Rombo E-Book

Esther Kinsky

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In May and September 1976, two earthquakes ripped through north-eastern Italy, causing severe damage to the landscape and its population. About a thousand people died under the rubble, tens of thousands were left without shelter, and many ended up leaving their homes in Friuli forever. The displacement of material as a result of the earthquakes was enormous. New terrain was formed that reflects the force of the catastrophe and captures the fundamentals of natural history. But it is far more difficult to find expression for the human trauma, the experience of an abruptly shattered existence. In Rombo, Esther Kinsky's sublime new novel, seven inhabitants of a remote mountain village talk about their lives, which have been deeply impacted by the earthquake that has left marks they are slowly learning to name. From the shared experience of fear and loss, the threads of individual memory soon unravel and become haunting and moving narratives of a deep trauma.

Leseprobe

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‘In Esther Kinsky’s new novel, language becomes the highest form of compassion and solidarity – not only with us human beings, but with the whole world, organic, non-organic, speaking out with many mouths and living voices. A miracle of a book; should be shining when it gets dark.’ — Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory

‘In Esther Kinsky, German literature has an author whose books are full of poetic intelligence. … A brilliant new novel.’ — Neue Zürcher Zeitung

‘Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality. … [T]he radical view of the loner resumes its place in literature: wandering, observing, feeling their way out of an initial state of strangeness, Kinsky’s narrators regard human stories as a mere part of the natural history in which they are embedded. Although the Earth’s movements and geology, flora and fauna are given uncommon attention, the popular term “nature writing” by no means adequately describes this work. As far as setting is concerned, the author deems no material unworthy … it is always clear that for her the only landscape worth describing is the one in which she is currently situated. Far from “eco-dreaming”, without sorrow or critique, Kinsky’s novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.’ — 2022 Kleist Prize jury

Praise for River

‘A magnificent novel.’ — New Yorker

‘An extraordinary book and a major writer.’ — Nelly Kapriélan, Les Inrockuptibles

45

ROMBO

ESTHER KINSKY

Translated by

CAROLINE SCHMIDT

6

7

‘Finito questo, la buia campagna tremò sì forte, che dello spavento la mente di sudore ancor mi bagna. La terra lagrimosa diede vento, che balenò una luce vermiglia la qual mi vins ciascun sentiment.’

— Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, Inferno,  Canto III, v. 130–135.

‘Unbeknownst to me at the time, I just wanted to be seen.’

— C. Fausto Cabrera, The Parameters of Our Cage

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphIIIIIIIVVVIVIIAppendixAbout the AuthorsCopyright

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9

I

‘One of the few phenomena that almost always accompany an earthquake, and often announce its arrival shortly beforehand, consists of a curious subterranean sound, seemingly of the same nature almost everywhere it is given mention. This sound consists of the rolling tones of a row of suspended explosions, and is often compared to the rolling of thunder, when it occurs with less intensity, with the rattling of many carts, travelling hastily over bumpy cobblestones.… In Peru the intensity of this curious clamour appears to correlate directly with the intensity of the quake that follows; the same is said in Calabria, where they call this dreaded phenomenon il rombo.’

— Friedrich Hoffmann, A History of Geognosy and an Account of Volcanic Phenomena (1838)

10

LANDSCAPE

All around: a dwindling moraine landscape. Soft hills, fields, peat moss bogs in outlying depressions, karst protuberances with oak groves, chestnut trees, blades of grass sharp and thin, growing on ridges less mountainous than they appear, which nevertheless offer a view: over the hill country, the crests dotted with churches and villages, here and there a castle-like ruin that is in reality a mouldering vestige of the First World War. For its mellifluousness the landscape has a tremendous material shift to thank; glaciers, boulders, matter that it carried all the way here with an inevitable clamour that far exceeded the rumble of a rombo. Not a preluding roar, as it was referred to, two hundred years ago, but rather an ongoing rage that no human ear could have endured.

