Poems by Lidija Dimkovska 

FREEDOM
                                                           
In the lift of the world
Freedom always presses the wrong button:            
instead of on the ground floor she gets out in the basement
where masked robbers stand in front of the lift
who kick and slap her,
or grinning maniacs with their trousers down,
or security officers who pinch her bottom
when she turns back to the door of the lift,
which is already squeaking its way back up,
and then they all grab her by the breasts,
drag her by the legs, and she struggles,
beaten black and blue she drags herself up the stairs to the ground floor,
where children stand with their satchels
waiting for the lift to come down from the top floor.
 
“What does she look like!” they whisper,
then run up the stairs to their homes and lock the doors behind them,
afraid that Freedom might
lean against their door,
sprawl at their threshold,
ask them for water, bread or a bed.
 
And they don’t know that the freedom they have in their life
is measured with the remaining cups from the tea set
in the Jewish museums across the world,
they don’t know that the seas wash up people too, not just seashells,
they don’t know that the executioner becomes a victim when he beheads her
and the victims become executioners when they forget her,
they don’t know that the metal head of the hammer is always loose
and falls off before the hammer is swung, straight onto your fingers,
they don’t know that it is that same freedom
they learn about in history classes,
but is easily run down by the train on the nearby railway,
they don’t know that the freedom they have in their life
is a white surface over a black pit,
the same as the belly of a pregnant woman
that they too were born from,
but it is only in death
that some will also become free.
 
Translated from Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh
 
SUITCASES
 
In the little chest under my mother’s bed,
brought from the village to the town,
fish-shaped dishes lay dormant for years,
each individually wrapped in newspaper,
a wedding gift, the souvenir of a society.
Their gills had gone pale, their sea grey,
when we opened the little chest
they had already eaten each other up.
 
In the small suitcase under my uncle’s bed,
which I used to open a hundred times a day,
all the wars from all times were mixed up together
in the notes taken during history lectures.
Folded in two, in two columns,
they charged out of the trenches
towards what would later become a state,
a political suitcase of oblivion.
 
In the suitcase under my bed in the student dorm
I kept the Liubinka typewriter
on which the Mongolian girls, my roommates,
wrote their love letters in Cyrillic,
and before sending them across three seas,
kept them for nine nights in vodka,
in bottles with sheep guts,
the umbilical cord to their motherland.
 
The suitcases in Auschwitz, separated by glass
from the reach of visitors,
confiscated at the very entrance
under the arch saying ArbeitMachtFrei,
are heavy with the emptiness in which
the weight of life, the lightness of death sit hunched over.
The Holocaustwas a one-way ticket from a world which vanished
in the false bottom of existence.
 
Life is a puff of wind among people,
leaving their suitcases in its wake.
In them knowledge gathers dust,
memory – mould, oblivion – stench.
Every suitcase is an open story,
every story is a closed suitcase.
And you don’t need to leave in order to stay,
or stay to have already left.
 
Translated from Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh
 
 
 
 

Lidija Dimkovska (1971) – poet, writer, and translator from Romanian and Slovenian into Macedonian, living in Slovenia.She has published seven books of poetry, three novels, one American diary, one short stories collection, and has edited four anthologies. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She has received numerous awards, among which the Macedonian awards for best poetry collection and twice for best prose books, the German prize »Hubert Burda«, the European Union Prize for Literature, the European prize “Petru Krdu”, the Slovenian prize “The Glass of Immortality”,  etc. She has participated at numerous literary festivals and readings.

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