The Taste of Translation

by Anne Gambling

  It had been his Christmas gift, the full catalogue of texts, each writer’s name, each volume’s title a doorway to memory. All neatly typed on an old Olivetti she had found in the cellar, on the backs of essays she had found in a box – essays on Tolstoy, Selimovic, Andric, Dizdar, the remainder fuelling their Christmas feast, canned humanitarian fish in macaroni-without-the-cheese.

  She remembered the silence in the space of her gifting. Silence as he untied the hair ribbon which held the pages, silence as he ran his finger down the list, page after page, silence as he re-folded them with care, secured the ribbon, walked to the small backpack by the door which held all their essentials, and placed it within. Silence, as he returned, held her in his arms, and kissed her untied hair.

  She had leafed through Klingsor’s Last Summer when he passed it to her that day, read the back cover blurb about his home in Ticino in a village above Lago di Lugano. Knew now what Samir had suspected. His flight into exile from a Germany hell-bent on war had not been in vain. He had found his place of exile, a place infused with Die Stille.

  The book had gone on the reading pile but like so many thereon had remained unread, Klingsor’s Last Summer Samir’s last winter, and so she bought it at the museum.

  Is that all you want? asked Tobias.

  It’s the only one I haven’t read, she replied while the woman at the counter stamped it with a seal in which his signature winked out at her.

  For you, Samir.

  I know, he said, cupping her heart in his hands. I know.

  Es bleibt nichts als Lesen.

  She surfaced from the memory, looked down at the book wet with tears in her hand, and decided to walk HG’s pilgrim’s path. To lead this frightened hull of a man out of siege.

  Eight

  Kisha read further in the text all day to prepare for the journey, saw how HG zittered and worried, trapped in a series of monologues each the length of a breath or micro-thought – a day-by-day recounting of weather, food, fog, a stone wall which had tumbled into his vegetable patch, brief snatches he had read in this volume or that.

  On and on it went. Each sentence, each querulous comment led him further toward his brink. HG’s mountain was indeed about to come down – his dam break, his catchment flood. She saw all his detritus in the text, pus-filled and pungent, knew how his demons took hold. And watched him busily fill an old canvas rucksack, trembling with angst.

  She held out her hand. I’ll come with you. It’ll be alright. We’ll go together. OK?

  They followed the path up and out of the village to the chestnut forest and beyond. Pulled from civilisation’s orbit, time crossed and stilled, she gently guided HG into a silence backgrounded by the rush of melt-water. A rusted bridge leapt the wide creek and led toward a farmhouse before the path veered and they began to climb steeply through a thick forest of chestnut and beech.

  The rustle of leaves – the sudden flight of a deer. A snorting growl – a wild boar herding her piglets. The sharp cry of blue jay, the whistle of hunting buzzard, the hammer-tap of woodpecker, HG’s breath in her ear. And her own boots the percussive beat to a tuning fork within.

  Here, in the forest,

  Tramping boots fill the traces

  Stamped by echoed-time.

  Finally they pulled free to an alpine meadow of ruminating goats. She trailed her fingers across sun-warmed backs and patted coarse hides, then crossed the flock to a clutch of stone barns and a small shrine to Madonna, fresco-cracked, plaster-cleaved. HG needed a breather, but soon enough they continued to the ridgetop, a row of self-seeded oaks running along its spine and a clump of silver birch at its furthest point. Here they picnicked beneath leaves of recent unfurl which fluttered in the breeze like Buddhist prayer flags.

  There! HG pointed over to the pass. We need to follow this slope around the mountain to reach it, and then make our way down into the next valley.

  She looked up at della Croce from this new perspective. It stood at the end of a long unwieldy ridge, like a breadknife in need of smoothing to a more uniform blade.

  The mountain hasn’t come down, she said.

  No, he pouted. Not yet.

  They reached the pass and the Sentieri which showed the way down to the next valley. But the sign offered other possibilities, and HG hesitated.

  Do you still want to escape the siege? she prodded.

