Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

Sergei Lebedev

human help: suppor ting, straightening, sawing, lifting. People here seemed to have forgotten all the verbs for creative activity, the sound of a hammer or the song of a saw, and had forgotten about themselves, too: being there was intolerable. There is a special color, the color of old fence boards that have been splashed all winter with the snowy mush underfoot, and in the spring the mud dries, turning earthy-gray; the color of carelessness and indifference. The whole villagewas speckledwith it, as if it had been sown over many years of drizzle; someone had hung a lantern by the gate and now its glass cover was f illed with rainwater and the canvas wick bore filigree rust crystals. What was intolerable was not the neglect itself but that life could accommodate itself to

neglect, take on its image, become identical to it. One garden was tended: strangely, it was entirely planted wi th potatoes, leaving only a narrow walk to the house, every bed filled with potatoes, as if nothing else grew anywhere in the village. Someone was inside the house, smoke came out of the crumbling chimney that dropped pieces of brick onto the mossy roof, but the windows were shuttered tight. Behind the house there was a creaking, grinding noise, metal on stone, ringing and then grinding again; the blue twilight that made the air thicken as it grew colder without losing its transparency settled on the village, and each screech causedgoosebumps,warning me not to come closer—only

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