with God, go with God.
I saw the white mountains and how they lay against the sky, and I am not ashamed to tel you that the sight was terrifying.
You'l be next Marienka, said Doctor Marcus. She walked back towards her clinic with her hands tight behind her back.
How lost I felt then, daughter, how very alone.
Only people with desires can be fooled, and I had none. My friend was gone. The next morning I put on the same clothes that I had worn for months, took my makeshift table, and prepared to go into town. But then I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and let me tel it to you straight, daughter, I knew that in my shame I had lost every shred of dignity that I had ever worked to own. I do not seek to make a complicated dance of it, I had done these things for a purpose, but now the purpose had disappeared. I looked at myself and saw nothing that shored me up on the left shoulder and little to shore me up on the right. The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be.
Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, had become it.
I went down past the cathedral to Franz-Liszt Street. No sound came from the high shuttered windows. I set my things around me. The people gathered and I gave them al bad omens that they accepted and wore like masks. The next day, I walked beyond the red-white-red barrier like there was nothing unusual at al , but instead of going down by the dump road I went towards the mountains.
Last night I woke thinking Enrico was here. I rose and flamed the lamp but found only these pages. Out the window, I could see way down into the val ey. What is it about the cold that sharpens the edges of everything? Enrico used to say that the emptiest days are the loveliest.
Do you, daughter, recal the sight of your father coming home after a foray across the rocky part of the northern mountain when he had cut himself from a fal off a smal cliff? He was carrying animal medicines then— steroids, hormones, injections to sel on the other side. He had packed them solid into a giant rucksack, had even fil ed his pockets and socks, and then he trudged off to Maria Luggua. A blizzard blew up, a curtain of snow opening and closing around him. He was edging his way around the point in the mountain where not even the goats ventured. He stepped off into nothing but air, and his fal was broken only by an outcrop of rock. He landed in a drift and he looked down to see that his leg had been ripped open.
He contemplated the animal injections but didn't know which might help him with the pain. He had to dig himself out with a smal folding shovel strapped to the side of his rucksack. The blood fil ed UDhis snowboot. He could onlv recognize where he was by the feel of the trees—the further down he went on the slope the less gnarled the bark became. When he reached home, he dropped the rucksack, and simply said: Put the kettle on, Zoli, I'm freezing.
He pul ed off the snowboot, put it by the stove and said it had been a very bad evening for a walk. He had been gone three whole days.
I can see him now, his thin nose, his wide mouth, the lines grooved deep in his face, his eyes half-closed against the glare of the snow.
When the new trade laws came in, there was no longer any need for medicines or cigarettes or coffee or seeds to be brought across the mountain, and he had always refused to bring dynamite for the Tyroleans who were blowing up pylons and causing havoc. He stopped his trade, just as suddenly as he had started, and he seldom walked the mountain anymore, except on festive days, and he made his living instead at the mil house, and when the mil house went the way of everything else, he bought it, moved with us in here, kept the wheel running, and did whatever handyman jobs he could find around the val ey. Two or three times a day he stood in the doorway, looking out over the weather above the mountain.
He could have walked out blindfolded and stil found his way there.
I have loved your father, pure and simple; his and yours are the only lives I have never betrayed.
The first truck to ever give me a lift belonged to a fruit farmer. He wore a black suit. His cheeks were red and newly shaven, his eyes bloodshot.
He knew that I was running from something, but at first he did not say a word. I sat tight in the seat as the gears clanked and the engine rumbled into life. The farmer asked where I was going and when I didn't answer he shrugged and said he was on his way to the market a few towns down the road and I was welcome to join him so long as I did not make a fuss. I feigned being mute once again and the farmer sighed deeply as if it were the oldest trick, which it was, and one that has always failed me, as much as looking over my shoulder.
Scared of something? he asked.
The hedges shot by, trees and windmil s, and I realized just how strange it had been to have walked so far, things being so much different at speed. I stil did not recal how I had walked in the haze after the judgment. I kept that part of my mind blank, I could not face it, how I had crossed the border first from Slovakia and then from Hungary, and then to Austria. Nor did I think of where I was going. Paris seemed as good, or as ridiculous, a place as any.
After a while it began to rain. The windscreen wipers were broken but the farmer had made a rope that he could pul from inside the truck. He showed me how to do it with exaggerated movements and it made me happy, this smal task. I tugged the rope from one side of the dashboard to the other. The fruit farmer complimented me, but I noticed that he had opened his window and was smoking furiously. So he thinks I smel , I thought.
I wanted to laugh. I rol ed down my window and felt the cold wind blowing. We went west in open country under the shadow of the mountains. The road was long and straight and the trees snapped to attention. The mountains lay white and enormous in the distance. It was curious to me that the closer we came to them the further away they seemed to drift. The farmer drove with one hand on the steering wheel and looked across at me every now and then.
You know those Russians put another satel ite up in the air? he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about, nor for what reason he said it.
You can see them at night like smal stars moving, he said.
