Matthias thought it over.
I’ll stop by once a week, the veterinarian said, to give you a hand and see how he’s progressing.
Matthias nodded.
Put him over there, he said reluctantly, pointing to the bed by the window. I’ll sleep on the sofa.
The watchman and the pharmacist did as he asked.
Come here, the veterinarian suggested. I’m going to change his bandages with you, that way you’ll know how to do it.
The pharmacist took out a roll of gauze, the first aid kit, and the jars of pills. The watchman sat on the stool by the door
and lit a cigarette.
Doesn’t he talk? Matthias asked.
Not really, the watchman answered, you know, with the accident and the medication, that’s normal. And I suppose his father dying shook him up pretty bad. At least I think so. Give him time.
Once the veterinarian saw that Matthias had understood her instructions, they tightened my splints and threw the soiled bandages into the burning stove.
If you run out of ointment, she added, you can put sugar on his wounds. That will fight the infection. But remember to always give him his antibiotics.
There are pills for pain, the pharmacist pointed out. That should quiet him down if he complains too much.
The watchman thanked Matthias, then motioned to his comrades to leave. As he was crossing the threshold after them, Matthias put his hand on his shoulder.
What if he doesn’t make it?
Come and get us as quickly as you can. But remember, his life is in your hands.
I’ll do what I can, Matthias stammered, taken aback.
Everything will be fine, the watchman assured him as he went out the door. I’ll be back in a few days with the wood and supplies.
What’s your name? Matthias asked. You didn’t tell me your name.
Joseph. She’s Maria and her husband is José, he said, pointing to the veterinarian and the pharmacist.
Joseph left, and Matthias stood in the doorway for a long time.
Maria, that’s it, her name is Maria, I thought. Then the fog overtook me again.
FORTY-FIVE
I am alone in the room. Matthias went out on his snowshoes. I pull on the old quilt that covers my feet. At the end of the bed, kilometres away, my toes are the colour of bruises, but at least they move. With the splints, they are the only part that is mobile.
Pain is still my master, but at least the bouts of fever have subsided. I have stopped waking up suddenly, gasping for breath, trying to figure out where I am. I have learned to recognize the room, the window next to my bed, and Matthias’s face. When I open my eyes, I know where I am, who I am, and what awaits me.
Not long after I was delivered here, my temperature shot up and my teeth started chattering. Matthias sat at my bedside. He put on fresh bandages and changed the sheets that were soaked in sweat. He wiped my face, my neck, and applied cold compresses to my body. He spoke to me too. I don’t know what he said, he told me all kinds of things, stories, adventures, it was like the odyssey of a man pursued by a furious god, and all he wants is to get back home after twenty years of absence. In the morning, he broke off his story and went for a nap on the couch. When he woke up later, he lifted my head, gave me something to drink and some pills. They were all the colours of the rainbow. During the day, I struggled against an invisible abyss. At night I slept with my eyes open. The way the dead do.
Often I dreamed I was running. I was running full out through the corridors of a labyrinth. Everywhere I went a red thread lay on the ground. I ran as if a beast were on my trail. I didn’t see it, but it was there, behind me. I clearly heard its panting breath and the clatter of its hooves. It was closing in. Its claws cut through the air, trying to tear off my legs. I kept on running. I was dreaming and I didn’t look back.
At the worst of the fever I must have lost consciousness, because I remember waking up, gasping for air, in Matthias’s arms. We were outside, in the pouring rain. My body was on fire and the ice-cold water helped bring me back to this world. When I regained consciousness, Matthias lifted his head to the sky as if he too had been saved. The rain poured down his face and his hair was plastered to his forehead. Then he picked me up and carried me inside. It wasn’t easy. We were soaked and I had trouble clinging to his neck. When he laid me on the bed, I was so weak I felt I was sinking into the blankets. Matthias fell to his knees and tried to catch his breath.
