Now she looked past the immediacy of destruction, out and over all the graveyards visible from this perch above the town, each a broad rip in the city’s scarred flesh. So many souls, so many ill-prepared to pass, torn from their bodies too early, too fast, shocked by the act and no chance of farewell. So many, she thought, and each remaining their allotted forty days in ghostly flight above a beloved Sarajevo, remarked only as wisps of cloud or filmy fog swirled round on a full moon’s night.
A shot, a single report. They had strayed within range of a sniper by dallying at the scene. But his target skyward for once – a peace bird flung to freedom from the UN HQ two blocks away. Maybe its gentle whiteness had disturbed the purity of his anger.
The bird fell lifeless at Kisha’s feet. No blood or mark stained its snow-feathered form. Perhaps it had simply died of fright, suddenly confronted by alien territory, the sniper an incidental extra in the drama all along. She lifted the warm body, cradled the delicate head. And carried it with her to Samir.
At five in the afternoon.
Strung out in a ribbon of life, the mourners climb the hill from the mosque to the cemetery. Led by the imam, Marko, Miki, Plato and Haris are at the four corners of his shrouded pallet.
Kisha marvels at how her feet step one in front of the other without instruction or intervention. How did they learn that? she wonders. Her mind is numb, yet the metronome tock of her steps sets percussive thought in action.
How long did it take you, Samir? How long to leap from here to there, to cross to the other side? It can’t be that difficult. No stream to wade, no stile to climb, no gate to unlock, no muddy verge to traverse. Just a step, a breath (or not) and the passing complete. Is the blink of an eye too long or the time it takes for a thought to form or a pinpricked fingertip to register in the brain? The time for a wave to lap a shore, perhaps, or the wing-beat of a hummingbird’s hover? What about a pen placing its mark upon a page or the toll of a bell not twice, barely once? Is that how long it takes to die? Brief, simple, the last action of a body in its here and now. Automatic, reflexive, known. An unconscious knowing, she supposes. The mind put away, the body knows how to do this very last thing it must do. The mind is useless. And after? she thinks. When the body is absorbed to earth and the soul high-flown? What then of the mind? Unless its products are translated into artefacts to remain in the world for other minds to peruse. But what use an artefact when a Library spanning ten centuries of mind can have its treasures hunted to extinction, reduced to ash, to dust? What use is anything in life, in death? All this she thinks as they arrive at the knoll.
Atop a knoll where a breeze blows fresh. She has walked up a hill and into air. Lightness-infused, her body lightens, feet lift away from the ground. She hears the cry of an angels’ swarm. Is this how it is to cross?
Samir? she cries into a sea of silver mist, suddenly afraid. It’s not my time, she says. Not yet.
Oh, but a part of her wants to detach. Please! it says, fuzzy-loud in her ear. Let me fly from this earth-bound hell!
No! she cries. It’s not possible. The body must detach first, it can’t be back to front. Stop!
Like a flag torn from a mast, whipped away she could be. An ephemeral wisp of breeze-borne spirit, a cottonhead setting sail on a summer’s day, she could sacrifice her gossamer sleeve, be caught by the current, give herself up to the whim of the wind.
Did she know this would happen? Is this why she wore the hat? She who never wears a hat, a woollen cloche Samir had spotted in the market one day, plopped down on her head and said: It’s you, it’s just so you, darling! in a silly fashion designer voice. A hat which sat in a cupboard untouched until this day.
She pulls the container down hard round her ears, anchors herself in its bowl, grimaces, struggles, shuts her eyes tight. What keeps us rooted? she wants to know before her soul can have its way.
Come on Ki-.
Marko’s hand is under her elbow. Samir has been lain in the grave. Was she gone so long? He guides her to the edge of the pit where she sinks to her knees, buries her hands in fresh-dug soil, plunges her fingers into damp living earth. Delivered by the structure of dirt, away from the space of space.
Intermezzo
The chorus now speaks:
Samir used to say: I am your companion of the evening, in the hours when the world is dark. Samir used to say: Like a good book I will come, and share with you my myths.