To the south the hills surrender to flatland, to the magnitude of the sky, the openness of the sea. Giant cornfields, industrial strips, highways, gravel quarries at the rivers emptying into the Adriatic Sea. Piave, Tagliamento, Isonzo, each river carrying off its part of the Alps, dolomite metamorphic rocks, pre-alpine conglomerates, the Isonzo’s karstic limestone, whose dazzling white colour people still attribute to the many bones of the soldiers fallen in the Battles of Isonzo. On clear days one can see from the hillcrests all the way to the sea, to the Grado Lagoon with dabs of island bushes, to the chiselled hotels of resort towns, like sharp, uneven teeth on the horizon.

The river that defines this hilly region is the Tagliamento. A wild river, as they say. Yet, aside from the few weeks of high water from snow melt and torrential downpours, the wild thing about it is rather the emptiness, the vastness of the unregulated stone bed, the caprice of the sparse rivulets, always seeking out new paths and courses. At the point where it exits the mountains and 11enters the moraine landscape, the river changes course, abandoning its eastward path and veering south, taking along with it the Fella from the north – hesitantly, both wavering, turquoise and white; a wavering that produced a giant triangular field of pebbles and scree, which separates the Carnic Alps from the Julian Alps, a bright plane like a wound, a space of procrastination before a backdrop of mountain valleys, before the secluded zones with their own languages, dulled by waning use, their own shrill, helpless songs and tricky dances.

The cemeteries of the hill country villages all have their own small, secluded summits with little churches and a view to the north, to the mountains, the trench of the Tagliamento valley, the narrow passage of the Fella valley, which the Romans passed through, heading north, and the Celts, heading south. To the northwest lie the Carnic Alps, cleft peaks behind pre-Alpine mountain chains, a picture book of the violence that certainly transpired in order for these mountains to be formed. The picture book is located precisely at the unstable point where two lithospheric plates collide, uneasy about their positions. Their discontent radiates eastward, into the mountain valleys of Italia Slava and the mellifluous hill country north of the coastal strip.

To the northeast one’s gaze is met by the Julian Alps and the Alps, the defensive wall of Monte Musi, appearing grey, blue, violet or orange, depending on the light and clarity. The cliffs are sheer in any light: a dark barrier, unclimbable, insurmountable, at the eastern end a mountain peak arching over it, that is, Monte Canin, white from chalk or snow, the dull eye tooth, the border tooth of the valley behind.

Two zones meet before the mountains, continental and Mediterranean climates, the winds, precipitations 12and temperatures of two migratory fields, to the land and to the sea. Thunderstorms, gales, deluges, earthquakes that all tirelessly abrade the traces of human migration running through this region that – no matter how worn down they may become – still never allow themselves to be erased. The sky falls into a dark mood, the rombo is never far away.

QUAKE

The earthquake is everywhere. In the rubble of collapsed houses overgrown by ivy on Statale 13, in the cracks and scars on the large buildings, in the shattered gravestones, in the crookedness of reconstructed cathedrals, in the empty lanes of the old villages, interconnected like honeycomb, in the ugly new houses and developments modelled on the dream location of suburbia found in American television series. The new houses stand out in the open on the field, at a distance from the rattled towns, often with only a single story – here the main point being to minimize the material that might fall on one’s head, in case once again there is… as there was that year, the earthquake year of 1976. Now it’s half a lifetime ago or more, but the script it inscribed in everyone’s memories has not faded: it is forever being notched anew by the act of recollection, by speaking of all the wheres and hows, of searching for shelter and the fear and listening out for further rumblings – in garages, in the open air, squeezed into the family Fiat, buried beneath rubble, among the dead, a cat in one’s arm. If one laid them out, all these evoked images would stretch from here, the cemetery with a view to the north, all the way to the harshly hatched line of Monte Musi, purple-blue in the distance, more a peak-of-muzzle-and-snout than a mountain of muses, jags around 13the muzzle for the eye tooth Monte Canin. Everything spelled in the language of the mountains. Perhaps at the end there would be an unexpected trail leading up to its ridge, from where one could look down onto the valley at the foot of Monte Canin, a small river valley which would form a right angle with the path of evoked images from the earthquake. One would hope for doldrums on such a day in order to read the images, for a celebratory calm to walk in along the path of images.

