The Taste of Translation

by Anne Gambling

  Are you sure you’re OK to give blood, Ki-? You’re getting awfully pale. I’m going to have to check this lot for anaemia.

  She bit her lip, turned her head away. How to explain she didn’t want this red liquid coursing her body anymore when everywhere else it spilled onto the streets? How to tell of the quick rush of exhilaration each time she watched her arm drained of life, how she could almost feel her veins become thinner, starved of sustenance?

  She shrugged instead into Nada’s question and said: I just keep thinking what would happen if someone I cared about didn’t make it because there wasn’t enough blood. Like little Farid for instance.

  Nada’s response was lost in a blast at close quarters. Plaster poured down from the already cracked ceiling.

  Damn, she said, scribbling a note on the pouch of blood. I’ll see you later.

  Kisha picked her way through corridors of least resistance, past ghosts of the dead and near-dead, back outside into bright summer sun. She edged her way round the corner of the building, passing through a tableau of steaming rubbish mounds where a half-starved dog licked out an empty aid can and an old man scoured for scraps.

  You got home alright, Nada said later, walking in the door at the end of her shift.

  Yeah. As always. Where did this one hit?

  On the third floor I think. Has Kasim come by?

  No. Should he have?

  He said he’d drop in with a change of clothes. I really must stink.

  They talked late that night, each lying on a mattress, end to end in the hall, talking about nothing in particular till they drifted off to sleep.

  Kisha dreamt of mice, a colony of mice living inside a tree. But none of them happy, the conditions were cramped. One after another they left home, zooming off on a flying fox, then suddenly letting go to take a slippery slide round and round, down and down, to the ground. She repeated the mouse journeys over and over, her night spent in a dizzy blur.

  In the dream, it was autumn. Leaves fell from the trees and hit the mice while they were on the flying fox. Some lost their grip, slipped and fell. Far, too far for a mouse to fall. Backs broken, they were buried beneath a constant rain of bloody leaves.

  This is grotesque! she shouted and tried to push her way through the leaves, but they were thick, unyielding. Caught in a rising tide of red mush and dead mice, she cried out, cried again. Cried until she no longer heard the sound of her cries.

  Her head in Nada’s lap. You were very distressed, she said, stroking her hair.

  Kisha got up, lit a cigarette, came back to sit on the edge of the mattress. I’m OK, it was just a dream.

  But the shadows of mice crowded the hallway wall, a bloody mush of leaves swelled around her ankles. I’m not looking forward to another autumn of this, she said.

  Nada took the cigarette. Have you ever thought it’s time to go?

  No.

  Maybe you should.

  I’m not a deserter!

  I didn’t say that. Nada sighed. It’s just – what’s here for you, Ki-? What’s left?

  Each day Kisha makes her way up to the centre at Zetra, the long climb through city streets made longer by detours and delays caused by the usual hit-men in their usual locations. There are no weekends, no days on which people do not need help, support, a comforting arm or warming soup. Each day her mask thickens, sets her face into a taut mantle of furrows worn deep between brows, inked smudges of unsleep beneath eyes, hollowed-out cheeks, thin dry lips. Each day she becomes less permeable, each day more like stone. Each day there is less to talk about, joke about, express anger about. It just is. It all just is.

  On her way back downtown, before the soup kitchen roster late afternoon, she walks through the ruins of Theatre Obala. A short-cut, a safe cut and, since the exhibition opened, a knife cut through memory into a place beyond hope. Witnesses of Existence – this is what they’ve named the exhibition. In a burnt-out shell of blackened walls and charred beams, of buckled pipes and concrete rubble, lies an art installation. Dirt, broken glass, bits of brick and stone transformed into a mass grave. She looks into the faces of the fallen, tiny cameo cut-outs from the newspaper obituary pages, smiling faces held in ashen eternity. She looks down and they smile up. Each day they bear witness, watch her mask tighten.

  That night she kneels before the low table in the living room and begins the slow ceremony to bring a new kandilo to life – a jar half-filled with water, a little oil, a little more water, a coil of wick floated within. Its end she pushes through a scrap of tin foil and presses it into place over the lip of the jar. Which is more precious, the oil or the water? The match to light it? The wick itself? Or the jar, the container which makes everything possible?

