Marcel Proust
"when nothing of the past remains, after the passing away of beings, after the destruction of things, the only enduring matters are scents and flavors. Brittle yet bright, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, they hang around like souls remembering, waiting, hoping against the downfalls of everything else, carrying without bending in their almost intangible droplets, the huge structure of memory."
Marcel Proust, translated by Flora
Now, that structure bends me down...
The bushes are full of tasteless, flavorless, sunless blackberries hardly reminiscent of the mulberry trees of my childhood on which both white and black delicious berries grew and under which we played tag or closed eyes to play hide and seek and when everyone vanished in their chosen hideaway, Hratch, the gardener's son would feel safe to take me in his arms and kiss me. A purple colored daring and pleasant kiss.
the light trickles through the tree branches, sparsely yet playfully and there shimmer before my eyes, in slow motion, fragments of memory. A father putting his daughter on the bike, holding her tight, the warm feeling of security and the ride through the leafy alleys of the orchards, the light making everything look soft and safe if only the time of that bike ride in a hand made cool summer dress.
On summer irrigation days, we would go to the orchards and among cousins, we would build bridges made of mud and dried sticks and leaves over the narrow ditches meandering the water all over the place. I loved it there. We would gather under the guidance of Hossein, the orchard keeper's son and we would wander off around in search of jackals. The thrill of it all and the delicious feeling of fear...
Afterward it was time to seat around our beloved grand-mother, to suck in her patient love, her fragrance of quince preserve, of tomato chutney, of sweet pickled lemons and peel walnuts. We would peel off the green skin of ripe walnuts fallen under the tree, letting our fingers soak up a dark inky color which remained till the school's opening day. But until then there was plenty of time to fill up big buckets of water and let it warm up to scorching temperatures under the sun and to bath our dusty bodies, running and chasing each other like crazies, droplets of water evaporating from our skin, vanishing into the hot summer air; Time working to take away the bliss of those moments which would soon enough vanish starting with the death of our grand-parents and erasing itself through the tumultuous history making its way.
How I feel like going to the place, digging the earth with my bare hands and see if the ground can still hold all my beloved smells, for which my body aches, when all it's left is people, stripped of their homeland, their tongue, now in a land with bushes of tasteless, odorless berries and no more mother tongue in which fantasize poems, like the one I wrote in 1984, five years after I knew that there will never be a return way to that blissed state of things.
Arroser le jardin des ancêtres
Qui reviennent à l'appel
Avec le parfum de la terre humide.
Est-il possible
Que la Beauté des choses
reste?
Watering the garden of forefathers
making them come back
by the sheer smell of moistened earth
Is it possible
that beauty be still
on duty?
To be able to say the beauties of past and present in a mother tongue. To be able to name a place where I belong. I already know all too well that all of it was meant to vanish and that fortunately my mother was smart enough to prepare me for all yet to come well ahead of her time, putting me through foreign languages, forging the road of becoming a citizen of the world, as for the rest all I know is that the spirit of beloved people will always be there, mixed with moist earth, with sweet memories,and despite their rotten dead bodies inside the graves of Julfa's cemetery, or Californian and Bostonian cemeteries, a beautiful, though still aloof, hymn of hope raises from that remote place,haunted by the playful children of yesterday.
Flora
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