A Swarm of Dust. Evald Flisar

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СКАЧАТЬ They had noticed that there was a difference between them and Hudorovec, that he was very much his own man, and they became uncomfortable, for at these words Hudorovec did very little, they had seriously offended him, he frowned but he did not move, nor did he say anything. They were not prepared for such a reaction, they didn’t understand it. Hudorovec felt humiliated. But the others had experienced so many humiliations that they no longer felt new ones, and it was impossible to cause offence amongst them. And now Hudorovec was acting so oddly! It had never occurred to them that they might hurt his feelings, for they had only given him good advice. And yet he was being like this!

      After this conversation he stayed quiet for two days, he looked so disgruntled that his eyes bulged even more, he took to sitting in the woods, gasping for breath as if he had asthma or was carrying a heavy load. Then one day he reappeared and called his son. And they proceeded to move all the family’s possessions out into the open.

      The others stared: ‘Hudorovec, what the devil are you playing at, what’s wrong with you, man, we’re not throwing you out, take those things back inside!’ But Hudorovec said not a word and his eyes became sharper and brighter with satisfaction, for this was his idea of revenge. They all saw that the man was stubborn, defiant and that he could not be dealt with in a reasonable way, their way.

      Then he produced an axe from somewhere and began to carry it around, so that all the Baranjas, Horvats and Šarkezis could see it, and he did it without a grin, his face oddly distorted. The mother and boy used to sit among the trees the whole time. She would cook something in a pot and the boy would gather firewood. They kept whispering to each other, they spoke to no one else, and the community thought them strange, impossible to understand.

      Then one day the sound of an axe being used came from a nearby wood: Hudorovec and his son were cutting down trees. The wood lay below the top of the hill and spread across its slopes into the valley. To the left were some bushes above which stood the gigantic old chestnut tree. When a number of straight trees had been cut down, they moved to the other slope, across the stream and cut their way forward. Every evening they went down from the stand of beech trees, across the meadow and the stream and up into the woods. While the father swung his axe, the boy had to stand guard on the edge of the wood, which belonged to a local farmer, or so the Baranjas and Horvats said. The sound of trees being cut down continued to come from the woods. Then they dragged the timber into the valley, to the stream and beyond it to the settlement. It was hard work. The boy would have collapsed under the weight a hundred times if his father, at the front, had not cursed and threatened that he’d skin him alive if he didn’t keep up. The mother did not help, she had fallen ill and was drifting through the trees like a shadow. Finally, when the timber was all in a heap, Hudorovec silently chose a space near the other houses and began building.

      Then the Baranjas, Horvats and Šarkezis came and said that they would help, and that they had quite a bit of experience, and they’d do the roof first, and a lot more mud would be needed … and here and there … and this and that … Hudorovec didn’t say a word, but they helped and he didn’t drive them away. They kneaded the mud, adding wheat husks they had acquired from nearby farms. It wasn’t long before the Hudorovec family had a new home.

      The priest didn’t know exactly when the young Hudorovec began to trouble him. Certainly not until the mother brought him to church. That was when he began to stand out in his mind. But it possibly began before, during conversations with village teachers who spoke with fear of the boy’s strange qualities. Although the other schoolchildren reacted with him in a relaxed way, he seemed too taciturn. He was completely different from the other Roma children. They represented a good third of the school and were a special branch on their own. Even their appearance was different from the farmers’ children: ragged and dirty, their books and exercise books tatty and creased, they were as careless as you could imagine, although they were clearly bright. They liked getting into fights and were always causing trouble. But from the first day, Hudorovec was a surprise. He was placid, hard-working, different. He came to school in poor, but clean clothes. He gave the impression that he simply didn’t care what was happening in school. He never listened and during lessons he stared thoughtfully at the bench in front of him. But whenever the teacher asked him a question he answered quietly, slightly hoarsely, without any awkwardness, and always gave the answer that was expected and sometimes more.

      Yet he always spoke coldly, looking at no one, staring into space, as if he saw in front of him nothing but air. The priest’s eyes were immediately opened after the first mass that the mother attended, bringing the boy with her. He spoke to Geder about it that very evening and was almost a little excited, which was unusual for him.

      ‘You know, Geder,’ he said, ‘on Sunday I met the Hudorovec family. Actually, not all of them, the father wasn’t there. Her and the boy. And that boy, I tell you … In the presence of the mother I asked him if he sincerely believed in God and he stared at me for a while as if wanting to take a good look at me, and what I felt was akin to horror, because he wasn’t really looking at me and didn’t see me. Then he suddenly said, very calmly: “I don’t know, Father”. I was stunned by his honest reply. When I chatted with him I realised that this child – for he’s still really a child – lives in a strange state of obsession, which he clearly cannot grasp rationally, or else is afraid of. He reminded me of someone who is about to act, but still does not know whether he will do so or not. And I get the impression that he does not know what the action should be. He looks as if he is caught up in this tension, this suffering! If you could see his face! Take a look at him some time, look in his eyes and you’ll see a kind of disgust, as if he has been completely shocked by something. And yet when he stares like that into the distance, his eyes almost glow, as if he is longing for something beautiful. To say that the boy is torn would not fully describe it, since it’s not that simple. And listen: evidently he’s the best pupil in the school. I asked him what the teachers were like, how they got on and he said: “I give them the answers they want to hear”. I looked at him in disbelief: “Surely you answer what you think is right, don’t you?” And after a while he shakes his head. “Why ever not?” I asked him. Now he replied very decisively: “What they say does not come from them, but from elsewhere, and it seems to me that what they don’t know is different … They scare me. I want that other thing, what I call theirs, even though it scares me … ” That’s roughly what he said, Geder. I couldn’t repeat his exact words, I was a bit shaken. But imagine! The child seems intelligent, but Geder, I’ll say this only to you: I get the impression that he’s not quite right. A strange child, strange and mistrustful. That also worries me, Geder, because you never know when it might grow into something sinister.’

      It was the last day of May. Young Hudorovec was sitting on the hill and looking at the land below. He was crouching on the grassy edge of the fields that sloped down towards the valley and among which were houses, vineyards and orchards. He could see the plain all the way to the horizon, but on the right the outline of the mountains was very hazy because of the mist; you could see them properly only when the air was very clear. On the plain were villages, woods and fields; far away were two bell towers, indicating a small town. He liked these strange places very much, for where he had lived until now everything was very different. For quite some time he had enjoyed coming up here in the evenings, to get away from the settlement. As soon as he got accustomed to the idea that the distant horizon was new to him and in his mind he began to seek other new things, then his thoughts strayed to the past of their own accord and images, events, faces appeared before him.

      Where he grew up there was no plain, there were hills everywhere, although not so high, and when you climbed to the top of one you saw more of the same. There, the view was always interrupted. Here, when he looked into the distance nothing disturbed his view. You could see where the earth met the sky. He soon noticed something interesting about this; when they first came to the plain his mother said that the people there, whenever they were thinking about something, looked straight in front of them as if staring into the distance; but in their old home, when people were thinking, they looked down, or even up at the sky, as if they couldn’t see into the distance and this had become СКАЧАТЬ