But today it is windy. Right by the wall with a view to the mountains that look as if folded together in this light without shadow, beside a grave sealed by a layer of cement smooth and white with a faded wreath of plastic flowers on it, stands a short man with white hair and bad teeth, talking into his phone. He is describing the grave, emphasizing that it is clean and orderly, and he slowly pronounces the name on it, even mentioning the wreath – on the fadedness of the flowers, however, he does not comment – and in conclusion, as if responding to the voice at the other end of the line, he says: Memory is an animal, it barks with many mouths.

ANSELMO

The short man with white hair and bad teeth is named Anselmo. He is a council worker who always requests work at the cemetery. There is a lot to do there the layer of dirt, covering the mound of rock is thin, and the number of graves limited. The columbaria have to be expanded, graves need to be levelled, remains brought into the ossuary, trees pruned and cut down, the stability of the grave plaques and stones tested. Anselmo knows his way around. He is familiar with the locations where the graves are sinking, knows what kind of damage gravestones can 14incur and which cemetery plot would be safest in case of an earthquake. He advises against mausoleums, pointing to the cracks in the walls of the showy family burial units. He banters with grave visitors and offers himself up as a confidant to bereaved persons visiting from out of town.

The cemetery is a recommended stop for hikers and cyclists passing through: on the northwest side of the wall there is a long panorama board where one can read the name of every peak. There the semicircle formed by the peaks and crests, surrounding the moraine landscape as if holding it in a rescuing embrace – on the west, north, and east – stretches out like a straight chain before the beholder, who first has to get used to the distortion of the landscape, letting their gaze wander back and forth between the image and the mountain range, while they graze with their fingertips the peaks on the panorama board, as if they could thus feel their constitution. Anselmo is wont to approach these day-trippers, as well, and tell them about the landscape. He always directs their gaze to Monte Canin and its summit, covered in snow into spring, and mentions that he grew up in the shadow of this mountain. When the peak is hidden behind clouds, Anselmo says: It doesn’t want to show itself today. A moody one, that Canin.

6 MAY

On the morning of 6 May a rosy light falls on the snow clinging to Monte Canin’s peak. It soon fades, the sun lies low. The slopes are quiet in the valley on this morning in early May, chalk white and green from beeches and hazelnut bushes, metallic grey from silverberry at the riverside. Beneath thin clouds the heat disperses. 15

—

Olga leaves the house early, heading down the road to the bus. When asked later, she will say: That morning as I walked down the steps to the road I saw a snake, a carbon, the kind you usually find down below along the river, and not up in the village. It lay on a piece of the wall, as if to sun itself, a black stick, yet the sun wasn’t shining, although it was warm. The cuckoo was calling ceaselessly, already in the morning. The cuckoo and this snake and all the stories I’d ever heard about this kind of snake came to my mind then, all this I can remember very well.

—

In the afternoon Anselmo helps scythe. It is still early in the year to be cutting. He will remember that Thursday. I still remember it exactly, he will say. We got out of school early on Thursdays. I still remember that it was hot outside, and after lunch my sister and I had to help down below, in the valley on the hillside, with the first mowing. The grass was already high.

The sun is a lurid hole in the clouds that day, it burns the children’s necks until they hurt. The crickets chat thinly, hastily, as if they have somewhere to be. Their grandmother cuts the grass with a scythe. The grass is heavy, she sweats, and the scythe becomes dull again and again, more often than usual, and the blade has to be whetted. The children hurry with their raking and piling. Get it done already! one can hear the grandmother calling out again and again, Do it faster!

Anselmo will remember that she was angry at the children for being slow, but she is also angry at the grass, which appears so dry and bristly and yet dulls the scythe, 16as if it were wet. The whetting stone strikes the blade without an echo, as if the air had swallowed the sound. That whole time, Anselmo will later report, we heard our neighbour’s greenfinch all the way down in the meadow.

