*
In the old bazaar one can hear the cautious steps of high heels in the night, a half-known refrain brought by the wind, the jingling of keys and lighters, sighs of bar owners, the clink of glass in the rubbish bins in which the night sleeps, the muffled sounds of text messages for missed calls and loves. During the day, people look at the golden jewellery which had been brought back to the shop window in the morning, as if it were the belongings of a prisoner who had served his sentence; people look at themselves in the boutique mirrors, doubtfully glancing at their partner who has just gone to buy cigarettes. They look at the menu while thinking of all the waiting in their lives.
*
Summertime in the city became a metaphor for transience and maturity, a period in which everything should be crafted and ready; the studios are empty, whereas the museums are full, a time when you hear more of reading than of writing. Those who had left to work abroad come back every summer, and during their stay here we measure their ageing; the migrant birds have already built their nests on visible spots; political parties have printed leaflets which lie neglected on park benches; doctors warn not to go out, despite the percentage of domestic violence. Summertime is a period in which people in beauty parlours talk intensively of eliminating the flaws of nature, whereas nature stubbornly eliminates the flaws of beauty. We accept fires as normal then, and falling in love as false. The seaside is crowded with voices, the city emptied of people, but not of walls.
*
I am travelling towards Skopje, the dream is travelling with me. The traffic signs are drawing out the road like the signal lights on the runway do, the sunflowers in the field change the sky, the deer on the sign, ‘deer on the road’, will become a significant artefact one day, like the drawings of hunted animals on cave walls. When the bus enters the city, it’s like it’s entering a tunnel – the children shut their eyes, the elderly start speaking louder, the driver slows down. The street lights come near us, each time there are more and they are denser, like wasps nearing an abandoned watermelon.
*
When I get on a city bus, I am infiltrating the pauses between routine talks about crossroads of life and the folklore of pains. I don’t know those people, yet I know their stories. I am looking for safety in the familiarity of their life’s situations; I am looking for empty double seats, to be alone.
*
I can hear the midnight motor races, from one traffic light to the other, from one life to another. They’re faster than the changes of the red light, faster than the moon cycles, than the pauses between the orgasms in the nearest flats. I heard my grandmother once telling the doctor not to rush because one day we will all go to that place. Sometimes the night doesn’t pass, and the traffic lights flicker only yellow, yellow, yellow…
*
Taxi operators always sound the same, the streets are the same with different names – of mountains, saints or dead ideologies; the air freshener’s scent in the cabs gets weaker, and the passengers own different silence, yet the taxi operators always have the same tone. ‘Car number 15 – from Biser to the Main Cathedral.’ The taxi driver drives: ‘Somebody died…? Did he see something in his dream…?.’ ‘Car number 15 – from Bunjakovec to Porta Vlae.’ Taxi operators always sound the same, taxi operators always cry the same way.
*
At midnight, around the burek bakery-shops, there are always dogs, cars with all the blinkers turned on at once, overturned bicycles with a wheel going down, half-extinguished cigarettes, the last puff of which struggles with the steam on the glass. The bakers are invisible; the logo on the napkins is pale. The emptied plastic yogurt pots are being squashed, as one would squash a significant letter. Soon, a window in each building will blink. Birds will land on the spots we had left.
*
People throw coins into the fountain in the Cathedral courtyard. They keep the last coin for the crevice between the glass and the frame of the first icon they see.
*
After midnight, the casino door in the heart of the bus station is opened. One can hear the voices of those who lose, of those who win and then lose, of the beggars who sleep-talk over the iron benches in the gloomy waiting room. Every night the bus station is looked after by those who never travel.
*
In the State Hospital garden I run after people who wear white lab coats, wanting to ask them where the most precise laboratory for blood work is located; and they look at my face, measuring its colour, suggesting the diagnosis; but I look down, to the ground, although I would like to look up, farther than eyesight, farther than all the skies stuck over the cities.
*
In the cameras of the tourists, there are huddled statues, houses protected by law, smiling faces in front of the ruins of ancient wars and earthquakes, beautiful women in the airports who walk upright looking at the flight schedule boards, blurred landscapes from bus windows, Swarovski crystals that they hesitate to buy, the misery on the streets that they cannot bear, yet they want to see… Lots of endemic plants, lots of passersby travel around the world inside the tourists’ cameras.
*
The ambulance siren is echoing. Cars pull over at the crossroads; windscreen-washing boys run towards the pavement holding the bucket out of which pour waves of water as dark as the sky is; beggars withdraw their hands as if they are assured it is not raining and leave the crossroads without looking back as one leaves his home. An old man sitting on the bench in front, unwraps the scarf to take his glasses out and looks at the sunflower seeds around his feet. Cars remain frozen like passersby when they face a funeral procession. The siren fades and birds are returning. It’s quiet. People cry secretly in hospitals, unlike in the graveyard.
