Читать книгу A Walk with Love and Death - Hans Koning - Страница 16

In one day I became the owner of a horse and saw the sea.

The horse was a rather sorry creature, dazed-looking and so thin that you could follow each rib from beginning to end. But its stomach wasn’t swollen, which, I’ve been told, is a very good sign, and its walk was easy. That was important enough for I hadn’t been on a horse since I was ten. I liked her from the start—it was a mare—and since the dubious fellow who sold her to me (for eight francs with saddle and bridle) claimed she had no name, I decided to call her Melody. My only problem with her was that she kept shaking her head and pulling it down, and soon she thus broke one of the badly worn reins. That took me by surprise and somehow made me fall off; but it was the only time and she didn’t use the occasion to run away from me. I was now the visible owner of property worth having my throat cut for, and I was thankful for the ex-soldier’s long knife. When I went to sleep I held it in my hand.

It was late afternoon when I came to St. Valéry at the mouth of the Somme River but I rode through the village and on. A path led gradually to the top of a dune; the soil here was sandy, shining through the sparse redtop leaves. The hard wind carried a smell of brine and swept deep patterns in the grass. There was a new, an unheard sound in the air.

I came to the top, I hardly dared look; there it was. The sea—very much not a canting glossy plain of water as I’d imagined it, but a wide huge gray swell, waves coming in endlessly, line after line from far out and breaking in foam, gulls crying painfully and a wind which brought tears to my eyes. Opposite me the sun was just visible through a thin cloud layer. Dark clouds, much lower, raced across the sky.

I stood there and stared, and the thought that there was nothing before me but water until the end of the earth made me dizzy and almost sick to my stomach.