Words.

I have been thinking about the words English-speakers have for love, and the words associated with love - and we are overwhelmingly negative.

We fall in love, in the same way as we fall out of bed or from a computer-table in the middle of the night because it cannot hold our weight. When we fall, it is then that we invent new swearwords and set about enumerating the few body parts which are not bruised beyond repair.

From 'fall' we are led inevitably to 'I fell for him', and the denouement of a magic trick or a swindle. You mean there is no God? Okay, you got me: I fell for it. We walk away, embarrassed, and resolve to be more alert next time.

Similarly, we can be love-sick: it is a malady for which there is no known cure; an affliction which diminishes the self.

More poetically, Cupid's arrow punctures the very flesh, leaving a hole where it entered. It speaks of a sharp dose of pain, and a scar which will never heal properly. Love ought not to be described thus, for we are constrained by our language, which defines the perimeter of our expectations.

Our language itself is insufficient to describe the incremental progression of what it is to love - we don't have enough tenses for the job.

In Serbian (and Spanish, as well as other languages) there are two separate tenses to cover the following two statements, which would both be expressed in the same tense in English:

• I was very thirsty, so I drank the largest glass of semi-skimmed milk I could lay my hands on.


• I drank the largest glass of semi-skimmed milk I could get my hands on, and as I was no longer thirsty I could concentrate on doing something else.

We lack the perfective and imperfective faculties of language, then, that allow a Spaniard to say, without tying themsleves up in knots:

• After a short time, I was permitted to lace my fingers through yours.


• After permitting me to lace my fingers through yours, I then concluded you had shifted both our perceptions in a way which was measurable by an increase in heart-rate.

When talking about love in English, then, we have a negative vocabulary, and no way to describe subtle yet terribly important fluctuations of a quality with respect to time.

I don't know what can be done about this. Being aware of the problems is a start, though. I shall try to arrive at a way to unambiguously talk about the first awakenings of need for another person; the idea that you already belong because you stay awake talking until five o'clock one morning and seven o'clock the next morning; the way in which a set of ideas can be represented by the light glancing from a pair of dark eyes, and that same light is then transmitted inexorably, with no loss of meaning, to your own eyes.

Wish me luck in coming up with the words. I shall need it.

Tension.

In the faked interview transcripts which were 'done' with the former Romania footballer Miodrag Belodedici earlier this year, he went into some detail about the most momentous event of his childhood.

Belodedici recalled, as a five-year-old living on the border between Serbia and Romania, watching the Yugoslav cup final on television, and how he had been swept away with emotion as Red Star Belgrade carried off the trophy.

That day, the 'baby' Miodrag, as he called himself, made it his life's ambition to play football for the biggest club in the old Yugoslavia - and he did so, with his crowning glory coming in Bari in the spring of 1991 as Red Star (or Џрвена Звезда*, Crvena Zvezda, as they are known in Serbia) became European champions - the only team ever to do so from the Balkans.

So this much we know: Belodedici dreamt, and Belodedici eventually did, like a fairytale. When I spoke to him, though, he was less forthcoming about the pressure, both internal and external, that existed as he lived through his greatest night in southern Italy.

It must surely have been there, and he must surely have felt it. I understand pressure and expectation and hope and other such intangible things to be as all-encompassing as the pull of gravity, and I can appreciate how ruinous they are when not respected, or, accordingly, when respected too much.

So for Belodedici to be aware, in the European Cup final against Marseille, that one slip or misjudgement would cost Red Star everything - how did he carry that knowledge with him and manage to function normally? The team were playing anyway with a very defensive mindset; none of the players wanted to be the one who erred fatally and cost Red Star the tournament.

There was, then, a human frailty to the greatest club side the former Yugoslavia ever produced, a collective fear of being beaten. They had iron in the soul, and the unabashed brilliance which had humiliated Bayern Munich in the semi-final had been forgotten, to be replaced with this torpor.

They were not beaten, though, and a goalless draw after extra-time condensed the outcome of the final into a penalty shoot-out. Belodedici took Red Star's third kick, and scored. He was not the master of his own dream, but where he could steer it, he did. It was for Darko Pancev to convert the winning penalty, and to realise what, 20 years later, the fictional Belodedici said was his life's ambition.
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Pressure for Belodedici, then, is his life rearing up before his eyes as he prepares to take Red Star Belgrade's third penalty in the European Cup final.

Belodedici doesn't miss: he puts the ball in the corner and walks away with his fist pumping, a half-smile crossing his lips. It's placed so perfectly that the goalkeeper can't hope to get close to it, his fingers clutching at the air as the ball flies past him and inside the post.

Pressure for the rest of us comes in more everyday, but no less important, circumstances. I am reminded of this on today, December 5, the second anniversary of the last time I saw Bluefish. There was a moment of tension similar to that experienced by Belodedici as he stepped up to the penalty spot, when all concepts become one, the Perpignan which all roads thus far have led up to.

She and I had spent part of the morning in an antiques shop, and suddenly the impulse was upon me to act. My eye had seen it, and the impetus was there to act, and act immediately.

*I read earlier that, one day, it’s likely Serbians will have to vote on which alphabet(s) they want to use: Latin, Cyrillic, or both? I am already campaigning in my head for the retention of Cyrillic.

Choices.

Your author uses the idea of the persona of Ertugrul Osman to express the concept of having lost something, for few of us, like him, have ever had to relinquish an empire.

This was Ertugrul's fate, for he was born just as the Ottoman Empire he'd have ruled began to take its last shallow breaths, and it had expired before he had the chance to steer it.

The choices open to Ertugrul after this setback are the choices open to all of us after having lost something dear to us, or, perhaps worse still, having seen a dream dashed just at the point when it was close to being realised.

Ertugrul could have:

1) shrugged his shoulders at the loss and carried on without a second thought, in a manner which is uncommon to most of us. The Ottoman state is dead, but I persist without it.

2) accepted his lot with a straight face, beneath which writhed feelings of devastation that were never properly dealt with.

3) summoned such rage that he set about reconstructing the empire from its roots, and made it his life's work - and when there is such an all-consuming imperative, it almost ceases to matter whether or not one succeeds.

4) split his mind into two parts - one which 'knew' the empire was lost, and which more often than not held sway when Ertugrul and the world interact. Sometimes, though, it was easy to believe the falsehood that all was as it had ever been. The Sublime Porte continues to radiate its influence across a vast sweep of the globe, and the culture built up from a tribe of 13th-century Muslim wanderers still strikes fear into its enemies and joy in its acolytes.

The next morning, you wake up with heaviness in the head, and in the limbs, and in the soul, because it was nothing more than a dream. Like being drunk, you can't properly remember all that happened to you last night, and this amnesia prevents the full horrors of your own mental state being drawn into the light.