*
The waitress leans over me superiorly, while asking what I will take while looking out of the open window, and then leaves like lovers who won’t leave their phone number. In my life I remember the covered hair of the nurses whose glances were falling over my pain; I remember the androgynous faces of the stewardesses, who have no right to lament even when the plane crashes; the pharmacists who can decode all the handwritings and hopes in the world.
*
An embraced couple, on the ground, in the bronze shadow of the monument which looks to the sky.
*
On the Stone Bridge, a mother is holding her freezing baby in one hand while reaching the other one to every passerby; in Vienna, a mother was holding a photo of her baby while begging. It often happens that a woman opens her wallet to give alms and her children’s faces flash on the photos behind the transparent plastic, right of the credit cards. One can hide the sky, the streets and bridges in the gap between those two women.
*
When it stops raining, old men will appear on the streets, mushrooms on the nearest hills, snails on the park greenery; there will be flashes of lightning in the secret lovers’ eyes.
*
From each black marble bench in Warsaw, like a wail coming from a peripheral cemetery, the sound of Chopin’s compositions was coming. On the benches in Skopje there are carved names of people who nobody recognizes. The knife enters deeply into the wood and hurts through all times.
*
The dog near the Cathedral runs after the cars and comes back, waiting for the next wave of cars at the traffic light and then runs after them, finally coming back again. A newsvendor cuddles it softly while both are looking at the traffic light and this will never appear in a newspaper.
*
In the Military Hospital in Skopje all my relatives’ shadows were going under my bed, over the brown rubber slippers that would take me to the half-used toys at the bottom of a spring every night.
*
The lightened cross at the top of the hill was wounding heaven, while I was hiding within the city night mists, like an ancient mosaic covered by sand from archaeologists, protecting it against all the snows and glances of time.
*
I always leave home feeling I’ve forgotten something; something left on the table, carried out of a dark corner where it was kept for years without evoking memories; something I should have taken with me, and now it will be kept on the table for years, while light and shadows pass across it alternately every day, like waves passing across a sand tower.
*
When I mount Kale Fortress hill, I can see the round grey building of the Central Post Office, open to the sky as a year-old field flower. Pigeons used to land on its windowsills, though it’s been a long time since they ceased delivering the letters of war.
*
In my grandfather’s garden, there is still the well, as deep as someone’s eyes, as wide as the body of a mermaid. Every morning, wearing a white undershirt, he would pull up the bucket full of water, which would hit the inner stones, as the pendulum in a church bell does. While opening his iron garden gate in my dream, I can feel through my body the drifting of the water, which will never belong to me, not even in thirst.
*
Many photo albums and memory cards store the image of the Old Railway Station clock, whose hour hands have been stuck marking 5.17 am for forty-eight years now. The 1963 earthquake stopped time. With the same illusion, the camera freezes the already frozen moment, while minutes and hours softly kill the earthquake survivors, their intermittent stories, half-shrieks, dusty glances to the renewed sky.
*
On the highway, wind was wafting the mist in the wrong direction, and for two hours not a single car had stopped before my decisiveness to return. When I put my hand down, a driver invited me in. We didn’t talk much, he was telling me about the colours in the rooms of his house, the quality of the seeds in agricultural pharmacies, his first days of military service. He dropped me by the door of my house and left like patients leave the truth.
*
I spent my student days living in a basement apartment, listening to the unsuccessful piano rehearsals of the landlady’s daughter or the revelation-like TV news jingles. On my wooden bed railing there were stickers of local rock bands that never appeared on a front page. Every night, the cockroaches would come into the kitchen, following the darkness and the hot water in the pipes. There was no time to feel lonely, not even when everybody went to bed, when the red boiler light turned on and off, like a heart which knows all the secrets in the world.
*
I’m running along Vardar, the river follows me, butterflies are flying away, I am erasing the traces of bicycles and starving dogs, uprooting little stones which later children will throw into the water; I am running without looking back, racing with my own fears that flow into the blood of all my unborn children.
*
Fences need to be painted, chimneys need to be cleaned, water taps need to be tightened, door locks need to be changed, windows need to be opened to air the room of the strong parquet lacquer scent. A twig comes into the room, so do children’s voices from the nearest school. There enters the voice of my dead grandfather saying to me, ‘leave the windows open, leave the windows’.
*
At the place where the circus would spread its tent with flags that don’t belong to any country, there is now a building, which if viewed from a distance, looks like a box of matches ready to burst into flames from the evening silence, from the dialectics of the tenants’ thirst for migration, whenever next-door voices screamed while dreaming after midnight, silencing the choral voices’ prayers in the churches and the mosques.
Translated from Macedonian by Marjan Gjorsheski
Marjan Gjorsheski graduated in 2010 from the Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski” in Skopje from the Department of English Language and Literature with Spanish Language and Literature as a second subject. In July 2009 he assisted at the General Course of Spanish Language and Culture at the University Complutense of Madrid. Marjan Gjorsheski works as a an interpreter at seminars and workshops, and also as a translator of literary texts from Spanish and English to Macedonian and vice versa.
