The Taste of Translation

by Anne Gambling

  We have leavened your dust into seeded loaves, they explained. Our rhizome clusters host real meaning. Here, you will find your truth.

  Nothing for it. She surrendered to their supremacy, their insight into best-fit, and when handed a needle and cotton, she understood her task was to stitch a fine cloak from their scattered snatches. As translucent as muslin, she tried it on for size, looked in the mirror, the sheer wrap following the contours of her form.

  Is this who I am? she asked her reflection. Is this the life of me? Do I exist before I am told? Can I tell if I do not exist?

  Kisha returns from the dream, from her memory of the dream. Tobias and his interest stand before her. And she knows now what she cannot tell, what she does not understand enough to tell. Not yet. The ring is her witness and confessor. This is the way it must be.

  Look into me, the ring says. Look into me and the story will follow. The memories I house are good ones, not to be shut out or choked of their flow. Please. Twirl me round with less distraction, more conviction this new day. I do exist and what I tell is real. Despite your doubts. Perhaps even because of your doubts.

  A lovely morning. A summer’s morning.

  Come on, says Samir, let’s go window-shopping. He tousles her hair, pulls her reluctance out from under the covers.

  Oh, she groans. Can’t I sleep a little longer?

  He hugs her tight, fierce in his resolve. A little longer is too long on such a beautiful day! Come on, a coffee will rouse you.

  Kisha opens her eyes a fraction and groans again, the steamy rise of morning mist into the glare of July sun predicting the hot day ahead. They had partied late for her birthday the night before, out on the balcony where the cool of river breeze kept all refreshed till almost dawn.

  But not quite – everyone preparing for holidays, an early start next day their excuse for 3am exits. To pack and be ready to jump on buses or trains and head out of town into the mountains, toward the lakes, off to the coast. Ah – but not the Adriatic, not this year. Everything a mess over there this year. Tomorrow she and Samir would head off as well. To a Greek island, a real treat, and all because of war in Croatia.

  Why waste a beautiful day? he coaxes. Come on!

  She is slow to dress, her reflection bleary in the bathroom mirror. But he’s right. A first then a second coffee works to banish the cobwebs.

  Ready? he says.

  Can’t we sit awhile? she whines. We can window-shop all day.

  Yes, he says, dragging her to her feet. But this is a particular window.

  Across the bridge they go, winding their way into the narrow alleys of Bascarsija toward the stalls of the smiths, their small shopfronts secure behind lock-down wooden shutters. They pass merchants unfastening the wooden clasps, hooking the top shutter up as a welcome awning from summer sun, the lower flipped out as a narrow sill for further trinkets.

  See? she says. They’re barely awake!

  Yes – but we have an appointment.

  Still she hasn’t twigged. Till they stand before the man himself, the one they call Zlatara, gold and silver worker. With a nod he continues his morning ritual, bringing low stools and a small copper-topped table out front for the coffee offered after each transaction. Or simply to sit, relax and watch market life.

  Later, Samir murmurs as she inspects his window display.

  He guides her into the cool dark of a tiny workshop. Behind the counter is the master’s work bench where some intricate strands of filigree lie, the small implements of his craft stacked neatly to one side.

  It’s time to choose a birthday gift.

  Oh really?

  And an early one for me, he says as the jeweller lifts a selection of rings onto the counter.

  Your choice, he says, setting the rules of engagement. But we both receive the same.

  The same?

  He kisses the top of her head. How else can I properly connect to you? He grins and sizzles a fingertip against her forehead. Zzzzzzzzz.

  But what if I don’t like any?

  All these rings, says the jeweller, sweeping a long-fingered hand across the black velvet tray, are replicas of archaeological finds from digs around the country.

  Really? Her interest piqued.

  I have a commission from the National Museum to produce them – rings, brooches, necklaces and earrings. They receive a sizeable cut from my sales.

  Twenty-five percent, Samir whispers. So we’re helping preserve national heritage at the same time.

