When I went outside, I saw that the moustachioed men who had summoned the priest were now greeting him in front of the cottage. The priest hadn’t been able to drive all the way here – his car was stuck in a snowdrift, so they’d had to bring him here by tractor. Father Rustle (as I privately called him) brushed off his cassock and gratefully jumped to the ground. Without looking at anyone, at a fast pace he went inside. He passed so close that his scent enveloped me – a mixture of eau de Cologne and smouldering fireplace.
I noticed that Oddball was extremely well organised. In his sheepskin work coat, like the master of ceremonies, he was pouring coffee from a large Chinese thermos into plastic cups and handing them out to the mourners. So there we stood outside the house, and drank hot, sweetened coffee.
A little later the Police arrived. They didn’t drive, but walked up, because they’d had to leave their car on the asphalt – they didn’t have winter tyres.
There were two policemen in uniform and one in plain clothes, in a long black coat. By the time they reached the cottage in their snow-caked boots, panting heavily, we had all come outside. In my view, we were showing courtesy and respect towards the authorities. Both uniformed policemen were stand-offish and very formal, visibly seething with rage because of the snow, the long journey and the general circumstances of the case. They brushed off their boots and disappeared into the house without speaking. Meanwhile, quite out of the blue, the fellow in the black coat came up to me and Oddball.
‘Good morning. Hello, madam. Hi, Dad.’
He said ‘Hi, Dad’, and he said it to Oddball.
I would never have expected Oddball to have a son in the Police, and in such a funny black coat as well.
Disconcerted, Oddball introduced us rather awkwardly, but I didn’t register Black Coat’s official name, for at once they stepped aside, and I heard the son scolding his father: ‘For the love of God, Dad, why did you touch the body? Haven’t you seen the films? Everyone knows that whatever may have happened, you don’t touch the body until the Police arrive.’
Oddball defended himself weakly, as if rendered helpless by talking to his son. I’d have thought it would be the other way around, and that a conversation with his own child could only give him extra strength.
‘He looked dreadful, Son. You’d have done just the same. He’d choked on something, he was all twisted and dirty…He was our neighbour, you know – we couldn’t just leave him on the floor that way, like, like…’ he said, searching for the right words.
‘An Animal,’ I specified, going up to them; I couldn’t bear the way Black Coat was dressing down his father. ‘He choked on a bone from a Deer he’d poached. Vengeance from beyond the grave.’
Black Coat cast me a fleeting glance and addressed his father. ‘Dad, you could be charged with obstructing the enquiry. You too, madam.’
‘You must be joking! That’d be the limit. And with a son who’s the local prosecutor.’
The son decided to put an end to this embarrassing conversation.
‘All right, Dad. You’ll both have to make statements later on. They might have to do an autopsy.’
He gave Oddball an affectionate pat on the arm, a gesture that included domination, as if he were saying: There, there, old boy, I’ll take matters into my own hands now. Then he disappeared into the dead man’s cottage.
Without waiting for any sort of resolution, I went home, frozen through, and with a sore throat. I had had enough.
From my windows I saw a snow plough locally known as ‘the Belarussian’ driving up from the direction of the village. Thanks to the path it cleared, towards evening a hearse was able to drive up to Big Foot’s cottage – a long, low, dark vehicle, with black curtains veiling its windows. But only to drive up. At around four o’clock, just before Dusk, when I went out onto the terrace, I noticed a black shape moving along the road in the distance – it was the men with moustaches, bravely pushing the hearse with their friend’s body back towards the village, to his eternal rest in Perpetual Light.
Usually I have the television on all day, from breakfast onwards. I find it soothing. When there’s a winter fog outside, or after only a few hours of daylight the Dawn imperceptibly fades into the Dusk, I start to believe there’s nothing out there. You look outside, but the window panes merely reflect the inside of my kitchen, the small, cluttered centre of the Universe.
Hence the television.
I have a large choice of programs; one day Dizzy brought me an aerial that looks like an enamel bowl. There are several dozen channels, but that’s too many for me. Even ten would be too many. Or even two. In fact I only watch the weather channel. Since finding it, I’m happy to say I have everything I need, and I have no idea where the remote control has gone.
So from morning onwards I’m kept company by pictures of weather fronts, lovely abstract lines on maps, blue ones and red ones, relentlessly approaching from the west, from over the Czech Republic and Germany. They carry the air that Prague was breathing a short while ago, maybe Berlin too. It flew in from the Atlantic and crept across the whole of Europe, so one could say we have sea air up here, in the mountains. I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again – an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front, a moody figura serpentinata within the Earth’s atmosphere.
I find the satellite pictures and the curvature of the Earth very moving. So is it true that we live on the surface of a sphere, exposed to the gaze of the planets, left in a great void, where after the Fall the light was smashed to smithereens and blown apart? It is true. We should remember that every day, for we do tend to forget. We believe we are free, and that God will forgive us. Personally I think otherwise. Finally, transformed into tiny quivering photons, each of our deeds will set off into Outer Space, where the planets will keep watching it like a film until the end of the world.
As I make myself coffee, they are usually reading the weather forecast for skiers. They show a bumpy world of mountains, slopes and valleys, with a capricious layer of snow – the Earth’s rough skin is only whitened here and there by snowfields. In spring the skiers are replaced by allergy sufferers, and the picture takes on colour. Soft lines establish the danger zones. Where there is red, nature’s attack is the fiercest. All winter it has been dormant, waiting to assail Mankind’s immune system, fragile as filigree. One day it will get rid of us entirely in this way. Before the weekend, weather forecasts for drivers appear, but their world is reduced to the few rare lines marking this country’s motorways. I find this division of people into three groups – skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers – very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carried down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines often suffer as a result; we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war. I must surely be an allergy sufferer.
I wish there was a channel about the stars and planets as well. The Cosmic Impact Channel. This sort of viewing would also consist of maps; it would show lines of influence and fields of planetary strikes. ‘Mars is starting to rise above the ecliptic, and this evening it will cross the belt of Pluto’s influence. Please leave your car in the garage or a covered parking lot, please put away the knives, be careful going down into the cellar, and until the planet passes through the sign of Cancer, we appeal to you to avoid bathing and chickening out of family quarrels,’ the slender, ethereal presenter would say. We would know why the trains were late today, why the postman’s Fiat Cinquecento got stuck in the snow, why the mayonnaise didn’t come out right, or why the headache suddenly went of its own accord, without any pills, as unexpectedly as it came. We would know the right time to start dyeing our hair, and when to hold a wedding.