Читать книгу Everything Happens as It Does - Albena Stambolova - Страница 9

3.

Farther Up

At the end of that summer, his parents decided to baptize him. God only knows why they hadn’t done it earlier. Boris was mortified. He could not understand why this had to happen to him: it never happened to anyone else. The comparison caught him unprepared; he was not used to seeing his life measured up against those of others. He was overcome by panic at the prospect of this mystery in which he was to become the main protagonist. But he understood that he would be doing something for his parents, something, whatever it was, for their benefit.

He let them dress him in clothes he had never seen before and joined the procession of adults on the forest path leading to the chapel. They forbade him to carry anything with him. He felt content moving along the path, observing how his feet followed each other over the ground. One foot, the other foot, then again, as if moving by their own volition.

Movement and silence hand in hand. Intimations of other silences, of other movements, of someone walking next to someone, hovered around them. Each bend in the path made him anticipate the next. It was anticipation too brief to invite fear, under the dome of the indefinite woods, dimensionless like a house never visited.

Everything required silence. Stepping was almost like walking. Yet not quite. He discovered that stepping on the path was a cautious pleasure, felt by him and felt by others, a shared pleasure. They stepped side by side and moved toward the next bend, a little farther up the slope, hand in hand with that silence.

Boris and the others. It was possible as long as there was silence. Together in the half-light of the dome. The place opened up to receive the procession.

And Boris learned that the world could be this way. No one was rude. No one touched anyone in the increasingly dense stillness, which had now become a permeable environment. Behind them, he could hear a rustling sound like that of a snake’s tail among the thickening layer of rust-colored leaves. There was no need to turn back to look. Before them lay the same full-bodied stream of leaves, from all these different years, and his feet sank in them to his ankles. Many autumns under their feet, their feet now invisible, driving them down the same path, along the same steps, already made by others. Where others had walked. Years later, Margarita would try to explain a similar thing about her grandmother’s lamp and only Boris, to an extent, would be able to understand her.

He pictured the chapel from time to time. He had no idea how far it was. Or if it was white or if it was small.

They stepped on the leaves and were silent. In their silence was nothing they wished to conceal.

Boris began to love this walk, just as he had begun to love the old woman.

The steps followed one another, alone, together, sometimes simultaneously, not according to any rule. But the steps were not made, they were making themselves. The walking did the walking itself and he was there, knowing the chapel was at the end of the road. A place in this big house where they found themselves together.

Then he saw it. He was already in front of the door, almost as big as the chapel itself. They told him to open it.

Boris pushed the door with the tips of his fingers and it opened beautifully, revealing in the coming light a small space where someone was sitting. A tiny woman in black, whose eyes he was to meet again years later. Eyes the color of fog. He drew back his fingers and the door gently closed.