Читать книгу Grove - Esther Kinsky - Страница 25

Via

I EXITED AT OSTIENSE STATION, grazed by a memory. Glimpses of the backs of houses along the tracks had awoken something in me somewhere, which nevertheless sunk back down once I stepped off the train. Moments later I found myself at the pyramid again. The Appian Way came to mind: a spring morning, decades ago, the white light of high fog streamed through the interstices between dark trees onto the cobblestones, which shone without being wet. It had snowed in Rome the day before, but immediately afterwards spring arrived, and that morning on the Appian Way was quiet and pleasant, remained in my memory and returned in my dreams.

The sky clouded over in the afternoon and a cold wind blew. On that weekday in February the Appian Way was practically empty, save for an occasional car with tinted windows driving to one of the luxury villas located on the grounds behind the gravestones. Perhaps the people in the villas didn’t know that the quarters of the living should remain separate from those of the dead. The routes of the living, the Roman roads leading out into the world and coming from the world up to the city limits were bordered by places of the dead; it was the dead who escorted the living, and not the other way around. And one could speak of lingering in the streets only in terms of eternity, which appeared to be incidental here, which didn’t call out to prove itself not a fairy tale, not an illusion. The dead marked the old streets as places one ought not to linger, as long as one can keep going.