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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to Olevano, a small village south-east of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it. Written in a rich and poetic style, Grove is an exquisite novel of grief, love and landscapes.
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‘Deeply sad and darkly beautiful. The novel is masterly and uplifting and without any doubt it offers solace.’
— Jury for the Düsseldorf Literature Prize
‘Like a landscape painter who day after day sets up their easel outside, Esther Kinsky directs her eyes onto the terrain, studies it at particular times and in everchanging weather, and seeks to understand its anatomy as well as the way it is used by people.’
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
‘For it is this ambivalence, this relaxed cleaving asunder, this shimmering multiplicity of meanings, every thing the narrator notes and keeps from her two recent trips to Italy and the memory of countless previous ones with her long-dead father, that gives this book its extraordinary charm.’
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Praise for River
‘A magnificent novel.’
— The New Yorker
‘Esther Kinsky’s unnamed narrator observes and remembers, piling up beautiful, silt-like layers of description and memory until it becomes difficult to know which is which … This is a book to relish.’
— Guardian
‘The form of River mirrors its content; its consciousness flows with a sense that, like water to the sea, it will one day lose itself. It is appropriately, seamlessly translated by Iain Galbraith.’
— Times Literary Supplement
GROVE A FIELD NOVEL
ESTHER KINSKY
Translated by
CAROLINE SCHMIDT
6
‘Does it make sense to point to a clump of trees and ask “Do you understand what this clump of trees says?” In normal circumstances, no; but couldn’t one express a sense by an arrangement of trees? Couldn’t it be a code?’
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar
CONTENTS
I
OLEVANO
‘I plans un mond muàrt. Ma i no soj muàrt jo ch’i lu plans.’
— Pier Paolo Pasolini
16
VII/MORŢI
In Romanian churches believers light candles in two separate places. It might be two niches in the wall, two ledges, or two metal cabinets, where the candles flicker. On the left side of the partition are the candles for the living; on the right side, the candles for the dead. If someone dies for whom in life a candle was lit in the left partition, then the burning candle is transferred to the right partition. From vii to morți.
I have only observed the tradition of lighting candles in Romanian churches; I have never practised it myself. I have watched the candles flicker in their intended places. I have deciphered the letters above the partitions – simple niches in a wall, ledges, filigree containers made from forged iron or perforated sheet metal – and I have read them as names, designating the one space for hope, vii, and the other for memory, morți. One group of candles illuminates the future, the other the past.
I once saw a man in a film take a candle that was flickering for a relative in the niche of the vii and move it into the niche of the morți. From what-shall-be to once-was. From the fluttering of the future to the stillness of a remembered picture. In the film this observance was moving in its simplicity and acceptance, but at the same time it inspired disgust, obedient and impersonal, a mutely followed rule.
A few months after I saw this scene in a film, M. died. I became bereaved. Before bereavement, one might think of ‘death,’ but not yet of ‘absence.’ Absence is inconceivable, as long as there is presence. For the bereaved, the world is defined by absence. The absence of light in the space of the vii overshadows all flickering in the space of the morți.
TERRAIN
In Olevano Romano I’m staying for a time in a house on a hill. When approaching town on the winding road that leads up from the plain, the building is recognizable in the distance. To the left of the hill with the house is the old village, vaulting the steep slope. It is the colour of cliffs, a different shade of grey in every light and weather. To the right of the house, somewhat farther uphill, is the cemetery – angular, whitish cement-grey, surrounded by tall, slender black trees. Cypresses. Sempervirens, the everlasting tree of death; a defiant answer to the unexacting pines, projected sharply into the sky.
I walk along the cemetery wall until the road forks. To the southeast it leads through olive groves, becomes a dirt road between a bamboo thicket and vineyards, and grazes a sparse birch grove. Three or four birch trees, scattered messengers, vagrants among olive trees, holm oaks and vines, stand at a slant on a kind of protuberance, which rises up beside the path. From this protuberance one looks to the hill with the house. The village lies once again on the left, the cemetery on the right. A small car moves through the village lanes, while someone hangs laundry on a line beneath the windows. The laundry says: vii.