He reaches to her through memory, tries to reach her through dream. But she sets her faith only in memory, her door to dreams locked ever since the crushed walnut in his hand.
We watch from the shadows, sit and think: If only she had told! If only he had known how frightened she was of dreams, perhaps it would be different. Perhaps something could have been said or done differently so she could take heart now.
As it is, she lies in the dark reading from the book of Samir, the one in the drawer marked S, the one which hosts ancient and modern history both.
We watch her work, work hard, to push past pain and consciously conjure the images, to sift and sort her memories into an order of best-fit. Her lips are pressed firm in resolve, to not lose the imprint of their story. Her heart beats fast, so worried that she will forget. Hears again the wise woman words Azra spoke to a small girl whose parents had flown:
As long as you remember, as long as you honour them, they’re not gone. They won’t leave, ever. But you must remember. Their presence is up to you.
Kisha has tried, oh, so very hard. But as the next overture of hate begins, memories scatter like skittles before a rumbled bowling ball, the patchwork woven this whole night through rent by the whistle of a single mortar. She hugs her chapped knees, curls into the dust-caked mattress, strokes the place where his head used to lay, and leaks hope, this last hope, to remember.
Oh – how we share her agony! Oh – how we feel her pain in our hearts of light! We understand. We know, substantively know. That anything can lay siege.
Moving Staircases
One
Marko walks through the dark room out to the balcony. Are you packed?
There’s nothing to pack, she says, still communing with the river.
Pack – the word conjures one of those countless days at the bus station, people milling about, talking low, the harried smoking of a last cigarette. While she stands with a clipboard to mark off names destined for yet another convoy. Confronted by a quantum of suitcases and plastic bags tied together with string, Kisha listens afresh to the wisps of thought which escape the battered broken cases, their contents lamenting the descent into exile. Oh-so-contrary to the traces of hope which issue from their custodians:
We’ll be back. It won’t be for long ... I left food out for the cat ... The valuables are buried under the apple tree in the garden. If you need anything, start digging.
She sees the excited faces of children who think they’re off to the seaside, hears the ache of conversations between those who stay and those who go. No. She’ll take nothing, be nothing. Inner and outer as one. Nothing.
Come on, says Marko. I’ll help. He puts an arm around her reluctance and tries to draw her inside.
She shrugs him away, stubs out the remnant of cigarette, grinds her foot into it, hard. Just to hear something else cry out in pain.
Samir had never packed.
She grabs the backpack by the door. Feather-light, it holds her passport and papers proving she is an employee of an accredited aid agency given leave to jettison misery, hijack malaise, fly west into sanity. Baba’s scroll, a tattered notebook, some stale crackers and a flask of water complete the haul. Marko forces an extra pair of jeans on her, shoes and socks. And tells her to bring a rain jacket.
No need to knock at Plato’s door, it’s already open, Nada pacing the hall.
Finally, she says, enclosing her in a hug. I’m not going to cry because if I start, I won’t stop. Ever.
Kisha squeezes her tight. Everything’s still up there, she says to
the small group of eyes crowding the doorway. Food, shampoo, books to burn. Oh, and some make-up in a small sponge bag –
It is barely dawn as they drive deserted streets to the tunnel’s entrance in Dobrinja. A soldier emerges from the shadows, slaps Marko’s hand, climbs in behind the wheel and drives off.
In here, says Marko.
Here? It’s just a hole.
Yep, and a wet hole at that.
Bent double like an old beggar, he holds her hand the full distance, guiding her through the passage, ill-lit, stale-aired. Often she stumbles in the muddy water or needs to shrink to the side when soldiers hurry by with arms, ammunition. Finally they catch up to a farmer slow-leading his goat. Only eight hundred metres, but more than an hour of lips and turns, of high-stepping over unseen hazards in the stream, to arrive in the cellar of a house where a woman and her clucking hen offer water to commuters beside a humming generator.
Kisha accepts the plastic cup with relief. That was unbelievable! she gasps, climbing into the trench beside the airport runway.
