Patrick Hartigan

The Village is Quiet
23 May - 20 June 2009

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Wet snow is falling. It is falling from the North; cold wind is blowing through the valley from the North.

No-one was in the street today. It was quieter than ever. Only one man in a dirty green parka, hood darkening his face. He came down-village like the grim reaper as I carried bags of bread and milk. An empty sack hung from his shoulder.

It’s not freezing. The ground’s too warm for snow; roofs are too warm for snow and it dies there as it falls. Snow hits the ground as water, drops of water line up in rows at the edges of roofs. The drops splash and echo in the quiet yard, so that you see snow but you hear rain.

The kitchen is airless. Sitting at the table, I filter air like a fish, seeking from it, in vain, something I can use. The gas flame has eaten all the oxygen. Soup is loudly boiling and filling all the space with smell. Not a bad smell, the smell of food, but it makes the air heavy. What I want is the thin, sharp air outside. I open the door for an illicit minute. Hard-won heat rushes out and long fingers of cold reach around me, but I am rewarded with the cool joy that fills my lungs.

There is that sound, of the water’s rhythm, irregular in some intelligent way. Ears try to decipher dripping into an unknown music.

I know someone will stop me. I hear grandpa in the yard; I hope he can’t see the gaping door. I wait. I fill my lungs with crystal air, hoping to fill them enough to last me for after. Time compels me to the door. There’s grandpa, shuffling across the wet yard. Walking stick pointed at heaven, he says, airing the room, are we, airing? Yes, a little, I say, hand on the door, and there is the sound of the door in its frame and the racing sound of the soup, and the interruption is averted.

The clock ticks double-time. Two dogs arranged as breathing circles on the daybed. Invisible hands in the gas heater drum another erratic song with tiny hammers, as metal expands with heat, straining to remake warmth in the room.

Grandma makes quiet entrances and exits, collecting dark clothing for the washing machine. She launches it at twelve, when power is cheap; it takes off slowly, with bouts of humming, but at the end of the cycle it spins like an ardent helicopter.

I stir the soup, taste, and add salt from the glass salt-box; stir, taste again, and add another spoon of salt. The falling snow is small and sparse now. Dogs sigh and groan from sleep.

Grandma comes softly, cautious face asking if I am working. I close my notebook. She tells about the big brown goat.

Mancie is old. She was here when I flew back the first time, ten years ago. She has borne many young, and should be getting fat again. But she is picking at her hay, and getting thinner. Grandma said to grandpa why don’t they sell her to the gypsies, if they can get a thousand crowns. Old but big; she will make lots of soup. But grandpa said no; he always says no (if she’d said let’s eat her, he’d have said let’s sell). So grandpa said, let’s get her slaughtered.

His son the butcher. But how can grandpa eat her, the old companion, a decade of lazy summer days looking down on their village together, as younger goats have come and gone? Her pieces would not even fit the freezer. And how do you eat soup made from the backbone of a friend, thinking her name, even if the pupils of her yellow eyes had been rectangular? And he can’t even bear to see the slaughtering.

Grandma says that grandpa said she had a ruthless character. Their dog had died. She had watched their son-in-law scrape a hole under an apple tree, the sour-appled tree at the top end of the garden, and place in it the old dog wrapped in cloth. Grandpa could not bear to go. She brooded on his judgement; then she said: and do we not stand watching as they lay into the earth the coffins of our loved ones?

Lenka Miklos

January 2009