Adler Nadia

The Distant Voice of the Cuckoo

Since I was not born here, I carry with me the weight of memories from another place, recollections embedded in the body more than in the mind; places and landscapes that follow me into every stage of life like an echo or a shadow, stubbornly coming back to me with every step on this foreign land. I am not sure who is more foreign — me or the place. My proximity to the motherland can be measured in miles of longing; and in my difficulty to identify myself here and now. Over time, childhood memories are fading away and turning my birthplace into a genuine yet unreliable piece of fiction. The return to the homeland evokes "a deep rift with the world and with myself, an inability to find a balance between reality and a long-awaited harmony — an experience of nostalgia awakened not only by the distance from home, but also by the yearning for the perfection of existence." (Andrey Tarkovsky, 2013) Home is a place where memories flourish with the colors of the sunset, scattering in shivers and filling the space with scents from the past, a sacred palace of childhood dreams. It is a place of belonging that I have not found here. Words cannot express my burning desire to return to a place sealed in my memory and to retrieve past events. At home, after the storm, we would always hear the distant voice of the cuckoo bird from somewhere in the woods at the edge of the village, like the consoling song of a mother urging her children to come home.