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Todays writing…
The wind is blowing. The wind is speaking, a gentle hush, and it is raining. ‘What is it in me that cannot take in rain and nourishment?’ the woman asks of herself. She does not know.
She is on the mountain at the centre of the world, her world. Her body is stretched out onto a white rock. It is not comfortable. A lump in the middle presses between her shoulderblades. She turns over and lies face down, her head to the side. The rock is warm. A smell of pine fills the air. She can see the edge of the Drina flowing in the distance. The river looks windblown, her grey mists rising in the breeze as if seaweed fingers are floating in water.
The woman points and flexes her dust sprinkled feet. The two toes on her right foot are bound together. Broken in the climb, in her running night, her escape from the valley of death.
She can see the other mountain, in the distance, alone, beautiful, her green-black forests a veil falling thickly from her head.
‘What is it in me that cannot take in rain and nourishment?’ the woman asks again. And then, the answer to her question comes to her like a voice entering her mind from outside, a man’s voice, ancient and gravelly. ‘That which keeps me from taking in rain and nourishment is fear,’ says the voice. ‘My fear,’ says her own voice, out loud. And then the woman asks another question as she lies on that unforgiving white rock, ‘how do I face that which keeps me from taking in rain and nourishment?’
She remembers something her grandfather had once told her, in his voice that sounded like small tumbling stones, teaching her the little English he knew. He told her that the English word courage comes from the Latin word for heart, cor.
So. I must love my fearful part, she thinks My fear. That which caused her fear, the fear she thought once, amazingly, that she didn’t have.
The woman stops and starts. She doesn’t know where to go. She asks for help. The birds speak but she does not understand their language. Are they calling to her? Are they warning her? Or are they simply talking to each other? The tweets become more animated. Insistent. Louder. I’m listening. I am listening, the woman says. They are calling to each other, two birds. She hears them as if in stereo. In one ear and out the other. She still does not understand. It feels like fear to her. It sounds like fear. She does not think they are telling each other it’s alright. She cannot think this, not now.
And then there is bone silence, silence except for the breathing of the wind and the rain’s weeping. A slow, steady downpour. The woman still doesn’t know where to go. She rolls off onto the ground, sitting upright, gathering her tired legs beneath her tired body. She sits between the long white unforgiving rock and a small moss-skinned boulder. She is sitting between a rock and a hard place, she thinks. She is a flow of words, bound by these rocks. Saying nothing. What is the story of no story? She asks herself. Her story is like a book thrown into the fire. She is a library burning, all the words gone, her history gone, her people gone. She wonders if ashes are a kind of divination. Not in her country.
Rain is sheeting down now, at an angle, drowning out the sound of the wind. No birds sing in this rain. She imagines them huddling in the bright green pines, their tiny heads tucked under their wings, waiting it out. I must wait it out, she tells herself. Even if there is no end in waiting.
In her heart she senses a window is open. Just a bit. Enough for her to slip out, enough for them to slip in. Them. What do she mean by that? Who is them? Dreams, nightmares, of people filling her rooms, dreams of crowds, armies, dreams of not ever being left alone. Too many people, the soldiers lined up like forest trees closing in upon her. But she is alone here, between these rocks, watching the rain, watching pine tree arms wave as if calling for help. They shudder and then they are still, and she wonders if she misunderstands, she wonders if in fact their gentle arms are waving ‘hello’ to her, she wonders if they are telling her it is indeed alright. The rain is softer now, just a bit. Slate grey sky, not a cloud, not a star, not the sun, nothing but grey. Her heart beats. It beats like a soundtrack in those moments in a movie when danger is approaching. Insistent, like the birds were, the birds who are not tweeting any more.
