Читать книгу Grove - Esther Kinsky - Страница 19

Hands

EACH MORNING I awoke in an alien place. Behind a tall mountain with snow lingering in its hollows, the day broke, gray and blue, sometimes turquoise and yellow. Fog often still covered the plain, at times in individual drawn-out banks, which looked like frozen bodies of water. Each morning it was as if I had to learn everything anew. How to unscrew the moka pot, fill it with ground coffee and turn on the burner, cut bread and set the table, even for the smallest meal. Memories of actions drummed against the top of my skull, as if a sea were swashing inside there, and they rose from its depths, distorted. Dressing. Washing. Applying bandages. The imposition of my hands.

I stood at the window, waiting for the water in the moka pot to boil. I looked out onto the village and the plain, which extends to the chain of dormant volcanic mountains; beyond that I pictured the seaside, even though I knew it was farther away. The expansiveness of the plain was an optical illusion—I had seen for myself that a small hill ridge lay before Valmontone—but this flat terrain, where tucked between woods and groves were small villages and farmsteads, workshops and supermarkets, and an oil mill, closed due to the olive tree disease, was a connected basin for me, a former lake whose water had once slipped away somewhere unknown, and in whose bed, while raking through the ashes from the olive fires and the crumbly soil beneath, you would readily find the remains of fish and other water creatures.

When after sweeping the landscape my gaze fell to my hands on the window ledge, I thought I saw M.’s hands beneath them, in the space between my fingers—white and delicate and long, his dying hands, which were so different from his living hands, and they lay beneath mine as if on a double-exposed photograph. Then the coffee maker hissed, and the coffee boiled over, and my living hands had to break away from M.’s white hands in order to turn off the stove and remove the pot, but I inevitably burned myself, and this pain made me aware that I hadn’t relearned anything yet.

Arduously and despite what my hands had unlearned, I fumbled my way to my camera and to photographing. I lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder. At last I clumsily tore open a box of film and began loading the camera. Over the years it had so often seemed as if the movements performed by my hands had become part of me. While working with my negatives I sensed retrospectively that each instance of changing film—the pressure of the crank, the spool, and the camera’s external coating on my fingertips, the smoothness of the black film leader, the process of inserting the leader into the spindle—had left an impression on me, and that these gestures had been added to my repertoire of hand movements. Executing them had moored a memory in this part of my body, which became operative and led the process, even if in my thoughts I was somewhere else entirely. Each sheet, with its four slots for negatives, was a testament to this habit’s gradual colonization of my hands. That had satisfied me. Now, sitting with my back to the sun and the view to the valley, with uncertain hands I needed half an hour just to load a roll of film. I had to recall what the numbers meant on the rings for exposure time and aperture, how to operate the light meter.

Each exposure was an effort. I stared into the viewfinder and forgot what it was I wanted to see there. I photographed details of the plain with and without the olive fires, the village in the morning light, and three columbaria in the rear, new part of the cemetery. Once I took my camera along up to the birch grove and photographed the village and the house on the hill. I photographed the vineyard, where the old man had now prepared all his grapevines for spring. Afterwards I went to the cemetery. I had one exposure left. The cemetery lay empty and silent—it was early afternoon, not the usual visiting time. Only between the columbarium walls on the street-facing side did I hear two women’s voices. They spoke so monotonously that I thought they must be praying, but as I turned the corner of a grave wall I saw the two women kneeling on the stone ground, busy cleaning the gravestones of two neighboring for-netti, conversing all the while in this droning, prayer-like tone. Cleaning products lay beside them and fresh artificial flowers, vase and all, as if of a piece. I could barely understand their conversation; their dialect clipped words at their roots. When they caught sight of me they fell silent, as if by arrangement. “Can I help?” asked the one, then the other in echo, once she saw me. I was startled and stepped back. What was there to say? There was nothing to help with. They eyed the camera hanging from my neck with suspicion, it seemed to me. I might have appeared as an intruder to them, a meddler who had no one there to mourn. They might not have been mourners; perhaps they were busying themselves, merely out of a sense of obligation, with the fornetti of long-dead aunts or uncles, childless distant relatives whose legacy they had perhaps partially inherited and whom they felt to owe certain duties, like the cleaning of gravestones and replacing of years-old artificial flowers, gone brittle and pale from the wind and weather. My wandering through the cemetery among the graves of people whose terminated lives I had no connection to might have appeared strange to the bereaved, offensive even. I took off, saving my last exposure for a different occasion.

In the evening I stood at the window and looked out into the darkness. Twilight was almost always beautiful, the sun often appeared as it set, and the cemetery hovered in an orange light in which the cypresses were no longer so black that they looked cut-out, but rather blue and deep and seemed to almost lean slightly toward the village and the house on the hill. The village in turn now lay cool-gray until the street lamps were illuminated and light was flicked-on behind the windows. On the plain it was never entirely dark. One could make out points of light from larger towns in the distance, street lamps which lined smaller roads that were invisible by day, and the headlights of cars that came in a long, uninterrupted line from the west in the evenings, allowing me to trace the path that I had taken. As it turned to night the volcanic mountains stood out all the clearer against the sky, which appeared as if illuminated from a great distance. That must have been Rome reflecting.

I stood at the window for hours as if inside a bell jar which had covered me and displaced me to my childhood, when in the afternoons and evenings I often felt incapable of doing anything but look out the window. Save that now beneath my hands on the window ledge I could feel M.’s hands. I didn’t see them like I had that morning, only felt them and wondered if this was what had taught me to forget my own hands.