A Man Was Going Down the Road by Otar Chiladze

Author:Otar Chiladze [Chiladze, Otar]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Garnett Press
Published: 2013-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ships still came into the port as they always had, although the water was no longer visible: rubbish thrown overboard, sticky strands of algae and yellow water-lilies covered the surface like wine-must. Only when an oar dipped into it, did a flash of water prove that the sea was still alive under its thick coating of filth. Now the fishermen had to make week-long trips far off-shore, and spend all day and night fishing, but they still came back empty-handed. If there were two or three small fish flapping their tails at the bottom of the boat, that made the unsuccessful fishermen even angrier. All they could now do was blame it all on Bedia, their former chief. ‘He wouldn’t rest until he’d made the sea really angry,’ they grumbled as they listlessly rowed their empty boats. The nets, shiny with jellyfish, had become as useless as elderly cats. They trawled them to no purpose, but couldn’t abandon them, their old loyal friends.

The city was waiting for a strange death: Queen Kama was thawing. Tents had been set up in the palace courtyard, as they had been during Phrixos’s illness, but now, as then, the soothsayers and healers were at a loss: they had never seen such a patient, or illness. The queen was thawing, like an icicle brought into the warm. In fact, she was on a bed of snow, with a covering of snow, but was still thawing, draining away, slipping off as they watched. Mules brought snow from the mountains. Water streamed from baskets filled to the brim with bluish snow, but, as rumours from the palace had it, mourning would be declared any day soon. As she withered away, Kama’s eyes grew and grew: you could even hear the stinging, blinding light pouring from her eyes. Every minute the servants cleaned the mirror’s steamy surface, for the queen had not yet lost hope: she did not believe that the mirror would leave her outside and not open the door to her. She had a mattress and a blanket of snow, she lay on a pillow of snow, staring hard at the mirror. The mirror world, too, was covered in snow, and, in this still snowscape, the queen’s eyes rested like two bright gigantic stars. Nothing else could be seen except bottom­less, endless whiteness and disturbing emptiness. The Kama that dwelt in the mirror had vanished without trace. But the queen was thawing, and the bowl under her bed quickly filled with water. The snow brought down from the mountains permeated the palace with the smell of forest meadows and dry pine needles.

But even before the queen vanished, the city witnessed other wonders. Death made its first surprise visit to Bakha the vintner in his forty-step cellar: it slipped down and in so neatly past the rowdy drunks that nobody noticed: only three days later did his kin realise. Bakha the vintner’s death was followed by the disappearance of Dariachangi’s garden, so that for some time the city forgot all about the palace and its inhabitants.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.