In the nineteenth century, this protuberance might have served as a good lookout point for those who came here to paint. Perhaps the painters, pulling their handkerchiefs from their jacket pockets, carelessly and unwittingly scattered birch seeds brought from their northern-coloured homelands. A birch blossom, picked in passing and long forgotten, spread rootlets here between blades of grass. The painters would have wiped the sweat from their brows and continued painting. The 19mountains, the village, perhaps the small columns of smoke rising above the plain as well. Where was the cemetery then? The oldest grave that I can find in the cemetery belongs to a German from Berlin, who died here in 1892. The second-oldest grave is for a man with a bold expression and a hat, of Olevano, born in 1843, died in 1912.
Below the vagrant birch trees, a man works in his vineyard. He cuts bamboo, trims the stalks, burns off the ragged wisps, brings the lengths of the stalks into line. He’s building scaffolding out of them, complicated structures made of poles, formed around the burgeoning grapevines. He weighs down with stones the points where the interlocked stalks meet. Here the viti thrive between the vii in the distance, on the left, and the morți, somewhat nearer, on the right.
It is winter, evening comes early. When darkness falls, the old village of Olevano lies in the yellow warmth of streetlights. Along the road to Bellegra, and throughout the new settlements on the northern side, stretches a labyrinth of dazzling white lamps. Above on the hillside the cemetery hovers in the glow of countless perpetually burning small lights, which glimmer before the gravestones, lined up on the ledges in front of the sepulchres. When the night is very dark, the cemetery, illuminated by luce perpetuae, hangs like an island in the night. The island of the morți above the valley of the vii.
JOURNEY
I arrived in Olevano in January, two months and a day after M.’s funeral. The journey was long and led through dingy winter landscapes, which clung indecisively to grey vestiges of snow. In the Bohemian Forest, freshly fallen, wet snow dripped from the trees, clouding the view through the Stifteresque underbrush to the young Vltava River, which had not even a thin border of jagged ice.
As the landscape past the cliffs stretched into the Friulian plains, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had forgotten what it is like to encounter the light that lies beyond the Alps and understood, suddenly, the distant euphoria that my father experienced every time we descended the Alps. Non ho amato mai molto la montagna / e detesto le Alpi, said Montale, but mountains are good for this shifting of light upon arrival and departure. At the height of the turn-off to Venice, dusk fell. The darker it became, the larger, flatter, broader the plain appeared to me. The temperature dropped below zero. There were dotted lights, even small fires in the open here and there, or so it seemed to me. I stopped in Ferrara, just as M. and I had planned to do on this trip. Ferrara in winter. The garden of the Finzi-Continis in snow or freezing fog. The haze of the pianure. Italy, a country to which we had never travelled together.
The next morning, I found the car with a bashed-in window. The backseat and everything stored there – the notebooks, books and photographs, the cases filled with pens for writing and drawing – were littered with shards of glass. The thief had taken only the two suitcases with clothing. One of them was filled with things that M. had worn in the last months. I had imagined how 21his cardigan would drape over a chair in the unfamiliar place, how I would work in his jumpers and sleep in his shirts.
I filed a police report. I had to go to the Questura, an old palazzo with a heavy portal. A small policeman sitting behind a desk in a chair with a high, carved back recorded my complaint. His police cap, adorned with a magnificent gold cord, rested on a pile of papers beside him, like a forgotten prop from a sailor-themed Carnival celebration.
On the recommendation of the lower-ranking police officer who had handed me a copy of the report, I spent hours searching for the stolen suitcases among bushes and shrubs, near the car park at the foot of the city wall. I found only a bicycle carefully covered with dried autumn leaves. When it became dark I gave up my search and made a few necessary purchases. That evening I noticed the address on the Questura papers’ letterhead: Corso Ercole I d’Este, the road leading to the garden of the Finzi-Continis.
The next morning I left, heading towards Rome and Olevano. It was bitterly cold, the grass atop the city wall was covered in hoar frost, and large clouds formed before the mouths of the vendors assembling their stands on Piazza Travaglio. A few freezing African men loitered around the cafés. Market days promised more life and opportunity than other days of the week – some trading, help wanted, cigarettes, coffee.
