Magnolia petal

Перевод произведения "Лепесток магнолии"

http://proza.ru/2008/08/08/91

Переводчик Адам Асвадов
Его страница здесь:

http://proza.ru/avtor/blackbaron



I admire the sky with every glance I make at it. I adore it, that divine chameleon. The one side is the night, the other is the day. While your sky above your city is like an endless blue blanket, spotted with white furry caterpillars of legless clouds, mine is satin bluish black, with stars scattered like rhinestones. At nights, the Moon poses for an artist. Sitting at his window he paints pictures of the Moon by candlelight. The Moon is a least fastidious model. She has been sitting still for more than four billion years.  She asks for no pay. She remains still for hours.  Invisible to the human eye, she walks through the sky, and now and then hides away a couple of stars. Each of us has an inner sky , thoughts floating in it like clouds. We just can't see them. We are thought-deaf as well. All we have is their echo resounding inside. 

But if we try to write these thoughts down we can see brick-like words and hear sounds bound together.They sound like stage monologues, or like line singing in church. I write the words on a scrap of paper ripped out of a notebook, and the untamed echo of my thoughts seems to be leaving.

Thoughts, thoughts...  Multicolour, multicalibre, miscellaneous, mixed. They come into my head, roaming and giving me no rest. But when I think of you, everything I thought about vanishes, floating away like pink turbellarians into the deep sea. I think that getting to know somebody closer is to mingle the worlds like ores into a single alloy.  When I was at school I invented an alphabet of my own. Take two letters from the Greek, seven signs of Moon's alphabet, same portion of Phoenician script, eight Arabic letters, the rest was from Latin.  I wrote my secrets into a copybook, and the list of deciphered letters and signs was kept at the attic. My friends and brothers failed to read my notes. I was so glad that nobody could understand my writing. My memory served me wrong, taking away the secret of those scripts into the Past, like a slave trader took the last of  the priests understanding indigenous Rongorongo glyphs away from the Easter Island. What used to be a secret for others became a secret for me. But this happened in the remote past, long time ago.

It was the beginning of a new age for my soul, it started the day when you came into my life. So strange. My parents brought me up with the idea that nobody can be loved so much as close relatives, but there came a man who lives a wrong life and eats the wrong food, yet he was able to understand me better than anybody else.

At nights, when dreams drown in the river of insomnia, I return to my past. But why? I paint the pictures of today with yesterday's colours.

'What are you up to?' I asked as you once called me just before midnight.

‘I'm sitting on a park bench. Just caught a sky reflection onto my credit card. Can you imagine that? A sky blue credit card. Just like holding a shard of sky', you answered with laugh.

‘What day you think is the happiest?' I asked.

‘The one when one dies'

‘No, a day of dying is the most reasonable one', I argued. .

‘Why?'

‘Because you are through with the uncertainty then', I sighed.

‘You're too much of a philosopher. I've got to leave', you said jokingly.

‘You'll come back'.

‘Why are you so sure?'

‘When someone comes back they do so for their own sake. If you come back, that will mean that first you seek happiness for yourself and only than for me. There's nothing new about it'. 

‘Magnolia petals are falling down to the ground', you remarked after a short pause.

‘Never seen them. What are they like?' I asked.

‘They are white, with lilaceous and pinky overtones. Palm-sized. I've caught one, to write something on it and to let it dry between book leaves, so that you will read it when you are back'.

Recently I have seen a dream. There was a sakura in bloom. I was wearing a light knee-long lilaceous dress with big pockets. I stood near Jacques Torres's chocolatiery and watched a confectioner, a middle-aged man in a white apron cutting chocolate into lacy pieces with a circular strokes of his knife.

Then he mixed dark and milk chocolate and carefully pouring this mixture on grains. The shop windows tempted with glitzy wrapers of chocolate with caramel popcorn.  Candied orange peel was coated with chocolate and wrapped in packages shaped like green apples. Pretzel-shaped milk chocolate was teasing from a transparent cylinder.

I entered the shop and sat at a table near the window. I enjoyed the mango-and-vanilla cr;me aroma of the shop and sipped hot chocolate.   A girl at a table near mine smiled at me with pinky chasms of her gums.   Jacques entered the hall. A friendly smile, a distant and questioning  look.  Questioning about something unearthly.

‘Have you been to Bandol recently?' I asked Jacques as if he was an old friend of mine.

‘Yes, it's been a long time', he said with a sad look on his face.

‘I was there yesterday. Drank new wine', I said joyfully.

