The Taste of Translation

by Anne Gambling

  They’ll bring the best gifts, Kasim noted. Especially if you tell them what you need first.

  Shampoo! Susu called out. Face cream!

  Books, said Kisha, looking at the ruins of the wall.

  From well before curfew the tiny flat overflowed with people, the stairwells were full of chattering students, the halls a crush of humanity. After adding several books to the wall, stashing a couple of coffee packets at the back of the kitchen cupboard and delivering shampoo and moisturiser to Susu, Kisha piled the remainder of the myriad gifts – bottles of water, bars of soap, a few batteries, packets of matches, two cloves of garlic, a couple of onions and some sad apples – on a trestle by the lift with a sign: Help yourselves!

  Earlier she had placed candles around the edge of the balcony and hung Chinese lanterns found in the cellar from the gutter.

  It made Nada a bit edgy. Doesn’t it sort of call attention to us? she said.

  Relax! cried Samir. You know better than anyone that every shell, every bullet has someone’s name on it. He kissed her forehead, enveloped her in a bear hug. None of them are for us tonight, I personally guarantee it.

  M&M played request after request in the corner of the living room. Miki’s new girlfriend jived to every song.

  No hips, said Susu, sipping her mother’s homemade saki. Pretty smile, though.

  On cue, the Chetniks decided to see the New Year in their way. People huddled wherever they could as mortars hit the city. Everywhere the boom-crash of opera, everywhere the overture to Beethoven’s 1812, everywhere but where they were.

  Congratulations! Samir called from the balcony. We have survived 1992. May we all see each other again – same time, same place – in another 365 days. Fires backlit his grand speech. Automatic gunfire crackled and spat from across the river.

  Have you ever noticed, said Kisha, how they sound like those tiny strings of fireworks we used to let off as kids? She sipped her rice wine. Women’s farts, we called them. I wish these were as harmless.

  What? hiccupped Plato. Since when are women’s farts harmless?

  Susu gave him a good kick in the shins while Kisha slopped her wine, bent-double with giggles.

  What’d they hit this time? someone called out.

  Looks like over around Tito Street, Samir called back.

  Great, grumbled Marko. There goes my wanted ad. And he hugged a grim guitar while Kisha tight-wrapped him in a fresh round of giggles.

  Twelve

  What did they say?

  She stood by the radio. There were always enough batteries at the refugee centre. Kasim leant his head closer. The reception was bad. A shell had hit the water line at the brewery. Eight dead, 20 injured – and –

  No more. Out the door, pulling on her coat on the way. The streets were icy, slippery, but she didn’t fall, falter. Like the day with Baba, it was as if she ran through air.

  Don’t think, she told herself. Don’t think, otherwise the magic will stop.

  Should she go to the hospital? Or home? The hospital was closer, but she couldn’t bear to think the worst. Not yet. Not ever yet.

  Samir, Samir? Calling his name as she climbed the stairs, two at a time, all the way to the fifth floor, the stitch in her side seamlessly merging with the struggle to find breath.

  Mmmm?

  He stood at the door, book in hand, backlit, beautiful, alive.

  Oh! She fell into waiting arms, collapsed into the relief of his warmth.

  I’m not ready to say goodbye, she whimpered, shaking her head over and over as he cradled her in one of Baba’s massive coats.

  Shhhh. He stroked her hair, held her to his heartbeat. There is no goodbye, he reminded and tilted her chin, looked hard in her eyes. No goodbye. Only hello. Over and over again.

  He kissed her hair, smiled and said: Hello Kisha.

  She stirred the rice in the pot. Steam tentatively rose from Tolstoy’s dance with the flame while snow flurried in happy eddies about her head. She wound the scarf tighter round her throat and chin, pulled the coat’s collar higher to hug her ears, and rubbed hands still bitter-cold inside thick ski gloves.

  Sometimes I think I’m losing it, she said to Samir who was jumping up and down inside to stay warm. I really cracked up this afternoon.

  You’re not losing it, his breath a white cloud before his nose. Every now and then you have to let a little out. The sluice gates have to open occasionally. He grinned. I can take the adoration.

