Amartia’s
Adventure - Part Two
It was three weeks before Amartia gathered enough courage to
leave the house again. The children were
at school, Berkit working and she had hours to herself. She would find the
mountain.
It took her most of that day just to gain the
soft, green pasture that led to its first slopes and when, as the sun lay low
and golden across the grass, she
returned, it was to a family fraught
with anxiety - and a police officer who
told Berkit to keep a sharper eye on her in future.
But there was, at last, the beginnings of
peace in Amartia.
As time passed and the children succeeded at
school, she began to love the mountain more and more. She persuaded Berkit to move to the edge of
town, where from her kitchen window she could see the slopes climbing into the
soft haze of sky.
At weekends, she would clamber through the
daisied meadows and walk the goat tracks which rose steeply to the rocks
above.
Within the year, she’d gain the courage and stamina to reach
the peak and felt as if she’d ascended to heaven.
Standing on the summit, the cold air razor
sharp in her throat, Amartia lifted her arms to the sky - then sunk down with
her head against the hard rock face and wept.
Berkit and the children had learned the new
language quite quickly but try as she might, all understanding evaded Amartia.
It was
as if her brain was incapable of retaining even the most elementary means of
communication.
When kindly people took her to social events
and tried to converse, she watched their expressions turn quickly from sympathy
to impatience, even anger.
How long would it be before they sent
soldiers?
At meal times the family spoke their own
dialect but later, around the television, the children would chatter in the
same incoherent speech as the screen and their father would say something which
made them laugh and Amartia would look, half smiling from one to the other,
hoping to understand or be included in their jokes.
Occasionally, other women from her homeland
came to visit but they were strangers and had little in common, and fear is not
a good basis for relationships.
Although she was beginning to feel more and
more isolated from her family, she could not but be pleased that her children
were settled and happy. Her eldest son even had a girlfriend. Berkit was valued in his work and promoted.
Amartia tried hard to remember all this when
her husband accused her of not trying.
She was trying, she was trying very
hard but in this race to belong, to be winners, they were all so much swifter
than she - and without knowing it, had
long since left her behind.
She bought a small tent and a sleeping bag
and every now and then, perhaps when Berkit was away on business, Amartia would
spend a night with the mountain.
They conversed gently and long after sunset
and as the nocturnal birds hunted in swift silence across the rocky outcrops
and sheep bleated far below, they fell
asleep, contented, in each other’s arms.
The family became used to her eccentric but
harmless preoccupation with the mountain and Berkit referred to her trips
indulgently as ‘Amartia’s adventures.’
At the beginning of their tenth year in The
New Country, when her eldest boy announced his intention to marry, Amartia’s
heart leaped with pure delight.
Berkit would find the couple a small house
nearby and she would help her new daughter-in-law, maybe at last learn enough
of the strange language to converse.
And there would be grandchildren for her
empty arms. She would no longer be alone. She felt like singing.
But first the wedding.
They would invite the other ex-refugee
families.
The
women would laughingly invade her kitchen, help prepare the traditional foods
and explain to the bride the traditional and interesting wedding customs of their country.
The men would gather together to rehearse and
after the marriage they would all sit around a huge fire, shouting, drinking brijski,
playing the old music and telling tall tales.
In this atmosphere of festivity and peace, Amartia might even find the courage to face the haunting ghosts of her past.
But the young man, with his father’s
approval, had decided upon a modern, ten
minute ceremony in an air-conditioned office and then, with rapid goodbyes,
left with his wife for their new home
and jobs, two hundred miles away.
‘You must understand,’ Berkit had told her,
‘our children are citizens of this country now, and that’s the way they do things
here.’
Amartia went to the mountain and the mountain
held out its arms and she wept on its broad and comforting breast.
A slight mist veiled the town as Amartia,
wedding sorrow now behind her, resumed
her climb, the pack bumping against her shoulder as she sought to keep her
footing on the scree of the steepening slope.
The grass gae way to rock but the goat
path was easily visible and she continued on.
Berkit had left for a conference that morning
and would be away six days; the younger children, not children anymore really,
were away skiing with friends in the first of the winter snows.
She was so proud of them, the way they had
re-made their lives after the horror, the way they had fitted in, made friends,
trusted this country.
She could trust only this
mountain, and as she strode steadily upwards to the snowline, the sun began to
set, dusting the snow with rose and gold.
By the time she reached 'her place', most of the light
had left the sky and above her was a shroud of silver stars in the deep,
vibrant blue.
Amartia
spread out her blanket and sat with her back to the
mountain, whose friendly rocks still retained a little of the day’s winter
warmth.
From her pack she took two small crystal
glasses, rimmed with gold, and a bottle of brijski, the peach brandy which should have
been served at her son’s wedding.
She folded the empty pack neatly and placed
it beneath her feet. This time, there
was no tent, no sleeping bag, no change of clothing.
Amartia filled the glasses and held one aloft
so that it chinked against the rock, then poured the sweet, fiery liquid down
in one, traditional draft.
There was so much to celebrate and each
celebration demanded a toast. She filled
the glasses again.
A chill wind curled around her raised arm and she
laughed, feeling the mountain’s embrace as it rejoiced with her.
As she drank the second toast, it began to
snow.
L D Finn © 1999