The light beyond Bologna, the view from the motorway, evoked memories of my childhood and were a strange comfort – even the petrol station convenience stores, still selling those extravagant chocolate sculptures – as if the whole world could be so innocuous and incidental, as disconnected from all pain as the bright 22landscape that glided past me, a moving panorama-stage which tried to fool me, in my deep fatigue that no amount of sleep would relieve, into thinking it was the only thing moving, and that I remained stationary. For a time, I believed it.
But after exiting the motorway in Valmontone, I was in unknown territory, remote from the space of memory. As traffic crawled through the small town, I realized that this Italy was a world away from the country of my childhood experiences. Past a small hill range sprawled a plain, mountains surging at its other end. The summits in the second and third rows were capped in snow. Perhaps it was the Abruzzi already, still linked with outdated fantasies of wolves and highwaymen in my head. Disquieting terrain, like all mountains.
On my first morning in Olevano the sun shone and a mild wind rustled the withered leaves of the palm trees crowding my view of the plain at the foot of the hill. A bell struck every quarter hour. A different, tinny one followed a minute later, as if it had required this intermission to verify the time. That afternoon the sky clouded over, the wind became cutting, and a shrill noise began abruptly in the village. It appeared so far away, the village – a peculiar illusion seen from the house on the hill, as it took mere minutes to reach the square, where a festival was taking place. At this festival Befana presented children gifts to the tune of Italo pop. Befana, the epiphanic witch; the previous evening in small supermarkets grandmothers had haggled for discounts on cheap toys in her name. They had wrenched the gifts from the sale baskets that blocked the aisles at every turn. Silver-clad Barbie dolls, neon-coloured soldiers, lightsabers for extraterrestrial use. An announcer called out, a timid choir of children’s voices repeated her, and 23again and again I heard the word Be-fa-na!, stressed on the first syllable, as the dialect demands.
On the night after the day of Befana, moped drivers dinned through the lanes, and I learned that here every sound is multiplied, broken by numerous surfaces and evidently forever sent back to this inhospitable house on the hill. I lay awake, contemplating how for the next three months to force my life into a new order that would let me survive the unexpected unknown.
VILLAGE
In the mornings I would walk to the village via a different lane every day. Whenever I thought I knew every route, a staircase would reveal itself somewhere, or a steep corridor, an archway framing a vista. The winter was cold and wet; along the narrow corridors and stairs, moisture crackled in the old stone. Many houses stood vacant and around lunchtime the village was very quiet, almost lifeless. Not even the wind found its way into these lanes, only the sun, which usually stayed away in winter. I saw elderly villagers with scanty purchases, bracing their feet against the steepness. The people here must have healthy hearts, trained on these slopes, day after day, with or without burdens and beneath the weight of winter’s dampness. Some climbed very slowly and steadily, while others paused, drew breath – whatever breath there was to draw here, in the absence of light or any scent of life. On these winter afternoons, not once did I smell food. On brighter Sundays in the early afternoon, clattering plates and muted voices would sound from the open windows on Piazza San Rocco, but on gloomy winter weekdays the windows remained closed. There were no cats roaming about. Dogs which might have remained silent had they had a bone yapped at the occasional passers-by.
Then one day the sun shone again. The elderly came out of their houses, sat down in the sun on Piazzale Aldo Moro and squinted in the brightness. They were still alive. They thawed like lizards. Small, tired reptiles in quilted coats trimmed with artificial fur. The shoes of the men were worn down on one side. Lipstick crumbled from the corners of the women’s mouths. After an hour in the sun they laughed and talked, their gesticulations 25accompanied by the rustle of polyester sleeves. During my childhood, they were young. Perhaps they were young in Rome, rogues in yellow shoes with mopeds, and young women who wanted to look like Monica Vitti, who wore large sunglasses and stood in factories by day, occasionally partaking in demonstrations, arm-in-arm.
Above the valley whitish plumes of smoke unfurled, more buoyant than fog. After the olive trees were pruned, the branches were burned – daily smoke sacrifices in the face of a parasite infestation that threatened the harvest. Perhaps the stokers stood in the groves by their fires, shading their eyes with their hands, looking to see which columns of smoke rose in what way. All was blanketed in a mild burning smell.
