The Taste of Translation

by Anne Gambling

  Walks on. I don’t want to know, she says into the space where we listen. I don’t want to know who prays there, what they believe, what they would have done if given the chance.

  At the store, the narrowest spiral staircase she has ever seen, a home-job of beaten tin and black enamel paint, leads down to the cellar where kitchenware and household items lurk. She gathers up china, two of this, two of that.

  Why? she thinks. There’s only one of me. But doesn’t return the second to the shelf, instead brings the practical to the fore. I won’t need to do the dishes so often, she reasons. Still, the symbolic niggles at the edge of consciousness, the ghost at her elbow, the shadow stuck to her heel. Who is this who tugs?

  We know, of course. But she hasn’t sensed it, not directly, not yet. The way is blocked, but no matter, for she has spotted the prize – a Turkish coffee pot of bright copper, as simple and timeless as anything sold in Bascarscija, enough for two cups on the gas burner. Ah, see? Even her shadow will receive his measure.

  At the supermarket she buys fresh ground coffee and a box of sugar cubes to honour his dip-nibble-sip ring cycle, his slow ingestion as if by osmosis, his pleasure in normalcy relived. Till all sugar consumed, till all coffee drained, till he rests his eyes upon her again and says:

  It’s like they say. The best coffee should be as black as hell, as strong as death, and as sweet as love.

  There is a spring to her step as she makes her way home. Already she is there in her mind in the kitchen with him. And, anticipating this small ritual where she sips from both cups, takes his part in the drama, a more-than-worthy understudy, we smile, we sigh – sighs which brush her cheek as she crosses the street, heads down past the church, takes a right before the playground and arrives at the heavy iron gates.

  Sara’s pink bike is propped against the courtyard wall waiting for her to pump up the tyres and begin her stewardship. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe this coffee pot is her turning point. We do not know but trust to hope – that she’ll brave the pink bicycle and try to find the bookshop Hanna told her about, the one near Lochergut where a famous writer once lived.

  Maybe tomorrow, Kisha. Yes, tomorrow.

  She fairly runs up the stairs to her one-room life with its high plaster ceilings and old parquetry floors. Yesterday, it was so difficult to drag her up, but today everything is different simply because of a shiny copper pot. Shoes off in front of the door, jacket on the hook in the hall, straight into the kitchen she goes. Water poured, gas lit, doors opened, a cigarette, and she stands on the balcony to pluck at the thyme in the troughs, rub it between chapped fingers under her nose.

  She goes back in to watch the pot on the stove, twice boiled it must be – a little longer is needed. Aroma fills the small space and she greets it with a soft-spoken sigh before returning to the balcony where she taps her foot, gnaws a fingernail, finally remembers what it was she wanted to do.

  She looks out over the railing to the bikes in the yard. Tomorrow, she promises the pink hand-me-down with its merry basket. Yes, tomorrow, she repeats. Tomorrow we’ll go exploring.

  Moving Staircases

  Five

  Kisha’s coffee pot, little more than a long-handled dish, serves its purpose well. To open the portal between spaces, to offer comfort in an alien world. Each day she slips it into her backpack and takes it with her to the centre, ready to make coffee for her drop-ins the old way.

  If a mother’s nerves are too bad, she will take her by the arm, bring her to the kitchen to stand by the stove and watch the coffee boil and bubble, watch pain dissolve with its steam. And after the coffee, sipped out on the kerbside sharing a cigarette and some words, they return to the social worker’s office to begin again. Where she sits by the woman’s elbow to attempt the faithful translation of her problems and fears.

  Sometimes it is too hard, too sad, to repeat the full tale of suffering. Sometimes Kisha paraphrases and commits the remainder to a case history sheet, externalising it in print. She finds it difficult to stay afloat, not to slide under and be trapped by another’s pain. How to offer full voice when the knife scrapes against her own heart? How to translate suffering when its tongue is universal? She is the shadow by the sleeve, the witness who intones: What did they do to my Sarajevo? while the woman rocks back and forth on a stiff metal chair.