  What siege? he flustered.

  Kisha grinned, had waited for just this moment in the text to propose an alternate ending. Alright, she said. Let’s choose another path.

  Once more they began to climb, heading for the summit of a different mountain. This one had a grassy saddle, a gentle cap smoothed by an Ice Age glacial sheet which, HG informed her, once stretched from far in the north all the way to Milano. Nevertheless, he was less than happy about the route she’d chosen.

  Why are you doing this? he wheezed as they stopped to look for red and white way markers in the density of forest below the crest.

  Why? he asked again as they clambered over rocks and tree roots, skirted mounds of huge red ants, stubbed toes on hidden risks, and slipped on mossy outcrops.

  Why? his teeth gnashed as they crawled on all fours across great sheafs of stone, broad-backed as breaching whales, only the red and white stripes painted fore and aft convincing her they hadn’t strayed from the path.

  Why?

  There is no why, Kisha said. Only is. And climbed the last of the slope, up and into air.

  As he hobbled toward her, she pointed to the whole interconnected web of mountains and valleys which surrounded them, a rumpled quilt spreading in any, all directions – peaks and troughs, wave upon wave of foam-capped ridges, each and every watershed gravity-pulled to the sea.

  Look, she said. You were never cut off. You were part of this endless tangled rhizome all the time.

  He humphed, grumbled, shrugged. It was only a story, he mumbled.

  Kisha looked over to where Samir stood on the edge of a cliff of memory, studying the small segment of a river’s mammoth journey more than a thousand metres below.

  Only a story? she asked him.

  Samir turned and shed the hood of his cloak.

  Isn’t that what we all are? he grinned.

  A century later or before, still to come or long past, Kisha stopped at the bridge on the way back down to the village while HG continued on. He had to see about his dinner. We spent a pretty day, he admitted. But you forgot to tell me – how is dear old Tito?

  She laughed at his retreating back, lay down by the creek in the wake of unbounded mountain time and floated in pools of infinite space. She spread her fingers across the faces of boulders which shaped and hugged its flow, curve-softened by millennia of seasonal grift, of water shifting granite from its path in foaming joy.

  Remember Smetana? Samir said and hummed the refrain of his beloved Moldau.

  This creek, too, knew its passage by heart, repeating a symphony in four movements afresh each year – springtime’s roar, summer’s steady stream, autumn’s murmuring cargo of red-gold leaves, winter’s burble beneath a sheet of cracking ice. The tape looped, the thread sewn, in out, over under, round about, and in between.

  Give me a haiku, Ki-, he said after they were brimful of dreaming the myth onward.

  She rested her head against his shoulder and studied the scene before her. Of white water flipping over grey-green stone, of silver-brown light snuggled into deep pools, of musty backwaters filled with tannin-rich leaves.

  She sketched what she saw with pencil on paper in words ripe with colour and taste. And said after a time of scribblings and crossings-out:

  Still life won’t stay still.

  Winter’s broken branch

  In springtime’s glittering stream.

  Nine

  She made a last round of the garden, watered the small punnets of hope instructed to guard against rhizome incursions, cleaned the house and climbed the stairs to the attic to farewell her view.
/>   Afternoon sun bathed the bed and spotlit a column of dust in suspended nonchalance. Dust. After all her cleaning, dust!

  Plain to the eye in the shaft of light but no doubt, at sun-shift, new dust would be revealed, and she sat on the bed, wrapped in sunlight and dust, tiny specks bobbing about her with the random delight of a bottle floating at sea, adrift, with no thought of destination. Yet arriving somewhere, eventually, to tell stories of the journey, of life itself as a speck of dust.

  She sat and wondered: What’s the difference between me and a speck of dust?

  Is that a trick question? asked Samir.

  She ignored him, thought: Does dust have memory of where it’s been or plans of future bright? Does dust know anger, frustration, fear, pain? Disappointment? Love? Does dust know love? Her brow furrowed at that one.