CEMETERY
In the early mornings I would walk the same route every day. Up the hillside, between olive trees, curving around the cemetery to the small birch grove. The two kiosks with cheerful-coloured greenhouse flowers and garish plastic bouquets weren’t open yet. The municipality workers, busied since my arrival with thinning out the cypresses that had grown into one another, arrived in a utility van and unpacked their tools. The roadsides were littered with debris from the felling: sprigs, cones and pinnate, scaly leaves. Beside the cemetery entrance larger tree clippings piled up, thrown together sloppily and interspersed with stray tatters of plastic bouquets: pink lily heads that refused to wilt, yellow bows. Seen from here, the house on the hill lay between the village in the background on the right, and the cemetery in the foreground on the left. A different order. The village, quiet in the blue-grey morning light. Behind the cemetery wall the men called loudly back and forth to one another.
From the birch grove I looked onto the village and the cemetery; in the mornings not a sound from there reached this spot. I could see only white smoke past the wall and a row of ascending cypresses. Tree remains were being burned. The arborists were not yet felling. They first brought their small sacrifice. They must have stood there watching the fire. When the smoke thinned, the first saw revved.
In the afternoon I visited the graves. Both flower kiosks were open. On the left fresh flowers were for sale: yellow chrysanthemums, pale-pink lilies, white and red carnations. The kiosk on the right offered artificial flower bouquets with or without ribbons, hearts, little angels 27and balloons of various sizes. The woman selling flowers at the kiosk on the right was occupied with her phone for the most part, but occasionally cast me a sullen, mistrusting glance.
I searched for a term for the grave walls that made up a large part of the cemetery. Stone cabinets with small plaques, mostly bearing the name and a photo of the deceased, rendered on ceramic. Rocchi, Greco, Proietti, Baldi, Mampieri. The names on the graves were the same as those above shop entrances and windows in the village. The walls are called columbaria, I learned, dovecotes for souls. Later someone told me the grave compartments are referred to in everyday language as fornetti. Ovens, into which the caskets or urns are slid.
The cemetery was always busiest in the early afternoon. Young men above all fulfilled their duties as sons and grandsons then; they would race in, jump out of their cars, slam the doors and slide rattling ladders up to their fornetti, in order to trade wilted flowers for fresh ones, wipe off the photographs, check the small burning lights. Old men scuffled by the grave walls, exchanged greetings, carried wilting bouquets to the bin and filled the vases with fresh water for the flowers they had brought with them.
In front of each fornetto was a small lamp, evoking an old petroleum lamp, or a candle, or an oil lamp like in The Thousand and One Nights. The lamps were hooked up to electric cables which ran along the lower edge of each tier of the grave walls, and burned at all times. Lux perpetua, someone explained to me. Everlasting light. In daylight their faint glow was barely perceptible.
On rainy days I would stand by the window, not wanting to go out. I fought fatigue brought on by the heavy, wet air. Sometimes the rain was mixed with snow. From 28the rear windows of my house, which faced north, on the low ground to my left I saw the new housing estates of Olevano, the road to Bellegra, the paved market place, the new school and the sports field, all lying between the cobbled-together, angular new construction and the hillside too steep to develop, with its narrow sheep pastures and a holm oak forest.
Above on the right was the cemetery, a darkly framed stone lodge with a view out onto the ripped-open valley. From their lodge, the dead could watch how ambulances were cleaned at the foot of the hillside, while paramedics made phone calls and smoked; how Chinese merchants set up their booths on Mondays, in order to sell cheap household goods, artificial flowers and textiles; how football matches took place at the sports field on Sundays. Whistles and calls would echo from the hillside during football matches, and the dull-green ground glistened in the rain, while old women on the steep path up to the cemetery slowly carried their umbrellas through the olive groves.
DYING
Not long after arriving in Olevano, I had a dream:
I encounter M. He is standing in a doorway. Behind him is a room filled with white light. M. is like he used to be: calm, composed, plump again almost.
There’s nothing terrible about being dead, he says. Don’t worry.
Half-awake, I remembered the dreams I had of my father after he died. My father always stood in the light. Waved. Laughed. I stood in the shadows. At first farther away, then ever closer. In one dream he took me sledding and stayed behind in the white hills, laughing, while alone on the sled I glided down into a snowless valley.