  Alright, she smiles. That’s a good enough reason to restrict my choice.

  She looks through the tray, only half-hearing the smith explain the provenance of each and how difficult it is to translate techniques from centuries past to produce a replica that reflects this embodied spirit.

  Her fancy is finally caught by a wide silver band, its stone set in a cup of finely-looped metal ribbons.

  This is very special, he murmurs, no longer the salesman, but the craftsman who reveres a higher craft. I would never have expected silverwork to be so finely wrought. A true artist produced this piece.

  It’s an amethyst, isn’t it? she asks, pointing to the violet gem at its centre.

  Yes, but here is its brother.

  She inspects his choice set with plain rock crystal. The stone is much larger, a huge chunk which overflows and blurs the ribboned nest in milky white.

  She shakes her head and slips the amethyst onto her finger. It hugs the space between knuckle and joint, home found.

  Fourteenth century, the smith says, showing her its certification. From a castle ruin at Visoki.

  When she looks up, Samir has the rock crystal locked firmly in place on the little finger of his right hand.

  A perfect fit, he says.

  Yes, she marvels. Perfect.

  The bazaar is full of summertime joy, strolling shoppers and people-watchers, but they leave the crowds behind, take a horse and carriage from Alija upstream to Goat Bridge.

  What a treat! Kisha cries.

  Ah, but I’ll make you walk back, he laughs while the horse clip-clops along, mane singing from copper bells strung to the fringe of its bridle.

  Kisha twirls the ring on her finger to catch the merry wink of the sun’s reflection. And takes Samir’s hand to repeat the ritual. These ring twins, heavy, solid as their commitment, age their love by centuries, weight it with longer-than memories, of life deeper-lived.

  I think we should go to the museum one day, she says, so they can say hello to their ancient forebears. And laughs at a random thought. What if, some time in the future, they come across our graves in an archaeological dig – do you think they could tell we’re from now, and not then?

  Samir shrugs, his thoughts elsewhere. He pays the coachman, walks slowly to the centre of the bridge, and at the highest point of its medieval arch over the Miljacka’s swift flow, takes her hand.

  This is more than a birthday gift, he says. It’s a promise, a pact. Nothing, no one can separate us – whether six centuries past or six centuries hence. With this ring as my witness, I am with you.

  Tobias asks again, points to the ring on her finger. But she is still unready. Much more is bound up in this story, much more must be dredged before the grains of sand settle at the base of the pool and her sight is cleared of debris. So answers this question the same as any other:

  Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it.

  Three

  They say most people die in the spring. And so it is, even here. She hears the bells toll to announce the hour for setting a new body into the earth. A man on a park bench down a nearby lane sits hunched, soul weak with grief. Lunchtime over, a child skips past on his way back to school. Skipping, running the whole way. The man looks up, watches till the child and his innocence are out of sight. Till his head drops back in his hands.

  Everyone has a story, she thinks. Anything can lay siege.

  In the early days of this place, she had walked with Hanna, trying to learn the town. One d
ay they walked by the lake, the sky a heavy sheet of grey mirrored in its gunship metal surface. No chance of clarity on such a day even though a thin seam of light attempted to split the mass of grey upon grey to offer a space for thoughts to slip through.

  Kisha stretched out her fingers into the fog that day, sent them as her scouts to the other side. The other world was always there, close enough to touch, beyond the blurred non-edge of lake.

  Cobbles icy with January sleet led her and her guide away from the lakeshore, back into the old town and up a narrow path to a high square.

  History, said Hanna. We also have our history. And showed her the statue to the warrior women of her city.

  Kisha looked up to the figure of a medieval knight in skirt, armour and hatchet. Their men were away, fighting another battle, yet still they stood firm when the city was under siege.

  When? she found herself asking.

  Oh, Hanna shrugged. Six-seven hundred years back?

  Nothing changes, they agreed that day. Nothing changes, and everyone has a story, a history, or in this case a herstory. The woman’s expression was stoic, tough, resolved to her fate to cleave a head in two or deliver a knife-slice to a chainmailed breast if needed.

