Once through the gate you turn right. The village lane is narrow, it runs along the bank of the creek. After the rains the water has the color of lusterless emerald with an undertone of silt. The houses are mostly wooden, from before the war. They have glassed-in verandas. When someone slams a door, the small rectangular panes rattle like in an old dresser. Footbridges hidden in the bushes lead to the houses on the other side of the creek. In gaps between the tall trees you can see the mountains. Their distant, essentially decorative presence gives the lane something of the look of a resort or a fairy tale. At the end there’s a preschool. That’s why you mostly meet children there, and a black-and-white dog. On sunny days the place is mostly plunged in shade interspersed with a trembling greenish glow in which a golden light is diluted as if in water, and at such moments the air becomes visible. The borderline where the atmosphere meets people and objects is softened. It’s like an innocent attempt at proving the primal unity of all things.
But with the end of September everything changes. It’s enough to leave the house and walk twenty yards, and instead of a country alleyway, instead of an avenue of old trees there’s just an inferno, columns of fire and blazing bushes. The flames rise from the depths of the earth and, coming up through the thick trunks of sycamore and linden and chestnut, burst into the sky like fiery feather headdresses. If a wind is blowing, the air is filled with smoldering scraps. Even the dark elderberries, which look like polished pieces of coal, seem to be alight, as if they held glowing embers in their moist interiors. Leaves spin, drop into the water with a hiss and turn to ash. After the first frosts the wild vine turns red and runs down the walls of houses like thick blood.
At eight on a Tuesday morning temptation emerges from every corner. The cigarette has the same taste as always, children roll about like colored balls, milk cans rattle, nothing changes, but everything suggests that the soul is a fiction of the mind, which is trying to use it to equal the visible world. Yet it’s all in vain, because even thought vanishes in the incandescent aura of early morning. The sky is blue, distant, cold. Sparks crackle along the rusty wire fences. Yellow explosions, crimson, slanting rays melting and spilling into the air like golden wax, magma and malignant fever, fear and trembling, the praise and glory of matter whose red tongue is licking reality down to the bone.