To the Wedding Read Free Page B

coffee when an orchestra files in, tunes up and starts to play. Tchaikovsky! Maman hisses. A disgrace! For Czechs it’s a disgrace! We have our own composers. I ask her if she knows the Doors? She shakes her head. Jim Morrison then? No, tell me about him, you must tell me. I recite in my poor English:
    Strange days have found us,
Strange days have tracked us down.
They’re going to destroy

Our casual joys.
We shall go on playing
Or find a new town …
    Say it to me again, slowly, Maman asks. So I do. And she sits there gazing at me. After a silence she says something I immediately wanted to write in my diary. You’ll neverhave, she says, all of you, the future for which we sacrificed everything! I felt so close to her at that moment, closer than my sister ever is. Afterwards, in the tram, we cried a little on each other’s shoulders and she touched my ear, fingering it—like the boys at school try to do.

T he roar of a waterfall. Jean, the signalman, has left his bike on the mountain road, its two headlights still burning, and he is picking his way across a kind of shore of stones. The waterfall is behind him. On the shore there are many boulders, some as small as him, others much larger, which have fallen from the peaks. Perhaps yesterday, perhaps a hundred years ago. Everything is stone, and everything speaks of a time which is not ours, a time which touches eternity but can’t get back inside it. Perhaps this is why Jean Ferrero left his headlights on. The crags and mountains around the shore are lit up by a pale light, the stars are fading. In the east, towards which he is walking, the sky is the colour of a dressing over a wound which bleeds. He appears totally alone in the vastnesswhich surrounds him, but this may be more evident to me than it is to him.
    A mountain is as indescribable as a man, so men give mountains names: Ovarda. Civriari. Orsiera. Giamarella. Viso. Each day the mountains are in the same place. Often they disappear. Sometimes they seem near, sometimes far. But they are always in the same place. Their wives and husbands are water and wind. On another planet the wives and husbands of mountains may be only helium and heat.
    He stops and squats before a boulder, whose southern side is covered with lichen. It is the south winds from the Sahara which bring rain here. They gather clouds of vapour as they cross the Mediterranean, and these condense to make rain when they touch the cold mountains.
    He’s looking, as he squats, into a pool of water beneath the boulder. The pool is the size of a washbasin. A current of water flows into it from under the rocks and, on the side where he is squatting, overflows into a gulley, which captures the little stream no larger than the width of two fingers. In the depths of the pool the tiny current is as continuous as the roar of the waterfall and he is staring at it. Its rippling waves are like those of hair and their curling is the only soft, unbroken thing to be imagined here among the jagged mountains at daybreak. He changes position and kneels on his knees, head bowed. Abruptly he puts a hand into the basin and splashes a handful of the icy water over his face. The shock of the cold stops his tears.

    When I take the train with Papa, he talks railway talk. When I’m alone, I see soldiers. I know why. Ever since the History Prof, told us about the accident that took place in 1917, I’ve seen them. When the train’s empty, like this morning, they are there. The ticket collector just came in and said: Ah, Miss Ninon, so this term you’re going to take your Bac! Now he’s gone and all I see on this fucking train are the soldiers.
    Not officers, common soldiers. Young men like the ones I talk to in the Tout Va Bien Café. The train is packed with them, with their rifles and their haversacks. A long train packed with soldiers can change history, Papa says.
    My soldiers, they’re happy, it’s nearly Christmas, the twelfth of December, they’ve left the front