Читать книгу His Name is David - Jan Vantoortelboom - Страница 19

-

ON MY TENTH birthday, I was given the most magnificent birthday present ever: permission to cross the border. To slip through a gap in the hornbeam hedge behind the shed and go into the woods. I had badgered my parents about it for years until suddenly, out of the blue, they allowed it. My mother’s consent was only half-hearted. She fussed with the ribbon in her hair and looked at me with a worried frown while Father was telling me, handing me a brand new pocket knife to boot. He was enjoying the moment. I leapt up and ran round the kitchen table to hug my parents. My father went on to explain to me how to reach the path into the woods. Starting from the hedge, I was to walk straight ahead for one hundred paces. He had nailed small wooden panels to the trees, which I should follow to the gravel path. At the junction, he had driven a willow post into the ground and painted it white. That way, he said, I would never get lost—the path was a loop, all I had to do was follow it and I would always end up back at the post. Mother had prepared a rucksack with sandwiches and a filled canteen. Overjoyed, and as excited as a puppy about to escape through a hole in the fence, I searched for the breach in the parapet which the hedge had always been for me. I soon spotted it: the moist, white stumps of pruned twigs like the innards of the hedge. That was Father’s doing. I crawled through, followed the panels, found the post and set out to explore the woods on my own for the first time in my life. I still remember the way my shoes sank into soft forest soil, the scent of humus, live foliage and mouldered wood I inhaled, punctuated by birdsong.

At lunchtime, I leaned against the trunk of a beech tree to eat my sandwiches. Then I saw him. Out of nowhere, he had appeared just ten metres away from me: an old roebuck, a three-pointer, glorious in his sand-coloured summer coat. I watched, dumbfounded, as he calmly nibbled at the shoots of a bramble bush, white chin in the air. I stopped chewing so as to avoid any movement that might spook the animal. But a wasp landed on a dollop of jam that had fallen from the sandwich on my trousers. I shook my leg. The buck’s coat shuddered, chasing away flies. He saw me. The wasp stung. I slapped the insect from my trousers with a sharp swipe of my wrist. When I looked up, the buck had disappeared. Disappointed and with a painfully swollen thigh, I got up and went to the spot where he had been nibbling. There was a fresh pile of droppings, moistly glistening. I saw the tracks his hooves had made in the soil. Then I thought of my brother, and imagined telling him about this magical encounter that night. He would be jealous. I wanted to take him something. Owl pellets were easy to find.

I walked on until I reached an exotic-looking tree whose split bark gaped open like a jacket. Deep purple leaves with thick veins hung limply from its branches. I jumped to the lowest branch, held it down with one hand and carefully plucked off one of the leaves at the stem. The gift he would like most, however, was the skull of a bird—a crow, I reckoned—bleached and with its beak still attached. It was lying at the foot of a silver birch as if on display, there for the taking. I carefully packed it into my lunchbox.

The wood was getting darker, only the treetops glowed in the weakening rays of the sun. The undergrowth rustled here and there, wildlife getting ready for their nocturnal hunt. Reluctantly, I started for home. I’d promised to be back for supper, and was too grateful to my parents to betray their trust.