"The Tartar Steppe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dino Buzzati)

But for the time being here he is, cocksure and heed­less, on the ramparts of the fourth redoubt on a pure frosty night. Because of the cold the sentries kept pacing up and down without pause a/d their steps crunched on the frozen snow. A great -)moon of extraordinary whiteness lit the world. The Fort, the crags, the rocky valley to the north were flooded with wonderful light —even the curtain of mist which hung in the extreme north shone with it.
Down below in the room set aside for the orderly officer, in the heart of the redoubt, the lamp had been left burning ; the flame shook slightly and rocked the shadows. Shortly Drogo had begun to write a letter ; he had to reply to Maria, Vescovi's sister, his friend's sister, who might one day be his bride. But after com­pleting two lines he had got up—even he did not know why—and had climbed on to the roof to look out.
This was the lowest stretch of the fortifications corre­sponding to the deepest point in the defile. Here in the ramparts there was the gate through which the two
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states communicated with each other. From time im­memorial the massive, iron.shod portals had not been opened. And the guard for the New Redoubt went out and in every day by a postern, barely wide enough for one man and guarded by a sentry.
It was the first time Drogo had mounted guard in the fourth redoubt. As soon as he came out into the open he looked at the overhanging rocks to the right, all encrusted with ice and gleaming in the moonlight.
Gusts of wind began to bear little white clouds across the sky and shook Drogo's cloak, the new cloak which meant so much to him.
Without moving he gazed at the barrier of rocks be­fore him, the impenetrable distances of the north, and the ends of his cloak rustled like a flag and assumed wild forms. That night Drogo felt he possessed a proud and soldierly beauty, upright on the edge of the terrace with his fine cloak shaken by the wind. Tronk at his side, wrapped up in a wide greatcoat, seemed no soldier at all.
"Tell me, Tronk," asked Giovanni with an assumed air of concern, "Is it only an impression or is the moon bigger than usual tonight?"
" I don't think so, sir," said Tronk, "It always gives that impression up here at the Fort:"
Their voices echoed afar as if the air were made of glass. Tronk, seeing that the lieutenant had nothing more to say, went off along the edge of the terrace bent as always on checking the routine.
Drogo remained alone and felt almost happy. He relished with pride his determination to remain, the bitter pleasure of leaving the little assured happinesses for something which a long time hence might perhaps prove to be good and great—and underneath there was the consoling thought that there was always time still to leave.
A presentiment—or was it only a hope ?—of great and noble events had made him stay up here, but
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perhaps he had merely postponed things ; at bottom nothing was settled. He had so much time before him. All the good things of life seemed to await him. What need, was there to exert onseif? Even women' these strange and loveable creatures, he looked forward to as a certain happiness, formally promised him by the normal course of life.
How much time there was before him! A single year seemed immensely long and the good years had barely begun—they seemed to form a long, long series of which it was impossible to see the end, a treasure still intact and so great that one might tire of it.
There was no one to say to him : "Watch out, Gio­vanni-Drogo." Life seemed to him to be inexhaustible —the illusion was obstinate although youth had already begun to fade. But Drogo had no knowledge of time. Even if he had had before him hundreds and hundreds of years of youth that, too, would have seemed no great thing to him. And instead he had at his disposal only an ordinary simple life, a short human youth, a miserly gift which could be counted On the fingers of two hands and which would, slip away before he had even got to know it.
What a long time -there was before him, he thought. And yet—so he had heard tell—men exist who at a certain point, strange to say, begin to wait for death—death, which everyone knows about but which is quite absurd and cannot possibly concern them. Drogo smiled .to think of it and as he did so, urged on by the cold, he began to walk up and down.
At that point the ramparts followed the slope of the valley and so formed a complicated staircase of terraces and platforms. Below him, pitch-black against the snow, Drogo saw the various sentries by the light of the moon ; their methodical pacing made a creaking noise on the frozen ground.
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The nearest of them, on a lower terrace ten yards or so away, feeling the cold less than the others, stood motionless with his shoulders leant against a wall so that it looked as if he were sleeping. But Drogo heard him singing a lament to himself in a low voice.
It was a succession of words, which Drogo could not make out, strung together by a monotonous and unend­ing tune. Speaking, and worse still, singing on duty was severely forbidden. Giovanni should have punished him but instead took pity on him, thinking of the cold and the loneliness of the night. Then he began to descend a short staircase which lead on to the terrace and gave a slight cough to put the soldier on his guard.
The sentinel turned his head and seeing the officer corrected his posture but did not interrupt his lament. Drogo was overcome with rage—did these men think they could make a fool of him? He would give him a taste of something.
