In the night the temperature fell to twenty-two below. A round moon hung beneath the dark blue vault of the sky and it all resembled a dream in which the outlines of events leading us into temptation can barely be made out. We know it’s perilous, but we don’t want to wake up.
The air hung in place, strained to its limits, and not a single sound could hide in it. Noises that usually would fall silent after a moment now went on without end, because a frost like that makes even time freeze solid, fusing it with light and air. This newly produced substance had the resonant quality of metal.
We were walking along an old logging road that had been smoothed over by sleds hauling timber. The tiniest things cast a shadow. A lump of ice, the track left by a runner, the imprint of a winter horseshoe, a broken branch—everything had its own black double. The bark of the beech trees shone with a glassy burnish. White, silver, and black entered into subtle combinations with one another, thus placing reality under a question mark. And if not reality, then at least the purpose and meaning of perception. The landscape breathed death: the rivers had frozen solid, birds were dying in flight, and the woods resounded with the crack of splitting trees. That sound was pitiless, because the silence lengthened it into infinity. The hard, dead snap endured in space as in eternity, endured as an ideal model of hopeless sorrow.
Then the road ended and we came out by a scarcely trodden path onto an exposed pass.
Down below lay the earth. It was turned on its back, spread-eagled, given over to icy light. An unseen immobility seeped down from the heavens, filling the crannies, the hollows in trees, the holes beneath the bark, the crevices in the rocky cliffs above Zawoja, the insides of the trees, the bodies of animals, the skin of humans, the porous structure of stones, walls, houses, blades of dry grass, straw mulch around plants, stocks of food, dogs’ kennels, cats’ baskets in attics, thoughts, dreams and fears before falling asleep—everything lost its fluid nature, shifting toward immutability, toward the fulfillment of dreams, in the direction of the place where alpha entwines with omega, and essence creeps into existence like the delicious tingling in the feet and hands felt by a drunk in the frost.
The snow shone with a luciferous shimmer. Temptation always assumes an aesthetic form. The stars were dim glittering pinpricks. Things that are unencompassable, indifferent, and beautiful draw us to their rim and perhaps watch as we sway at the edge of the abyss, touched in equal part by desire and fear. The mercuric moonlight grew ever colder, trembling in the valley at our feet. The vividness of the dark landscape surpassed its realness. We heard dogs. The barking came from the south, but there were no villages there, and so the sound must have been circling amid the frozen expanses of air like an acoustic fata morgana. It was quite possible that the concentrated space had preserved these noises since the previous winter, and that our faint, half-whispered conversation would also be kept, and we’d be heard by others a year or a century later. In the end, by an effort of will, we forced ourselves to push on. There was something cowardly in this motion of ours. We were slipping out the back way, a little like scurrying animals intent on preserving a modicum of heat in their tiny bodies, while the rest of the world was simply enduring in its magnificent prodigal way.