In the afternoon that same day, farther down in the village I saw a dead person being brought out of a house. The body was laid out on a stretcher and covered from head to toe. Two paramedics wheeled it through the building entrance into the street, where an ambulance waited. The front door to the multi-story house was open behind them. No one followed the paramedics and in every apartment the street-facing blinds were pulled down. No one stood on a balcony and raised a hand to wave farewell. The ambulance blocked traffic on the steep road to the village and the tunnel into the hinterland. A small traffic jam had formed, drivers honked their horns. The stretcher appeared strangely tall to me, as if distorted; an adult would stand barely a head above the stretcher’s edge and while contemplating the dead body, feel like a child. I imagined standing at the stretcher at eye level with the dead man, whose eyelids had already 30been pressed shut, as that is the first task of paramedics and doctors once death is established. The eyelid of the dead becomes a false door, like those found in Egyptian and early Etruscan tombs. The blanket on the dead man gleamed matte. It appeared to be of a heavy, black, synthetic material, like a darkroom curtain.
CLOUDS
In the morning at times the clouds hung so low that the landscape all around was invisible. I heard buses droning uphill, voices, the village bells, too, which struck every fifteen minutes. Noises from a different world, and nothing visible but clouds. Over my head the village sounds met the sputtering caws of chainsaws in the cemetery. Come fog, the tree fellers still worked. Their calls could be better heard through the clouds than clear air and, as if in reply, these short, fitful reports from the land of the morți followed the inquiring sounds from that of the vii.
Throughout the day the clouds lifted, broke open, scattered as slack veils and sunk into the valleys. They hung awhile in the holm oaks on the steep hillside, a spindly, disused small coppice, where in the thin tracks between the trunks, objects were put to pasture. Worn-out and rejected objects hung, hindered by the trunks while rolling downhill, diagonally between trees and shrubs: furniture, appliances, mattresses. Delicate vines unfurled like dreams across the covers.
In the afternoon the plain at the foot of the Olevano hill lay dark and severe below high rainclouds, which drifted across the sky over the mountain peaks in brown and blue tones, suffused with yellowish veins of light. The volcanic mountains before Rome loomed lucid and crisp against the distant glow that opened up behind them. Sometimes a remote stripe of sun would blaze a trail to the southwest and briefly illuminate the hovering Pontine Marshes, which in a different light were hardly perceptible. Smoke rose from the olive groves below Olevano and even farther, towards Palestrina. The farmers tirelessly burned the clipped olive branches 32and fallen leaves. Occasionally a more slender, more dazzling beam of light burst from one of the yellowish veins in the clouded sky and fell like a finger, pointing diagonally onto a column of smoke, as if it were a sacrifice, chosen by a higher hand.
HEART
On clear days in the first weeks of January, the village lay as if quarried from red stone in the light of the sun, which rose between the mountains behind the cemetery. From my veranda I watched it awake into a toy world, moved by invisible hands: windows opened, a rubbish truck crept backwards through the lanes, and small figures in blazing vests carried over the rubbish bins, emptying them into the barrel. Past the palm tree I looked down directly onto the greengrocer that opened its doors around this time. The Arab men arranged the displays, bright oranges slipping into my view of the grey lane. On a large cart lay a mountain of artichokes. In the courtyard behind the closed gate next to the greengrocer, broken plywood crates towered beside mountains of spoiled oranges, tomatoes, heads of green cabbage or lettuce, visible only from here above, a concealed pendant to the neat arrangements in front of the shop. The men, the stands with fruit and vegetables, the rubbish truck – it all seemed to be part of a distant theatre. Or an unusual theatre, whose performances are viewed only from a distance. There was no audience up close.
Behind the village, hills ascended blue and grey, the highest ridge crowned with a row of parasol pines which from here below looked like an ossified platoon, scattered colossal soldiers of an army, perhaps, a rearguard bereft of all hope and any prospect of returning home, cut off from intelligence and provisions, standing exposed at this height to all harsh and bitter weather, lost in contemplation of the valleys. From up there they would have seen boulders, barren grasslands, Olevano in the distance, maybe the village on the right, the dark cemetery lodge on the left, between them the house on 34the hill – a different order.
