Between the Stillness and the Grove by Erika de Vasconcelos

Author:Erika de Vasconcelos [de Vasconcelos, Erika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36718-1
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2001-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In Odzun, Dzovig hadn’t asked the woman about the grove. She had wandered around to the back of the house and found some buildings that were dilapidated but nevertheless looked like recent additions. She had followed the outline of what had once been a low stone wall, she had followed it until she could see the gorge, but there were no trees there. In the village, there was a smell of burning wood and chestnuts. There were yellow flowers, sunflowers, growing in a line beside some broken-down cars, car parts rusting in the grass like metal carcasses.

Odzun was the kind of place whose configuration you could memorize in a day. Tomas had probably memorized it already, the architecture of it, even though the houses and the short roads would have told him nothing of what went on here. They had passed small groups of men in the village, idle men who stood with their cigarettes, young men who had looked at them with a vague curiosity before turning their eyes back to the tips of their own boots. And they had seen children playing, two boys pulling tape ribbons out of cassettes and holding them across an intersection like some line of defence, a demarcation of property. Dzovig had stopped when a piece of tape had blown against her knee, not wanting to cross the imaginary barrier, but the boys had scattered almost immediately, leaving dark ribbons on the ground. Tomas hadn’t spoken to the boys, or the men. In a way, Dzovig understood how he could accommodate his love for the old churches so easily; they were inanimate, they didn’t talk back. Or if they did, they spoke only as emblems, proof that some things were capable of lasting. Perhaps he held this fascination in common with those who had built them, men who had carved infinite patterns on slabs of stone, the world concentrically divided until the very idea of cessation seemed an impossibility.

Earlier, at the church, Dzovig and Tomas had sat under an arcade, eating the fruit and bread they had bought in Dilijan.

“Your mother must have come here a million times as a girl,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“I think she used to paint here.”

“She never told me that.”

It was the end of the day and the sun was low. Around them the mountains were immense, purple and black. Dzovig looked to the edge of the grass, the line where the earth suddenly dropped off and she felt herself unsteady, held up on a plate by some invisible hand.

“It’s beautiful here,” she said.

“In twenty years, there won’t be a dog left in this village, only this,” Tomas said, pointing with his chin towards the church.

“Do you want to look for the house?”

“What house?”

“Where your mother grew up.”

“Not now,” Tomas said. “Do you suppose anyone has ever had sex in the church?”

“In ten centuries? Probably.”

“The priest, most likely.”

“With himself.”

He was laughing, finally, and she felt grateful. She couldn’t quite remember the last time he had laughed.

“It’s getting pretty late, you know, we should probably look for a place—”

“Let’s just wait,” he said, “wait a while.

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