  The tiny flame sputters into life, sheds soft and shadowed light upon a colourful mosaic, a slim package of holiday snaps she has stumbled across while searching out the tin of oil at the back of a kitchen cupboard. Not so many, a single occasion, their first and only holiday of together-life. They had finally gotten around to developing them just weeks before the photo lab, like everything else, fell victim to hilltop artillery. There had seemed no rush, back then.

  She spreads them before her, fanned out like playing cards. Samir had collected them from the lab, deposited them on the kitchen bench where they had sat unopened while arguments raged about the coming war, while the radio was tuned to political debates, while friends came and went, shared bottles of slivovica, talked round and round irresolvable issues over and over again. Perhaps Baba had put them safely away in the cupboard at some point. And now she had found them, a whole lifetime later.

  She searches out the one, for there is only one, of the two of them sharing a single frame. Hears again her laughter at the old man with his donkey who had seen their dilemma – blue sky, white cliffs, green sea. First one, then the other taking their turn against the beauty of the backdrop. A flurry of hand gestures, click-click sounds ensue, and he takes the camera, they grin, he snaps. But suddenly his donkey is gone, has shied at some invisible hazard, and he too is gone with raised stick and a volley of expletives. The camera forgotten, his good deed cursed.

  Yes. Again she sees her laugh and Samir’s shrug as he rescues the camera from the dirt, checks to see if the lens is scratched.

  Well, he’d said, kissing her hair. All will be revealed soon enough. And so it is, this sliver of together-life.

  She walks through the ruined theatre next day and the picture falls into the mass grave. Gravity-pulled, it drops. Like an autumn leaf from a wind-tugged tree.

  They take it in shifts. She doesn’t realise, not at first, but there seems to be always someone with her, wherever she happens to be. Today it is Marko, today it is Saturday. Today the weekend Chetniks are up in the hills.

  Sometimes I’ve seen women up there doing their bit for the cause, he says. One had an air mattress beside the trench. She was in a bikini and all.

  Kisha prods the tiny flames, reaches for Eliot’s Wasteland: These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Scrunched up paper added to scrunched up paper.

  Every now and then – I don’t know, maybe she was tired of lying in the same position, maybe she was hot or bored – she got up and pulled the catch on the rocket launcher. Didn’t check the sights, didn’t choose a target. Bitch didn’t even take off her sunglasses.

  Kisha rises from her squat and looks to where this sister – this Bosnian Serb sister – was, or still is. Doing it because she believes in it, or perhaps to earn a rabid boyfriend’s approval, or for any other of a million reasons.

  It goes in, this new knowledge, goes in to a place deep inside. Walks up to the door, no need to knock, the door already open, ready to welcome this new anecdote to join a crowd of fellows jostling inside the entrance. Jostling, because she has given up sifting and sorting them into catalogue drawers. Her artefactual tools stand idle now, her process crumbled to dust.

  Intermezzo

  The chorus now speaks:

  S
he stands on the balcony on a warm late summer’s night, and we watch, we who have already flown. We watch how her ear is tuned to the river’s patient flow.

  We know the river won’t stop to lament the fires on her quayside, the stones punched from retaining walls and plunged into her stream. We know they can stop most things, but not the river. She leaves Sarajevo over and over, she knows what it is to move on.

  All this Kisha knows too, for Samir had said it. Once. And now nothing can pull her sight from this rippling brown sheet, straight as a hair ribbon, not on this night. We know that nothing can coax her ear from its single fulsome note, its constant calming shhhh. No. Not on this night.

  Once, yes, she would lie in the night and listen to the river with one ear, his heartbeat with the other, her head lain full on his chest. His soft downy-haired chest, like a fledgling’s, his heart the one constant when even the river’s voice was muted. When the waves of shelling blocked all except the certainty of life within his breast. She, fused to his skin, melting into his very self.

