An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

Author:David Malouf [David Malouf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

IV

OUR WINTER DREAM begins.

It is my fifth year in this place, and I have still not grown used to it. Day in day out there is the same grayish light over the marshes, it snows, freezes, snows again, the wind blows steadily off the steppes. Inside our room the air is thick with smoke from the peat that smolders under us. The windows are kept barred for the most part against the wind, and can be opened only on those strange still days of absolute frost when the sky turns icy blue and the whole world holds its breath and glitters blue, gold, white, as if we had suddenly stepped through into a new land. Otherwise we huddle here in the half-dark, listening to the wind whistle around the eaves, shaking clumps of snow down with a heavy thump; listening to the wooden shutters rattle and the icicles clink, and protecting ourselves against the draughts that find their way in and blow up little eddies in the smoke-filled air. I write by a guttering candle, having to shield it, every now and then, with a cupped hand, to protect its being sucked out by a sudden gust. For a good deal of the time I sleep. It may be the heaviness of the air, or some slowing of the blood in the extreme cold, or perhaps it is simply boredom but I find myself nodding off at odd hours of the day and seem always drowsy and thick-headed. How many hours a day, I wonder, do I spend half sleeping, half dreaming? Twelve, fifteen?

The days, with so little to mark one off from another, pass quickly, falling away into absolute oblivion like the nights. A week passes, three weeks, five. Unless one notches them off on a stick, or marks them on parchment, one hardly knows they have been and gone.

I measure the weeks by how many guard duties I have done. One night in five I go out for four hours and man the wall, pacing up and down on a wooden parapet, just below the spiked summit of the palisade, with twenty others. On clear nights it can be beautiful: the moon high among clouds, the river flats bluish, broken with thick shadow, the whole countryside open as far as the eye can see, all the way to the river. On such watches you can see the wolves moving in packs over the snow, and if it is still enough, hear them howling. Sometimes a lone wolf will come right up to the wall, and once or twice a whole pack will appear, showing their fangs in the moonlight and filling the air with their terrible yowling, as they smell the beasts in their stalls, and the oxen, the asses, hearing their howls, make their own uneasy bellowing and braying in return. But most nights we just pass up and down in the fog that swirls around us like the sea, moving like blindmen with one hand extended before us on the narrow walk.

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