  I’m serious, said Samir. Are you doing this on purpose?

  Perhaps we should drift, she wondered. No plans, no future, no memory, no past. Just a string of todays where everything is revealed in its true light and true measure, the siege simply a breeze which skittered us about, our whims unheeded as much as these innocent specks.

  Ah, said Samir. But here’s a thought – is it better to be aware of this or not? Is it better to be an enlightened speck of dust or are we just as blissful (or not) by the turns of fate as an ignorant speck? None of us knows our destiny, where our message-in-a-bottle bobbing on a vast and trackless sea will beach us, what hazards we’ll face in the stream, which rocks will bruise and scrape or slice us to shreds as we’re carried past. It all just happens. So what sort of speck would you rather be?

  He spread his arms wide atop Pizzo Ruscada and parted the clouds of unknowing which clung to the peak, wind-shifting them with an invisible breath. Now she could see him full in the kiss of the sun.

  I’ll take enlightened, she grinned.

  He laughed, whooped his joy. This is how it ends, Ki-. And how it begins. At the end of a journey of no end from a big bang before beginningless time. Never without the hope that a spark will pierce us, illuminate us, enlighten us, we humble specks of dust.

  Love! he cried aloud. Love! That’s the spark!

  And she couldn’t help but agree as he conjured an image of billions upon billions of radiant dust stars, a universe of twinkling dust fireflies, all filled with the light of love.

  Intermezzo

  The chorus now speaks:

  Last logs crackle on the fire downstairs. An owl hoots from the church tower. Mountain water cascades via the washhouse below the church before tumble-turning on. We have finished our watch, but still we may tell of what we see, what we hear.

  Kisha lies in silence, her ear tuned to the silence, the real silence. The low hum (or maybe thrum is a better word, she thinks) of all life simply going about the business of living, generated by all the souls of the world – the souls of the ten thousand things as the Buddhists liked to say – simply breathing. Nothing more than a breath is needed – inhaled, exhaled, over, over – to enjoin the thrum of life.

  Silence, she thinks, is the sound of my soul breathing. And listens on till its shape is revealed. It is the surety of the O in the care of cloud-twins, the soft-woven warmth of a butterfly’s cocoon, the diamond-hard strength of the mountain at her back.

  Into this surety, she closes her eyes and glides down to the washhouse to watch the melt-waters flow. Indeed she wants to join the waters, flow with them to the sea. But there is the business of getting back to work, taking the bus, the train north – what should she do?

  A message in a bottle, that’s what she’ll do. Write a message and send it in her stead. A message carried all the way from here to there, down into the gorge, slapped against boulders, rumbled over stones, but unbreakable, this dream bottle.

  She watches it head off into the basin of the four rivers to make its way into the fjord-thin lake and bob inexorably south until taken up by the Po, further, further, her message channelled into the lagoon and current-directed into Venezia’s Grand Canal where a passerby fishes it out.

  He sits on the quayside, lights a cigarette, studies the cork stuffed in the bottle’s throat, the yellowing paper within. Curious, no doubt, but wary about the consequences of unlocking its content. He remembers the fate of poor Roderick the Goth, knows his history well. So continues to sit while vaporettos chug past, their wake sending gondola-ed tourists to regret their three-course lunches, and grins into a tableau of cursing and hurling.

  He finishes his cigarette, thinks: Alright, I’m ready. And extracts the cork.

  A finger inserted, carefully it tightens the scroll and brings it out into the air, into the light, unscathed. Slowly, slowly, so it does not tear, he unfurls the fragile note.

  At one time, her message would have said: Help. But now it simply says: Hello. Kisha smiles into her dream, the passerby turns toward her. Samir’s eyes, dark, depthless, flooded with golden light.

  Hello, he says. Hello.

  The Seventh Wave

  One

  Kisha sits in the midst of a shipment from an art and design publisher. It has taken some time, but Tobias has finally relented to customer and employee pressure to extend his stock offer and complement the old and well-loved with the shock of the new.

