The Axe That Fell In Honey

 

New Serbian vocabulary: sekira (axe), med (honey)

 

 

After a year of Albanian lessons, I decided it was time to do something structured about being able to speak to the other eight per cent of Kosovo’s population. Working on a bilingual education project with an international charity, it was becoming increasingly embarrassing with the multi-ethnic team in the office, or at coffee breaks in the training sessions I ran, when the interpreters were at rest, and I chattered away in my enthusiastically flawed Albanian to the Albanian-speakers while miming ‘dobro’ and ‘hvala’ with incompetent smiles to the Serb-speakers.

I knew from the well-thumbed Albanian book in my bag that the first thing I needed in learning a language was a dictionary. When a friend heard I was interested he put me in contact with Kujtim, the Samuel Johnson of Kosovo, a man who had produced a bizarre Kosovan achievement – a dictionary in six languages, including all those of com- munities in Kosovo.

Kujtim is Roma – one of the smallest and the most desperately alienated minorities in Kosovo. Whether it’s the official statistics on girls dropping out of school to get married, or the figures you see scrabbling in the city’s skips for metal to recycle, it is clear that the Roma are frighteningly vulnerable. We spoke on the phone and he told me how his privileged experience as a Kosovan Roma at the Sorbonne made him want to do something in his own field of expertise to help his people. We arranged to meet so I could see the result of his labours. When I got to the café, I had no problem working out which one was Kujtim, with his dark skin and professorially wild hair.

He showed me the six-way dictionary he had compiled. It starts with a history of the Roma language in Roma, translated into English, Turkish, Albanian, Serbian and French. From there it offers some charming phrasebook nonsense (‘I’m sorry we have no bread/money/guitars,’ ‘Tomorrow is the circumcision of my brother’s son’) and then a picture dictionary where words are listed alphabetically – in Roma.

Some weeks later I was desperate to ask for butter in a Serbian hotel we were staying at, and found myself flicking through the pages of Kujtim’s dictionary looking for the picture of butter, and wondering whether I’d have to learn Roma for reference purposes before embarking on any other languages round here. The waiter had come and gone, and Rob had finished his dry roll before I discovered the dictionary’s line drawing of something greasy in a pat, and triumphantly pronounced the word written next to it. Treasure trove though the six- way Kosovan dictionary was, maybe it would be better to find another way into Serbian.

The next thing I learned about Serbian was how difficult it was to find someone willing to teach it to me. I can’t say what part of that was because I was British, and the Brits were loudly and forcefully calling for a resolution of Kosovo’s final status to include independence from Serbia. Equally, many Serbs were reluctant to come into Pristina – a factor of the perception of risk that was impossible to counter. If Serbs didn’t believe they were safe to move freely around Kosovo, then who was I, or an Albanian, or the international military presence, to assure them that they were? Some Albanians offered to teach me – anyone over a certain age had needed Serbian for education and work and many spoke it fluently – but I rebelled against that idea. Language is politics, and learning Serbian was more than acquiring a picture dictionary or even a cluster of nouns. For me it was some kind of commitment to Kosovo in all its variety, not just to the Albanian-speakers who had become my friends.

In the end, I was introduced to Ana, and her cousin Zorica who acted as her driver. Stout and bottle-blonde, they were unlikely heroines, but for me they achieved that status for their bullish determination – in remaining in Kosovo with their children, in driving freely between their little Serb-only village and Pristina, and in speaking Serbian loudly to me through the car window when I met or left them outside my house, under the gaze of groups of fit young Albanian men who dominated the passing traffic on every Kosovan city street.

I never found out why Ana didn’t drive herself – perhaps, like me, she was simply terrified of all Kosovo’s swerve-inducing potholes, the impulsive overtaking, compounded in the hours of darkness by the unlit horse and carts and the power cuts that take out all lights, including traffic lights. But none of these things – indeed, very few things in the world at all – seemed to scare Zorica. Usually she would collect me from my home and drive me out to the village, past the Albanian-language signs, the posters urging votes for Albanian politicians, the defiant Albanian black eagle on its red flag flying from most shops. The drive, looking out through her windscreen at this country, was a lesson for me in so many ways, translating Kosovo into a different syntax. Zorica used to be the deputy leader of Pristina municipality – in the days when Serbs did that kind of thing. In the days before Albanians did that kind of thing. She told me that she has Albanian friends. She tried to speak English occasionally, and often mixed her English words with Albanian which she had never admitted to knowing. I liked her. I hope that people like her stay in Kosovo.

And I hope that Ana’s little house and the Serbian houses like it stay in Kosovo. It was the first time I’d been to a Serb’s home and when I first started tuition there, the weather was still good enough for us to have our lessons in the garden. Chickens clucked around our feet, the neighbour’s cow bellowed from the next field. On one occasion, Ana mistook it for her choleric husband calling, and tried to answer it, until she realised her mistake and we both fell into awkward giggles. Ana’s bristly mother-in-law sat in the shade stripping peppers for the sweet pepper chutney called ajvar. To reach the table where our lessons were held you had to walk through the orchard, avoiding bumping your head on the plump apples on the loaded branches.

Ana’s family eats mainly homemade and home-grown. As such, it is the bounty from their backyard – not the Bounty from the corner shop – that is their main source of treats. Honey – yes, they also keep hives – is therefore a synonym for luxury and indulgence. Sitting in the hum of the bee-loud glade with my textbook, it seemed very appropriate when we covered the chapter on ‘Serbian idioms’ to learn that when someone has unexpected luck, in Serbian you would say his axe has fallen in honey.

I understood how honey could be used to mean sudden fortune, but the axe didn’t make sense to me. Did it suggest fortune so sweet that even the most brutal of weapons, most vicious of tools, was no longer destructive? As so often with folklore, I tried to imagine the circumstances that could have led to this saying, and failed. A wild hive revealed as you are cutting down a tree so that your blade drips with honey, perhaps? In the context of manual work around trees, it would be the weary woodcutter’s version of the tired fruit picker’s windfall. But if your axe fell in honey, wouldn’t you just be annoyed – the honey would get sawdust in it, and the axe would need a lot of cleaning?

Ana couldn’t see what my problem was with the expression, so I let it go. Perhaps it had lost something in translation. On our way to the garden gate at the end of the lesson, she cupped a hanging cluster of grapes and offered them to me. I should take them this week, she explained, because the family was about to harvest all the grapes for home-made wine. It was an unexpected bonus – a windfall, a sticky blade.

 

Recipe for ajvar, sweet red pepper relish

 

Ingredients

 

2kg red peppers

2 cloves garlic

2.5 tbsp salt

Pepper to taste

225ml olive oil

110ml white vinegar

 

Preheat an oven to 190 degrees. Roast the peppers until the skin is black on all sides.

Place the roasted peppers in a large pot. Cover and leave for two hours. When the peppers are cool, peel the skin off and remove the seeds and stems.

Mash the peppers to a pulp. Transfer to a large cooking pot.

Add crushed garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil and vinegar. Cook for three hours at 190 degrees.

When finished cooking, let it cool. Fill jars almost to the top.

 

Makes just over half a litre of relish.