The woman turns the palm of her left hand over. The vessel that burst, of its own accord, no help by her, is slowly disappearing. It had looked like a dam flooding, like a river overflowing its banks, coursing to the centre of her palm, a bloodless stigmata. She is on the cross and her god has forsaken her. She feels hammered there by one hand, her left hand. The hand, which, according to her grandfather, corresponds to the right side of her brain, the brain that can see the larger picture, the brain that can see the forest. She wonders if this has a meaning: that she is to see the trees, or is it that she is to see the forest? All she sees are soldiers. Nothing makes sense. Her right hand hangs limply. Untouched. Unmarked. Unloved. Perhaps there is no meaning other than she is hanging here, betwixt and between, waiting.
She is beginning to love these rocks, sitting so gently on either side of her, as she hangs in the rain, the wind, one hand to the sky, the other to the earth. It is hard to keep her head up. It tilts to the side, resting on her right shoulder. She sees her white, dust covered feet dangling. They look somehow sad, disembodied. The two bound toes, like two tiny babies wrapped in swaddling cloth. She tries to reach down but she cannot. She tries to pull her legs up and she cannot, not hanging here lopsided as she is. Her right knee she can lift a little, just close enough so she can touch it. She places her palm over it, covering the scratches and bruising from the climb. It does not feel as if she is caresssing herself. It feels as if she is caressing something deeper than herself, something that remembers what she cannot not. And then the effort is too much and she drops her leg down again.
The rain is so thick it blankets the air with a soft grey mist. The trees are completely silent. Large drips patter against the background of white rain noise. I’m going nowhere. she thinks. I cannot go anywhere. I am here. She wants to run, she wants to get out, to find a door, a gate, a road, an EXIT sign in red neon. The movie is too dark, she is going to suffocate amongst all these people, just sitting here, see-through people, their bones clicking as they twitch and press against each other. They are watching, they are laughing when it’s not funny, laughing when a man falls from the mountain and bounces, once, twice like a ball, they think it’s funny and whoever made the movie thinks it’s funny because the soundtrack has that jaunty elated feel, and the medal-studded hero who, to her, is a monster, a handsome charming monster, he is smiling, he’s managed to roll his enemy off the mountain as easily as skimming flat rocks across the surface of a lake.
The woman is transfixed, frozen solid, standing in the aisle, aware that the bone people behind her are grumbling, wanting her to move, to duck down, to get out of their view, out of their sight and but she cannot find the EXIT sign, she is blinded by the movie, by the monster’s victory, she is suffocated by the audience’s breath, she is deafened by her own beating heart.
Time has passed. Minutes. Hours. Maybe years. She doesn’t know. She fell asleep. How many aeons pass in a moment of unconsciousness? she wonders. What is missed? What moment of risk is avoided? Could I have lept if I tried? Hammered here as I am? She hears someone or something groaning behind her. It could be the roots of a tree shifting. It could be someone trying to get something off their chest. The woman tells herself she is not alone, with this groaning behind her, perhaps it is a comfort but in truth it’s not a comfort. Not at all. She wants to tell it/him/her to shut up to go away to leave her be. She soaks up their groans like the devil soaks up sin. It’s not my voice, I don’t sound like that, she tells herself, I’m not crying, I’m not. The groan changes to a cackle, a witch’s cackle, laughing at her. I must look a fright, the woman thinks, hanging here by one hand, drowned in rain, with nothing to say. She can’t stand it anymore. She must plug her ears, stuff them with treebark or her hair or turn her head this way and that so puddles form in her ears, water bearing, water holes, rain traversing the ear canal until it reaches the drum, settling there for the night. Go away, she says in her head because she cannot say it any other way but the groans keep on, entering her body, grinding into her like a hammer drill, there it is again and she cannot do anything.
I give up, she says. I surrender, she says. It is a lie. She turns away from the groans, she shuts her ears, she shuts herself and she plucks an old song from her heart and into her head she sings this song, drowning out the groaning sound in her ears, she hides it with the voice of a woman, a woman sitting between two rocks, her country war-split beneath her, soaked with the blood of her sisters, her brothers, her mother, her father, herself, and she sings, her voice a chord, a cry, a bird call.
I stood there trying to remember who I was
Looking inside my house, but no trace of him was there
What should I do now?
