{They had returned.}
{Back to the beginning.}
{With a joy hard to contain.}
Yesterday I spent the day reading. I began early, the room suffused with soft light, and all I needed by my side on the Japanese packing chest. I finished Andreï Makine’s Le Testament Français and the scenes drawn of Paris before the Great War, of the Soviet Union under Stalin and WWII, of a life lived behind the Iron Curtain all seemed so clear in their description that I am sure they were my actual memories too. From the consistency and comfort of familiar objects to the sky above described in various scenes, from the mirrored black pools of the eyes of an animal as it slowly dies, to hoar-frost that covers all, and knives brandished in the mouths of mutilated soldiers who without their legs resemble samovars. These images remain in my mind as if I saw them with own eyes that very morning.
A shift of the pillow behind my head and a stretch of the arms, I picked up Herta Müller’s The Passport and read it in one largely unbroken sitting as befits her poetic text, her frankness. A brief scene describing a goat skinned alive made me gasp aloud and with heart hammering against chest confines I raced to the end. An apple tree that eats its own apples, owls and superstitions, bribery and a surreal picture shaped of a German village in Romania, I was travelling far. And then, then, at book’s conclusion, I picked up Tolstoy’s War and Peace. A day spent reading, a whole day. It was just what I needed.
It was in picturing this woman's handbag amidst the crosses, under the Siberian sky, that I began to have a feeling for the incredible destiny of things. They travelled; beneath their commonplace exterior they accumulated all the phases of our lives, linking moments that were very far apart.(Le Testament Français, Andreï Makine)
+ (An evening edit) A library of books.
