Mouroir

On the Way to Ku

When we were brought here as war prisoners. I can’t go on. When we were brought here as prisoners of war it was a journey which stretched over seasons, always through a landscape of mountains, always covered with snow and ice. High, where breath is dry and bitter. Endless distances over glass. On the last rounded summit above the city one wild horse remained etched against the skyline. The troop of horses which followed us all the days of our lives, at a distance, and stopped when you looked back, the breaths lovely warm snorting ribbons, and then sometimes pawed with their forelegs at the ice so that the earth sounded in a hollow resonance, the troop of horses gradually drifted off. (I believe there are among us travellers who sneaked away in the quiet of the night to furtively mount the horses, but I do not know this for sure.) Except for the last one, the one with the ruddy colour of a satsuma and with patches, untamed, high-spirited, who stayed behind on the curve of the white horizon while we moved ever nearer to the city. Until the horse was only a speck on the earth’s edge. And long after the others had continued I still kept looking around. Thickly swollen with tears my throat was.

We stink. Our bodies stink. The rags on our bodies stink. The animal skins wrapped around our feet stink. In the city we shall get freshly ironed clothes. The building where we are lodged is in an offshoot of the city, an isthmus between white and white of snow. Below the building the street is full of people. There are cinema halls advertising unknown flicks, of romances in distant lands and people with embroidered jackets who can swallow swords and sticks of fire just like that in the open air. There are boutiques and very small shops, some run by orientals selling exotic spices and noodles. Perhaps there are brothels too. But the building in which we are lodged on many floors is solid and new. That is to say it is in the process of being renovated and rebuilt for strewn over the floors inside and piled against the walls are heaps of scrap. The new rises up amidst the rubble of the old.

The prisoners of war have new clothes. Lightweight suits. But their faces bear the tracks of neglect. That one with the yellow visage covered by wrinkles and stubble is a famous philosopher. Except (or therefore) that he is also an alcoholic, he says with tears like glad tidings over his cheeks.

Here my wife lived. I roam through the rooms full of accumulated rubbish, from the one room to the next, down stairs and up steps. The floors are freshly laid, the walls strong. Those window sashes she had painted blue so that they may seem like framed entrances to heaven. And this, this unfinished tapestry, she embroidered. Look, it is the repetition of our faces until the mouths together become one black orifice. Far, very far away, in the direction of all our seasons from which we came, on the last crest of the unfolding mountain chain, a wild horse stands silent in the wind. Too far off to be discerned with the naked eye.

But in the snow where we have to work along the other flank of the city’s outgrowth there are queer humps under the white matter. We walk with difficulty. We stumble over things. And with the unearthing we see that these are the carcasses of horses, infinite in the distance. How deep down do the dead go? How high? In how many layers? The cadavers are transparent and smooth with the colour of glass. Where blood has not yet coagulated the scratched open surface is slippery. Nothing can freeze here. Although everything is whitened by snow it is not at all cold.

In the white landscape are small groups of brown children. Each little group must imitate the song of a different bird. Life must be tempted back to earth. New patterns must define the emptiness. The band who must call up the ducks, stiff upright in the snow, make quick quack sounds. They also have fastened to strings wooden ducks shinily painted and varnished. Like the decoys which hunters of yore deployed in the marshes.

We are the war prisoners. We are the task force. Our duty it is to lay a path of green grass over the snow. So slow, such an infinite time it takes to create the dotted patterns of all the days of our lives. But we know that we have to complete it, green and with a spongy give under the feet, and that we shall go to freedom only along that way. Freedom. Freedom will lie waiting at the end destination of the road we are building and we shall reach it on a Tuesday. And the horse — will the horse still be there?