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213
OBLIVION
Translated by Antonina W Bouis
A
few days later I saw
houses on a knoll;
that was the village
of exiles. The houses seemed
transported by a mirage, an
optical illusion; as if actually
they were somewhere
thousands of kilometers from
here, near a small river and
woods, and it was the play of
light in the atmosphere this
far north that placed them
on a knoll where they could
not be.
I left the dinghy and took a
path that zigzagged up the
hill. The village, a dozen
houses, did not seem
completel y abandoned:
clearly someone had walked
down the road, splotches of
spilled water dried in the
sand. But the weeds were
too thick in the gardens, the
windows had been shut up
too long ago, the nails were
falling out of the wood; and
most importantly, there was
every indication that people
had stopped caring about
the place where they lived.
Besides which, I couldn’t
understand how there was
dirt, how there were weeds
here in the tundra; where
did the soil come from?
At the well, which is always
kept clean in villages, dogs
had dug themselves a
hollow, a dusty hole full of
fur and scraps of bone; a
torn wire hung down, easy
to brush against, the pole
was so crooked I longed to
straighten it; every object
in the vi l lage asked for