It’s screaming as if there were a fire, says the man mowing the meadow lot next to theirs. He swings his scythe back broadly and drives it into the blades, and the sweet grass sinks down onto the earth. Still he has to pause and whet the blade just as often as Anselmo’s grandmother.

—

On 6 May snow on the peak shimmers into the shadowless morning light. The smallest mechanical action would be enough to cause the snow fields to slide into the valley. An imprudent hiker, falling rocks – that would already be enough. But this time of year there is no one out in the mountains.

—

The snake that Olga sees on the wall in the morning is black as coal. It loves dampness. It lives in water and on land and is not poisonous. In the spring when they mate, the male and female snakes entwine, as if to form a coiled rope. If they fear being interrupted, they close themselves off, thus coiled, forming a ring that can transfer an electric shock if touched from the outside. After mating, the two carbon snakes remain together until death do them part.

—

Lina is nervous this morning. The siskin calls out wretchedly. Her brother is looking for a job, and she knows 17he won’t find one. But something else remains in her memory.

What I still remember about 6 May, she later begins one day, as if writing an essay for school: Because it had been so warm, on that day we were already mounding up the soil on the potato plants, that is certain. We heard sparrow hawks, their brief, tight tones calling out to one another, we talked about it. There were three of us in the field. My brother was back from living abroad. He always liked to tell us scary stories. On that day it was a snake that someone had driven over, by the village entrance. He saw it. If it was a female snake and had not yet laid its eggs, it will bring bad luck, he said. Then the male snakes will slither through the village, searching for the guilty person. Must have been the bus driver, he said. I know the bus driver now, I also knew him then. He didn’t live in our village. After his afternoon drive he always parked outside the cemetery, where he enjoyed his lunch. As my brother told his story, I wondered whether a snake would be capable of finding the bus driver. While we worked, a sudden gust of cold wind came, very brief. The wind comes from the snow, still lying up there, my brother said. The snow and this heat, they don’t go together.

—

On 6 May a thin white layer of clouds blankets the sky, causing the beams of sunlight to become particularly sharp, broken frequently as they are by tiny drops of steam. In the afternoon a peculiar phenomenon occurs. In a doubled reflection, two pale suns briefly grace the sky directly above the snowy peak of Canin, standing eye to eye with the sun, which glides in mist over the valley. The double sun soon dissipates. 18

—

In the meadows are already spurges, knapweeds, campions; on the waysides is blue bugle. And pale pink catchflies. Here they call it sclopit. The bloom consists mainly of a two-part bladder. Children pick the blossoms and crush them in their balled-up fists, letting them explode in two brief cracks. It sounds like sclo-pit. The flower is named after the sound of the blooms bursting. The leaves of sclopit are harvested before the flowers. They are pointy and narrow and of a pale, somewhat dull green colour. Everyone has their own sclopit spot. Some people divulge theirs, others keep it for themselves.

Mara gathers sclopit on 6 May. Before she goes out, she has to lock in her mother, who has already half-forgotten the world. She had always acquiesced calmly, but that morning she cries out from behind the locked door, as if it were a matter of life and death. Mara walks uphill, away from the cries. When later the conversation turns to 6 May, she does not mention her cries: I reached a meadow at the edge of the forest above a steep slope, where the sclopit was everywhere, not a blossom yet in sight, she says. Jays called out among the pines. I filled my cloth, until I could hardly tie it shut. When I arrived home, the sclopit was wilted and droopy, as if someone had sat on it. It smelled like cut grass. I heard a child cry out and was startled. So came the evening.

—

In the afternoon on 6 May the sky above the mountain ridge turns grey-blue and dark in the southwest, as if a storm were coming from that direction, as rarely occurs. 19This pseudo-wall of clouds remains motionless for a while, then dissipates, and the sun rests white and lurid and large in the sky. Below it the snow plane facing the valley lies as if submerged in a tempestuous yellow.