The sentry at once remarked Drogo's threatening attitude and although the formality of giving the pass­word, by an ancient tacit agreement, was not used between soldiers and the guard commander he had an excess of scruple. Raising his rifle he asked with the peculiar accent used in the Fort : "Who goes there? Who goes there?"
Drogo stopped short, thrown off his balance. In the clear light of the moon he could see the soldier's face perfectly clearly perhaps less than five yards away—and the mouth was shut. But the lament had not been interrupted. Where did it come from then, that voice?
Since the soldier stood there and waited, Giovanni, pondering the strange phenomenon, mechanically gave the password : " Miracle." " Misery," replied the sentry and stood at ease again.
There followed an immense silence in which the muttered words and song drifted more loudly than before.
At last Drogo understood and a slight shiver ran
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along his Spine. It was water, that was what it was—a distant cascade dashing down the steep sides of the crags. The wind causing the great jet to quiver, the mysterious play of the echoes, the varying sounds of the struck rocks made of it a human voice which spoke and spoke—spoke of our life in words which one was within a hair's breadth of understanding but never did.
So it was not the soldier who was singing under his breath, not a man sensitive to cold, to punishments and to love, but the hostile mountain. What a terrible mis­take, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that—we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language ; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we see that we are completely alone.
The wind blows against the officer's splendid cloak and the blue shadow on the snow waves, too, like a flag. The sentry stands motionless. The moon moves on and on, slowly but not losing a single moment, impatient for the dawn. In Giovanni Drogo's breast his heart beats hollowly.
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XI
ALMOST two years later Giovanni Drogo was sleep­ing one night in his room in the Fort. Twenty-two
months had passed without bringing anything fresh and he had stayed there waiting, as if life could not but be specially lenient with him. Yet twenty-two months are a long time and a lot of things can happen in them—there is time for new families to be formed, for babies to be born and even begin to talk, for a great house to rise where once there was only a field, for a beautiful woman to grow old and no one desire her any more, for an illness—for a long illness—to ripen (yet men live on heedlessly), to consume the body slowly, to recede for short periods as if cured, to take hold again more deeply and drain away the last hopes ; there is time for a man to die and be buried, for his son to be able to laugh again and in the evenings take the girls down the avenues and past the cemetery gates without a thought.
But it seemed as if Drogo's existence had come to a halt. The same day, the same things, had repeated themselves hundreds of times without taking a step for­ward. The river of time flowed over the Fort, crumbled the walls, swept down dust and fragments of stone, wore away the stairs and the chains, but over Drogo it passed in vain—it had not yet succeeded in catching him, bearing him with it as it flowed.
And this night, too, would have been like all the others if Drogo had not had a dream. He was a child again ; it was night and he was standing at a window.
To one side the house fell away and opposite, across the space he saw in the moonlight the facade of a sumptuous palace. And the attention of the little boy who was Drogo was all intent on a high narrow window crowned by a coping of marble. The , moon, shining through the glass, fell on a table on which there was a
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runner, a vase and a few ivory statuettes. And the few things he could see made him imagine that in the dark, behind them, there opened out the intimate secrets of a great salon, the first of an unending series, full of pre­cious things, and that the whole palace slept that pro­found intriguing sleep of buildings whose owners are both rich and happy. How wonderful, thought Drogo, to be able to live in these salons, to wander through them for hours discovering ever new treasures.
Meanwhile between the window where he stood and the wonderful palace—there was perhaps twenty yards between them—frail appara.tions had begun to float (some sort of fairy creature perhaps) trailing behind them trains of velvet which gleamed in the moon.
in his dream the presence of such beings, which he had never seen in the real world, did not surprise Giovanni. They floated through the air, whirling gently, and returned again and again to brush past the narrow window.
By their, nature they seemed logically to belong to the palace, but the fact that they paid not the slightest attention to Drogo, never once approached his house, mortified him. So the fairies, too, kept away from common children and had time only for people blessed by fortune, who did not even stand watching but slept indifferently under silken baldachins.
"Hist," said Drogo two or three times timidly to attract the attention of the apparations, although he knew quite well in his heart that it would be useless. And indeed not one of them seemed to hear, none of them drew even a few feet nearer to his window.
But suddenly one of these magic beings caught at the sill of the window opposite with what seemed to be its arm and knocked gently on the glass as if calling someone.
Only a few minutes had passed when a slight figure —how small it was in comparison with the immense
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window—appeared behind the panes and Drogo recog­nised Angustina, who was a child too.
Angustina, who was strikingly pale, wore a little velvet dress with a collar of white lace and seemed far from pleased with the silent serenade.