Читать книгу Grove - Esther Kinsky - Страница 10

Journey

I ARRIVED IN OLEVANO in January, two months and a day after M.’s funeral. The journey was long and led through dingy winter landscapes, which clung indecisively to gray vestiges of snow. In the Bohemian Forest, freshly fallen, wet snow dripped from the trees, clouding the view through the Stifteresque underbrush to the young Vltava River, which had not even a thin border of jagged ice.

As the landscape past the cliffs stretched into the Friulian plains, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had forgotten what it is like to encounter the light that lies beyond the Alps and understood, suddenly, the distant euphoria that my father experienced every time we descended the Alps. Non ho amato mai molto la montagna / e detesto le Alpi, said Montale, but mountains are good for this shifting of light upon arrival and departure. At the height of the turnoff to Venice, dusk fell. The darker it became, the larger, flatter, broader the plain appeared to me. The temperature dropped below zero. There were dotted lights, even small fires in the open here and there, or so it seemed to me. I stopped in Ferrara, just as M. and I had planned to do on this trip. Ferrara in winter. The garden of the Finzi-Continis in snow or freezing fog. The haze of the pianure. Italy, a country to which we had never traveled together.

The next morning, I found the car with a bashed-in window. The backseat and everything stored there—the notebooks, books and photographs, the cases filled with pens for writing and drawing—were littered with shards of glass. The thief had taken only the two suitcases with clothing. One of them was filled with things that M. had worn in the last months. I had imagined how his cardigan would drape over a chair in the unfamiliar place, how I would work in his sweaters and sleep in his shirts.

I filed a police report. I had to go to the Questura, an old palazzo with a heavy portal. A small policeman sitting behind a desk in a chair with a high, carved back recorded my complaint. His police cap, adorned with a magnificent gold cord, rested on a pile of papers beside him, like a forgotten prop from a sailorthemed Carnival celebration.

On the recommendation of the lower-ranking police officer who had handed me a copy of the report, I spent hours searching for the stolen suitcases among bushes and shrubs, near the parking lot at the foot of the city wall. I found only a bicycle carefully covered with dried autumn leaves. When it became dark I gave up my search and made a few necessary purchases. That evening I noticed the address on the Questura papers’ letterhead: Corso Ercole I d’Este, the road leading to the garden of the Finzi-Continis.

The next morning I left, heading toward Rome and Olevano. It was bitterly cold, the grass atop the city wall was covered in hoarfrost, and large clouds formed before the mouths of the vendors assembling their stands on Piazza Travaglio. A few freezing African men loitered around the cafes. Market days promised more life and opportunity than other days of the week—some trading, help wanted, cigarettes, coffee.

The light beyond Bologna, the view from the highway, evoked memories of my childhood and were a strange comfort—even the gas station convenience stores, still selling those extravagant chocolate sculptures—as if the whole world could be so innocuous and incidental, as disconnected from all pain as the bright landscape that glided past me, a moving panoramastage which tried to fool me, in my deep fatigue that no amount of sleep would relieve, into thinking it was the only thing moving, and that I remained stationary. For a time, I believed it.

But after exiting the highway in Valmontone, I was in unknown territory, remote from the space of memory. As traffic crawled through the small town, I realized that this Italy was a world away from the country of my childhood experiences. Past a small hill range sprawled a plain, mountains surging at its other end. The summits in the second and third rows were capped in snow. Perhaps it was the Abruzzi already, still linked with outdated fantasies of wolves and highwaymen in my head. Disquieting terrain, like all mountains.

On my first morning in Olevano the sun shone and a mild wind rustled the withered leaves of the palm trees crowding my view of the plain at the foot of the hill. A bell struck every quarter hour. A different, tinny one followed a minute later, as if it had required this intermission to verify the time. That afternoon the sky clouded over, the wind became cutting, and a shrill noise began abruptly in the village. It appeared so far away, the village—a peculiar illusion seen from the house on the hill, as it took mere minutes to reach the square, where a festival was taking place. At this festival Befana presented children gifts to the tune of Italo pop. Befana, the epiphanic witch; the previous evening in small supermarkets grandmothers had haggled for discounts on cheap toys in her name. They had wrenched the gifts from the sale baskets that blocked the aisles at every turn. Silver-clad Barbie dolls, neon-colored soldiers, lightsabers for extraterrestrial use. An announcer called out, a timid choir of children’s voices repeated her, and again and again I heard the word Be-fa-na!, stressed on the first syllable, as the dialect demands.

On the night after the day of Befana, moped drivers dinned through the lanes, and I learned that here every sound is multiplied, broken by numerous surfaces and evidently forever sent back to this inhospitable house on the hill. I lay awake, contemplating how for the next three months to force my life into a new order that would let me survive the unexpected unknown.