—

At night in front of their doors some people place hollowed out slabs of wood filled with milk for the black snakes. In the morning the bowl is always empty, so they say. It brings luck. The carbon is a clever snake. One story goes like this: Once a sparrow hawk snatched up a carbon. In its talons the bird carried it back to its nest. Before the bird knew what had happened, the young snake had devoured all the eggs in the nest. I’ll return them to you if you bring me back, said the snake. The sparrow hawk promised, and the snake spewed out the eggs. Then the sparrow hawk brought back the snake, and since then in the valley sparrow hawks no longer snatch up snakes.

—

In the valley some people keep goats, while other people, who have more money, keep a cow or two. The stalls are not large. Gigi’s family had always kept goats. I only know about two things, Gigi says. Wood and goats. I know how to fell timber. I know how to milk a goat.

On 6 May in the afternoon he comes home from his work in the forest. The sun burns, without shining. He passes by the cemetery, where there is not a shadow, and sweats. On the street he sees a runover snake. It lies there, black in a spot of blood. Flies rest on the blood. From the edge of the forest the cuckoo calls. Gigi still remembers that the goats were stubborn. Their fur felt sticky. It was 20hot. On days like this, one wondered when Canin would finally shed its snow. When I was finished with the first goat, the second one didn’t want to come, he remembers. That had never happened before. It stood crookedly behind the pushcart. Behind the cart, its head and legs seemed mismatched. Nearby a bird in a cage whistled so loudly the milk might have turned sour. All the dogs in the village were barking. When I finished milking, both goats wanted to stand behind the pushcart. They stood there, incredibly still. It was already turning dark. The milk smelled bitter.

—

In the late afternoon on 6 May a dark shadow falls over Canin’s peak and the remaining snow fields, resting on them, like a hand. A short burst of cold wind, and the shadow disappears, as if the hand were pulled away.

—

Why should I remember? Toni says. Why not forget it all instead? Come on, Toni, tell us something, people say, we all know something about 6 May. All right, Toni says:

On Fridays my mother smoked cheese. The evening before I always had to gather wood, so that in the morning everything would be ready in the smokehouse. That evening I didn’t want to gather wood. I can’t remember why. I sat on the veranda and whittled something. Go get wood, my father said, but I remained there, seated. Below on the street people headed home. Someone whistled a tune, I think. All the dogs in the neighbourhood were howling. My father smacked me on the back of my head. I took the basket and went down to the woodshed. It wasn’t 21a proper shed, more like a few posts and shelves with a roof on top. The back wall was the side of a hill. Dirt and stone. It wasn’t late. Still light out. I took a log from the pile, and a snake shot out of the crack, between the woodpile and the hillside. It was black and long and must have been thick as my arm. After all, I was practically still a child. The grass rustled below the snake, which disappeared down towards the river. I ran back up to the house and yelled, I just saw a huge snake. I don’t believe you, my father said. I had to go back down alone for the wood and carry up the basket, all the while listening out for every sound. Everything was eerie to me, even the voices from below on the road, the yowling of the dogs, the bird calls.

—

Before dusk falls on 6 May the bare cliff on the south side of the peak lies bathed in an orange-red hue, as if reflecting the light of a sun, setting on the invisible western horizon. Briefly this glow reflects onto the snow fields, which are already in the process of sinking into the evening shadows.

—

The birds in the trees are restless. Silvia stands at the village exit, waiting for her father. She strains to hear the sound of a motor. But she hears only the brief, excited, flat trills of the birds in the trees. Like a rattling. How the birds rattled, she will say.

The sky is heavy. The mountains to the west are indistinct. Like shadows.

