Best European Fiction 2011 by Aleksandar Hemon

Author:Aleksandar Hemon [Hemon, Aleksandar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2010-11-22T06:00:00+00:00

It’s dark as Clara gets up but by the time she’s made the coffee morning has broken and another bad day begins. Rain spits against the window and turns to tears on the cold glass. A blast of wind ruffles the palm tree in her patio so badly that it looks like the tossed hair of some garden giant.

When she’s washing up, though, the sun creeps out from behind a cloud and casts light on the west side of the garden, shining on the heaps of leaves that lie in big drifts under the hedges. She’ll have to rake them up before she goes, if she gets a chance, if the rain holds off, if all goes well. Alan used to do that sort of thing, before they broke up, ages ago when Eoin was five. Eoin has never raked leaves, or done anything much in the garden. Your children know the garden is not their responsibility, whatever about the inside of the house.

A wild gust sends the leaves charging down the garden like a cavalry racing through the sleeping grass.

It’s then that she sees the old woman, in her mind’s eye, raking the leaves off her driveway, making those neat hillocks of golden light along the edges, and her husband helping her. She sees them there, moving together rhythmically, old people clearly accustomed to working together, raking leaves or washing dishes, hanging clothes on the line. They look like characters in a soothing pastoral painting, with a title such as “The Reapers,” or “The Gleaners.” They look like a couple working together making hay, or footing turf, or gathering seaweed, on a golden morning in a blessed landscape in the west of the country, miles and miles and miles away from this cold suburb, which looks as if all its roads and houses fell out of the sky and just happened to land on these unremarkable fields, miles from anywhere that makes sense. Miles from the city and miles from the mountains and miles from the river. Miles and miles from the silver sea.

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