• Rumena Bužarovska in Translation

Rumena Bužarovska in Translation

The Playground, An Extract

My mother told me not to play on the playground, but I didn’t listen.
        It wasn’t fair from the very start, because I was the first one to see it. Before, it had been totally ruined. The swing set was just one A-frame with two suspended chains, one lonely, rusty chain for each swing. Even the seats were broken, and there were only dangling pieces of wood left to cut you if you weren’t careful. Somebody told me that Milan cut his hand trying to break the piece of wood. I didn’t feel sorry for him, because maybe it was people like Milan who broke the swings when they were pretty, clean and new. Apart from the swings, there were also see-saws, but those were for smaller children. Sometimes, if we were very bored, we would go on the highest one and give “burgers” to one another – the person on the side of the ground would jump up quickly, and the person who was on the high end would slam her bum on the board. But then someone demolished those seats too, so the only seats left were those on the smallest see-saw. Sometimes, Branko’s mother would bring her youngest son there and would gently lift him on that see-saw, and he would giggle.
        The third thing on the playground was an arch with rungs that we called the bridge. I was always afraid of the bridge because it was taller than me and I was afraid I would fall. When my mother told me to never go to the playground, I think she was also terrified of the bridge.
        As a small child, I watched some of the bigger kids walk the bridge. They would first climb up the first several steps with their arms spread to keep their balance, and then they would continue on up to the highest bars and down the other side. I was very little then and usually played in the sand with Keti, or we would sometimes go on the lowest see-saw and give each other burgers. But the playground grew boring. There was nothing apart from the demolished swings, the bridge the bigger kids would climb, and the broken see-saws. With nothing left to do, we stopped going and took to playing football in the meadow with the boys, or we’d play jump-rope or dodgeball in the street.
        Then one morning my mother sent me out to buy some bread. It was still early, so the kids had not come out to play yet. As I walked towards the store, I heard pounding noises coming from the direction of the playground. I thought to myself: someone is breaking the seats – and ran to see who it was. At first I carefully hid behind the corner of a first-floor balcony, in case it was some bully who’d spot me and then pester me. Then I peeked out for a better view.

To read the full text, go to Blesok. 

Waves, An Extract

The morning we left, I remember my mother woke me up very early. I didn't want to get up, so mommy put my orange jacket on over my pajamas, then she put some socks on me and had such a hard time pulling on my boots that she twisted my foot a little. Picking me up in her arms, she carried me to the front door, where a large man in a thick coat and a black turtleneck stood waiting. “Let's go,“ my mother told him, and he picked up the two big suitcases leaning against the wall and followed my mother to the main gate. I wanted to ask where we were going and whether my mother remembered to bring my teddy bear and my diary, but I just couldn't open my mouth or unglue the eyelashes on my left eye.

It was dark and cold outside. I felt how one of my pajama legs had ridden up and the air slipped inside like a jet of cold water, giving me goosebumps. My mother whispered something in my ear, but her words evaporated in the air and I didn't understand anything else but “shhh“. In the parking lot, the man opened the back door of a big black car that wasn't one of ours, and we got in. The leather seats were cold. My mother covered us with her coat and put my head in her lap. The car shook when the man got in and closed the door; then I heard the hum of the engine and we started moving. The city lights passed overhead through the foggy windows and slowly became milky spots between my lashes. I couldn't really see my mother's face because she was watching through the window without wiping the mist off of it. Then with her index finger she tried to draw an eye, but accidentally smeared the right corner. She erased it with her palm and next to it drew two mountains with a sun in between. Slowly the car got warmer, and the mountains started running down the glass. Suddenly, I was all soft and warm and fell sound asleep. I remember waking up after a while and seeing that my mother had removed my pajamas and dressed me in my brown corduroy pants and yellow sweater. The sky was purple outside and the moon was a sharp sickle, stuck into the corner of the window. It followed us, overtaking the telephone poles and the naked trees. Then I fell asleep again.

