You are too wild! he cried, splashing them with holy water. You will become mountain goats!
The water had not touched her. The switch of rosemary dunked in his shiny silver basin, the water skipping through the air, had not touched her. She had ducked away while the others squealed their delight. No black-robed man’s magic water would drench her bird-brittle wings.
Brittle, yes, a fragile waif cocooned in Baba’s lap, after the sudden flight of her parents, lost to a truck’s careless swerve on a narrow mountain track. They had fallen-fallen, the car tumbling over-over, into a ravine. But their souls had flown, straight up to heaven and God, Baba had told her. To the God they didn’t believe in, to the place Tito said didn’t exist.
But they must be somewhere, Kisha thought. Somewhere high. Not stuck beneath the earth with worms, not caught by rocks in the gorge, scarred and damaged beyond repair. They had to be somewhere high, of this she was certain in a way all five year-olds are certain. And so wanted to fly, to visit them wherever they were.
She squinted up into the sky, to a place she couldn’t see, to a place she could barely imagine. No priest’s holy water would stick her like glue, bind her to this place, root her to the earth and its grubby bones. She needed to be wild to fly so high.
Kisha stays quiet in her refuge, this cave at the top of Baba’s house. Living here is still new. Not like coming to visit, a tea and cake and then gone again. She needs to learn this place, explore it, feel it, dream it, so that even in the midst of a moonless night she knows every wrinkle of its face. She puts a finger to a wooden cupboard door and swirls a pattern in its thick film of dust. She listens to the tiny claws of a mouse scurry across the bare boards, and watches a spider repair her web in a broken pane of glass.
All this she sees. Now. Again.
She hears the priest downstairs. The creak of wooden floor accompanies him from room to room, muttered incantations float alongside, and Baba’s responses echo in a singsong chant. Incense seeps through the floorboards and all the while there is this white light crawling in from under the door, an iridescent glow which surrounds her no matter how tight shut her eyes. Screwed up they are and her hands balled into fists before her face. But the light won’t go away. It appears beneath her lids with a power all its own.
Kisha is young, wild, curious. However fragile her self in these early days of loss and newness, she wonders about the light. It is a mystery to be solved. She opens the door a crack, registers that they are in the bedrooms, and quietly, on unshod feet, slips down the flights of stairs to stand in the hall. The doorway to the sitting room veritably leaps at her – something silvery, shimmery lies within.
In the room is an altar, a small table covered by a linen cloth. Candlelight bathes the icons which stand there. St George she knows, on horseback with lance high – the family’s patron saint, the one whose feast day they celebrate with the priest and his ritual blessing.
But the other? The other is a mother who clasps a baby to her breast. Gentle is her embrace, gentle her love. Here is the white light, glowing from the clear-as-moonshine silver plating which embosses the icon from frame to veil. Only the mother’s face and hands, and the baby’s, are revealed within the beaten silver.
The mother cradles her child in arms, but also somehow beckons to the girl with a hand outstretched. Come, she seems to say. Come, let me greet you.
Kisha bites her lip. What should she do? She is already close enough to see her shadow in the fresh-polished silver, a shimmery wisp of smoke reflected in the frame. She rocks forward on the balls of her feet, propelled. Not enough, not yet –
Sudden. A heavy step behind her and she feels the priest’s warm breath on her hair. A murmured prayer wafts down, reaches her ear as a mere hint of grace. And she is gone, to Baba, climbs into her lap and buries herself among the many skirts and embroidered apron she wears for the occasion.
Father Sava takes his place at the altar. His beard is long, his eyes deep-set, a small black hat perched on his head. He places Baba’s prayer book on the table, pulls up the sleeves of his heavy black robe and dips long brown fingers into a bowl of rosewater.
She cannot, will not look, as he intones the rites, breaks bread and fills small cups with red wine. His melodic voice chants on and on, over, under, in-between. A stream’s current swirled round and about and she a small leaf drifting down from an autumnal tree. There now, her landing is soft in the stream. The scent of incense is heady and she drifts. Gently.
