Read Online By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel - Free Book Online
Authors: Philippe Claudel
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
comes to rearrange the dust three times a week, came across one of the notebooks—the first volume, I believe. “Fine thing, wasting paper like that!” I looked at her. She’s stupid, but no more than most. She didn’t wait for a response but went on with her housework, singing silly tunes that have been going through her head ever since she was twenty years old and couldn’t find a husband. I would have liked to explain a thing or two to her—but explain what? That I move along those lines as on the roads of some unknown and yet familiar country? What’s the use? I thought. And when she left, I went back to work. The worst of it is, I don’t care what becomes of the notebooks. I’m on number four. I can’t find two or three anymore. I must have lost them, or perhaps Berthe took them one day to light her stove. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to reread. I write, nothing more. It’s a bit like talking to myself, a conversation from another time. I lay away portraits. I dig up graves without dirtying my hands.
On that notable Sunday, I had walked for hours along the hill. A little farther down lay the town, heaped on itself, house against house—the piled-up mass of the factory buildings in the background, their brick chimneys gouging the sky. A landscape of smoke and work, a sort of shell inhabited by lots of snails without a care for the rest of the world. And yet the world wasn’t far off: To see it, all you had to do was climb the hill. That explains no doubt why families preferred to take their Sunday stroll along the banks of the canal, with its genteel melancholy, its calm waters stirred ever so slightly from time to time by the wriggling of a big carp or the prow of a barge. For us, the hill served as a stage curtain, but nobody felt like going to the show. People keep what cowardice they can afford. But for the hill, we would have had the war right in our faces, an honest-to-goodness fact. By the grace of the hill we managed to dodge it, despite the smells and noises it threw our way like so many farts from a sick body. The war mounted its stylish performances behind the hill, on the other side, in a world that wasn’t even ours—in other words, nowhere. We refused to be its audience. We made of the war the stuff of legend, and so we were able to live with it.
That Sunday I had climbed higher than usual—oh, not much higher, twenty or thirty meters, somewhat inadvertently—and all on account of a thrush I was following step by step, as it fluttered and chirped, dragging a broken wing beaded with several drops of blood. Since it was the only thing in the world I was focused on, I ended up by reaching the crest, which is a crest in name only, since a great meadow there gives you the impression that an immense hand, its palm held skyward and covered with grasses and low copses, crowns the hill. I felt by the wind in my collar—a warm wind—that I had passed the line, the invisible one that we below have all traced on the earth and in our minds. I raised my eyes, and I saw her.
She was seated casually on the thick grass dotted with daisies, and the pale fabric of her dress scattered around her waist reminded me of the
déjeuners
of certain painters. The pasture and the flowers adorning it seemed to have been arranged for her alone. From time to time the breeze lifted the wispy curls that lent the nape of her neck a soft shadow. She was looking straight ahead, at what the rest of us never wanted to see; she gazed with a beautiful smile, a smile to make the ones she offered us each day— and God knows
they
were beautiful—seem wan and remote. She looked at the broad plain, dark and infinite, trembling under the far-off vapors of the furious explosions that came to us deadened and decanted—in a word,
unreal
.
There where the front line merged with the horizon—so that at times you might have supposed several suns were rising at once, only to fall back again with the thump of a dud shell—the
On that notable Sunday, I had walked for hours along the hill. A little farther down lay the town, heaped on itself, house against house—the piled-up mass of the factory buildings in the background, their brick chimneys gouging the sky. A landscape of smoke and work, a sort of shell inhabited by lots of snails without a care for the rest of the world. And yet the world wasn’t far off: To see it, all you had to do was climb the hill. That explains no doubt why families preferred to take their Sunday stroll along the banks of the canal, with its genteel melancholy, its calm waters stirred ever so slightly from time to time by the wriggling of a big carp or the prow of a barge. For us, the hill served as a stage curtain, but nobody felt like going to the show. People keep what cowardice they can afford. But for the hill, we would have had the war right in our faces, an honest-to-goodness fact. By the grace of the hill we managed to dodge it, despite the smells and noises it threw our way like so many farts from a sick body. The war mounted its stylish performances behind the hill, on the other side, in a world that wasn’t even ours—in other words, nowhere. We refused to be its audience. We made of the war the stuff of legend, and so we were able to live with it.
That Sunday I had climbed higher than usual—oh, not much higher, twenty or thirty meters, somewhat inadvertently—and all on account of a thrush I was following step by step, as it fluttered and chirped, dragging a broken wing beaded with several drops of blood. Since it was the only thing in the world I was focused on, I ended up by reaching the crest, which is a crest in name only, since a great meadow there gives you the impression that an immense hand, its palm held skyward and covered with grasses and low copses, crowns the hill. I felt by the wind in my collar—a warm wind—that I had passed the line, the invisible one that we below have all traced on the earth and in our minds. I raised my eyes, and I saw her.
She was seated casually on the thick grass dotted with daisies, and the pale fabric of her dress scattered around her waist reminded me of the
déjeuners
of certain painters. The pasture and the flowers adorning it seemed to have been arranged for her alone. From time to time the breeze lifted the wispy curls that lent the nape of her neck a soft shadow. She was looking straight ahead, at what the rest of us never wanted to see; she gazed with a beautiful smile, a smile to make the ones she offered us each day— and God knows
they
were beautiful—seem wan and remote. She looked at the broad plain, dark and infinite, trembling under the far-off vapors of the furious explosions that came to us deadened and decanted—in a word,
unreal
.
There where the front line merged with the horizon—so that at times you might have supposed several suns were rising at once, only to fall back again with the thump of a dud shell—the
Similar Books
