The Hills Reply by Tarjei Vesaas & Elizabeth Rokkan

Author:Tarjei Vesaas & Elizabeth Rokkan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2019-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

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THE WIND IS RISING.

The lake will be dangerous.

The wind from the ocean blows on to the land in the darkness.

It is not quite dark, though; there is a moon. The wind sweeps in the night and howls at the chairs from the night-side. The wind grows stronger and blows the doors open, sweeping in towards the empty mass of chairs – but is stopped abruptly as if by a sudden thought. The doors slam shut again. Windows opened by the wind slam shut. It is as if all air stops streaming in. All the chairs are occupied. The skulls from the graves are back in their old places. The windows are thickly curtained. Outside are moonshine and wind.

The chairs filled for a meeting. Muttering in the chairs. Silence in the chairs. The eternal matter of Sirius’s Slaughterhouse:

We are tired of the talk about dogs.

We want no talk about dogs.

What is all this talk about dogs?

There never has been any dog.

Is there a smell of meat here?

Is a dog howling outside the wall?

Is this Sirius’s Slaughterhouse?

Now it is the fourteenth night.

There is no dog.

I say there is no dog.

Nor is there any Slaughterhouse.

Why should there be a dog?

There is no smell.

No smell at all.

No dog exists.

It is howling beside a crack.

Night after night beside a crack.

A crack that cannot be caulked.

A crack and a dog?

There is no dog.

Sirius’s Slaughterhouse—

what is that?

Such a thing has never

existed.

Sirius’s Slaughterhouse—

which of us is mad?

I say there is no dog.

It howls on the seventh night,

howls on the fourteenth night,

beside a crack leading into

Sirius’s Slaughterhouse.

Nightly the moon waxes larger.

There is no trace of a dog.

Not the slightest trace of a dog.

The moon has been sent to the earth

to shed light on all things.

Nightly the moon waxes larger,

shining longer,

shining stronger,

shining down its broad path.

As you know the moon is now at its zenith.

This very evening the moon will wane.

No dog has ever existed.

I say there is no dog.

Silence.

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