A thousand thoughts are crumbling inside of my mind
She can’t remember the rest. She wont remember the rest. Instead she looks for small things.
There is something warm in her hand, a soft tender thing settling and then it moves to her wrist, down her arm. She turns her tired eyes and she sees the red, a thin blanket enfolding her arm, as if she has dipped her hand into the deep hot belly of the earth, into the belly of a man, into the belly of a slaughtered deer, a divination by blood, the blood covering her breast. She is an Amazon, bow-less, man-less, help-less.
Again she looks for small things. A slender blade of grass, poking up through the broken earth, its tip blackened. A brown ant crawls towards it, one ant step after another, antennae quivering, sensing the current in the air, looking for the rhythm of the future, for toxins, for food. The ant stops half an inch from the grass blade, feelers pointing like arrows. The woman watches with her grey eyes, silent. She already knows what the ant knows. The earth is poisoned. Her people are poisoned. From silver mines flow blood and on her mountain a General sang the song she could not remember -
Death shall rule your world
I will rule with plague
Side by side with you
Not her man, not her people she says but she knows she lies, he is her man, he is her people, this General Zdravko, whose blood flowed no thicker than the husband he murdered, this General Zdravko Tolimir, who thought a chemical rather better than a gun, this General Zdravko Tolimir from Zepa, her own village, her home, her life, the valley between two mountains, two great rocks like a woman’s breasts, the village nestled between, resting on the woman’s heart.
It began with the peach trees. Her grandfather said trees can talk. If only they had listened.
Her family owned a tiny orchard, tenderly cared for by her father, her grandfather, her greatgrandfather. The fruit was their pride, their sustenance, their livelihood. Come harvest time she helped with the picking, even as a young child, carefully placing the fruit in her mother’s handwoven basket. They felt like living things, they were living things, her grandfather told her and she was even more careful. She cupped them in her tiny hands, fondling their warmth, their sun-hot, velvetskinned bodies, the colour of her own hair. She couldn’t bear to eat them, it was like eating a living thing. Her mother called her Kusuzumu, ‘my plum’ my plum of a daughter who cannot eat a peach because it is like eating her sister.
And then the pox came. The spreading virus, the rings and mottling of their flesh, the yellowing veins on the leaves, spreading from branch to tip, or from nowhere at all, a single fruit on a single tree deforming and colouring. She had found one on the ground, turned it in her hand. It was cratered and scarred like the face of the moon. Their orchard was the only one affected in the valley. It is the end, her grandfather said, my life is over, Kusuzumu, he said to her as she sat in his bony lap, his hands covering his eyes, his steel grey hair matted from the night of tossing and turning in the room next door to her own, trying to find a way to cure the trees.
He could not.
They found him later, his back pressed against the trunk of his favourite tree, the one he called Askim, my sweet, my heart, my only one. He had planted it over his wife’s buried body and it had produced the sweetest fruit of all the trees, yellow flesh blushing like a girl in love.
The girl had found him. His eyes were half open. She called his name, ran to him to be held. She touched his face, screamed with the cold of it, screamed when he fell forward onto the ground, a great thump vibrating through her bones and the tree shaking above, weeping diseased fruit and she ran to the house, tears hot and stinging flying into the air as she ran. The pox has killed him, she said to her mother who wiped her floury hands down her apron, a white cloud rising between them.
That night the girl heard her parents whispering. She climbed out of bed and crept to the door that was always just a little bit open, letting in the warmth from the kitchen stove, the warmth from her parents voices, the smell of bread and peach jam and earth and her grandfather’s sweat, still alive in the air. They were talking about the trees. Their disease. The name of it. It had always been the pox, that’s what she called it, that’s what she had been told, it’s a pox, no mind, it will get better, and when it didn’t get better they stopped talking about it at all, not with words. But now she heard its name and its name was her own. Plum pox. Kusuzumu. The girl walked away from the door, backwards to her bed. she lay down and covered her face with the rough sheet.