My father had promised to come home on a moped, Silvia says. He peddled off on the knife grinder’s bicycle, 22with our neighbour. That was weeks ago already. Then he wrote a letter, I’ll be back on 6 May. I still remember it exactly. He had got a job at the factory and would buy himself the moped, he wrote. I listened and listened into the valley. Then I saw him coming. He looked so small, and I could see that he was limping, and he was pushing the moped. I walked towards him, jumping over a crack in the street. Not until I was mid-air did I realize it was a snake. Run over. So not a snake any more, not really. Snake mush. I walked over to my father, I was so happy he had arrived. I was spooked out there, all alone outside the village, it was already turning evening.

Silvia’s father is very tired. He lifts her up in the air and sets her down on the moped’s saddle. The fuel ran out. Someone had a bad day, he says, as they pass by the flattened snake. At least that’s how Silvia will tell of it later.

—

Occasionally the carbon is seized by fury: then it bites its own tail and stiffens into a ring, charged with electricity. In this form it throws itself into motion, and the rolling ring quickly picks up speed and races forward with a high-pitched buzzing and hissing, until it’s derailed by some obstacle, at which point the electricity is discharged and the jaws release the tip of the tail. The snake lies weary, as if from an incredible exertion, and is hardly able to take cover and seek shelter. In this weary state after the race the snake is open to attack.

—

Anselmo has to go to bed early, school is in session. It’s not dark out yet, a yellow gloaming. There are no swifts to 23be heard; usually at dusk they overtake the roofs and the church tower. But in the yard the dog wails, as if someone were kicking it. The musicians are arriving at Anselmo’s neighbour’s house, to rehearse. This is what Anselmo remembers: They tuned and tuned before playing a few bars, then cursed and tuned their instruments again, but before long the bass was back out of tune, or one of the fiddles, and the musicians cursed and argued, and then a bow glided over the strings of the bass, and then over the strings of the first and then the second fiddle, and the bass again, in this manner in a circle and back and forth, the canary in the cage at the house below near the path whistled and whistled as if it were a matter of life and death, so loud that the musicians complained about it, too, and from time to time it was utterly silent, near dark and silent like never before, a very deep kind of silence that came on all of a sudden, and then a deep drone started, and a rumbling and a trembling and a grinding coursed through everything, and I jumped up and looked out the window, where I saw, in the last light of dusk, the dark snow come loose from Canin.

SISMA

On the evening of 6 May an earthquake shakes the region. The ground opens up, houses collapse, people and animals are buried beneath the rubble, the clocks on the church towers stand still, it is nine o’clock, black snakes are fleeing into the river, below the peak of Monte Canin a cloud of snow travels through the evening into the valley.

The earthquake is the result of tectonic plates shifting. There are countless words to explain what transpired at the end of a day of three suns, yowling dogs, restless carbon snakes, shrill birds. Words like tectonic plate boundaries, 24spreading centre, lithosphere. Beautiful words that you can hold in your hand like small foreign petrified life forms: Hypocentre. Surface rupture. Earthquake lights. Rupture velocity. The tremor’s path. An earthquake modifies the surface of the planet, it is said. It can be measured. The magnitude of the earthquake on 6 May was not even that great, according to the units of the man-made scale. ‘The assessment relates to the physical body and overlooks the fact that the planet may well be measured by man, but not in relation to him,’ is written in a book. In any case: The world is not the same.

Tremors seized parts of the Earth’s crust, rattling everything far and wide. Dislocations occurred, and all the frightened survivors were unavoidably reminded that they live in a zone of disruption, and without going so far as to examine the landscape for hinge lines and fractures, fault lines and radial cracks, without consciously knowing what a ‘mine tailing landscape at the edge of a subsidence area’ means, they nevertheless understand, even if only by the streaks of mortar and mites of stone in their hair, that what they have just experienced cannot be erased or redeemed, because it is beyond the categories of good and evil.

DISTURBANCES

What did the land look like before? One forgets all at once, and over the years will continue to search for it in dreams – what did the ground look like before the crack, before the fragments, the rubble and the grinding marks, the ground beneath one’s feet, from one day to the next?

The ground of daily life becomes a disturbed terrain, where everyone searches for what they have lost: groping, looking, listening out. 25