Over the days that followed, my fever broke and I stabilized. At the time I felt nothing outside of a tingling sensation. Then a sharp, cutting pain took hold of my body. As if thousands of nails were piercing my flesh from the inside, slashing though my spine, driving into the palms of my hands, my feet, fastening me to the bed. A black frozen pain opened my eyes in the depths of the night and made me fear I would never walk again.
The analgesics Matthias had me take reduced the agony, but they lasted only a few hours. Sometimes he would massage my legs. He would sit on my bed, take off the heavy gauze, clean my wounds, and rub my thighs, calves, and feet. I did not like him kneading me like black bread. But he was careful when it came to my wounds. After every session, the swelling subsided and I didn’t feel so cold.
My toes are still moving at the far end of my body. I believe my bones are knitting together, my wounds are closing, and the penicillin is doing its job. But the pain is tenacious, constant, tireless. I pull away the cover to look at my legs. My splints are recycled wooden slats, and belts were nailed to them instead of the usual straps. On one of the slats, I can see saw-tooth marks. On the other the trace of a hinge pulled off with a claw hammer. I am a monster fashioned from cast-off wood, bolts, and pieced-together flesh. But that’s better than nothing.
The hospitals are far away. In space and in time.
FORTY-SEVEN
It is the end of the afternoon. When he came back from his walk, Matthias stoked the fire, then went looking for a book on the other side. He reads a lot, and since I show no interest in the books he leaves by my bed, he tells me stories. Like the one about the two tramps quarrelling beneath a tree as they wait for someone who never shows up.
Every time he crosses over to the other side, a cold draft rushes through the half-open door. And every time, the draft rouses me from my lethargy and I lift my head to look into the great lifeless house. But I can see no more than a dark hallway with a light at the end.
We live in the annex of a great manor, in the summer kitchen. A porch with a wood stove and a wide window facing south. When the sky is clear, the light enters and warms the room. But as soon as the sun falls behind the horizon, we have to stoke the fire. Though it shows signs of wear and a few stains caused by leaks, the room seems to have been designed with care. The moldings feature rosette figures. The floors are hardwood. On the walls, you can pick out spots where pictures once hung.
In the centre of the porch floor is a trap door. It gives onto a crawl space. Matthias uses it as a cellar. He stores meat there, and vegetables, and everything that needs to be kept cool but not freeze.
The ceiling is criss-crossed by broad wooden beams that follow the gentle incline. In the summer, I imagine the rain must drum upon the sheet-metal roof. A sort of roll that would recall the comforting interior of cars and the weightlessness of long trips. But for now the snow piles up without a sound. When I listen hard, I hear nothing more than the beams sighing above our heads.
Matthias stands in the doorway. He looks like a navigator in the prow of a ship.
Guess what I found, he says, eager for my answer.
For a moment, the door gapes open behind him. The corridor disappears into the shadows and appears to open into a spacious salon. I picture a manor with high ceilings, comfortable rooms, and hallways branching off. A labyrinth of sorts: some rooms lead into others, but some are dead ends. A wide staircase leads upstairs, there must be a chandelier above the dini
ng room table, an imposing library, and a stone fireplace in the sitting room. One thing is for sure, the house is too big for us. It would be impossible to heat, we would burn up our wood supply in the space of few weeks. Then we would die of cold after burning the furniture.
You give up? Matthias asks.
He stares, waiting for an answer that never comes.
It’s a chess set, he says, sighing. I thought you might enjoy it.
He closes the door with his hip. The labyrinth on the other side disappears as quickly as it appeared and the walls of the porch close in on us.
FIFTY-SIX
The wind rose in the night. Squalls shook the porch. It has begun to snow. I hear it beating against the window like birds deceived by their reflections.
From this side of the dark glass, I observe my face. A large, dark stain of shadow, haggard eyes, greasy hair, unkempt beard. Under the covers, the flat outline of my prone body, thin, useless.
Matthias is in the rocking chair. He is repairing one of the straps on his snowshoes. The oil lamp shivers. Soot is slowly smearing the glass bell. The wick should be trimmed, but Matthias does not react, too absorbed by the task at hand.
