"H-h-hey…", even today I can still
hear and see Pepe whispering, all choked up in excitement, looking at the
clouds that were flowing on the blue summer sky of our childhood. I am
still convinced that there aren't, nor that there ever will be such clouds
any more.
The clouds are like a child's world. The colors, the shapes,
the structures, the space, the dimensions of the childhood that never
repeat. No matter if all of them are still materially unchanged, once
you've returned to the abandoned place of your childhood, everything seems
to be different, altered, poorer, paler, even smaller compared to the image
of the childish experiences that are written in the memories that reality
so desperately tries to identify with. This is when the old magic that
imprints things in the memory, seems to be irrecoverably gone even from the
most unchangeable objects or places.
Still, everything seems to be different with the clouds.
Apart from the stiffed objects of the past, they never stand still. They
change repeatedly, taking the most peculiar positions and the most unreal
shapes, formed either by their own odd inspirations, or by their own
strange whims. When the clouds get moved and start changing forms, that
surely means that they lead high-styled discussions with the wind roses in
the skies: sometimes quickly and in high voices, and other times slowly and
solemnly. But, sometimes in that moving sky polyphony of the all-kind
winds, the cloudy tenors of the high flyers mingle through the open space
with the basses of the heavy cumuluses in a magnificent diversity of the
sky-whisperers. That rich game of the moving positions and shapes of the
white, once stretched and sparse and the other times foamy and fluffy sky
creations, appears to be either a serene windy, or a stormy sky fairy tale
that floats indispensably. That sky tale can be seen only if we look deep
into the marvelous and unrepeated fluid game in the skies, leaving itself
freely to the cloud fantasy... But exactly those stories, those exciting
fairy tales are what is missing today. It seems thay have simply
disappeared, gotten lost, or blown by the winds somewhere far away, in the
azure immenseness of the childish sky.
"H-h-hey, c-c-clouds!", shouted Pepe for himself, looking at
the silly game of the clouds, and choking from excitement – the sole reason
for his stuttering talk. The four of us were lying in the grass of a meadow
deep in the city park, inhaling the fresh, odd smell of the chamomile, the
fern, and the tiny unknown blossoms of the meadow vegetation. All of us
were chewing on a grass leaf at the edge of the mouth, peacefully gazing in
the hights above us...
And there they were, soft and streched out in the blue
overhead as if they were parts of a cottonball scattered above, filled with
soft, gray shadows formed in the afternoon spring sun of their lavish
configuration. The cloud pastels moved in the azure vault: some times
immense, darkened, extensive and round cumuluses, and sometimes thin,
stretched and lucid. We could have looked at them for a long time, one
could say with hours, while the spring sun pleasantly touched our faces,
finding us exhausted from the games, in the webs of a sweet drowsy
immobility. All of a sudden something would've ruined that lethargy: either
one of our excited voices, or the twitter of the birds fulfilling the
meadow sounds of the beautiful day.
The clouds like white, immaterial arcs of fantasies sailing
in the skies, continued to transform. Sometimes, when looking at those
metamorphoses, we felt the tiny touch of the first translucent veil of a
dream. The clouds - so untouchable, so rich in meaning, so mysterious,
spreaded, so white, clear and pleasant - seemed like sky bedding, calling
you to stretch out and flow, sail in the endless blue where the high,
tender winds carry you through the eternally opened space. Down there,
beneath you, stays everything: the school, the teachers, the principals,
the neighbors, the parents, the dull visits to relatives and the summer
drowsiness of the city...
The clouds, as we all knew, are dense water vapor. This way,
with all their forms they looked as if they were anything else but water
vapor made out of steam arising from all the boiling soup pots in our city.
To us, the clouds were something more. They were sky images of fantasy;
foam of our childish admirations shaped in the most diverse forms and
evaporating from the weirdest fantasies sailing in the sky...
"He-he-hey! Do you see an a-archaeopteryx?...", shouted out
Pepe, naming the ancient bird with the hardest pronounceable name that he
had seen in his brother's natural history book.
"Where?", I asked silently. "I see two white galloping
horses!".
"They look like the munch mallows that my grandmother
makes.", said Mishko. "She can never match two evenly."
"Mmmm, they look so creamy", whispered Yane.
"If I could just take a bite", adds Mishko. "If they were
ice-cream, I would've ate them all".
"There th-th-they are", laughed Pepe. "Eat all you want!"
