Cudzoziemiec w Olondrii

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? — No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there — the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.
Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It`s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it`s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you`ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadow of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it`s merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

You can sit in the corner. It`s all you can do when it starts raining. Sit in the dry corner and watch the water slide on the floor. It finds its way to the doorway at last and joins the rest of the rain, down there, outside. There`s a thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.
But sometimes — wasn`t it true that you would go outside, when the sky had cleared, and run, screaming and jumping to dash the raindrops from the leaves? Wasn`t it true that the smell of the mud was buoyant, delightful excessive — that the yellow light of the flats outshone the sky? And everywhere you could hear your own voice ringing in the cold air, and you would charge through the reeds, which sprang back, scattering moisture. And the sea, still bubbling, angry, glowed with a heavy phosphorescence. You could play with it: its radiance clung to the body.

Love, for our people, was synonymous with dishonor. It was something to be avoided, hidden, crushed... They spoke of it in hushed tones, telling about my cousin who loved a man forbidden to her and drowned herself, of disapproving of a father who doted on his young son, saying the child would be spoiled, would become a weakling. Then I don`t want to be strong, I told my mother before I left. That was her complaint, that I was weak. I don`t want your kind of strength, I said. Do you know what she said to me? I wish I`d aborted you with tama-root.