We have finished eating. The dishes washed, the floor swept, the wood stacked. Everything as it should be. I don’t know how he does it. The hours run together, the days repeat, and Matthias gets busy. He never stops, except to read. From dawn to dusk, he toils, cleans, cooks. He works slowly, never hurried. The way the snow falls. And he is right. He has to do something. Winter roars, the blackout takes us further back in time, and losing touch is the most pressing danger.
Even if I won’t accept my fate, I have to accept that I am lucky to have ended up here. Maybe I will never walk again, I have lost all desire to speak, but I’m not dead. At least, not yet.
As he sews the leather strap, Matthias watches me from the corner of his eye.
You know, during the world wars, some conscripts refused to join the army, he begins. Some of them got married in a hurry, and others, like my father, went and hid in the woods and hoped they’d be forgotten. But taking to the forest wasn’t easy. The winters were harder back then. And bounty-hunters had all the patience they needed to watch the outskirts of the village for the slightest sign of life. A rifle shot, a plume of smoke, an unusual path in the snow. Military justice was generous when it came to denunciations or information that would let them locate and hunt down deserters. But most of the time, the villages supported them secretly. Provisions were left at strategic points. The poor guys came to get the stuff in the middle of the night, attracting no attention, and returned to the mountains to pursue their desperate survival. Even in the depth of winter, they lit a fire only once darkness had fallen, and when the nights were clear, it was wiser not to stir the embers from the previous day. Deep in their hiding places, the young men busied themselves the best they could as they stared at the forest moving in on them. They darned their clothes, played cards, and polished their hunting rifles. Sometimes tensions grew, and when they switched sentinel duty, they would cast wary glances at their fellows. Yet they knew they could not do without each other. If they wanted to survive, they would have to face the cold, hunger, and boredom together. They soon understood that the most important job was, without a doubt, to tell stories to each other.
The wind is still blowing. The squalls pummel Matthias’s story and make the walls of the porch groan.
Resisters and deserters, it comes down to the same thing, Matthias went on. All of them had to spend the winter in some shelter, hunkered down in the middle of nowhere, saving their energy as they waited for spring. Spring, with its liberation. With a guy like you, he tells me, it wouldn’t have worked. We would have been discovered or would have killed each other. No one can survive with someone who won’t talk.
FIFTY-SIX
I awake. The sun is high in the sky and the blanket of snow lustrous with cold. Blinding. I slept poorly last night, my legs hurt, pain seized my bones. I could not close my eyes.
Kneeling in front of the plastic basin, Matthias is doing the washing. He rubs our clothes hard with detergent and hangs them on the line above the stove.
He gets on my nerves. Not only is he indefatigable, he is surprisingly agile. He leans over, straightens, and pivots as if his age were a simple disguise. When he drops something, he often catches it before it hits the floor. He is flexible and energetic. Slow at times, but always flexible and energetic.
Often he works without a word, though sometimes he talks too much. When he changes my bandages, when he stokes the fire, when he stirs the soup, when he washes the dishes, he chatters, he chats, he recites. I never answer. After all, he is only thinking out loud.
He was brought up in a world buried under work and days, he often says. Just before the great wars. The streets of his village were unpaved. The houses were bursting with children who wore hand-me-down boots with holes. Life in its entirety revolved around hard work and a few prayers.