  I run away from unhappiness but it chases after me, catches me! wails the woman. When you’re a refugee, nobody asks how you are!

  I’m asking, says the social worker.

  You’re paid to, she spits.

  Kisha makes another coffee. Again they stand outside.

  I was a dentist, says the woman. I went to university, had my own practice. We had a nice house, a nice life. But who am I, what am I here?

  She looks at the trees across the street, picks at a speck on her jacket. No one says anything bad to me, but they don’t say anything nice either. We’re like ghosts – no one sees us because they don’t want to know.

  Thank you, she says, stubbing out her cigarette. It’s good to talk.

  Kisha nods and watches as the woman calls to her son and they head off down the street to the tram stop.

  This new anecdote, the same as all others, walks up to the door of her heart. No need to knock, it’s more than welcome to join its fellows in that place of inner siege. But to brace the walls of her library, she decides to take a night job in a bar, retreating further from the mirror of others’ stories which leave her own translator’s tongue.

  Six

  Days pass, weeks, months. Sometimes it’s so hard for her to rise, to know that another day stands before her like a wall to be bulldozed, a mountain to be climbed.

  She makes her surface excuses, like she is tired from her shifts at the bar, and ignores the niggle of a deeper weariness which cuts across all others, which remains immune to her attempts to forge something new from the remnants of the old by working two jobs, and populating her life with books.

  Weariness, like a colony of termites gnawing at her tentative foundations, reducing everything to dust. And now her bicycle with a flat tyre? Damn. But maybe it’s a good idea to catch the tram. She feels so tired these days.

  She picks up the free daily newspaper at the tram stop and its same old, same old, of government regulations, celebrity scandals. Till this – an image of war – and she finds herself reading the caption, it looks so familiar. But no, it’s somewhere else, other lives dragged through the furnace of hate.

  Bile rises in her throat, instinctive, lived. And she is back in it. Deep. Tears prick unbidden at the corners of her eyes, angry bitter tears. The bile burns her throat, squeezes her stomach tight. She winces and screws up her face.

  How can a chance encounter with a free newspaper incite such inner riot? But it has, here, now. So long her dam has held but now it bursts through and her tiny self quakes on an unstable shore bank at the force of the surge. Mute, rooted to the spot by the shock of its coming, the flood sweeps all before its path, leaves rafts of debris in its wake, carves new watercourses in a landscape slashed by pain, fills her dry gullies with the wails of children, flings dead cows atop winter-bare trees. She sees the Miljacka, the Miljacka of Marko’s dream. And yes, it is blood red.

  Everything subsides. Everything subsides eventually. But the mud remains to be scraped away, no insurance guards against the wrath of the gods and the menace of their snarls. She wipes her eyes, dabs at her nose, presses the button, leaves at her stop, walks to the centre, straight into Rita’s office. And resigns.

  She escapes on a train heading east for a day, gets off in a random village and looks at the tourist bureau map plastered to the station billboard. A 14th century pilgrimage church is nearby, its frescoes apparently one of the best poor man’s bibles north of the Alps.

  Good enough, she thinks. Six centuries should be good enough to resist the lure of memory.

  She sees the slim spire in the distance, about a half-hour’s walk away, on a knoll above a snake
turn of the Rhine, cradled by beech and oak. Dedicated to Sogn Gieri, the local language means nothing to her, the saint’s name hidden behind a cloud of unknowing.

  Soon enough she stands before the chapel, its single bell tower and portico of stone, doors of reinforced oak. Alone, apart from the wind and the river, she enters the musty far past where frescoes fill its walls and ceiling. The saint himself stares down from above, replete with armour, horse, lance, slain dragon. Her intake of breath is audible, its exit visibly chill. Surely, George. Baba’s patron saint found on a wooded hill beside a tight swing of river? Six centuries not enough, a remote Swiss valley not enough.

