Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
The Gale
THAT LONG and empty winter, the darkness in our town yielded an enormous, hundredfold harvest. For too long, it seems, no tidying had been done in the attics and lumber rooms—pots were heaped up on top of pots, jars on top of jars, and limitless free rein to muster was given to empty battalions of bottles.
There in those charred, many beamed forests of attics and roofs, the darkness began to degenerate and wildly ferment. There, those black parliaments of pots were begun, those loquacious empty assemblies, the gibbering of the bottles and the gurgles of the demijohns and milk cans. Until one night, those legions of pots and jars rose up under the shingled expanses, and poured in a great, heaving multitude into the town.
Attics leading from attics stretched one after the other down long dark lanes, whilst an echo of cavalcades of footing-beams and tie-beams coursed through their breadths—the gambolling of wooden goats, kneeling on pine knees, only to fill up the expanses of the night upon being set free, with a gallop of rafters and a tumult of purlins and joists.
Then those black rivers, the wanderings of the barrels and jugs, burst their banks and flowed through the night. Their black, shimmering, grumbling horde beleaguered the town. That dark tumult of utensils swarmed in the night, advanced like an army of garrulous fish, an unstoppable invasion of bawling buckets and jabbering pails.
The buckets, barrels and jugs heaped up, their bottoms clattering; earthenware pots swung; old bowler hats and dandies’ top hats clambered up, one on top of the other, rising into the sky in columns, which came toppling down. And they all clumsily rattled their pegs of wooden tongues—they ineptly ground out a gibber of curses and insults, profaning the entire expanse of the night with their vulgarity, to the point of blasphemy, until their curses were fulfilled.
Finally, caravans arrived, summoned by the all-pervasive, scandalmonger creaking of utensils. The huge train of a gale pulled in and stood over the night. Its enormous camp, a black and stirring amphitheatre, began to descend in huge wheels upon the town, and the darkness exploded with an enormous, tempestuous gale, and it raged for three days and three nights...
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‘You won’t be going to school today,’ Mother said that morning. ‘There is a terrible gale outdoors.’ A delicate veil of smoke lifted up in the parlour, smelling of resin. The stove howled and whistled as if a whole pack of dogs, or demons, was imprisoned inside it. The great, badly painted likeness on its rotund belly was contorted into a coloured grimace, fantasticated by its swollen cheeks.
I ran barefoot to the window. The length and breadth of the sky was windblown. Silvery-white and spacious, it was inscribed in a huge line of energy, straining to splitting point, in severe furrows like veins of solidified tin or lead. It was full of potential energy, divided into electric fields and trembling with voltages. Upon it were drawn the diagrams of a gale, invisible and elusive in itself, which charged the landscape with power.
None saw it. They were aware of it, over the houses, above the roofs where its fury had penetrated. The attics seemed to inflate, one after another, and to burst with madness as its power entered them.
It stripped the squares; it left white emptiness behind it in the streets; it swept the whole surface of the market square clean. Only here and there was a solitary figure to be seen, bent and tossed by it, clinging to a corner of a house. The whole market square appeared to bulge and gleam, an empty bald spot beneath its powerful flights.
In the sky, the wind blew the cold and lifeless colours away, the verdigris, yellow and lilac streaks—distant vaults and arcades of its labyrinths. The roofs stood black and slanting under those skies, impatient and expectant. Those that the gale took possession of stood erect in inspiration; they grew taller than their neighbours and prophesied beneath the dishevelled sky. Then it sagged and died down, no longer able to hold in its powerful breath—which flew onward, filling all of space with turmoil and dread. And other houses stood up too, screaming in paroxysms of clairvoyance, and making proclamations.
In the churchyard, enormous beech trees stood with their hands in the air, like witnesses to shocking revelations, and screamed... screamed...
Further off in the distance, beyond the roofs of the market square, I could see the fiery walls, the bare uppermost walls of the suburbs. They reared up one above the other, and grew taller, rigid with terror and astonished. A distant red gleam painted them in its late colours.
We ate no lunch that day, because the fire in the kitchen range was blowing clouds of smoke back into the room. The rooms were cold and smelt of the wind. Around two o-clock in the afternoon a fire broke out in the suburbs and spread rapidly. Mother and Adela began to pack up bedclothes, furs and valuables.
Night fell. The gale gathered new strength and vehemence. It proliferated inordinately. It enfolded all of space. It was no longer afflicting the houses and their roofs, but now erected its convoluted, many-storeyed expanse over the town, a black labyrinth growing in endless tiers. It sprouted whole galleries of rooms from that labyrinth; it summoned up wings and passageways in a flash of lightning; it fashioned long enfilades with a roar. Then it seemed to let fall those imaginary storeys, those vaults and underground chambers, and it soared ever higher, giving shape on its own to the incomprehensible proportions of its inspiration.
The room trembled slightly, and the pictures rattled on the walls. The window panes glistened in the greasy gleam from the lamp, whilst the curtains hung swollen and full of the breath of that stormy night. We remembered that Father had not been seen since morning. He must have gone to the shop early, we decided, where the gale had caught him unawares, cutting off his return.
‘He hasn’t eaten a thing all day,’ Mother wailed. Teodor, the elder shop assistant, took it upon himself to venture into the night and the gale, to take Father something to eat. And my brother attached himself to the expedition.