As the sun rose higher, the red wore off and the village turned grey. I set out for the grey village, for the greengrocer where Arab men in black anoraks and gloves made calls over Arabic music playing on the radio, or spoke to one another in quarrelling tones. They let the weight of their fingertips rest lightly on the scales when weighing the produce and always added a gift to the purchased goods.
I bought oranges and artichokes. The bag was light, but walking home my heart was always so heavy, I thought I wouldn’t be able to carry it back to the house. Again and again I stood still and stared, abashed by my weakness, up to the sky and the trees. In several conifers I discovered whitish clews in the forks of high-lying branches and twigs: bright gossamer, veiled spools, tapered downwards slightly, chrysalides of remnant clouds, inside of which were perhaps rare butterflies maturing; they would hatch in summer and, spreading their wings in who knows what colours, alight, imperceptibly trembling, on the fornetti next to the perpetual lamps, their glow now dissolved by the glaring sun.
The heavy heart became my condition in Olevano. When I climbed up to the house, coming from the village. When I walked uphill, from the house to the cemetery.
I pictured a grey heart, light-grey with a cheap sheen, like lead.
The leaden heart grew entwined with all I had seen that took root in me. With the sight of the olive groves in fog, the sheep on the hillside, the holm oak hill, the horses that from time to time grazed silently behind the cemetery, with the view past the plain and its small, shimmering fields on cold mornings frosted bluish. With 35the daily smoke columns from burning olive branches, with the shadows of the clouds, with the winter-pallid thickets and violet blackberry vines along the waysides.
PIZZUTI
As days passed, the signatures above the shop entrances and display windows began to form an accompanying text to the colours of cliffs and stone, tiles and roofs, to the grain and texture of things, which shifted with the light and weather. They suited the sounds of the words, with their slurred sibilants and broken-off syllables. There were three cobblers in the village. Two often stared idly over the chest-high partition-wall of their window display featuring shoe creams, brushes, shoe trees, and some old cobblers’ tools. The third worked behind a high shop counter, from a barstool. Customers and acquaintances never failed to appear before him. At times it became lively – the sound carried into the lane. High on the rear wall, practically at the ceiling, hung an old poster on which I thought I recognized, in addition to a warplane with the colours of Italy, the outline of Mussolini.
Every day I encountered the same faces, winter coats, and hats. I became acquainted with several rules of etiquette, such as not to touch the goods before purchasing them, how to politely order from the vegetable woman, and to always follow the recommendations of the cheese-monger, whose ever-smiling, chubby daughter sat on a stool at the register, making a great effort to add small sums. Only at the Arab vegetable shop, which had no name, was one allowed to touch the fruits and vegetables, to pick them up and put them back down again. This liberty must have led to the mass of spoilage behind lock and latch, which was visible only from my veranda.
Coming back from the village I passed by a bar, where even on the coldest days people sat out front on a bench. If the winter sun was shining this bench was especially 37well-placed, lying for several hours in the light, and so it was a popular meeting point. The people on the bench smoked and talked, some with drinks from the bar, the interior of which was barely visible behind fogged windowpanes. Perched between the smoking men was often a nervous girl, who had a baby carriage with her. If the baby cried she would jiggle the carriage forcefully, while passers-by stopped and bent over the crying baby, and the smoking men on the bench laid their hands soothingly onto the blanket and mumbled pleasantly, cigarettes fuming between their fingers. If the baby did not settle down, the girl would stand up and rock the carriage back and forth in front of the bench, all the while talking in a hoarse voice and laughing loudly. She had short hair and dressed like a boy, in a beat-up leather jacket and heavy army boots. She begged the men on the bench for cigarettes. They were generous and complied, and she lit them hastily. Her hands were nearly blue from the cold and chapped, with gnawed nails.
