Читать книгу A Walk with Love and Death - Hans Koning - Страница 7

Around noon I came upon the body of a dog lying in the road. Big winter flies rose silently as I walked by it. I had been wondering what that black spot, shifting slightly, could be; and for some reason the discovery that it was a dead dog covered with flies unnerved me completely. What the man on the horse had failed to do, the dog achieved: it made me realize that I had left the protective ring of the city but without entering nature, that I was moving in a deadly no man’s land.

I stood still. The road ahead of me suddenly seemed implacable, the lightheartedness with which I had set out on my journey now was beyond my understanding. I had a feeling of being lost and alone on earth, a feeling such as I’d had before only at night in the hour that precedes dawn—not under a spring sun.

This is the road of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, I said to myself.

And I felt better. For that thought took me back to the university and to the house in Paris where I had lived and where the Revelation of Saint John was nothing more than a splinter of all things men believed; and with that the world brightened again.

But I jumped the muddy ditch and left that road; I set out at a right angle to it and went across the fields, going northeast.

Still nothing but weeds grew on the black land, and there was still no sign of human life; but after a while I came upon a cluster of trees. I found a sheltered hollow, and covered myself with my jacket and rested some time.

After that the going was harder, for the ground became hilly. Now I saw the first peasant’s hut and while I hesitated whether to look for shelter there, I saw another farther on, and then another; and I decided I could try to make a bit more headway. No smoke came from the huts and when I passed one close by I saw that it was uninhabited.

I walked along the foot of a rather steep hillside which faced south, and here the slope was planted with vines. They looked sickly but they were growing in rows. Someone was establishing order, some human being was near. From the corner of my eye I saw a shadow move and I turned: an old man was crouching between the vines. In his left hand he held a bunch of weeds he must have been pulling out, his right hand rested on a stone. He ducked low and peered at me with a frown.

“I’m alone,” I shouted at him, “unarmed!” I held my hands out and he scrambled to his feet and came toward me.

“Have you money?” he murmured.

“What have you got for sale?”

“I’ve wine, I’ve wine,” he said.

“No food?”

“No.”

“Is there a house anywhere near?”

He pointed east, where the ground fell away slightly from his hill. Far away in the plain a row of beeches was just barely visible, catching the sunrays.

“Is it empty?” I asked.

He grinned.

“Well?”

He didn’t answer, but shuffled away. I sat down on a bench, and he came back with a dirty jug which he handed to me.

I wiped the edge and drank; it was without doubt the foulest wine I’d ever tasted. But I drank it all. I gave him back the jug and a coin.

“A captain lives in the house,” he then said quite loudly.

“What kind of captain?”

He shrugged.

“Is it safe?”

“You must pay,” he said. “But you’ll pay on every road—” he moved his hand up and down and let it circle around as if the horizon were a cake he was dividing up. “His men are over there, everywhere.”