On Monday it began to rain. For several days there’d been a thaw. We were on our way home. Darek cursed, turned the wheel, and the car skidded on wet ice. We tried to use the sides of the road, where there were rocks sticking up. The way was clear, straight, climbing gently for four or five miles. The houses on both sides looked abandoned. Their windows reflected blackness, though the sky was the color of dirty water. A motorcycle was coming down the hill. The rider was sliding along the sheer surface, his feet spread wide. He looked like a stiff horseman whose mount had suddenly shrunk to the size of a WSK motorbike.
We crawled higher. The village was left behind. The rain was trying to wipe it off the map. A mile before the pass Darek said, “Dammit, it’s raining and freezing.” The windshield wipers were scraping against the glass like they were trying to get inside the car.
Then we came to the woods: it was strange, translucent, like something from a dream. Young alders leaned over the road. Their crowns rubbed against the roof of the car. Elder bushes, pussy willow, hazel trees, all spread like clumps of silvery seaweed frozen still in their underwater swaying. Everything was covered in ice. Every branch, every tiniest blade of grass was sheathed in a transparent cover. Once, long ago, they sold colored candies in glass tubes with a stopper at one end. It was a little like that: glass tubes, and in each one a stalk, a twig, even the pine needles had been dressed individually, with great care. A blackthorn plunged in ice looked like a living corporeal being surprised by the flash of an X-ray.
We pulled over. We’d never seen anything like it. The snow was covered by a hard skin. Drops of rain fell with a soft rattling sound. Trees were bent every which way in the motionless air. The tips of the huge firs by the pass leaned toward one another in a puppetlike dance. It was exactly as though a great wind had passed over the area and had suddenly come to a halt. It had ceased, but had kept on blowing. It had stopped dead in place. I thought to myself that the feathers of birds, if there were any birds at all that day, must be making a crunching sound in flight, from their icy carapace.
We drove on. The gray-green trunks of the young ashes had the glassy shine of man-made things.
It rained all night. The world seemed about to turn into an icicle. It seemed about to become like one of those glass spheres containing a little house and a snowman, with little flakes falling from a blue sky. Only the loud roar in the darkness clashed with that image.