Those were different days, he goes on, I would slip away from the family uproar and go to watch the blacksmith across the way hammer the metal and talk to the horses. If I really concentrate, I can still hear his raspy voice and smell the scent of burnt hoof, the fire, the iron. That was the only place where I could believe in something else. As if every animal newly shod could carry me somewhere far away. My parents died young and with them died their way of being, I took over the house and little by little the past fell silent. The flame had gone out in the heart of the forge. The newspapers shouted news of the future and fresh promises hurried to seduce us. A few kilometres distant, we could see the bony structure of the city rising. Dreams came from all directions in scrolls of smoke, there was talk of lighting the streets, digging tunnels, sending up buildings higher than steeples. My children were born, the fields fell prey to pavement, the church disappeared behind office towers. The family dwelling was lost in the corridors of intersections, fast lanes, and billboards. Everywhere you looked, cranes were harassing the horizon, a thick odour of asphalt weighed upon the roofs, in the streets the belly of the city was being opened up and sewn back again. From my balcony I heard the song of sirens. Sometimes I saw flashing lights speed by, other times not. The misfortunes were distant and anonymous. Then the children left and the house became very big and very empty. The rooms echoed with the ticking of clocks. My wife and I were alone to contemplate the endless construction sites, the sweaty foreheads of the workers, the rattling of steam shovels that lifted their arms like docile, powerful beasts. I remember the dust that floated in the beams of sunlight. When the grandchildren came to the house it was a blessing. My wife glowed with happiness. Even after fifty years of life together, I never grew tired of her beauty, her charm, her grace. But time is a thief. My wife started clinging ever tighter to the things she knew. Her memory wavered and her voice trailed off in the labyrinth of her words. She maintained an irritated, confused silence. Her movements became abrupt. Hesitation filled her eyes. I didn’t know who, of the two of us, truly recognized the other. Then one day she fell in the bathroom. I felt the end was near. The phone, waiting for the ambulance. They took her a few blocks away, to a building of elevators and corridors. I visited her every day. Her eyes soon lost their colour, and nothing seemed to bother her anymore. She started smiling again, and showed no intention of returning from her enchanted island. She knew I would be there every day, by her side. With age and fatigue, the chronology of life blurred. We distrust our memories more than we do our forgetfulness. I needed time off. I needed fresh air. I left for a week in my old car. Drive, see the landscape. See the landscape, and drive. Take a long trip, then return and see my wife, my head clear. A few days later, my car broke down in the middle of the forest. I walked to the village in search of a mechanic. Then the electricity went off. At first I thought the neighbour lady would come and get me. That was what she said when I talked to her on the phone. All right, I’ll get on the
road tonight, I’ll be there tomorrow. A few days later, she still had not shown up. The phone lines stopped working. I kept waiting. I didn’t understand, she had always been a trustworthy person. I was desperate, I tried to steal a pickup truck, but didn’t know how to go about it. In any case, all the gas had been siphoned off and people kept a jealous watch over their supplies. There was no way out. I decided to settle in here. Then one night the trap snapped shut. They brought me a feverish, crippled young man. That man was you.
Matthias is still bent over the basin, surrounded by a heap of clothes and a bucket of water. On the line above his head, the pants, shirts, socks, and underwear look like carefully sorted rags.
My wife is waiting for me, he explains, and he stops scrubbing. She is waiting for my visit. She waits every day. I promised her. I have to get back to town. I have to get back to her side. I have no choice. I promised. I promised never to abandon her. I promised to die with her.
Matthias’s voice wavers. He will burst into tears at any moment.
Look, he says, pulling a photo from his pocket, that’s her.
I don’t know how to react. I pick up my spyglass and scan the empty landscape. The snow gauge shows the same amount as yesterday.
FIFTY-SIX
Today the sky has clouded over and the trees huddle together. The barometer is pointing downward. Maybe a storm on its way. It’s hard to say. When the sky darkens we always imagine a storm is brewing. The chickadees chirp among the branches. When a blue jay makes an appearance, they scatter. As soon as it leaves, they return, one by one.
Matthias brings me a bowl of soup, a slab of black bread, and a few pills. He sits down at the table, absorbed in his meditations, as I take my first mouthful. After every meal, he takes stock of our supplies and stands in front of the trap door for several minutes. Then he sits me on the sofa to change my sheets. He takes me by the armpits to move me. As he holds me in his arms, my legs swing one way, then the other, as if I were a marionette.
The Weight of Snow Page 3