Rich Text Document (draft of October 2008)
The Gale
THAT LONG and empty winter, the darkness in our town yielded an enormous, hundredfold harvest. Evidently for too long, no tidying had been done in the attics and lumber rooms — pots were piled up on pots, jars on jars, and an empty collection of bottles had been allowed to amass endlessly.
There, in those charred, many beamed forests of attics and roofs, the darkness began to degenerate and to ferment wildly. There, those black parliaments of pots began, those loquacious and empty assemblies — those gibbering bottles, the gurgles of the demijohns and milk-cans. Until, one night, those legions of pots and jars rose up beneath 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, while an echo end p.90 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, sparkling, grumbling horde beleaguered the town. That dark tumult of utensils swarmed in the night and advanced like an army of garrulous fish, an unrestrained invasion of bawling pails and jabbering buckets.
Their bottoms clattering, the buckets, barrels and jugs heaped up; earthenware pots swung; old bowler hats and dandies’ top hats clambered one on top of the other, rising into the sky in columns, which toppled over.
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 — and their curses were fulfilled.
Finally, caravans arrived, summoned by the all-pervasive, scandalmonger creaking of the utensils — a gale’s huge train pulled in and stood over the night. Its enormous camp, a black, stirring amphitheatre, began to descend upon the town in huge wheels. And the darkness exploded with an enormous, tempestuous gale, and it raged for three days and three nights... end p.91
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‘You won’t be going to school today,’ said Mother that morning. ‘There is a terrible gale outdoors.’ A delicate veil of smoke lifted up in the sitting room, 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 cracked belly was contorted into a coloured grimace, fantasticated by its swollen cheeks.
Barefoot, I ran to the window. The length and breadth of the sky was windblown. Silvery-white and spacious, straining to splitting point, it was inscribed in a huge line of energy, 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 diagrams of a gale, invisible and elusive 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. One after another the attics appeared to inflate, 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. Barely here and there did a solitary figure, bent and tossed by it, cling to a corner of a house. The whole market square appeared to bulge and to gleam, an empty bald spot beneath its powerful flights.
In the sky, the wind blew the cold and lifeless colours away, verdigris, yellow and lilac streaks, the distant vaults and arcades of its labyrinths. Beneath those skies the roofs stood black and oblique, full of impatience and expectation. Those which the gale took hold of stood erect in inspiration; they grew taller than their neighbours and prophesied beneath the dishevelled sky. Then it sagged and died out, no longer able to hold in its powerful breath, which flew on and filled all of space with turmoil and dread. Then other houses stood up in their turn — screaming, making proclamations in a paroxysm of clairvoyance. end p.92
In the churchyard, enormous beech trees stood with their hands in the air, like witnesses to shocking revelations, and they screamed... screamed...
Further off, beyond the roofs of the market square, I could see fiery walls in the distance, the bare uppermost walls of the suburbs. They grew, one above the other, rigid with terror and astonished. A distant red gleam painted them in its late colours.
We ate no lunch that day, since 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, although now it erected over the town the many storeys of its multifarious expanse, a black labyrinth growing in endless tiers. Out of that labyrinth it sprouted whole galleries of rooms, summoned up wings and passageways in a flash of lightning, fashioned long enfilades with a roar; and then it seemed to let fall those imagined storeys, those vaults and underground chambers, and it soared ever higher, giving shape out of itself to the incomprehensible proportions of the immensity of its inspiration.
The room trembled slightly; the pictures rattled on the walls. The panes glistened in the greasy gleam of the lamp. 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 early to the shop, we decided, and the gale had caught him there 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, taking Father something to eat. And my brother attached himself to the expedition.
Wrapped in great bearskins, they weighted their pockets with flat-irons and mortars, for ballast, to prevent them from being carried away by the gale. end p.93
Cautiously, the door was opened, leading into the night. No sooner had the shop assistant and my brother taken their first step into the darkness, their overcoats swelling, than the night immediately swallowed them on the threshold of the house. The gale washed away all trace of their departure in an instant. Not even the lanterns they had taken with them were to be seen through the window.
