Читать книгу Grove - Esther Kinsky - Страница 14

Clouds

IN THE MORNING at times the clouds hung so low that the landscape all around was invisible. I heard buses droning uphill, voices, the village bells, too, which struck every fifteen minutes. Noises from a different world, and nothing visible but clouds. Over my head the village sounds met the sputtering caws of chainsaws in the cemetery. Come fog, the tree fellers still worked. Their calls could be better heard through the clouds than clear air and, as if in reply, these short, fitful reports from the land of the morți followed the inquiring sounds from that of the vii.

Throughout the day the clouds lifted, broke open, scattered as slack veils and sunk into the valleys. They hung awhile in the holm oaks on the steep hillside, a spindly, disused small coppice, where in the thin tracks between the trunks, objects were put to pasture. Worn-out and rejected objects hung, hindered by the trunks while rolling downhill, diagonally between trees and shrubs: furniture, appliances, mattresses. Delicate vines unfurled like dreams across the covers.

In the afternoon the plain at the foot of the Olevano hill lay dark and severe below high rainclouds, which drifted across the sky over the mountain peaks in brown and blue tones, suffused with yellowish veins of light. The volcanic mountains before Rome loomed lucid and crisp against the distant glow that opened up behind them. Sometimes a remote stripe of sun would blaze a trail to the southwest and briefly illuminate the hovering Pontine Marshes, which in a different light were hardly perceptible. Smoke rose from the olive groves below Olevano and even farther, toward Palestrina. The farmers tirelessly burned the clipped olive branches and fallen leaves. Occasionally a more slender, more dazzling beam of light burst from one of the yellowish veins in the clouded sky and fell like a finger, pointing diagonally onto a column of smoke, as if it were a sacrifice, chosen by a higher hand.