No oxygen, says Marko. But you get used to it. It’s like driving the same road to work each day. After a while you enjoy the monotony before the real stuff starts.
She strips off soaked jeans and mud-filled shoes, sheds the rain jacket, wraps it around the dripping pile, kisses his sweaty cheek.
I can’t say goodbye. It’s not, is it?
Take care, Ki-, he tries but she is already off along the trench toward the airport building with its handpainted sign for Maybe Airlines as an Italian Air Force Hercules comes in to land.
As if on cue, shelling starts and she runs swift and low for the cover of sandbags and her designated UN contact. He hurries her through security together with a handful of other passengers. A couple, fear dilating their eyes, and a pair of journalists yelling instructions to their cameraman. The videocam hones in on UNPROFOR soldiers unloading pallets of aid before cutting to still-spinning propellers.
Flak jackets are handed out, helmets.
No luggage? Mr UN asks. You knew you could bring two suitcases, and points to the couple’s bulging bags.
She stares into their burden. I have enough, she says.
Visas in order? Italian? Swiss?
She nods.
Croatian if we get diverted to Split?
She’s stunned. No. That’s –
It can happen, he mumbles. Let’s pray it’s not today.
The French ground patrol urges them across the tarmac.
Come on, he says, grabbing her arm. As soon as they’ve unloaded she’ll take off again. The crew never leaves the cockpit.
They run up the cargo ramp, past the newsman’s camera zooming in on the wide belly of the plane’s hold before a last atmospheric shot of smoke over smouldering fields. A soldier directs them to rigged seats along the shell of the aircraft, hands out earplugs with a wide Italian grin and returns to his own place atop an empty machinery box, comfort cold and hard.
As the ramp rises from the ground, she watches her town disappear, then her hills, and finally the sky’s sun-streaked trails of high cloud. No thought penetrates, no feeling pinpricks. All is numb from the shock of the new.
The Hercules rumbles along the tarmac, screams its load into the sky. The couple sit huddled, he fumbles for a handkerchief while she mimes her distress. Though possibly she is being very loud about it, Kisha finds it hard to tell.
Mr UN leans close. The best thing about the noise in this thing, he shouts, is you can’t hear the bastards trying to shoot us down!
She turns away from his delight, turns hard around and stares out through the small porthole in the fuselage. The sun races them west, clouds shift, separate.
Is this what an angel sees? she wonders. Is this how an angel feels? Like a vapour trail dissolved into the wind’s embrace?
She presses her nose to the glass, sets her head against the cold metal hull, lets her brain rattle loose inside a throbbing head. And shifts, separates, dissolves.
She had climbed the hill to Samir’s grave, sat with him, said goodbye. Nothing moved in the landscape except a small green beetle trundling nonchalantly over the hard-bitten earth. Collecting him in the palm of her hand, she rubbed a finger over his dust-covered shell to reveal the luminous sheen of bright summer wings. A thought occurred to her and she tucked him into the zippered pocket of her jacket.
Now she stands in Giovanna’s garden and unzips her pocket. A full twenty-four hours later, an eternity for a small green beetle, he begins a random wander over her hand and arm, shirt and collar, while she smiles.
Welcome to your new home, she says, kissing his bright-buttoned hull, and delivers him onto the waxy green leaf of a camellia.
Instantly he takes flight, a flurry of shimmering wingbeats which sends him high across the terraced lawn to an oleander more to his liking. Such a quick transition for a small green beetle.
Two
She had been told someone would be waiting at the airport in Ancona, a volunteer from the Italian chapter of the aid agency, to assist her passage north. She had been told, but was far from prepared for the effusive welcome of an Italian mama of the first order.
You made it! Giovanna cried, clasping Kisha’s face between her hands, kissing each cheek, twice, thrice, more times. My, but you are thin! she said, squeezing her tight. We must fatten you up, yes? Come – let us go up to my villa.
