I never judged the life Stepan led before the Ram’s Run. All that happened before the 31st of December 1953 was beyond judgement or comparison, for it had brought him to me in shed A, IN EUROPA. Since his disappearance, he has stayed with me where I first took him and hid him, beyond ashes. He has stayed with me as the seasons stay with the world.
The furnaces which robbed Stepan of his life took away from Michel his legs and now they are taking away his hearing. At night when he unfastens the prostheses he is legless. The two stumps are the colour of molybdenum bread when it’s cooling before the spray rains on it. Only their colour is like molybdenum. The specific gravity of molybdenum, Michel once told me, is 95.5—one of the heaviest metals, less heavy though than uranium, tungsten or lead. Legless, he weighs fifty-nine kilos. The colour alone of the stumps is like molybdenum, for they, unlike that monstrous metal, are alive. I know with my fingertips where their tissue is sensitive and the nerves murmur, and where the scarred flesh is numb, giving off warmth and taking in no sensation. On his back are light scars where they took skin to graft onto his face. Perhaps you are kissing my arse! he joked once when I was licking by his ear.
Without his artificial legs he hops like a bird on crutches. There are evenings when he lets me serve him like a king. Other times he is irritable and glowering and he pushes me away and, seizing his crutches, hops round the room like a plucked turkey. If he hears footsteps, when he’s doing this, he flings himself onto the bed and pulls the sheet up to his grey beard. He has never let his daughter see him unharnessed. Passionately he wants his daughter to have an unmutilated father.
The wind is ruffling the sheet and the sheet is slapping like the washing in the orchard of my childhood when the bise blew. It won’t blow away, Christian, are you sure?
Often the burnt come to the shop to have their pain taken away. Michel insists on being alone with them, I have never seen what he does. Sometimes somebody asks him to go down to an accident in the factory. Once or twice he has succeeded in taking the pain away by telephone. Four years ago, Louis’s son, Gérard, was pruning an apple tree with a chain saw, standing on a ladder. Somehow he slipped and the chain saw, still turning, touched his neck before clattering to the ground. Blood was pouring out of a jugular vein into his shirt. He came running into the shop, his face like a sheep’s. Michel stopped the bleeding within a minute without touching the wound. Then he sent Gérard down to the doctor, who couldn’t believe his medical eyes.
Each time he takes away the pain he is exhausted afterwards, and, when I’m there, I massage the back of his neck and shoulders to give him relief. One night when I was doing this to him, he said: Paradise is rest, isn’t it? Repose. You go to paradise after you’ve worked three shifts running, twenty-four hours without a break. You stop and there’s the pure pleasure of stopping, doing nothing, lying down. Paradise is doing fuck-all. You don’t know anything else exists. No relations in paradise, Odile, no children, no women, no men. Undistilled egotism, paradise! Isn’t that it, my love? I went on massaging him and I felt his cart-horse shoulders relaxing, accepting. After a while he turned towards me, his eyes piercing me, and he pronounced my name. Then he took me in his arms, and he carried me, yes, he carried me to the bed and murmured: It’s only in hell, my love, that we find each other!
And Michel found me there on the bed. He found Odile.
Look, look down there — can you see? — there’s a heron flying. Tzaplia, the last message before nightfall.
Tell them, Christian, tell them when we land on the earth that there’s nothing more to know.
Play Me Something
What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?
On your left is the city of Verona, announced the bus driver over the loudspeaker. Verona was conquered by the Ostrogoths, later by the Barbarians, and still later by the Austrians. In the fourteenth century Verona was the setting of the love story between Romeo and Juliet.
What is it that men have and women don’t and which is hard and long?
Tell us! demanded the boys.
Military service!
The flatness of the surrounding countryside was unfamiliar, making it difficult to judge distances. The coach was traveling fast, yet it seemed that time passed and nothing changed.
You see their maize? They’re two months ahead of us.
Finally the coach crossed the motor causeway to the Queen of Cities. In the vaporetto the men stood up very straight, as if on parade. This was because they were reminded of the first time they had left the village as conscripts in the army. The women lounged on the deck seats, and the younger ones pulled up their skirts to bare their legs to the sun. The vaporetto swayed first to one side and then to the other, like a woman pedaling very slowly on a bicycle.
How would you like a white suit like the ship’s captain?
Look at those insects!
Where?
There!
She’s been drinking!
He must change it every day.
Look! Along the water line.
Good God, yes, thousands of them.
They come up for the sun.
They’re crabs.
I’ve never seen crabs that size.
You don’t know what to look at.
I tell you, it looks like a flood.
You couldn’t make cheese here!
They disembarked at the Piazza San Marco and climbed the circular staircase of the Campanile. Afterwards the men were thirsty and insisted upon having a drink in one of the cafés on the piazza, which Napoleon called the largest ballroom in Europe.
It costs more to piss here than to drink a whole case at home!
Inside the café he noticed a poster announcing a festival organised by L’Unità, the Communist daily newspaper. Why not?
They crossed the Bridge of Sighs and stopped beneath a statue of Eve in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace.
It’s a wife like that you need!
Later the men climbed onto the terrace of the Cathedral of San Marco to look at the horses.
The festival was to be held on the island of Giudecca. From the Doge’s Palace he could see the coloured lights decorating the buildings across the water and from time to time he heard a strain of music.
If you’re not at the bus station by two, we’ll know they drowned you.
He’s more adventurous than the rest of you men!
He sat in the stern of the vaporetto with his instrument case on his knees.
You’re not from here.
These words were addressed to him by a young woman with magenta lipstick and white sandals.
How is that?
You look too quiet.
You know what I have in this box?
She shook her head. She had glasses and her black hair was drawn back in a chignon.
A trombone.
It’s not true, she cried. Play it! Please, play something.
Not here on the boat, he said. Are you going to the festival?
If you brought it with you, you must have had the idea of playing it.
We came from the mountains. I didn’t want to leave it in the bus.
Around her neck was a white necklace.
You, do you live down here?
In Mestri, across the bay, where the oil tanks are. And you — I’d say you work on a farm.