The sky is blank and we feel as if we were suspended in an in-between dimension, without any light to indicate the presence of the sun and locating us in the universe. The white has been persistent since we arrived from Berlin a few days ago, but we don\u2019t care: We have our apartment on top of the old yellow-brick building, with a warm stove, a big carpet and a rocking chair, and we can write and play music all day, with only trees outside our window to accept our occasional gaze. On Sunday after lunch we go for a walk.
I don\u2019t know what to expect, I only know there\u2019s a lake nearby. S. has been here before, a year ago, last September, so I follow him down a desire path in the garden, past a small iron gate that opens onto a gravel street. We walk away from the village and turn right into a smaller street, with grass growing in the middle. This looks like a proper wood. It\u2019s amazing how the air itself smells so different from the city, fresher and crisper, with undertones of moss, mushrooms and wet soil. We stop to take a deep breath and look at the greenery: a mixed broadleaf forest, with some sporadic flowers lingering as remnants of summer.
We cannot remember what any of these trees are, like children just learning to speak and struggling to associate a familiar image with the appropriate sound. Until we spot the white trunks. \u201cBirches!\u201d shouts S., the happiness of recognition in his voice, and I ask him what the word for birch is in Russian: bereza. I repeat the word and archive it in my language memory together with the other names for this thin and white tree, an ancient inhabitant of German forests. It almost feels like a greeting from us, the new settlers – in my case of less than ten years, in the case of S. almost his entire life – to the old ones, the Birken.
\u201cThe coldness of our forests, the breadth of our steppes is always with us\u201d writes Oxana Timofeeva in Maria Afanasyeva\u2019s English translation of How to love a homeland. \u201cHomeland does not exist without its people, but it can move freely with them around the world\u201d. And here we are, in a German forest, which is home, which is a home. Being exposed to nature after a long time is always a process of reconnection, recognition and excitement. I point at what I see and utter the words with a tone of wonder in them: fungi,
bumble-bee, coal tits, moss. Sometimes \u201cwee flower\u201d or \u201cfurry caterpillar\u201d is enough, where my knowledge is very generic, but it feels satisfying when we manage to go beyond that, reach a certain specificity, and with it a sense of belonging both in the language and the nature it describes.
Suddenly we hear grunting and look at each other: wild boars. S. hopes it\u2019s not a protective mother with her piglets, but the sound came from a single animal, who quickly puts some distance between its path and ours. I ask S. if there will be any ducks at the lake and ask for the Russian name of the birds: utka. I repeat it, together with bereza and my favourite word dyatel.
S. is quite impressed that I can still remember the Russian for \u2018woodpecker\u2019, from a walk in Grunewald a few months ago. I\u2019m amused that I fixated on that word, while for some reason in three days I still haven\u2019t learnt the German for rocking chair, despite my fluency in the language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes I feel like I exist in-between languages. Words overlap, but the corresponding signifiers are not quite the same in the different languages I speak . My Italian mela is much more delicious than the German Apfel, and it is different again from the English \u2018apple\u2019. My Italian tree is a Lombardy poplar, my German tree is a birch, and my English tree is a willow. My foxes are English and German, my hares are Italian, my sheep are Irish and Scottish first, German and Italian second. A name for \u2018gorse\u2019 exists in my English vocabulary, but the Italian equivalent feels almost estranged, like a word suspended in a vacuum. The sky is blank and we feel as if we were suspended in an in-between dimension, without any light to indicate the presence of the sun and locating us in the universe. The white has been persistent since we arrived from Berlin a few days ago, but we don\u2019t care: We have our apartment on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":20475,"template":"","categories":[56,10],"class_list":["post-20609","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-26-issues","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n
We walk past a bush of raw blackberries and have to go through our berries vocabulary before we find the correct one. The French word is the first one coming to my mind, probably through a similarity with my native Italian dialect for mulberry, then we think about the German name Brombeere, which always reminds me of a Germanistic lecture: The name of berries in German are compound words, but Brombeere are unlike all the others, because Brom in itself doesn\u2019t mean anything in German anymore. It comes from the Althochdeutsch br\u0101ma, brier. I think about this non-word, this container devoid of a meaning that suddenly fills up once you add another name next to it.
Isn\u2019t language as a whole a container of words? One that expands and shifts shape according to the images we associate with specific sounds, and whether those images are absent or present. Like Paul McQuade says in A Glasgow Sang: \u201cNothing in language is static; it moves like the tide, changing the landscape in slow, soft movements\u201d. Does language contain identity – or vice versa? Identity contains experiences that we process, categorise, explain and remember through language. Language is a way to express our identity, and at the same time language itself affects our perception of what our identity is.
I am reminded of a passage by Elif Shafak in her essay How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division.<\/em> \u201cDo I have a single identity – based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, gender or geography? Or am I essentially a mixture of multiple belongings, cultural allegiances and diverse inheritances, backgrounds and trajectories? [\u2026]I have multiple belongings\u201d. While navigating languages, we realise the path now follows the silhouette of the lake, which we can glimpse beyond layers of vegetation. On a cloudy day like today, the water reflects greyness and resembles a bowl full of mercury. We notice a sporadic spruce, and then another, quietly mingling with broad-leaved trees. The path turns to the left and opens up to the lakeshore.
Grass turns into sand and trunks become reeds. The surface of the lake is almost still, and I notice how different it looks from the open sea on a stormy day. Where the water is particularly low, we observe how the colour of the grey lake is actually quite orange, like the rusty extremity of a metal object.
Our attention is captured by a birch tree whose trunk divides into two low branches less than a metre from the ground. Someone has nailed a slat in the bifurcation and built a small seat, big enough for one person. I carefully touch it and sit on it, looking up at the rest of the tree: Have I ever seen such candid bark? It\u2019s almost luminescent, a white line peppered with darker spots, reaching out to an equally pearly sky. My gaze follows the trunk and the branches up into the colourless infinity of the universe and my mind is swallowed by the silent permanence of nature and a feeling of eternity. The sky is blank and we feel as if we were suspended in an in-between dimension, in a space outside time where we are firmly grounded on this lake shore with these birches in this instant.
A few days later I have to make my way back to Berlin. As I reluctantly pack my bags, I take a glimpse at the immobility of the wall of trees outside the window: Not even a gust of wind can penetrate it. The sky is still white, everything is quiet, but as autumn approaches with decision, the conker trees look a bit more brown, a bit less green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"