Her grandfather was wrong. That was not the end. The end happened eleven years later, on July 25, 1995. Her birthday, long after the poppies had flowered and died, the month when the sun was at it hottest, the season of the peach harvest only there was none, not that year. Instead of peaches dying men died by the thousands and the valley ran a river of blood, the mountains themselves caving in.
She looks for small things. The ant has backtracked away from the blade of grass and disappeared down a pinprick hole in the earth, the hole itself disappearing before her eyes, rubbed out by the rain. She forgot about the rain. It settles on her eyelashes, hovers a moment until she blinks. Still the birds are not singing. Not even the warning sound. They have flown the coop and why wouldn’t they? She wished she had wings to fly. Instead she has nowhere to go. There is nothing left. The great general Tolimir has killed them all, one by one, two by two, three by three, thousand by thousand and the rest, the women the children, the very old, were driven out of the bleeding valley, piled into trucks carpeted with excrement and fear and driven to Tuzla. The remains of her people now live in steelgrey highrises, buildings wept into being. Tuzla is a city of salt.
The woman will not let herself cry, she will not. Instead she sings again, her eyes shut tight against the rain. At first she hums, she doesn’t want the trees to hear her, she doesn’t want to fly through the window in her heart, but she can’t stop the words from from climbing out of her mouth.
Darkness spoke and nothing I could do
Hear my words you blind, twisted man
Killed you'll be for thoughts that are yours.
Bring his eyes to me for I shall feast upon them
Give me his strength
And I'll burn it away.
Yes, he believes that I'm dead
But blood is still running through my veins
I’ll cut his throat
I’ll destroy his lies
She stops singing. She can’t go on. The words feel like insects, they feel like black spiders crawling out from the back of her throat, they feel like an infestation, a virus. Her virus, the pox, the Kusuzumu, the word she has not heard leave her mother’s mouth, not since that day when her grandfather slumped to the ground, open eyed, the fruit of his loins falling to their death. Kusuzumu, the word she will never hear leave her mother’s mouth because her mother refused to climb into the truck packed with people, people bruising like peaches, because her mother refused to leave the side of her husband and so, instead, the great General threw them both from the mountain and they skipped and bounced and shattered like stones while the General stood watching, hands planted on his hips, a wire thin smile in his eyes.
I don’t know where I’m going, the woman says out loud. After a moment she hears a single bird calling in the distance. It has stopped raining. Perhaps that is all the bird is saying: it has stopped raining. The woman tries to find meaning in this but she cannot. No more meaning than her breath on the soft rain soaked breeze, the pine trees gently wavering. She lowers her left hand to her lap, cradling it there as she once cradled her grandfather’s peaches. The bloodless stigmata on the palm of her hand is quite gone now. How long has she been sitting? Days? Nights? She is not hungry. She is not thirsty. It is as if her skin has soaked up the rain, it is as if her heart has soaked up the call of the birds even when they were not calling. She did not do this, her body did it all by itself. The woman tries to remember the rest of the song, her mind turning like a record stuck in a groove, the swish swish sound of pine needles, treebranch sound, wind sound, the sound of her mother’s nightblack hair when she brushed it one hundred times before bed. She tries to remember her questions, the answers to her questions, but nothing comes, nothing but two lines from the song, somewhere towards the end, she knows there is more, but this is all she can find so she whispers them softly, not wanting to disturb the wind,
Through shadows of this mountain I'll pass
And reach the light on the other side
The woman looks for small things. The uneven stitches at the hem of her skirt, a thread coming undone. A single drop of rain on that same blade of grass. A vein of grey along the side of her unforgiving white rock. She looks up and sees a tiny star pressing itself out of the sky. She feels the texture of the sky, it is the texture of the inside of her head. She remembers one question. ‘What is the story of no story?’ She does not know the answer, but she knows it begins here, sitting between two rocks, her dusty feet, her bruised knee, her broken swaddled toes, her raindropped eyes, she knows it begins with remembering. And she knows it does not end with remembering.
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