To read to full text, go to Bjcem. 

Dinner Service for Guests, An Extract

I have lived with my sister since the death of her husband (God rest his soul!). He was a good man, though how he put up with Bella all those years is beyond me. She’ll be the death of me, too, sooner or later.

        My sister calls herself a ‘multi-media composer and musician’. When I gossip about her with my friends I call her a dabbler, because in fact she can’t play anything except the piano—and she does that badly. She refuses to play classical music because someone once said, many years ago, that under her fingers Chopin sounded like a hammer banging upon an anvil. It may have been me who said so, but that is of no importance. What is important is that, after receiving this comment, and most probably after receiving many similar remarks in the course of her studies, Bella started playing some strain of modern jazz which my ears have not learnt to abide to this day.
        For a long time she performed her jazz before audiences dominated by young men with hard-pressed lips and thick-rimmed glasses and women of a certain age whose self-styled hairdos, though impeccable at the front, were unkempt at the back. Then all of sudden she became a composer and started writing ‘contemporary’ scores. My ears were even more troubled by this music, if one can call it such. Her pieces typically started with the repetitive hitting of a key in the lower register of the piano, continuing until the sound faded away completely. The piece would then proceed with the staccato banging of a key in the higher register, followed by a tremendous noise in the middle register—repeated in such a manner until the piece came abruptly to an end. All this ‘dialogue’, as the critics dubbed it, reminded me rather more of the ‘dialogues’ she and her late husband Simon had enjoyed at home than anything resembling what could be called a work of art. 
       My sister’s experiments in music further evolved in the field of orchestration. Having always been au fait with contemporary trends, Bella soon realized that, where the Balkans were concerned, the greatest demand was for art related in some way or another to war. This theme had the benefit of enabling foreigners to identify the only thing they knew about the area with the additional advantage that they could pride themselves upon their compassion in being so moved by the great pain experienced by the indigenous folk. Thus my sister’s first composition was entitled Bloody Greetingand started with a gunshot.
        The live performance of this work kicked off with the explosion of a cap from a toy gun, spreading a terrible smell amongst the first few rows of the audience and triggering a coughing fit in one elderly lady. The conductor was entrusted with the theatrical aspects of the gunfire, but as the string section was supposed to start screeching dissonantly immediately after the shot had been fired, there would either be no time for him to dispose of the gun or he would become so confused that he would continue waving the gun in his right hand throughout the entire first movement. Some people in the audience were fascinated by this new concept and it received many raving reviews in the media. Her next work was called Screamsand was a ‘postmodernist mix’ of contemporary and historical conflicts. By this my sister meant to imply that she was inspired by the poetry of Grigor Prličev, on the one hand, and on the other by the screams of war she could hear all around herself in the Balkans. Accordingly, this work—one of her direst efforts and certainly the most unbearable for the ears—consisted mostly of screams. These screams were not the ordinary screams of people who genuinely suffered throughout the Balkans, of course, but screams produced by renowned sopranos, altos, tenors and baritones. This work was at the same time her first flirtation with multi-media: on a screen behind the orchestra which accompanied the screaming group, she projected black-and-white footage of two small runny-nosed children crying. I felt terribly sorry for the children, though I never asked her how she obtained the footage nor how she managed to make them cry so convincingly, although I guess the latter would not have been too much of a problem for her.
        My sister belongs to a generation of, let us say, artists who are neither part of the established older generation, nor enjoy the benefits of the younger generation obtained merely on account of their youth. But Bella is perfectly aware that she will never be admitted into the older generation, simply because all thrones have already been taken up, and that by joining the younger generation she might travel the world and win popularity with her multi-media music projects, which have obviously retained their topicality. I believe this was the crucial motive for her to start producing Screamsand suchlike.

To read the full text go to Blesok

Translated by Marija and Matt Jones  

Drawings by Jana Jakimovska

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