When Sepp Kunzli had left, Hanlon changed into ski clothes and walked out alone to look at the town. His first day in Bad Quellenberg was nearly over and he needed time and privacy to ponder the experience.
The snow was still falling heavily, filling the air like blown feathers, softening the harsh contours, icing the bleak trees, coating the town from road to rooftop, deadening the footballs of the homing burghers. The mountains were hidden by a mist that swirled in from the southern defiles and drooped in ragged streamers over the pines. Yellow lights pricked out round the amphitheatre of buildings, and already the dusk was darkening into night.
From the entrance to the Sonnblick, the road wound downwards through buildings of diminishing importance, towards the centre of the old town, where the waterfall ran under the roadway, a silent ice-bound torrent, writhing fantastically from the steep crags to the valley floor.
When Hanlon moved out from the lighted doorway, the cold hit him like a knife and he twitched the hood of his parka up over his head and walked briskly down the slope. Behind him he heard the frosty tinkle of bells and he stepped aside to watch the passing of a peasant sleigh piled high with firewood and driven by an old man with Bismarck whiskers and a high green hat. The horse stepped awkwardly on its high-toed shoes and its breath made little cloud puffs among the fluttering snowflakes. Hanlon followed the silver music of the harness down the road.
The first buildings he passed were high and dark, their windows were shuttered and their balconies covered with board frames to protect them from the snow. Their doors were locked and the snow was piled high on the deserted steps.
These were the big hotels, pride of the town, source of its boom-time revenue. Now they were white elephants, eating their heads off, the interest piling up on their mortgages, the snow ruining the roof covers, the water freezing the pipes, the dank cold of winter seeping through their corridors.
'This', thought Hanlon moodily, 'is the way towns die, and empires too. Not by the sporadic cataclysms - war, earthquake, fire and flood - but by the slow recession of life from the members towards the small pumping heart, whose ventricles are the market, the shops, the beerhouse, the church. After a while the heart stops too, because when the members are dead the body is inert and useless, and life is a fruitless repetition of pulse beats - lost energy, motion that leads nowhere!'
Then he remembered that this was the purpose of his own coming: to jolt new life into the fading heart, to set the blood moving outwards again to the cold extremities, to give them warmth and articulation and a new direction. Instead he had wasted a whole day on a cynical display of power, as if one frightened a dying man back to life, instead of coaxing him slowly to desire it first, then fight for it.
Morris West "The Second Victory" (excerpt)
Published by Harper Collins, 1977
No comments:
Post a Comment