  Yeah, but it all came at once, she said, trying to make sense of the fall. I mean – I was listening to the radio just after I’d finished writing you the letter. So I was already down in the pit, thinking morbid thoughts –

  What letter?

  A letter. Just in case.

  Just in case what? he teased.

  She turned back to the pot on the stove.

  His step was soft, arms encircling. Can’t I read it now? he asked. To see how much you love me?

  Oh. She grimaced and stirred the pot harder.

  Ki-.

  She looked up into his eyes. Twinkling, merry. Merry despite everything that went on around them.

  She tried to return his grin. You’re assuming things, she bantered. Maybe you’d find out things you’d rather not!

  Ha! He tickled her ribs. I’d be forced to kill you before a sniper got hold – so no one else would know the dreaded truth.

  You could put out a contract to the guy holed up in the Jewish Cemetery, she laughed. A packet of Marlboro for my life.

  You’re worth that much!

  Kisha felt herself tight-hugged, felt his full life flowing, spilling into her. It was over for the moment but still it stood close, watching for another chance to catch her up in fetid fear. The sluice gates closed, the pressure released.

  But till when? Till when?

  The newspaper lies open in the staff room at the centre. Beyond the obituaries and lists of dead, she reads the day’s editorial, Empire of Hatred, with Kasim on one side and Haris on the other.

  Hatred and vengeance have recruited new, often reluctant supporters. None of those whose nearest and dearest have been murdered, whose houses have been stripped and burned, will be able to forget … some say ‘we will avenge every stone of our house’ … some will give in to this madness at the risk of damning themselves.

  None of them speaks, each with his own experience to work through while she remembers Baba’s words on the day she died:

  Don’t let them do this to you. Don’t let them make you hate.

  She had gone home and watered the herbs that day, had done as Baba had suggested and kept the seeds. Now it is more than a year. Now she prepares to let them go to seed again.

  Baba knows. Baba always knows. But is there anyone left to tell?

  Intermezzo

  The chorus now speaks:

  So many stories. So many stories of pain, so many to whom harm has been done. Why talk about it? Why bother? Why give voice? Does it become some sort of brinkmanship? Like that silly pub game – you think you’ve got it bad? I have it soooooo bad that … on, on, on it goes. Building-building-building to a crescendo that slashes the soul as surely as shrapnel rips a body to shreds. The damage complete, irreparable, before its impact has even been felt.

  No, don’t talk about it, don’t tell the stories. Or if you must, do it in a monotone, a matter-of-factual monologue of everyday normalcy. For yes, this is our normalcy, this is the new-normal, and the old-normal doesn’t bear thinking about, reminiscing about, because it won’t ever come again. We look out on a shattered landscape and know it can’t. Ever.

  At some point, we imagine it will be replaced by another new-normal, the only prayer offered is that it is at least no worse than the present new-normal. And so we speak about our lives, normally, in that monotone of matter-of-factness. This happened and this, oh, and then that. Over coffee we talk, tell our stories, over coffee and a cigarette. No matter that the cigarette is only half a cigarette, or with a filter
made of toilet paper, and that the match used to light it has been split, finely, with a pocketknife, in half. It takes a while to go through a box of matches that way. But we have time, when it is light, to sit, split, and split again.

  No matter that the coffee is made of burnt rice, or chicory, or yesterday’s real coffee grounds boiled a second or third time. No matter. We still sit over coffee, sit with our cigarettes, and talk. Normally. For it is normal – who died, who lived, what was the body count on this fine, fine day, what the stupid politicians of the West said most recently, more stupidly than before, their latest thinking on a peace process to bring our hillside butchers to heel.

  All so normal. We talk about the items on the radio news (no need to comment on the dwindling supply of batteries to maintain this particular normal). We talk about the weather (no batteries required). We talk about what to have for dinner (even if it amounts to nothing, or the same as yesterday, or the same as for breakfast – if the ration of tinned humanitarian guilt, well past its use-by date, managed to stretch that far).