  Everyone has a story, even of siege.

  Look! cried Plato, leaping through the door. I got tickets to Hair!

  When? asked Samir. How many?

  Four. Tomorrow afternoon. He grinned. Think you can make it?

  Let me check the diary.

  Kisha frowned. I’m rostered on at the soup kitchen.

  Can’t anyone cover?

  I’ll see if Haris is about. He’s already been. Can you do the soup? A quick kiss and she was off.

  A reconnaissance mission of mammoth proportions, she needed to scout the most likely locations for the given time of day, her journey studded with risky intersections, disintegrating bridges, detours round (or through) bombed-out buildings. She leapt backyard fences, crawled along trenches past card-playing soldiers, and an hour and several kilometres later found her quarry.

  Yeah, sure.

  She hugged him. Owe you one! And was gone, the exercise repeated, the tape rewound into its canister.

  Hair. Hair. Hair. Let the sunshine in, indeed. Forget the stepping over dead bodies on the way to the theatre, forget the acoustic candlelit performance, forget the sub-zero temps and the actors, singers, dancers, musicians all bundled up in thick sweaters, forget the fact that every now and then someone fainted on stage due to low blood sugar brought on by chronic hunger.

  Forgotten, unremarked, unremarkable, the passion of the performers was their only focus, the red-hot anger of their chant:

  We starve-look at one another, short of breath

  Walking proudly in our winter coats, wearing smells from laboratories –

  Facing a dying nation, of moving paper fantasy

  Listening for the new told lies with supreme visions of lonely tunes.

  No hippie flower-power re-enactment in Kamerni 55, no nostalgia trip. Embodied experience was alive and well to scream its suffering from a war-torn stage.

  Did you like how they called themselves the United States of Love? Kisha said as they made their way home, crunching through dirt- and blood-smeared snow at street corners and skating on sheafs of icy pavement.

  It won’t make a shred of difference, Plato grimaced. Just further evidence of how tragically inadequate peace activists are to halt the power struggles of brutal geo-politicians and their slavishly indoctrinated electorates.

  Oh you’re a cynic, she said.

  And with such big words too, Susu quipped.

  Four

  The girl often came to sift through books on the stand outside the bookseller’s shop, the cheap ones he carried out each morning in an old wooden crate and stowed on a rickety table set against the wall, an eye-catcher to his window display.

  She always kept her head bowed, he did not know whether out of concentration over her task or to avoid being observed too closely by the gawping goldfish in his bowl, pipe in one hand, book in the other, his reading glasses at half mast specifically for this purpose – to observe the goings-on beyond his limited horizon. From a cracked leather armchair in the corner of the shop, he had a good view onto all street-based activity, and it was a position he often took up. Rarely did he have the need to rise and go to the desk, make out a small handwritten bill of sale and ring something through on a till as crusty as he, as old as his books.

  That said, there were times she caught him unawares – halfway up a ladder, stowing new arrivals into appropriate locations on shelves high over his head. She always stood quietly with her meagre haul, waited till he had finished, waited till he had turned and, noticing her, nodded his surprise. Her response never more than a thin sliver of movement from a mouth which may have had an early softness of form before hardening into its serious line, a line which quivered on occasion as if the borders were tremulous, open to negotiation.

  He remarked a brittleness about her. Whether borne of tension, avoidance, denial, he did not know. Hardly a word was spoken during their infrequent transactions. He was quite shy by nature, gruff – too long among books and too little among humankind, his few friends scolded. But neither did she attempt conversation. A swift Danke in an accent which betrayed she was not at home in this land-locked land before leaving, a slim slip of a thing, on a bicycle.