  She sighs and sits down on a low-slung slab of oak, curls her fingers around scarred edges smoothed by years of prayer. When will her scars be as smooth? When will her memories be as faded as these frescoes?

  An image arises of their island holiday, how she scoured the ruined chapels of Crete in search of a Lady, a Lady like Baba’s. One she had seen, been sure she had seen – the turn of chin and light in the eyes. Without the scroll she could not compare, yet had gone on with her quest in each church they came across.

  Samir’s sigh – sitting with arms outstretched across the backs of dozens of church pews while she toured walls with torch and camera – and his voice: Give it a rest, Ki-. They all look the same.

  She looks at her knees, looks at her toes, looks up at St George on the ceiling. The past always catches her, always finds her. But this is Baba – Baba and her icons, Baba and Azra. Good memories, strong memories, the ones her doctor had ordered.

  When? When did she have that conversation in her head? Too long ago and never heeded, they’ve arrived by themselves, it seems, sneaking in and around the folds of a day’s escape from city confines to arrive with a wave and a wink among frescoes and stone, among beech trees and oak, and in sight of high snows.

  She misses Baba, misses Azra, misses her childhood, her youth, her love, her life. Misses them all. Only the scroll remains.

  And she finds herself missing the Lady.

  Intermezzo

  The chorus now speaks:

  It all started the day she found the bookshop. Formerly her acquisitions, albeit of discarded objects in second-hand stores or on a flea market stall, were functional, practical. But another dimension surfaced the day she found the bookshop.

  We were with her the day she hopped on the pink bicycle to find the bookshop, and once there, watched as she made her purchases. Each one like an abandoned dog eager for a new master, selecting their target with discretion, the one who seemed as homeless, as lonely, as they, establishing a relationship between two lost souls, healing through belonging. We heard their whispers the same as she:

  Choose me. I need a home.

  Finding a second-hand bookshop. This is when it began. We saw how she relished the layered dust and musty leather, the high wide shelves and unwieldy tomes, called by the sound of their voices, the texture of their offerings. Called to step into pages, through into worlds, cocooned in tales of the long-dead or never-lived, her journeys conducted within well-braced walls.

  Yet they began to pile in her limited space, jostle for attention, assume an accusatory air.

  Do you care so little about us? we heard them cry, the same as she. Shall we be given up to an animal shelter of the written word once your fancy changes? Don’t we deserve a real home?

  We saw their soulful eyes turn toward her from the couch, the bench, the toilet floor, wherever she had stacked them, all ears cocked to a kind word.

  Alright, she conceded.

  And we smiled as she bought a bookcase, assembled it on the living room floor, stood it up against the long wall and began to populate its shelves.

  The uppermost she reserved for the past. Pink scroll, a tattered notebook – among other things, it housed haiku she had written to stay the monotony of days and nights merged into one, reducing her life to seventeen syllables, three lines, a seasonal word.

  First spring storms arrive.

  A face freshly fire-whipped

  Can’t be lashed by rain.

  She flicked through the notebook and finally closed it, scar tissue and all, while we watched.

  Branded with the slim white-edged reminders of knife-slices to her heart, secreted beneath a shirt swift-buttoned to the neck, she closed the book, placed it on the uppermost shelf. While we watched.

  Slippage

  One

  She saw the notice in his window: Help Wanted. Apply Within. Went home, handwrote a CV, made up a half-life, an after-life, enough of a life. He interviewed her in a small room off the back of the shop where filing cabinets spilled contents at random onto a desk to the side. In one corner stood a small table with an electric kettle, a jar of tea bags.

  I need someone as you can see, he said, indicating the sprawled mess of delivery dockets and receipts. My last lad graduated in summer. Headed off to Kathmandu as I recall.

  He looked down at the brief resume. You studied in Sarajevo.

  Yes.

  Were you there during the siege?

  No. I moved to Vienna before the war.

  Sheer tragedy it’s been allowed to continue this long.

  Yes.

  Who is your favourite author?

  That depends on my mood. She paused. But Hesse, always Hesse.