  This, then, is the sum total of our always, just a bog-standard-regular-normal-everyday-sort-of-always existence in this new-world-normal-sort-of-way which we live and continue to live until someone blows a leg off or a head off or an arm off and the new-normal changes again, with a sigh and an: Oh well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The odds keep lowering, you see. As those who can escape do, as those who stay grow more careless or fatalistic in their dashes between safe points, as those on the hills keep receiving their regular supplies of ammo.

  But wait. Don’t tune out quite yet. There’s more, there’s always more.

  Of course we talk about the day at the office, even if it amounts to classes in a stairwell, or serving soup in a school converted to a refugee centre, or patching up broken bodies in a hospital devoid of requisite instruments which the Chetniks, incidentally, enjoy shelling each day at noon during visiting hours. Each day without fail – they like their routines.

  Of course we talk about our excitement when the electricity comes on, suddenly, sporadically, in the middle of the night (enabling washing, drying, ironing, cooking at 3am no less), or the water (enabling the filling of buckets, an extra flush down the toilet, a bath for heaven’s sake!).

  Yes, these are our stories, and no matter how dull the monotone, no matter how flatline the narration, no matter how earnest the attempt at matter-of-factness, perhaps you still catch the sadness of what we tell.

  If you listen closely, with a different ear, not the ear of the senses but the ear of the heart, you will hear it. Tune into the subtext, scratch a little on the surface till a deeper layer is exposed. Feel free to finger-chip away at the façade, it has already been struck by gun fire. Just a little is needed – but be diligent, methodical. Take the small hunk of plaster in your hand, turn it over slowly, savour its texture (crumbly, yes? like a hard sheep’s cheese). Then (are you ready?), swift-crush it to dust.

  Open your hand, slowly now, to not disturb the remnants, cradle the debris, these fine specks of nothing. Look closely at them, look into them.

  For there you will find the remains of a life, a home, a family, a story. There you will find the tired grains of hope and faith and trust and love. And yes, there you will find the sadness, the sadness beneath the monotone, the sadness reduced to dust. Dust, then, is all that remains, ready to be given up to the wind.

  Spread wide your hand, let the dust lift from your palm and take flight. Fragments of sadness carried by a breeze to a beyond beyond the horizon, or perhaps delivered down onto a freshly-dug grave, or gently dissolved into the river Miljacka to flow away home to the sea.

  So many stories. Yes, so many stories. But all reduced to dust in the end. There, in the monologue of a city’s destruction. There, in the whistle of a mortar overhead. There, in the dispassionate disinterest of a Sarajevan like Kisha who watches to see where it falls this time, the plume of smoke, the flick of flame, the scream, the wail, the siren, the shout, pinpointed to a particular city block or landmark.

  Earlier, she felt the pang of compassion, pain’s spontaneous transference as she bore witness (a quickened heartbeat, an intake of breath, a tumble-turn of her stomach) but now there is nothing, simply a numb knowing.

  Why? she wonders. Is it guilt to be spared once more? Spared by the randomness of an attack which could claim me tomorrow?

  Or maybe it’s something more banal, more practical that mutes her response – the fact that fear, shock, generates sweat. A cold sweat that licks at the back of her neck, dampens her hair, plunges the crevasse between her breasts, pools in her armpits. Too much sweat has a consequence – too frequent washing of clothes and body when there is little water and less soap to spare. Has she somehow unconsciously registered this? And her disinterested witness is its manifestation? Is this another of the by-products grafted onto her city’s crucifixion?

  We watch Kisha as she watches. We who have already flown from shattered bodies and shredded hearts. We who hover and watch as she watches the new-normal take shape. Daily, hourly, moment by suffering moment.

  We shall not give up on those who remain, staying ever-close – our breath the mist on a foggy morning, our form the shadows cast by a wavering kandilo. We stay, we care, we trust to hope.

  Even though we see how she reduces everything to its lowest common denominator of emotionless narration. Over coffee, over a cigarette. She does not examine too closely the chipped plaster in her hand. And certainly, certainly does not crush it to dust.