  Pink, it was, the bicycle. And he found it so incongruous, for everything else about her person said: You can’t see me. I’m invisible. Like a chameleon she melted into the cityscape of grey-brown, seemed weathered before her time, a ghost pale-etched against smog-stained stone. But if the sun were to shine, to catch itself in her hair as she rode away? Then a dark amber glow brought the smudged fresco to life. Dark amber – as if it held in its strands the memory of a life before now – and at odd moments, he would find himself musing on her past, the determinants which caused her to act as she did.

  Melancholia – the word found him before he even noticed its arrival. He had been reading Keats and his cloud which hides the green hill in an April shroud. Yes, it was as if she shrouded herself. A wakeful anguish of the soul seemed to stalk her, bubbling up from the thin ridged scar which dissected her uncertain mouth. She wore suffering’s imprint upon her skin but it was deep-sunk, he imagined, in a well of memory. She had a story, he knew, like all those who entered his shop had a story, seeking a book to bind them to life, to lift them beyond their own stories to dreams housed in bound packages, to landscapes offering alternate truths.

  He imagined her first purchases from the crate on the footpath were required for this purpose – an art magazine and a slim volume of botanical prints. And found himself planning the early morning sorting of old forgotten stock, to place paradoxical possibilities within and see what would pique her interest if she happened past that day.

  She was not consciously aware but the time had come to re-populate her life. A need, an urgency, had arisen to bring life back into her life with his books. And returned to the flat, sat with one, then the other out on its tiny balcony – a metre wide, only two or so long – sat on the folding chair (never folded away), placed these first offerings on the folding metal table (likewise) and entered Wonders of the Plant World.

  She leafed through the book of drawings and felt the love which accompanied the artist’s task to replicate nature’s beauty, to translate it from the earth into another form, metamorphosed like a butterfly released from its chrysalis. His touch was light, she thought, gentle. A kiss, perforce, tangential his journey from there to here – skating past, he deftly brushed the source and conjured its afterlife in the book in her hand.

  And so she studied each picture as she would contemplate the original, a full life cycle laid before her. The ubiquitous dandelion, for example, its seeds taking flight, speckled gossamer heads lifted by the wind, surrendered to the sky-tides, to float and beach them at whim. A still life, this portrait was anything b
ut still. A frozen moment, to which she grafted a before and after like a cultivar to rootstock. All this she saw, slip-sliding between pages. On one a gentian, on another an oak. The volume began with a snowdrop, ended with a pomegranate, order bestowed by the cycling of seasons – first bulbs cracking through frozen ground, last fruits harvested before winter dark.

  She placed the small book back on the table and reached for the art magazine to continue her engagement with the aesthetic. Here were still lifes of things man-made. The artifice of unnature cursed, she flipped through reproductions of objects which litter lives in meaningless arrangements, long shadows cast at their backs – the experience not as satisfactory.

  She turned another page and the contents of a box stared up at her: Still Life Belgrade, 1986. A tambourine, a cross on a gold chain, a photo of a man in uniform, a gilt-handled sabre lancing the box in two, some marbles from childhood, a wooden toy, a cracked and faded red tin star – an image of what would be. The future foretold, made real.

  Did the artist know when he assembled these touchstones of the old regime? she wondered. Did he stick it through with a sabre after listening to the radio rhetoric of the ones jostling for power in the wake of Tito’s death? Was Milosevic mouthing off his ethnically pure ideals, his dreams of a greater Serbia, even then? Painted in tempera on wood, it was made like the icons of old. A perfect fit, she thought, to subject, theme, outcome. Such holy relics.

  She is back. Back in it again, the curse of memory has found her napping once more, zeitgeist woken by a foreign artist to things they did not, would not, see. Everyone has a story, she knows, and now his had found her, had become hers, lain siege. Again.

  Five

  July arrived. Samir’s deadline approached. The Siege of Sevilla had only lasted fifteen months.

  Only, said Kisha. To think at the beginning, we thought that was so long. That it could never last so long.

  She sat with her arm laid flat on a board, blood draining into a pouch.

  Mmmm, said Nada, withdrawing the needle. She held a small square of cotton to the mark, pushed Kisha’s forearm vertical.