Like rain falling, grass growing – kisha pada, trava raste.
Time passes. Or does it? For there behind her eyes she sees again the white light. Its brightness wills her to wake. Father Sava holds out a hand and this time there is no fear or thought that his magic will bind her to the earth. He traces the sign of the cross upon her brow and a wet streak of oily water slides down her nose.
He leads her to the Lady in her silvered veil, and says: Kisha, let the Holy Mother’s love rain down upon you, you who are rain itself.
A smile lies buried in his beard. Kiss the Lady, he instructs.
And she does, looking into eyes of the deepest green-black. Eyes that surprise with their life-filled witness, reflecting and absorbing in a looped and coiled ring song caught by refracted candlelight from behind a veil of silver moonshine.
No breath. No word. No thought. No sign. Just an emptiness, full of light. She feels herself exhilarated, lifted, lightened, by a joy she can neither describe nor understand. But knows it comes from the Lady, knows it comes from her light.
Ah. A memory hugged close in the drawer marked I. But where is A for Azra in this mix? Kisha must look further into the day. Later, after the feast, after baklava is shared, the sticky honeyed treat with a surprise secreted at its centre, where she takes a full and frank bite and finds a silver coin clanking in her mouth.
Hurrah! Everyone at the table claps. Luck will shine on our little Kisha this year!
She goes to the kitchen, washes the small coin and as Baba farewells her guests at the door, slips it into the sliver of gap of silver plating which hugs the Lady’s neck. It disappears from sight, silver into silver, light into light.
Childhood experience lies deep-embedded. It forms the very bedrock of life. So it was with Kisha and the Lady. Simply there as Baba was there, as school was there, friends, games, drawings, storybooks. A quick kiss to her fingertips placed on the Lady’s veil, the slight tremor felt, a buzz, hum or tingle. Each time she felt this life within life. Only now, in the deliberate activity of resurrection in the tense quiet of a moonless death-cleaved night does she think about the coin, for example, or the Lady’s gift of light. And wonders.
But her time in this drawer is far from over as she finds the intersects between different memory-watercourses form a mighty flow before fanning out into a river mouth spread wide as a sheet of straight dark hair spilled into a basin in flood. So it is when A and B and D and F and G and 1974 are made whole in the memory of I.
Hurry! cries Baba. We need to get to the festival before sunset. Azra is waiting!
The time of the Gypsies has arrived. When accordions are played, tambourines trilled and guitars chord-thread their songs. When St George is set afloat on the river Miljacka with candles fore and aft to guide him home to the sea.
They sit on the sandy riverbank with Azra and her granddaughters, with all the other children of the camp, while women wade singing into the stream, their skirts fanned out on the face of the water, the musicians on shore encircling the rites with their music.
Kisha watches the saint float down the river toward the weir, his candle scouts fording the lip first.
Today we welcome St George and farewell him to the soul of the river all in one, Azra tells her. There may be different ways to live this life but one God answers all our prayers.
Imagine that we share the same saint! she laughs and cuddles Kisha close. Baba is my sister in spirit and you my granddaughter in love. Our connection is deeper than
blood.
Kisha watches the women wade from the water, skirts wet-heavy at their ankles. A bonfire is lit and the sky deepens to evening blue. Venus grows bright in her heavens. She sits and thinks about the children at her school, the ones who tease her for playing at the Gypsy camp.
They’ll steal you, right out from under your Baba’s nose. You’ll be gone! And when you die? They’ll grind your bones to chalk and paint their faces with it!
Stupid stories, nothing more. Each year Kisha is freshly sad to watch the camp pack up their caravans, take their carts, horses and performing bear, and head off down an overgrown path shrouded by unknowing. Into another world, another year, another season.
Each year she sits on a rock with Azra watching them take their leave.
Why don’t you go, Azra? You’re a traveller too.
Ah child, she answers, drawing her into a hug as wide as the world. I’ll never leave Baba’s fireside.
Why not?
Because it is written.
Where Azra? Where is it written?