  Kisha would never go so far. Never.

  The Rhizomes of Memory

  One

  There is a place in Kisha’s memory for everything that has happened – a place of memory full of singular memories in small drawers which she opens and sifts through. Each container hosts an image, a scene, a conversation. They are stories strung like pearls around the neck of a life, tiny firefly sentries within a heavenful of stars. Each is sorted, noted and filed, to be retrieved by some sense reaction perhaps – a taste, a tune, a smell – but more often by a random thought which conjures (by way of its own logic) interconnections with memories long buried at the backs of drawers, dust-coated and musty with age. An encounter with the past which sneaks in, worms its way back up and into now when there is no expectation of same. When the jolt is pure, sudden, flavoursome.

  Less often, but no less potent, is the conscious resurrection of memory, to bear witness to the past, reflect on lessons learnt and build something new by coupling the actions of then with the insights of now. Perhaps a sort of wisdom ensues, a more rounded-out consideration of the original event, understanding granted by the time taken for it to mellow, ferment, age. Perhaps, but not necessarily. At the very least, she must prepare a new catalogue entry to acknowledge shared space between the then and the now. Or she makes a notation on an existing card with a furrowed brow, a chewed pen end and sighed scribble which admits: Knowledge Pending.

  On any night Kisha can be found lying in the dark, staring at a ceiling which cannot be seen, going to this place within her heart to stand before her catalogue drawers. Here in the heart is the place of memory, not her mind, her brain – there are housed the mere artefactual tools to prise archaeological finds out and into conscious space, not the place of their storage or source, these energy-charged memory beakers reside beyond. Into her heart, into the centre of all things Kisha must go to find her catalogue drawers.

  The image she conjures to enter the space is of the old oak cabinets in the National Library filled with their millions of typed cards. Containers for the artefacts recorded thereon, therein, they house the memory of all those who read them, loved them, referenced them in some essay or other. She likes the idea of a plethora of typed cards as keepers of her memories. Indeed, they themselves are memory texts, and she smiles before her old oak cabinets, anticipating the long night ahead, this parlour game she plays, here in a parlour of war, of death.

  Of course sense tri
ggers can help kick-start a memory trail – a picture, a smell, a snatch of tune, a taste or touch of textured form. But she finds it difficult to rely on her senses in a parlour which overwhelms and numbs. Better to go directly to the source, knock on the door of her heart and let the inner flood the outer, submerge their war beneath her stream.

  Yet she knows she must take care – so many drawers house the now of recent past. So short a time yet it commands a vast vault. Rather she searches for everything which lies beneath, below – events which take time to re-sift and re-assemble, to bring their fragments together into the circle of story. And on this night, stands before the drawers marked by year, cross-referenced by event, and traces a finger across the arc of time and space, an intersect between, say, 1984 and the letter O.

  Olympics, she smiles. Too easy.

  She starts again with 1974 and – well – a raft of letters could take her into a plethora of relevant drawers. A for Azra, B for Baba, D for Death, F for Feast Day, G for St George. How to unravel these tangled rhizomes and concentrate on only one thing? And sighs ruefully in the direction of the ceiling.

  I should have stayed with the Olympics, she thinks.

  But no, the more elaborate the search, the better the entertainment. To keep her whole, tight-woven, sane. Till break of day.

  The cabinets creak with age and disuse. They groan, shudder, spool updrafts of dust. She flicks through the typed cards and at last locates the intersect between A and B and D and F and G and 1974, the fat tuber of rhizome from which so many roots are spread. It is the letter I.

  The light is bright, stark white. It seems to climb all the way up the steep attic stairs to where she hides. As soon as Baba began to assemble the embroidered cloths, incense, perfumed oil, as soon as she began to hum the refrain of his chant, she knew. Knew where she must go to be safe from this event and her fear – of an unknown man and his magic unknown.

  Yes, she knew, and remembered the day he had passed her and the other children playing in the street. Oh! How they had run and jumped, thrown up imaginary obstacles into his path, teased and tugged his beard!