Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud

Author:Johanna Skibsrud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group (Canada)

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BUT THEN AT LAST THEY HAD BEEN PAID, AND THERE WAS NO WORK OR anything else one morning but the heavy stink of liquor lingering in the air. Douglas woke up before anyone else had risen; he sat up suddenly, bolt upright. He only later realized it was on account of the alcohol he’d drunk the night before, because every time he indulged afterward the same thing happened. He would be wide awake suddenly, like he had never been more sober or more awake or alive in his life, and when it happened he couldn’t do anything else but get out of bed and jangle his feet around, try to shake out whatever demons had lodged themselves overnight in his legs or his soul.

And so on that particular morning he woke up very early, while everyone else was still sleeping, and walked outside. It was very quiet; not even the birds spoke. There was a heavy blanket of gray mist that had crept up over the hill and covered the tobacco fields—the last plant spudded just hours before—and it occurred to him for the first time that the world was beautiful. It was a terrible, sick feeling, he felt then, as he realized it. He felt it shoot all the way through his body—from the tip of his head, which was bare and open to the chill of the morning air, to the ends of his fingers, which tingled with a by-now-familiar sensation, which was almost no sensation at all. A sensation, or lack thereof, which (though Hadley had promised him it would) had not gone away now that he’d been paid, and in fact never would. He would still feel it even many years later—all during and even long after the war. Not as sharply or as vividly as he did then, but still—an echo of it. A memory of numbness that, through the confusions of time, he later connected not with the pain of the work, but with the beauty of that landscape, which had just then revealed itself to him.

He stood out there that morning with that chill in his heart as equally as in his head and his hands, and he prayed that he might sense in that terrible beauty some sign, something that might indicate to him the path that he should follow. He looked up into the sky, which was just beginning to lighten, into that thick blanket of mist just beginning to disperse itself into the coming day, and he prayed. He prayed out loud—to God or whatever force was out there that might instruct him best.

He did not know why he formulated his question in words that he actually spoke out loud, and perhaps that was his most grievous mistake, for the words came out sounding dull, nearly meaningless in the open air. And no answer came. Perhaps if he had not spoken, but had found some language equivalent to whatever was just at that moment beginning to stir in his heart, then he might have been answered in kind.

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