The Gypsy smiles and lifts two small hands into her lap, palm up. Here, she points to the left. And here, she points to the right.
Kisha squints but cannot see. Still she believes. For this is Azra. Whose magic is real.
She reaches into another drawer, this time marked U. It is time to fly the nest. She wants to live in town close to the faculty where she will study these coming years. She will miss Baba, will miss the Lady, but it is time to leave.
Baba knows and sets to work.
It is late. Kisha sleeps in her room upstairs, her childhood room full of a child’s outgrown things. But she reaches into Baba’s memory, reaches deep and brings out this image of Baba at work while she sleeps.
Baba brings the Lady, lies her flat on the kitchen table, looks into green-black eyes and gains an unspoken agreement to duplicate her incarnation, to re-birth her in new form. She places thick parchment over the embossed silver and using a soft-coloured pencil – lilac, she has decided – begins to sweep her hand back and forth, rubbing the edge of the pencil across the paper.
Her hand flies swift across the page, such is the energy of her task. No longer a grandmother, she is a girl at her desk in an art studio, an art studio bombed during a war set to divide and conquer almost half a century before. Yet she has not lost her touch, her feel of parchment and choice of colours. She draws the paper away from the icon, pleased with the rubbing thus far.
Once more she secures it in place, taking care to align the edges, and touches up areas of lightness and softness with a firmer hand, carving borders deeper with colour. Suddenly, she removes the paper, deftly sweeps it up and away in a single fluid movement of artistic knowing. Yes, she is well-pleased.
Small spaces lie free of colour and imprint. Here belong the faces and hands which lie beneath the silver plating, on the board itself, in egg tempera stuck fast to wood by layer upon layer of lacquer.
Baba chooses her pencils, translates the Lady, then the Child to parchment – the turn of mouth, the shape of eyes, the curve of jaw and straightness of nose, a true and faithful translation. She works by candlelight, the flame flickers, the icon and her sister slip in and out of shadow. Now only her eyes remain. Her eyes, their inner light.
A difficult task. Baba thinks long on the mix of green and black she needs to capture the effect. Her hand hesitates above the page and she wonders if the icon writer found his task as difficult. Did his hand hover with uncertainty as hers does now or did he instinctively know how to make her eyes speak? Was it easier with pigment swirled in egg yolk, a matter of tool and technique, of simple craftsmanship? Or was he taken in hand by God’s grace?
She prays to the Lady for intercession in her own task, squeezes her eyes into narrow slits and begins to lightly shade this tiny space which holds an ocean of colour. Her breath flows easier now she has begun. A little more green, a little more black. She cocks her head, lifts the candle, looks from one to the other and back again. A smudge of blue? No. It is done, complete.
Baba sits back, wipes the sweat from her lip and brow, smiles into this expression of love fully formed on a sheet at her table. She blots the surface, rolls it into a piece of greaseproof paper. Into a pink cylinder it goes.
Upstairs, Kisha sleeps. Also time for Baba to sleep. She returns the Lady to the icon corner, whispers her thanks and sees the mere flicker of acknowledgement fanned by candlelight at her side.
A memory not self-made, but when Kisha receives the gift, unscrolls the parchment, and asks her questions, she enters the scene just seen. It is her birthday and this her gift in the last summer of childhood. She marvels at the beauty of a simple piece of parchment imprinted with the Lady’s image as Azra joins them at the kitchen table to add her own gift.
She lays a sprig of lavender on the paper, lights a candle, sprinkles perfumed oil all round this Lady of the Lady and chants:
Sun shines, wind blows, rain falls, grass grows ...
Three times round the chant, the candle in her hand swept across the parchment, its flame sketching a passage home to source.
Let us sing, says Baba and they hold hands, close eyes. It is the old love song she learnt by heart as a child:
Kisha pada, trava raste, gora zeleni …
(Rain falls, grass grows, green is the forest …)
Shall we call Father Sava to bless your Lady for you?
No, your blessing is enough, Baba. And your magic, Azra.