Having engulfed them, the gale abated for a moment. Adela and Mother tried once more to light a fire in the range. Their matches went out; ash and soot blew out through its tiny door. We stood at the doorway and listened. In the gale’s laments, all kinds of voices, persuasions, exhortations and gossip seemed to be audible. We thought we could hear Father, astray in the gale, calling for help, or my brother and Teodor chatting lightheartedly just outside the door. So convincing were the gale’s deceptions that Adela flung the door open, 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. For a moment they could only press themselves against the door, so powerfully did the gale assault the entrance. At last they shot the bolt home and the wind hastened away.
They spoke incoherently about the night and the gale. Their furs, impregnated by the wind, now smelt of air. They fluttered their eyelids in the light; their eyes, still full of the night, bled darkness with every beat of their eyelids. They had been unable to reach the shop — they had lost their way and barely managed to find their way back. They had failed to recognise the town, so disarranged were all the streets.
Mother suspected that they were lying. In fact, that whole scene gave the impression that they had actually been standing by the window during that quarter of an hour, and not gone anywhere at all. Or, indeed, perhaps there was no town or market square any more, and the gale and the night had merely surrounded our house with dark coulisses, full of howling, whistling and groans. Perhaps those enormous and doleful expanses were not there at all, which the gale had suggested to us — perhaps those lamentable labyrinths were not there at all, those many windowed passageways and corridors on which the gale played like long, black flutes. We became increasingly end p.94 convinced that the whole storm was merely the quixotism of the night, 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 struggled out of his scarf and overcoat and exclaimed, gasping and 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, and he listened intently as the attic rang with the gale. In the gale’s pauses he could hear the bellows of the attic’s ribs arranging themselves into folds, and the roof growing limp and sagging like enormous lungs whose breath has escaped them, or else drawing breath once more and rising up into palisades of rafters, growing like a Gothic vault, outspread into a forest of beams, filled with a hundredfold echo and reverberating 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 full of thrift, with the lace of her black shawl over her head, she began to bustle about the kitchen, lending a hand to Adela. Adela had plucked a cockerel. Aunt Perazja lit a handful of papers under the hood of the chimney, and from them broad sheets of flame rose up into the air, into the black abyss. Adela, holding the cockerel by its neck, lifted it over the flames in order to burn away its remaining feathers. The cockerel suddenly beat its wings in the fire, crowed, and was consumed. Then Aunt Perazja began to shake, to curse and utter abuses. Shaking with vexation, she shook her fists at Adela and Mother. I did not understand what had so upset her, but, in her anger, she worked herself up into an ever greater frenzy, became a single burst of gesticulations and execrations. It seemed that she would gesticulate herself to pieces in her paroxysm of vexation, end p.95 divide and come apart in all directions, into a hundred spiders, and branch out across the floor in a black, twinkling burst, like the paths of crazy cockroaches. Instead, she began to grow rapidly smaller, to contract, trembling more and more and pouring out profanities. Suddenly, hunched and small, she tottered into the corner of the kitchen where the firewood lay, and she began, fervidly, cursing and coughing, to rummage in 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; then she mounted them like stilts and proceeded to walk around on those yellow crutches, clattering over the floorboards, running ever faster and faster back and forth, in an oblique course 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 length of the kitchen wall, and she ran along it, her knees propelling the stilt-like crutches, finally, somewhere in the corner, to blacken, growing smaller and smaller, to 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, which had consumed and digested itself. We looked sympathetically upon the sad course of that paroxysm, and we returned, somewhat relieved, to our occupations when that woeful process had reached its natural end.
Adela once more clattered her mortar, pounding the cinnamon; Mother continued her interrupted conversation, while Teodor, the shop assistant, listening intently to the attic’s prophesies, pulled comical grimaces, raised high his eyebrows, and laughed to himself.
end p.96