It wasn’t difficult to be mothered, to shut down and enter a space of no-think, to surrender her destiny to someone else for a change and in a place where everything was safe, normal, strange. In Kisha-speak, normal equalled strange these days – streets of colourfully painted housefronts, washing strung from balconies, between buildings, upholstered car seats, unshattered windscreens. They wended their way out of town up a steep winding road cut into cliffs above the sea and she looked out at an uninterrupted view of Adriatic coast. There was salt on the air, its scent damp, tangy.
Ah, the sea.
A heady mixture of sensory joy shape-shifted into memory fast-risen. Their young-in-love holiday – the adoring student, the professor quoting Dickinson.
Ah, the sea! he whispered into her neck as they lay locked together. Might I but moor – tonight – in thee!
And her giggled response:
Beat your breast, break my heart –
Ah, the sea, I drown in thee!
Here we are! Giovanna announced, pulling into a driveway bordered by blooming oleander. Welcome to full pension R&R. And smiled at Kisha from behind expensive sunglasses, her manicured nails still curled around the wheel.
She slipped from the car, stood weak-kneed before the house and a lush garden which fell away into the sea below, and now understood why the agency workers always came back refreshed from leave, ready to struggle anew on behalf of the endless stream of refugees before their door. Yet it niggled, prodded. The twinge of guilt that said: Why are you here? What right do you have to relax, be pampered when there, just over there – and at this she squinted into an easterly swell beyond the horizon, over limestone mountains and down through summer-green valleys – you know what 4pm on a sunny afternoon in a besieged city means.
No promenading beside the river, no children’s calls of joy from the carousel in the park or as they leap from a bridge into the surge of the Miljacka’s flow, no shade trees under which to lie and drink cool beer. Now, right now as she sat in a wicker armchair with plumped cushions and matching footstool, as Giovanna served her coffee and biscotti, chattered away about the camellia hedges being trimmed by an elderly man in a battered straw hat – Federico’s been with me for years! – Nada would be trying to staunch the flow in some life-threatening injury, Marko would be manning a sentry outpost on a beleaguered frontline, Jasmina and Kasim would be covering her shifts at the centre, continuing the attempted translation of confused and harrowing stories into the linear narratives required for asylum applications.
It won’t be easy, Giovanna said
.
She found herself looking up into the kindly face of her hostess, her hand outstretched with a cup.
I’m sorry, she flustered. My thoughts were elsewhere.
Giovanna turned back to pouring her own coffee out of a silver urn with an ornate family crest. I was saying I admire your bravery, my dear. To leave Sarajevo and forge a new life away from family, friends, everything you know?
All I know is war.
Yes, that’s part of what I mean. It won’t be easy to rejoin normal society where people have their petty troubles and squabbles. Giovanna leaned across and touched her lightly on the arm. Your nerves will be very raw. Don’t let yourself fall victim to bitterness. It’s not a pretty path.
She drained her cup and stood up. Now I must be seeing about dinner.
There was nothing for Kisha to do, nowhere for her to be, than sitting here, looking out at the blue of sea. And soon the gentle clip-clip of garden shears backboned her descent into dreamless sleep.
I had a call with the Zurich office this afternoon, Giovanna said later at a dinner comprised of nourishing soup and some crusty bread. You must start to eat again slowly, she counselled. It will take time for your body to remember what good food is like.
When am I expected to start? she asked. I could catch the train up tomorrow.
Oh no! Giovanna scoffed. Not so soon! You will be much more useful if you arrive in decent shape. What’s that expression – to hit the ground running? Her voice trilled. It seems to be the only thing anyone says these days. But, she frowned, I find it so strange. If we were to hit the ground running, wouldn’t we fall over?
I can’t rely on your hospitality forever –
Giovanna waved her hand, shooed away a pesky fly. I have a job to do, you know. I must deliver a product in full functioning order. She seemed to enjoy her little foray into management jargon. Plenty of fresh sea air, relaxing walks along the beach, healthy food, sunshine. Two weeks, she said and held the requisite fingers aloft to seal her commitment.
The Taste of Translation Page 34
