowns. But there’s no evidence of their production until the 18th century when local icon writers who studied in the east set up their own workshops at home and varied the script to take account of their experience. So this is most unusual. Its age doesn’t match the manner of its translation.
Look, he points. Even the vines around the edge.
He squints close to the board’s surface. Pomegranates?! he exclaims. Extraordinary!
And I have never seen the veil rendered in such a quantum of gold leaf before. Perhaps the borders, the stars. But
the whole? It gives her a light which is more than ethereal. More, much more …
His murmurs drift into deep thinking breaths as he turns her over gently, tenderly. Points to the Arabic script on her back. See? I’m right.
But isn’t that Greek? And she points to a few squiggles beneath the trail of calligraphy.
Mmmm, Kiria. Which means our Lady. The Arabic probably repeats it.
She has seen something else. In the opposite corner is a small circle of alternate colours, light-dark conjoined. What’s this? she asks.
He squints at the cypress board again. Mmmm, he says, and retrieves a magnifying glass from another coat pocket.
Once more, Extraordinary! explodes from his forest of beard. How fundamentally unusual!
She takes the magnifying glass and the Chinese symbol of the ying and the yang, the eternal Tao, looms up. Nested fishes, each hosting a spot of the other’s colour. But their purity is marred, scratched it seems.
No, he says into her wordless question. I fancy there’s something scripted into each shape. And not the same thing in each, but different. I can’t make it out though. Too small and faded.
Still, he sighs as he places the icon on the table, sits back and scratches his chin, I must say it goes to making the piece an incredibly unique artefact. How on earth would an icon writer in 14th century Candia know anything about Taoist symbology for heaven’s sake?
He pauses, then turns to her.
You know, I think you should forget about re-silvering. This war’s been a blessing. It’s brought her back to the beginning.
Seven
I’ll make a fresh pot of tea, says Tobias when they are alone with the Lady.
Kisha studies the slim board in her hands. How did you arrive in our family? she wonders.
Any knowledge has melted into Baba’s shadow, but still she imagines a journey rich and long – involving those who have held her, who have whispered their prayers and pain in her sight.
Many scars mark her flesh, a multitude of injuries over centuries are mapped on her skin, hosting memories made. But the light in her eyes seems as alive now as when first written – like a spark had leapt from the writer with which to conceive her afterlife.
She finds herself wondering about the iconographer, what else he may have written and infused with his love.
From the doorway, the rumble of boiling kettle faint in his ear, Tobias remarks a nuance of light begin to grow in the room. Indeed, as soon as she arrived, he thought to see a light in her eyes where before had lurked shadow. A light now working to infill vast halls of memory while she sits and contemplates an icon in her lap.
Tobias knows nought of the journey, remarks only the light in green-amber eyes. Yet all at once his thoughts are tugged to a Moroccan lamp he has at home, its delicate mosaic of green-amber glass.
He had found it in a market in Salé. The funny town of Salé with its wicked bazaar on a day he crossed the river in search of a madrasa of medieval fame.
In a leering merchant’s stall he had found the lamp, a simple souvenir of precious memory-made – of a single candle’s glow in the madrasa’s central hall. A single candle which could floodlight the breathtaking beauty of sacred space like a firefly illuminating a night-dark cave.
Come on, he says, tea brewed and poured. You deserve the big chair for a change.
She doesn’t need to be asked twice, hops over and into crumpled old leather, arranging herself squeakily in holey pink socks.
She looks around the shelves from this new perspective, at the incarnate spirits of a plethora of myths in their containers printed and bound.
Looks further, to where kindness sits in the visitor’s chair quietly filling his pipe.
And finally smiles into the face of loving-kindness on the table, the one she has brought home.
All return her gaze, hushed, expectant. Knowing that now has arrived, the moment when before becomes past.
Settled into a time before time, a place before now, ready to exist, ready to be told. By the one in the storyteller’s chair.
Citations and References
Lines from the following creative works are quoted in the text:
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And with thanks to the following authors and their texts for contributing to my understanding in the development of this work of imagination:
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