Located across from the bench was a butcher. Meat was delivered in the mornings – almost every day I saw a delivery van parked there, with half-carcasses hanging inside. The delivery man shouldered a pig carcass and moved gingerly, stooped as if carrying a delicate, needy creature. The rear pig’s trotter dangled limp, yellow and rindy on the man’s back. After the pig, he carried a bundle of chickens into the shop hanging head-first, and occasionally additional cuts of meat, as well. Once he was done with the delivery, in his stained smock he joined the smokers on the bench and lit a cigarette, though always at a certain distance. He bantered with the hoarse girl and seemed to be altogether witty – in his presence there was laughter. All the while the rear door of his delivery van remained open, and anyone 38could peek at the butchered goods inside. Back at the butcher’s, the delivered parts disappeared into the rear of the shop where, through a small window, positioned behind the meat counter, you could watch the sausage maker at work. The sausages from this butcher were famous and highly sought after, and day after day a vast amount of meat was pumped out of the grinder into long skeins of casing, which at fixed intervals an assistant fastened a few times with twine before twisting. Later these fastened bulges would be sealed with metal rings at the base of the sausage. The long sausage chains were then hung and looped several times around rods, just beneath the ceiling.
On the windows positioned barely above ground next to the butcher’s shop was written, in elegant letters: Onoranze funebri Pizzuti. A few steps led down to a door, which I never saw open. Nor did I ever observe light in these windows; it must have been dark down below, even by day. I imagined that these half-subterranean rooms were also damp and freezing now in winter. But the Pizzuti undertaking business was represented not only in these vaults; it was omnipresent in the village, and the finely lettered windows might have merely advertised the place where the coffins were stored, conveniently located directly across from San Rocco, the church nearest to the cemetery, whose bells were always first to strike the hours and quarter-hours. There was a Pizzuti wreath and flower shop farther down in the village, where women were invariably occupied with putting together large, colourful floral arrangements, and farther was a large shopfront office with catalogues in the display window featuring coffins and grave decorations. There the bereaved were advised on next steps. A glossy grey-black hearse, which had the 39same inscription as the windows next to the butcher’s, often edged broadly through the narrow village lanes, usually empty, and it always caused a bit of commotion when rounding the particularly sharp and tight curve in front of the Arab greengrocer. Occasionally I saw the hearse, filled with flowers and wreaths, parked next to the church when a burial lay ahead. Funeral services were all held in San Rocco – or at least I never observed the Pizzuti hearse at any other church. The driver, in livery and a large hat, stood like a watchman beside the vehicle as singing came from the building. On such occasions the square was usually full of men. Women went into the church; I once saw the crowd part for two women in black, forming an honour guard, and as soon as they had disappeared behind the church’s doors the men reconvened into the same group they had formed beforehand, smoking and talking gravely. The Pizzuti driver, who also smoked, always had company, but in contrast to those around him there was something about his posture that was almost soldierly, due perhaps to his heavy peaked cap with a golden P.
I avoided looking at the coffin, which after the service was brought out to the hearse and slid into a sea of flowers. Sometimes after arriving back at my apartment I would look out the window down to the street, where an unfailingly small funeral procession trickled to the cemetery. The guests had surely already expressed their sympathy at the square, and for many this journey would have been too arduous. I was never witness to a ceremony, never saw a coffin being lowered into a grave or slid into a fornetto. I only came across the accumulated bouquets and flowers, which wilted away and ultimately ended up on one of the rubbish heaps, evidently later dispersed among small fire pits and burned. Animals 40also tampered with the rubbish, and, on stormy days in particular, dogs appeared, having found their way in between the bars of the gate, and descended on the artificial flowers, shredding them and trailing torn petals out into the street.