  How long have you been in Switzerland?

  Several years.

  Do you enjoy it here?

  It is very – calm.

  Yes, he smiled.

  How many times had she stood at his window while he read and smoked a pipe in the light of a single lamp? Like a composite of all that was familiar and comfortable, he was warm woollen socks and Baba’s kitchen table, the patched elbows of jackets and the scent of mulled wine. Everything that said – calm.

  Let’s try shall we, Miss Mirvic? he said and extended his hand.

  Please, she said, my name is Kisha.

  His eyes crinkled. And I am Tobias.

  He would find himself watching her. Watching as she took a book from the crate, her finger tracing the length of its spine while she considered where it belonged – on a shelf or stand, or perhaps the table reserved for customers who sought the thrill of trawling through dusty piles for a chance discovery. Each now and then she would look up, green-amber eyes momentarily tugged from the face of the book, and her scarred lip would twitch as she attempted a smile. A smile originating from a place beneath the scar’s cragged ridge, a place as soft as waters on which a silent leaf drifts.

  He would watch the silence of her work – how it completed her experience. Like the rests in a music score to round out its sound or the resonant hum which remains after all instruments are stilled at the closure of a symphony. He would find himself watching and thinking that the gaps in her conversation offered a similar space of silence, reminded of the times when she began to speak but fell silent mid-sentence, tugged to another, different place it seemed, tugged tangentially to an unspoken realm, a space of self alone which she would not, could not share.

  Like the time he inadvertently mentioned his sorrow to read about the night her National Library burned.

  Such a shock, he said.

  Yes.

  Her response a monotone of surface non-thought but when he watched her in the aftermath of his comment, he thought to witness the bruised and blackened pages, the fragments gnashed from their fragile spines. Twirled and spun, heaven-bound, dust-dissolved. Torn leaves trailed to the horizon, beyond the furthest star.

  Can we see into another’s memory? Tobias wondered that day. When a face is half-obscured, turned away toward a window, focused on an image seen only within?

  Two

  Hey Kisha, you’ve just missed your brother. So said the neighbour on the stairs.

  Brother? She stared at him.

  Yeah, I heard someone knocking and here was this lad at your door. I don’t know how he managed to come up. Someone didn’t close the gate properly i
s my guess. He said he’d try calling instead. Oh, but you don’t have a phone, do you?

  The man shrugged, scratched his chin. You never told me you had a brother, he said and continued on his way downstairs with a bag of garbage for the skip in the yard.

  She bit her lip, walked slowly up the last flight, turned the key in the lock, stepped into sanctuary, and locked the door behind her.

  A normal Saturday, a shopping Saturday, a crisp autumn day of golden maples in the courtyard. Perhaps the last of the good weather – a cold front was expected through that evening, rain in the lowlands, heavy snow up higher.

  She took her trolley out from under the hall stairs and headed off to the local supermarket. On the way home, she stopped off in the park behind the church to sit on a bench, suck in the sun. Maybe she’d go down to the lake later or for a walk through the forests above the zoo. It would be a shame to waste such a beautiful day.

  The gate swung open with a heavy creak and she heaved the trolley over its lip.

  Hello Ki-.

  Marko. Thin tanned tired Marko limped toward her with a shy grin.

  My God! She threw herself into his uncertain hug, stayed locked there while she sorted through emotions, stepped back at last.

  Phew! You gave me a right shock! And looked at him, at the slit across his cheek – red, angry, puckered – flinched on his behalf. What did they do to you?

  This? he barked. Tripped in the trench, sliced it open on a rock of all things. Miki had to drag me out, get me down to the hospital. Can you believe it?

  He turned away. It meant we weren’t there during the big one, the one when the rest of the guys were taken out by a howitzer. We were safely out of the way, all because I’m so fucking clumsy.

  His laugh was hollow. Hollowed out by memory. Backwashed with guilt.

  She felt the bile rise in her own throat, swallowed it down quickly. You want to come up, don’t you?