Don’t Forget to Breathe

Translated by Melanie Mauthner¹

        To my mother
In memory of Aram Krimian

I remember events after my father’s death in vivid colour. Every holiday, I would go to Tasso, my mother’s village, often travelling with my aunt, a childless teacher. Her fear of flying meant it was a long journey. We took the train from the Gare de Lyon to Marseilles before boarding a huge ferry in the evening. When we reached the port of Ajaccio at dawn, after lingering for hours in the suffocating heat, we collected our bags from a café where no woman ever ventured. Jojo was waiting at the counter. Twice a day, he criss-crossed the mountain between Tasso and the capital of southern Corsica, steering the old coach round the hairpin bends that made me travel sick. It was the most remote village in the Taravo valley. Centuries separated the granite houses clinging to the rocky mountainsides from the tourist port. Twice a day, for decades now, the coach has been travelling through time.

As you leave the city and approach the eucalyptus tree-lined villages beyond the Saint-Georges pass, the perfume rising from the maquis marks the border crossing. A new world begins, a land known for the profusion of aromas wafting from the vegetation.

One year during the Easter holidays, heeding the instructions of a secondary school teacher, I collected plant samples in my mother’s village for a herbarium. My aunt named the plants and flowers in French, or in the language of the Taravo valley, telling me that some of ...