The Country Road by Regina Ullman

Author:Regina Ullman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2014-11-12T04:30:00+00:00

The Hot Air Balloon

It was a very sunny day when the hot air balloon was to take flight. It didn’t even look foolish to stretch your arms out as if to touch it; sometimes the whole world appears to be painted on porcelain, right down to the dangerous cracks.—

The green was already showing on all of the trees and shrubs, but only at the very tips—as if a green hand had brushed over them—and Easter wasn’t far off anymore, such thoughts could cross one’s mind.

It had to be a very bright and windless day for the balloon to take off. I don’t know if the others cared, the important people with their children and their servants. But it mattered quite a bit to our mother; she thought everyone should be able to go along to the launch. Just imagine climbing up with that captive air, higher than all the mountains where the gentians bloom, above the edelweiss. My God! it was certainly dangerous. Perhaps even sinful, she reflected. And all at once the earth seemed to grow dark. It was certainly dangerous . . . What if the balloon were stranded over the sea, forever and ever, until its pilot died of grief and fell down like a little rag, alone, with the balloon still hanging in the sky . . . Children certainly believe that it is possible to see everything beyond death. There is a place inside them that is not like a picture just drawn on paper. If we could hold onto that love that feels so alive in childhood, we would be the truest sort of magicians. We would learn: Never to die. A sound would still carry over, across the waters of death, and whoever approached the shore and gazed across would see only water lilies blooming. That was how we thought of the balloon. We thought of it with our Sunday clothes and with our arms and with our faces.

The voices reminded us of it, and so did the whole wide Sunday world. People were streaming along the road to the church. A boy, small like us, was drumming in front of the weighmaster’s little house, shouting and stamping in such a way that his knees knocked against the skin of the drum. It was an awful business. He wasn’t going to the sports field to see the hot air balloon. He had a giant drum just like that all to himself. He drummed for his street, for his father, for everyone who wasn’t out there sparkling in the sun. But his father sat at the window. He saw us and we saw him, and he saw his child and we saw the boy. And we heard him too. But the weighmaster lived behind deaf windows. The world is a giant mirror, and suddenly we find ourselves face to face with one another, unable to turn away. “That man,” our mother said, “is always sitting there inside his house.” If he had suddenly been

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