  She opens the boxes as if it were Christmas, sorting through shredded paper until she finds the volumes shrink-wrapped in plastic. Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, several international names, a survey on Swiss artists of the last century. After putting an exemplar of each on the floor beside her for later browsing, she gathers the remainder and takes them to a table near the front of the store. Perhaps she will re-arrange the window display to catch the beauty of the Kirchner cover, the paradoxical frailty of the Giacometti.

  Now to a second, smaller shipment, a single box housing a new publication on the art of Byzantium. She leafs through the book, each page hosting a memory-image of home, of frescoes, altarpieces, icons, all in full colour gloss. She searches for a Lady like Baba’s lost treasure. But none appears.

  Closing the book, she hugs a memory close. Of a scolding from her teacher for … she can’t remember what. But remembers telling Baba, remembers mumbling and looking at her toes.

  What did you do?

  Nothing! She’s just an angry old hag and I hate her!

  Mmmm, shall we ask the Lady what she thinks?

  Oh – how she trembles before the icon, feels the Lady look into her heart.

  Silent, their communion, but into it comes a cough from the chair behind her. Well? What did she say?

  Her cheeks burn, now, to hear her whispered response again. She didn’t say anything, Baba.

  Well, that’s strange. Because I heard something. I heard the Lady say: Listen to your heart. Baba pauses. So what does your heart tell you?

  More silence, more fidgeting, but finally she admits: I should do my homework.

  Baba sits back. There, you see?

  But it wasn’t my heart saying it! It was my tummy – all squirmy and sad.

  Baba hugs her. Damp breath kisses her hair. Yes, she says. Sometimes our heart strings tug in funny places.

  Tobias comes into the room from the back office. Ah, a new shipment, he says. What have we here?

  He lifts each exemplar in turn while she cradles memory in her lap till finally he reaches down to collect the Byzantine book from her.

  Good, it’s arrived. He’ll be very pleased.

  Who?

  Herr Bueller. He ordered it in specifically and it seemed a grand opportunity to make a box of it.

  He scans the shop. I think we should bring all our books on Byzantine art and iconography into the one area, don’t you?

  Look here, he says, taking down from a shelf a volume on the church frescoes of Crete, its cover torn and binding frayed. This is a seminal text, very difficult to come by these days. I’d even forgotten I had this.

  He flicks through the pages, mumbling as he goes: I think a new display is in order. The new boo
k’s our diva, all the second-hand and antiquarian the chorus.

  Alright, I’ll get started.

  No – take this one over to Herr Bueller first. Charming man, he’ll appreciate a personal delivery. It’s over in the Augustinergasse near the church. I’ll draw you a map.

  She makes out an invoice, wraps the book well, and pops it into her bicycle basket. Off she rides, morning chill on stockinged legs. At Bahnhofstrasse, she walks the bike up a cobbled side street, down a narrow lane and across a wide church square. Tucked away in the far corner she finds his small storefront between a jeweller and furniture maker.

  It looks locked, and dark within, but that only serves to highlight gilt frames, silvered borders, the sticky sheen of lacquer over richly-coloured tempera. She tries the door, sees movement, and the shadow of a large man looms to unlock the grill.

  Herr Bueller?

  I’m closed. Won’t open till after lunch.

  Tobias sent me. I’ve brought your book.

  Oh excellent! He claps pudgy hands together. Come in, come in. And waves her past his long black beard, moving aside so she can squeeze through the narrow entrance and descend the several steps into his compact shrine to Orthodoxy. She hands him the package and wanders the gallery while he unwraps his prize.

  Beautiful, beautiful … when I saw the review –

  Calming to be in her own culture again, she fingers the cloths, studies the forms of the saints on their slim cypress boards. But stops short in front of one, something she recognises, or thinks to recognise.

  St George. Baba’s St George.

  She begins to shiver. No, it’s not possible. And turns, walks to the other side of the small room. The gallery owner sits and talks into his beard, her progress between worlds goes unnoticed.