BLACKBIRD DAYS
The days grew longer, but barely warmer or brighter. At the cemetery I listened for birds and heard none, nothing but the jeer of a jaybird in flight, the raspy sounds of magpies lingering outside the cemetery, or the hooded crows. The crows liked to gather in loose groups at the edge of the olive groves, near the road, where scraps that still yielded sustenance could always be found. The cemetery was, nevertheless, not quiet; there was always a clanking of ladders, a rush of water filling up watering cans, engine noises from the various equipment with which workers felled, sawed, and chopped, sucked up leaves in corners. Cemeteries are usually home to birds – I would have expected to find coal tits here, linnets and nuthatches, even black woodpeckers and tree creepers. In lieu of their calls, the air was filled with the drone of a radio mast, which, bounded by clumps of bamboo, rose up directly next to the cemetery. Scattered cypress saplings buckled over, as if in pain, right-angled away from the droning mast. The unbroken buzzing ran beneath the occasional small talk of grave visitors like a murmur. Elsewhere, I saw birds: in the bushes along the path to the birch grove were small flocks of long-tailed tits and, on brighter days, warblers; farther up the mountain I heard goldfinches. Above the olive groves that surrounded the house I heard the green woodpecker but never saw it. The shattering and shrill, yet often also heartrending, wistful, and anxious sequence of tones that the green woodpecker uttered became, in this winter quarter year, the sound that grew entwined with the village, the house, the groves, the hillsides, drawing everything to it – the light, the colours, and the ever-shifting layers and grades of blue and grey in the landscape. On mornings 42without rain, it was the first bird I would hear; with its call it seemed to be forever letting itself plummet from a high point, because despite the call’s loudness and density, it faded as if dying away, as if the bird were capitulating, falling silent in the face of something larger again and again, without my ever having seen it, even at times when its call sounded so near and hung so out in the open, distant from all treetops, that the invisibility seemed incomprehensible, unfathomable, as if either this call or the invisibility were a trick, an uncanny joke played on me every day anew by someone unseen. Even the childhood lesson, to look for the green woodpecker in the grass, was no help and the bird remained a sound, which came closer to my heart each time I heard it, without ever taking visible shape.
In late January, wet snow fell. For two days the clouds hung so low that I never saw the village. I laboured on my daily walks through the heavy damp air and swathes of wet woodsmoke. I met the caretaker at the gate, a nervous woman constantly busied with the fastidious cleaning, putting-in-order and arranging of the estate. She lived with her sister in a narrow house next to the entrance gate. In the mornings, at the break of day I would hear the two women exchanging words loudly. The sister stood on her tiny balcony, while the caretaker, on her equally tiny terrace, chopped wood for her oven, or hung laundry to dry. I saw her every day, yet knew nothing about her family, her history, her life – nothing aside from these reciprocal shouts at dawn, which occasionally sounded like quarrels, and the television’s flickering in her room past nightfall. I preferred to keep a distance from her nervous desire for order. But on this day, shrouded in white, wet cloud, when she appeared all at once communicative and calmer, she pointed upwards 43– surely to the sky, which couldn’t be seen – and said: Giorni della merla!
The blackbird days are the last of January, in Italy supposedly the coldest of the year. So cold that one day a blackbird and its young, freezing, searched for shelter in a chimney. On the first day of February the sun shone and the blackbird, once white and radiant, emerged dyed forever black from the soot, but the bird was content, grateful for the sooty chimney’s warmth. This story of plight and metamorphosis with its subsequent moral – sealing the winter fairytale like a leaden stopper – is told in several variations, but it always involves these days of the year, and they are always referred to as the days of the blackbird.
On the first of February the sun shone this year, too. The caretaker, rushing past, promised the end of winter, while the cheesemonger, accompanied by his daughter’s grinning nods, explained that proper winter only begins in February. With his hand in front of his apron he demonstrated the height of the snow some winters – and never until February! he said. So much for blackbirds! He made a dismissive gesture with his hand and I paid his daughter, who on that day wore an old-fashioned mob cap, like a chambermaid from an early film.
In the afternoon I found a dead bird on my narrow apartment balcony, from which I could see only the cemetery and not the village. In the morning, viewed from this angle the cemetery hung like a colourless, angular bulk in the shadows; it could have just as well been a factory, a bunker, or a prison, untouched by the morning light. Now the sun shone brightly, and the cypresses stood as sharply excised figures against the blue sky. For the first time since my arrival, the balcony tiles were warm from the sun. The small bird lay there as if 44nestled against the wall to bask in the light, and it was still soft and warm, but no longer living. I found no injury. It was a coal tit, its small head bore an all-black hood, which began at its beak and left blank a white spot on the back of its head. Around its neck, too, was a black line. The hood glistened in the sun, and the cream-white down on its belly trembled in the gentle breeze. Its back was dark grey, its wings somewhat darker with two rows of extremely delicate whiteish flecks, between which the feathers appeared blacker than on the rest of its wings. How tiny, how surreally small creatures look, once drained of life. The bird lay so light in my hand, as if it were hollow: it weighed practically nothing, a pitiful thing, which now so soon after its death one could hardly imagine capable of life.
I waited until dusk and once the television in the caretaker’s room began to flicker I buried the bird between the olive trees below the terrace.
