Читать книгу The Weight of Snow - Christian Guay-Poliquin - Страница 12

The door opens and a gust of cold air blows into the room. Matthias comes in and drops an armful of wood next to the stove. The logs crash to the floor and shards of bark go flying.

Matthias pulls off his coat, kneels down, and stirs the fire with a poker. Behind him, the snow from his boots begins melting and seeks its level on the uneven floor.

It’s not very cold, he tells me, holding his hands toward the source of heat, but it’s damp. It chills you to the bone.

When the flames begin to growl and lick the iron frame, Matthias closes the stove doors, puts the soup pot on to warm, and turns in my direction. His bushy eyebrows and white hair, and the deep wrinkles criss-crossing his forehead make him look like a mad scientist.

I have something for you.

I give him a questioning look. Matthias picks up the gold cylinder from the table and hands it to me. He gives me a big smile. The cylinder is heavy and telescopic. Its ends are covered in glass. I examine it from all angles. It is a spyglass. Like the ones sailors used long ago to pick out the thin line of the coast, or the enemy’s ships.

Look outside.

I sit up in bed, extend the sliding tube, and place it against my eye. Everything moves toward me and each object takes on precise dimensions. As if I were on the other side of the window. The black flight of the birds, the footsteps in the snow, the unreal calm of the village, the edge of the forest.

Keep looking.

I know this landscape by heart. I have been watching it for some time now. I do not really remember the summer because of the fever and the drugs, but I did see the slow movement of the landscape, the grey autumn sky, the reddening light of the trees. I saw the ferns devoured by frost, the tall grass breaking when a breeze rose up, the first flakes landing upon the frozen ground. I saw the tracks of the animals that inspected the area after the first snow. The sky has swallowed everything up ever since. The landscape is in waiting. Everything has been put off until spring.

Nature with no respite. The mountains cut off the horizon, the forest hems us in on all sides, and the snow blinds us.

Look harder, Matthias tells me.

I examine the long stick that Matthias set up in the clearing. He has added minute graduation marks on it.

It’s for measuring snow, he announces, triumphant.

With the spyglass, I can see the snow has reached forty-one centimetres. I consider the whiteness of the landscape a moment, then slump back on my bed and close my eyes.

Great, I tell myself. Now we can put numbers to our distress.