Wrapped in great bearskins, they weighted their pockets with flat-irons and kitchen mortars for ballast, to prevent them from being swept away by the gale.
Cautiously, the door was opened, leading into the night. Barely had the shop assistant and my brother taken their first step into the darkness, their overcoats swelling, when the night swallowed them whole on the threshold of the house. The gale washed away in an instant all trace of their departure. Even the lanterns they had taken with them were nowhere to be seen through the window.
Having engulfed them, the gale abated for a moment. Adela and Mother once more tried to light a fire in the range. Ash and soot blew out through its tiny door, and their matches were extinguished. We stood by the entrance and listened, seeming to hear amid the gale’s laments all manner of voices, persuasions, exhortations and gossip. We thought we could hear Father, astray in the gale, calling for help, or my brother and Teodor chatting lightheartedly, just outside the door. The gale’s deceptions were so convincing that Adela flung open the door—and in fact we did catch sight of Teodor and my brother, struggling into view out of the gale, in which they were immersed up to their armpits.
They fell breathless into the hallway, struggling to fasten the door behind them. The gale assaulted the entrance with such power that for a moment it was all they could do to press themselves against the door. But finally the bolt was shot home, and the wind hastened away.
They spoke incoherently about the night and the gale. Impregnated by the wind, their furs now smelt of air. They fluttered their eyelids in the brightness. Their eyes, still full of the night, bled darkness with every beat of their lids. They had not been able to reach the shop. They had lost their way, and barely managed to find their way back. The town had been unrecognisable, so disarranged were all the streets.
Mother suspected that they were lying. That whole scene gave the impression that throughout that whole quarter of an hour they had in fact been standing by the window, and not gone anywhere at all. Or perhaps really there was no town or market square any longer, and the night and the gale had merely surrounded our house with dark coulisses, full of howling, whistling and groans. Perhaps there were no such enormous and doleful expanses as the gale had suggested to us. Perhaps there were no such lamentable labyrinths, such many-windowed passageways and corridors, played by the gale like long, black flutes. We became increasingly convinced that the whole storm was merely the night’s quixotism, imitating tragical immensities in the narrower space of coulisses—the cosmic homelessness and orphanhood of a gale.
More and more often now, the door to our hallway was opened to admit guests, grey and muffled in cloaks. A breathless neighbour or acquaintance would struggle out of his scarf and overcoat and exclaim in gasps, in a breathless voice, discontinuous, incoherent and fantastically magnified words which unreliably exaggerated the immensity of the night outside. We all sat in the brightly lit kitchen. Beyond the hearth of the range and the wide black hood of the chimney, a few steps led to the attic door.
On those stairs sat Teodor, the elder shop assistant, listening intently as the attic rang throughout with the gale. He could hear in the gale’s pauses how the bellows of the attic’s ribs arranged themselves into folds, how the roof grew limp, and sagged like enormous lungs whose breath has escaped them, how it drew breath once more, rising up into palisades of rafters, and grew like a Gothic vault, spreading out into a forest of beams, filled with a hundredfold echo, how it reverberated like the box of an enormous double bass. But later, we forgot about the gale. Adela pounded cinnamon in a chiming mortar. Aunt Perazja had come to visit. Small, mobile and thrifty, the lace of her black shawl tied around her head, she began to bustle about the kitchen, lending a hand to Adela who had plucked a cockerel. Aunt Perazja lit a handful of papers under the hood of the chimney, and broad sheets of flame rose up from them into the air, into the black abyss. Adela, holding the cockerel by its neck, lifted it over the flames in order to burn off its few remaining feathers. Suddenly, the cockerel beat its wings in the fire, crowed, and was consumed. Aunt Perazja began to shake, to curse and shout abuses. Shaking with vexation, she shook her fists at Adela and Mother. I had no idea what had so upset her, but in her anger she worked herself up into an ever rising state of frenzy. She had become one great cluster of gesticulations and execrations. It seemed that, in that paroxysm of vexation, she would gesticulate herself to pieces, divide, and disperse in all directions, into a hundred spiders, and branch out across the floor in a black, twinkling burst like the paths of crazy cockroaches. But instead, she began to grow rapidly smaller, to contract, trembling more and more and pouring out profanities. Suddenly hunched and small, she tottered to the corner of the kitchen where the firewood was stacked, and began, cursing and coughing, to rummage fervidly among the resounding wood until she had found two thin yellow splinters. She seized them, her hands fluttering with agitation, and measured them against her legs. She mounted them like stilts and proceeded to walk around on those yellow crutches, clattering over the floorboards, running faster and faster, back and forth in an oblique line across the floor. Then she ran up onto a pine bench, hobbling along its clattering planks, and from there onto a shelf of plates, a resounding wooden shelf running the whole length of the kitchen wall. She ran along it, her knees propelling her stiltlike crutches, finally—somewhere in the corner, growing smaller and smaller—to blacken and curl up like shrivelled, charred paper, smouldering into a flake of ash, crumbling into dust and nothingness.
We all stood helpless before that raging fury of vexation that had consumed and digested itself. We looked with sympathy on the sad course of that paroxysm, and returned somewhat relieved to our daily tasks when that woeful process had come to its natural end.
Adela once more clattered her mortar, pounding the cinnamon, and Mother continued her interrupted conversation, whilst Teodor, the elder shop assistant, listening to the attic’s prophesies, pulled comical grimaces, raising high his eyebrows and chuckling to himself.
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