And so we laughed until we were overcome by the serenity of
admiration. In such a moment I lived my most beautiful cloud fantasy. A
story which started quite ordinary, here at the end of the park, in a
nearby meadow. In such a moment at the frontier between the cloudy view and
the snooze, that was imperceptibly surmounting us. Mishko was already
breathing slowly and his monotonous sound dazed us even more. Just as I
slipped into the pleasant nap filled with sunshine and the scent of the
fresh plants that had been spreading all over the meadow, I felt a light
trembling shadow before my closed eye-lids. Soon after, I felt a similar
tremorous touch on my face. I opened my eyes and saw a beautiful butterfly
with lusciously painted wings, a large shivering "Swallow tail", which had
finally found a landing spot on my shoulder. Her unusual wing stains were
so beautiful, that, just for a moment, I wanted to touch her. Softly I
spread my palm and touched her wings with two of my fingers. Even today, I
can still feel her silky dust on them. I quickly put my hand off her tiny
wet wings, while the butterfly started strangely trembling, and flying
without direction. Shortly after, she had sipped some more of her magic
dust on her wings, and finally restored the balance and beauty of her
flight. Obviously she didn't like my touch. Although brief and gentle, it
was dangerous for her. The secret to the flight of the butterflies, and I
was convinced then, was in their wet magic dust, which was obviously put on
by the winds, and now that I felt it between my fingers, i thought, smiling
to myself, that I, myself, can fly just like the butterfly.
I arose and looked after the butterfly. She was briefly
stopping on the flowers, on her way onward, away from me. Suddenly, I
wished not to ever lose her. I took pleasure in the joy of her flight and
the presentiment of a new game with her. I wished to touch her soft yellow
wing covered with unusual stains once more, and I loved the peculiarity of
that small, living kite. I followed her, leaving my friends behind. As we
entered the nearby forest, the butterfly began to stop for a while on each
log, fern and blossomed plant. She was tempting me, flying away as I
approached her, making me burst into laughter every time we repeated our
silly game.
And as the flight of the butterfly continued, I was overtaken
by a care-free whim. Soon after we got out of the forest, I stopped at the
edge of the woods astonished by a magnificent view which had appeared
before me.
Lifted just above the ground of the country meadow, a thick
white cumulus stood right in front of me. The cloud was floating just above
the plants. He was so low that he could touch the moldable tops of the
dandelions. Since then, I know that dandelions are actually little pieces
of clouds fallen on the tops of spring plants. That is why one can so
easily blow them away as if they had never been there in the first place...
So, there he was, the huge and fluffy cloud, the one in which
my butterfly had entered and disappeared. Following her, I too stepped into
the cloud. The minute I thought that I'll get myself into an enormous
white-gray vail of mist, I fell into an open space surrounded by white,
lavish whiteness, stepping through its interior that looked like a
snow-white hallway. Walking through the miraculous inside of the cumulus, I
suddenly saw the butterfly wriggling though its halls that had been
separated in cloudy passages and stairways. They made the white space look
more and more like a velvety white labyrinth. The butterfly, with it's
yellow wings, could be easily seen in the cotton whiteness of this open
spaced cloud labyrinth. As the butterfly started moving through the cloudy
foams, and as the cloud started changing it's cotton-white color into a
yellowish-white one, I began loosing her. Then, my miraculous cumulous
changed it's color again, at first in orange, and then the metamorphosis
continued until the cloud finally turned into fiery-red.
It was a marvelous site. From the outsides, the magnificent
purple of the sunset penetrated through the cloudy walls, painting them in
the coloration of the early twilight. I continued walking through, as if I
were climbing upon a fluffy purple stairway. I was feeling as if I had
become a part of the same cloud. Then, the outside wind opened a hollow in
the cloud, showing an impressive site river, the park and the city, that
were laying down, while the late spring sun slowly sank in the west,
painting the whole landscape. The mountains, the meadows, the tree branches
in the park, the river, the air, and even my own cloud on which I was
sailing high, high above the city sky.
From somewhere, I could hear the voice of Pepe, riding his
archaeopteryx cloud and shouting louder than ever: "H-h-hey! Clouds!" Over
there, on my two cloudy horses, Mishko and Yane raced with the high winds,
loudly laughing, while the sunset breeze messed their hairs, and filled
their open mouths. There were clouds all over the sky. Small, round clouds,
that the winds had pushed all around the open space above the city. A kid
was flying on every single one of them: my friends from the kindergarden,
the kids from my alley, the rascals from the neighborhood, and many others
that I didn't even know. And that game in the early evening sky, continued
above the river in which we could see our reflections together with the
ones of the pigeons, the crows’’ and the silvery tiny fishes in the water.
In the meantime, we didn't stop our game. We were shouting
freely, amazed from that wonderful walk upon the evening city-sky while the
winds carried our voices far away.
Kids, flying on clouds above the city...
*
Whenever I remember of that cloud
fantasy, and whenever I lift my eyes toward the skies trying to rediscover
it in the todays' clouds, I understand that the clouds are no dense water
vapor. The clouds, that I know very well now, are white, pure and only
child dreams...
Maybe that's why today's clouds are not like the ones from my
childhood. Maybe that's why I can't see there, the so happy, smiling child
faces anymore. This however, doesn't mean that, even now, on the clouds
that are still floating above our heads, some other children are not still
playing, foolishly astrayed during the hunt for the butterflies of their
own childhood.
( From the book of short stories “The Butterfly of the Childhood”)
Translated by: Dimitar T. Osmanli
