14 06
Luch2 en
Piercing rays of light break through his eyelids like forcing into a door. Luch crowls to his feet, gropes about in this dank house. Get up and about, there must be warmth out there. Walking into the fresh, a glare gets hold of him. He totters a bit, closes his eyes – what a delight. He takes a deep breath, and with it, a biting smell he knows well. There he is, trotting off to the main road taking the dung, the droppings with him under his soles passing piles of silage bales and all those things the neighbour has dumped over the years, broken furniture, toilet bowls, old mattresses, ropes, rusted machine parts rotting away sinking into the ground. But everything looks to him like new, the waste land which stretches left and right of the narrow winding asphalt road hill up hill down, all the colours in that sea of winterly faded blades of moor grass, drab haulms and reddish-brown rotten fern, pale waves floating around tiny islands of moss, goarse branches, rushes, and shrill spots of freshly upcoming leaves of lillies and grass in it, even the light violet gleam on the grey, round rock humps jutting out from underneath like petrified waves of a subterranean ocean. He puts his nose into the air taking a sniff towards the north where the wind is still droning from, drawing a muffled rumble with himself. Looking round Luch sees them come tramping swaying their ponderous bodies like battleships on a too narrow a fairway pushed from the back by a closely following pick-up. Like in slow motion he sees them pass in a spin, a pack of cows struggling along in a desperate effort to get forward splaying their stiff-kneed legs out to swing them round their huge udders standing out and dangling to and fro under their broad bellies.
Barely been by, a stampede breaks out in the front mooing, lowing, bucking. The driver gets out of his car. Luch instinctively rushes there spreading his arms out as if embracing them all trying to help somehow. Mingled with the crowd he is overrun. He sees a monstrous udder hanging over him before he runs out of the picture.
A wobbly bag of dusky pink with yellowish speckles on it fills, expands, gets bigger and bigger, begins to hurt weighing down distressfully. A congestion, something that can‘t be discharged, a spot where pressure grows to every limb of the body to paralyze it. The bag stretches to its limit, is near to bursting. Then a jerk, it is shaken, lifted, hooked into a gear. Heavy soles clatter on a tiled floor. Somewhere something rattles. The weight under the belly gets lighter, the pain dissolves, very slowly.
Come on, let‘s go.
Where to?
Anywhere. This life is not good here, after all.
Are we that good, after all? Are we still what we used to be? Eh, get me rid of them!
Exactly.
Even when making it to the main road, they‘ll catch us there then.
What if, crock. Don‘t you see? I don‘t want it anymore.
They use me, yeah, but at least I‘m of some use to somebody. And I‘m not bothered.
Not to be bothered, is that all? What has become of us! Degenerated inferiors hardly able to walk, shut up in crates, properly yielding machines withering away. What have they done to us folks! Have you forgotten or are you just forgetful? Haven‘t we had it? Didn‘t we frolic about and did our own thing? Didn‘t we roam the country together picking the cream of the crop? Now you eat your own shit and let yourselves be shut off. It‘s all right as long as you‘re fed, isn‘t it?
Yeah, the meadows were greener when we were young, weren‘t they? It‘s how it is.
I leave you to the living dead, so. The more they squeeze out of you, the less they‘ll get! Think of me, I‘m off then.
Hey, stay… you… moo… wait a minute… yo …. loooow!
In a daze, Luch picks his hat out of the hedge. Nobody around there anymore. In a straight piece, the road lies ahead of him, empty. He takes to the side, sits down. After a while, he hears the noise of an engine, sees a car approaching, lifts his hand. The cars stops by him. It‘s Conor. He looks over to him:
How‘re ye keeping.
Not so bad at all.
Want a lift?
Where’re you going?
Just driving about.
Fine.
Well, then.
Very good.
07 03
luch1 en
All clouds of the sky seem to have gathered over the tousled pines, their tops being swung by the wind. May the gale come forth and roar, try to rock them, they won’t budge an inch. He comes, rolls a heavy pile of brewing darkness out over their battered heads, whips it up, tears it apart, presses the scuds together again and whirls them shorewards.
Streams of water are squeezed out, fall off. Poured upon paths, roads, fields, and meadows into puddles, ducts, ditches, and drains, having even the biggest run over, flow round all those little crippled trees, bushes, and thorny shrubs scattered about. Driven forward across the country, pushed off and downed deep into the peat, the moss, the bog, and the lichens, they pervade it all, until they reach the crusted stone benches where the sea sprays up squirting away into masses of drops strung along like close-drawn curtains dragged off to the farthest end of the land.
There you’re, hanging in the balance, the horizon gets out of the picture, and the sea, the mountains are melting into one. Only the brooms sit firm on their roots like clucking hens on their eggs not daring a move.
They stand the water, the streamlets, the watercourses flowing around, barely rendering shelter. Yet, the horses are keeping to them – large looming shadows in wafts of haze, grown stiff in the rain – sculputures wrapped in mistiness. Where should they go? They had been there. Any effort in vain: all boils down to the same. Just keep up and bear the downpour.
It’s bleak, like in a preserving jar, and I don’t get to the bottom of it. Who said the Irish rain would be of that lazy Celtic fashion drizzling, with no energy to pour? That must have been long ago. Not this one. This kind of rain is unlike any other, a perpetual power of wetness with no outlet to nowhere.
Empty garbage sacks puffed up pass flapping, pilotless aircrafts in tatters – loony birds trying to attack barbed wire fences. They’ll be getting trapped there wildly beating their wings.
The roaring has grown louder, as if the ocean rushed right round this shivering house, the wind having forced himself in through gaps, cranks, and hinges, holes, through crevices, cracks in doorpost bolts, and this slightly dysfunctional door. Things clack, clatter, crackle, whistle in the water tank neck, whizz in the chimney, hum in a tube, sum in a piping like wailing sirens in the high-speed subway of a spray nozzle. A post crunches, the window frame rattles, something is swept over the floor, clacks. Drops patter on the window sill, clink on the pane, tinkle, tap on the lintel, jingle like chimes, strum the rooftop gutter like ringing a bell.
Dozing while wide-awake, you find yourself on an unfixed ground, right? Night and day are fading – rainlike phantoms beyond time and space clanking on surfaces splat! slapping against shutters, splattering on slades splash! There clatters one from the roof, clashes with something, crashes on the floor – humph! Uh? What’s happening? Well, no, still the same: rain! Masses of drops still dribble, scatter, pitter down, platter, lap against the wall, rap on the railing, on the door running off in torrents –
For how long have you been here, Luch – hours? Days? Weeks?
********
Then it came to pass in the days of the occupation when they did everything to them, the Russians, and the cows put their heads in at the windows. And there, somebody came and cut them udders off. They killed the cow and all the women. There shall be no water no more. There shall be a new earth, and the old one will vanish.
And the man took the kid and went away with it. But where should he go? There was nothing left there. Houses destroyed, battered down, cars blocking the way, horses by the roadside with their bellies ripped open. Their flesh being sweet, he didn‘t cut a piece off though. But what should become of the kid? The father couldn‘t make it any further, hunger hath eaten him. He lieth himself down and says, Now it‘s my turn to die. Take the kid, sister, havest thou not three already? It shall give thou four.
to be continued….
Luch at share-iDea