  But this night all senses must be attached to the voice of the river, to follow its stream away. This we see, this we know. And watch, as she finger-chips away at the balcony façade, looks once, twice into the face it presents in her palm.

  Now. Now she is ready to swift-crush it to dust, and leans over the balcony rail to let the wind guide her lonely grains to the river. Away.

  Kisha’s glass hosts a generous shot of brandy, the lights in the courtyard shimmer like tiny globes of hope, each a world announcing a better tomorrow. She has turned off the lights in the flat, rendered herself invisible by dark. Only the red glow of cigarette end would confirm the presence of someone on a third floor balcony to a close observer, tobacco crackling and spitting from a shadowed outline.

  A key turns in the iron lock, the gate swings open with a whine. The low crunch of feet on gravel signals someone’s return home. On this, her first night alone in a place that isn’t home. Soon she must sleep and mutes her senses with liquor. Just for tonight, just to help.

  We understand. Gulp now, Kisha, gulp.

  She converts the couch into its minimalist futon. Sheet, quilt, pillow are retrieved from the cupboard. All in place, all prepared, she lights a candle, sets it on the floor to the right of her pillow.

  She wants to stare into its flame, wants to fall asleep before it burns down to nothing, before she burns down to nothing.

  The slivovica swims and swirls in her head. A breath from somewhere beyond closed windows sets the candle to dance. She sees it flicker, waver, rise and fall, become a line of dancing souls on the wall, golden light dancing in and out of focus from the inky depths of alien space.

  She closes her eyes, her breath slows to a steady rhythm. While we watch from the wall and dance.

  Into the Pit

  One

  She stoked the smouldering fire, waited for the coffee to boil. Early morning – a thin veneer of rising sun skated across the misted quiet atop the calm of death. She could almost hear the brutes safe in their hilltop bunkers, snoring off their work of the night before. Sleeping, farting, dreaming, scratching, stretching, dribbling while she tried to focus on the miracle of silence, she on her treadmill in this experimental rodent’s cage. An almost Pavlov’s dog-drool lurked in her mouth at the thought of staying out on the balcony to drink her coffee rather than scurrying back inside to sit in the gloom.

  Yet as surely as the sun rose, the moon set, they would wake and it would begin again, this delight in destruction, this joy in evil. The ceasefire hadn’t worked. Not this one, nor the last, nor the one before that. Such a fun game – why spoil it?

  She prodded the hesitant flame, forced herself to stay in the moment and not look ahead to when it would next begin– in a minute, an hour or three. She knew, they all knew, that when the mongrels finally woke, cursing the pain in their heads from too many celebratory drinks, they wouldn’t search far for someone to blame. An old man negotiating the twisted remains of bridge so easy a target for a still-drowsy sniper, a balcony where someone bent low over a makeshift tin stove the therapeutic first mortar of the day for a pimply-faced teenager in oversized fatigues. The heart-starter, the whiskey chaser, the Bloody Mary for breakfast to set the brain in gear.

  Come on, she cursed. Pick me, you bastard.

  Come on, as she scrunched another page from Rilke’s Book of Hours into the firebox, pushed it into the feeble smoulder with a broken bit of wire wrenched from the smashed gutter above her head. Do it. Now.

  Steps on the staircase, the creak of the door, Nada’s 24-hour shift was finally at end. She groaned and collapsed onto the mattress in the hall.

  Coffee first? Kisha called.

  Yeah. I think the smell of it was all that kept me going past the first floor landing. She threw several packets of cigarettes over. I saw Marko. He brought in some guys last night.

  Is he OK? She turned to get the answer straight.

  Sure. Not even a scratch. But his mates were in pretty bad shape. Nada looked away for a moment, rallied and said: Anyhow, can you get to the market for some homemade cognac or whatever? Something to share when we get back from the theatre. And maybe some chocolate to go with it? I really need to get some sleep – I don’t want to nod off during the performance.

  Performance?

  Yeah – didn’t I tell you? Or did I forget? He got us tickets to Waiting for Godot. You know, that American writer Susan Someone who came to help with the Festival?

  Sontag, Kisha said. And no, you hadn’t forgotten. I had.

