Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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

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