A three-way hug becomes three sets of tears, and on a frigid mattress in a frozen hallway, Kisha looks down the years and smiles to see Azra’s face in each – her mosaic of scarves, her jewellery and skirts, the trill of melody from the bells at her waist, the scent of incense when the cards are cut.
Azra, Azra. Where are you, Azra? Did you leave us like Baba or have you hidden yourself away? How can one sister remain when the other is gone? How can she not? Who will light a candle then?
I will, Kisha decides. I will light a candle for you both. Whether in this world or the next, I will keep your memory safe. Here. Inside.
Out on the balcony a cigarette becomes her candle of the night as she watches the sky open her windows to shake out her crumbs. Snow flutters down, a spring shower of weightless crystal which has no desire to reach the ground where its magic will melt.
Why do they call snow powder? she wonders. It’s more like goosedown in a breathless breeze.
She looks into the tunnel of memory once more and finds herself stuffing pillows, duvets. All the while feathers escape to drift nonchalantly in the no-breeze of time around her and the Gypsy children down by the river under twilit poplar trees.
Laughter, as they jump and grab at the soft clouds about their heads, reaches her down all these years. While Baba waves from the circle of the camp, sitting, knitting, smiling.
There beside her sister.
Two
Kisha wears a ring. Has no idea why she still wears it, but each day, in a ritual as long-standing as face-washing, teeth-brushing, toilet-going, she twirls the ring back round to face heaven. It always manages to shift slightly on her finger during the night, its heavy core of amethyst-set acquiring a half-mast perspective which she corrects automatically, instinctively even, in an act as natural as breathing. Each day.
Occasionally she looks at the ring surprised it still exists as its own entity, surprised it hasn’t melted into her skin and disappeared, an embodiment of all she has witnessed in this performance of life. Since the first it has felt like a part of her anatomy, like the mole on a cheek, the scar on an arm, the too-early strands of grey in a thicket of chestnut hair. Only when someone comments on its unusual design is she reminded of its separate self. And a wan smile of acknowledgement may cross her face as she answers:
Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it.
Few in this place have noticed. Few have come close enough to notice. But the woman at the supermarket check-out does during the time it takes her t
o rummage for change.
Moment schnell, she may say, but in that split second the assistant remarks – for its size, its ornamentation, is not easily overlooked. At one time the social workers at the centre had admired it and now it is the turn of Tobias. Only natural, when she reaches to pluck a book from a higher shelf.
With anyone else, she unconsciously restricts the exchange to a light answer in the affirmative. But Tobias’ enquiry is deeper, his interest more earnest.
The ring’s provenance, he asks. It is most unique.
And she wonders. Should she remove it from her finger to make his enquiry simpler? Or is he satisfied to observe at a distance, too much the gentleman, too aware of her reluctance for contact to take her hand directly. How would she answer in any case? What story would she tell?
Once she had a dream. A dream of how to tell the story if someone asked. Of what happened, back there, back then. How it all came to be – why, when, and to whom.
In the dream, a typewriter began to tell the story, typing by itself. All she had to do was watch as each sheet was lifted through space to a workshop bench where the text was laid out, stacked and bound. A frenzy of words tumbled out of the typewriter in their desire to tell the story of what happened. And she watched everything become ordered, everything in its place, linear, rational, believable. All she need do was watch.
But suddenly it went awry. The words, the very letters began to float off, detach themselves from the completed pages of the story while the typewriter still pounded, producing more, yet more words.
No! she cried aloud in the dream. Stop! And reached up, tried to catch the letters and words, return them to earth and finite logic.
Ream upon ream of gobbledy-gook swirled about her head, bobbing in a chaos of thought, merging, separating, scattering, like fireflies tugged by a turbulent breeze. No sense to the text, no meaning to the story, no language in which it could ever be understood. Who could possibly translate such a mess?
But the letters seemed happy, the words satisfied to float in an airborne harbour, and no amount of poking, prodding, imploring or urging could put the story back the way it was.
The Taste of Translation Page 30