  Now it was her turn to look away. I don’t know, Nada. I don’t know if I can make it.

  Nada sat up properly to get a good look at her. She was hunched. Hunched more than usual. Hunched over a slim volume, her hand trembling as she debated whether to tear out the next page or not.

  She came over, stood behind her, lifted the book from a non-existent grip. Rilke, she said. No wonder.

  … a monk has just writhed through the doorway,

  His hair lank and his habit creased,

  His shadowed face a sickly blue

  And blotted out by demons.

  He toppled over, as if he’d snapped in half

  And thrown himself in two pieces on the ground

  That now seemed to hang at his mouth

  Like a scream, or as if it were

  A flung-out gesture of his arms.

  And his fall went very slowly past him.

  Nada’s hand was on her shoulder and it spilled:

  I don’t know if I can do it anymore. Everywhere I turn there’s pain. In a damn book of verse, in a Beckett play. Everything I read, see, feel seems to be about us. Like everyone has always been writing about us and our pain. Since the beginning of time! Which, of course, they haven’t. But it feels like that. I’m so sick of seeing pain pushed back in my face from anything I read or see. I want to read, see something again and not think it’s about us. I want to read Rilke as Rilke wrote, not as I feel.

  But you’ll come, said Nada into the silence which followed the monologue. You’ll come. Not a question, a statement, said into the space bookmarking the void.

  Yeah, I’ll come, she sighed and tore out Rilke’s pain to wait its turn in the queue. I always come.

  They sit in the dim daytime theatre beside Marko and one of his comrades, both in flak jackets, guns propped between their legs. In amongst the murmurs and bums shifting on seats, the whispered Sorrys! as knees are grazed by stragglers shuffling in to find an empty seat in the dark, she remembers:

  I always come because I can’t say no. I stay because I can’t go. I come, I stay, because I’m weak.

  Others had the strength to stay. This she sees. People like Nada and Kasim, or Marko, or the actor who sat in the wheelchair at the end of the front row, merely an audience member these days courtesy of both legs blown clean off by a shell in front of his house. Staying gave them strength, a strength in defiance of everything that had happened, a str
ength born of sheer stubborn tenacity to see this thing through, to emerge from its other end as moral victors.

  Once, I had their strength, she thinks. But now?

  Where is your strength, Kisha? What do you feel after reading Rilke and seeing your fall go very slowly past?

  She shakes her head. I don’t know.

  But what do you feel? the doctor in her head asks again.

  Nothing. I feel nothing. Like a great cloud of dust is being blown toward me and I’m too weak to run. Like my legs are filled with putty, they’re so heavy. And I’m too weak to move.

  Are you afraid of the cloud?

  No. I feel nothing, she repeats.

  Hmmm, the doctor diagnoses. You are under siege.

  Well, that’s a revelation! she snaps.

  No, the doctor humphs. This siege is within. And she feels the point of the doctor’s pen jab hard against her breastbone.

  You have lost hope, the doctor goes on. It’s time to leave and search it out. It’s probably just past the dust cloud. There, she points, beyond the horizon, beyond the nothing, waiting for you to catch up. She scribbles on her pad, hands over a prescription.

  What’s this?

  Two in the morning, two in the evening. The doctor turns back to her desk, busily sorts through papers, prepares for the next consultation.

  Two of what?

  She looks over the top of her glasses. Memories, my dear! Good strong potent memories. Gather them all up in the folds of your skirt, they’ll be a good tonic to bolster your defences against the cloud of nothing.

  She pats Kisha’s hand kindly. We have to get your legs moving again, don’t we? Leaving won’t be easy but it’ll be a darn sight more hopeful than sinking beneath the nothing.

  Vladimir and Estragon sat, hungry, homeless, hopeless on a candle-lit stage. The audience rigid participants in their leaden mood, Sarajevo’s communal breath on the verge of suffocation. As suffocating as the noon-time heat here in a theatre in a second summer of siege. Smoke, ash, dust, a great cloud of crumbled buildings, shattered lives, torn facades and shredded flesh – all this they saw on a stage peopled by two actors.