Before leaving I bought some chocolate with roasted pistachios.

Then I walked nineteen steps forward in that dream of mine and all of a sudden I found myself inside a circle with a mark ‘0 km', the one at the Notre Dame de Paris.  The  Rose Windows buldged their eyes at me, and a bell was pontificating something. Then I found myself near the ‘I love You' wall, reading the phrase in different languages. An old blind French woman stood nearby. She gave me some sweetened chestnuts. 

Then I made six steps right and found myself at the Avenue des Champs-;lys;es.  I walked barefoot on the warm asphalt.

‘There's a river falling', I heard a voice behind

I turned around. There was nobody.

Later I found myself at a river with colored pebbles on the bottom. I came into the water, it was  knee-deep, but the cold  stream seemed to run downwards.  I got scared and ran towards vineyards. There I stood for a while by a house with a lavender garden.  A smell of fresh bread eminated from the open window. An elderly man came to meet me and said:

‘Don't tell anybody what you heard under the Rose'

‘But what did I hear? Do you know me?' I asked the man.

And then my dream broke off.

When I woke up I lay for a long time in my room filled with sweet melon odor and questioned myself, searching for clues to my strange dream, Why did I see the places I had never been to before and the people I had never met? No answers. Who am I? It's simple. I am a woman.  I'm made of dreams, illusions, recollections and questions about days yet-to-come. And I am full of you. Filled with your words and your kindness. Do you know what postcard I like the best?  The one where you wrote: ‘now you are open as never before and all I want is to see your face, feasting my eyes on it, as man fests one's eyes on sunlight. You are mine, and nobody can disprove it. not even your ever-vigiling mind'.

I remembered eleven red roses you gave me as a gift last year. Eleven books. Why books? When I was a little girl, I used to believe roses to be oval-shaped books, where every petal was a page with verses written on it in transparent ink. For several days my room was filled with the flowers' odour. Now I understand why Hugo wanted to die in the season when roses are in bloom.

‘There was a custom in India; one who presented a rose could ask for anything he wants' you said jokingly.

‘So, what do you want to ask from me?'

‘Just be happy'

‘I am. And I want to tell everyone about it', I said admiring the flowers.

 ‘Can we stand against people's envy?' you said with care.

‘I don't know. Just want to thank you for the happiness'

‘It's better to give', you said with a smile and offered me some lip-shaped, fist-sized milk chocolate on your palm. I decided to try it later. I put it on a shelf and forgot about it. A week later we had a quarrel. I was sharp.  Intemperate.

‘I can't believe it how the same person could be so different', you burst outrageously up.

-‘Sometimes you are so romantic, and then you are a vixen. Why be such a difficult woman? Can you explain?'

‘I'll be whatever I want to be!'

‘What can I do about your temper? It's your nature, so do I have the right to break it?'

‘No!' retorted I and then thrust on you with a batch of other twits.   You said nothing. You just left.

The time of our break-up was dribbling along, like chocolate poured by the confectioner. My memories conversed with the ticking clock.  If only you knew how hard it was to listen to those dialogues on my own! I felt abandoned even by my reflection in the mirror. And then I remembered your sweet gift. I opened the small box with a label of Jacques Torres on it and was going to cut that chocolate shaped like woman's lips, but all of a sudden its top opened as I touched it with the tip of my knife. It turned out to be a box, and smaller coloured lips of real chocolate rained out.  I ate them all. Why were they so tasty?  Was it because of your hands holding them?  Or did Jacques know a special secret? If you are ever to meet him, please tell that his candies are a marvelous masterpiece. That was yesterday. Tonight I am watching the dark sky. I've got used to it.

The time before the new Moon. The Moon is like the first letter of your name. Wind intruded into my house as an unwanted guest. I chase it away, and it shuffled away down the street, spurning candy wrappers. A vailtail goldfish with a fussy gaze swims in the fish tank. A run-out clock battery is pushing hard the arrows and lies to me, showing wrong time. A street lamp casts its light on a concrete wall with gray wallpaper peeling off. With my hand, I'm trying to reach for a pass of the casted light. It's like a shadow theatre. My hand is like an octopus silhouette. I am thinking of you again. You are still far away. When will there be nothing but zero kilometers between us?

I have been recently thinking that relationships have different heights. Being with you, I was flying so high, higher than ever before in my life. And I don't want to reach any other height anymore.

My question is lurking, ashamed, behind a little silver frame for a photo put on a glass table with a silver stand. The question is: what did you write on the magnolia petal?