Napoleon's Roads by David Brooks Page A

away, a fortnight later. Who ever heard of a hotel room without a table, a chair? And so I’d come downstairs. It was quiet on the terrace, and shaded by the building, out of the sun. A broad, calm view of slopes covered with trellised vines, mountains capped with snow even at this late stage of summer. And in the vineyard just below the terrace a dirt track, leading off along the edge of the vines, turning at the end into a small wooded area, disappearing from sight. What is it about a track that makes one walk along it in one’s mind, wonder what one would see? Grasshoppers, I thought suddenly, or a butterfly, a large bee on some thick clover beneath a vine-stock. And silence. There would be silence. That as soon as you listened to it would be full of busyness, the constant whispering and shuffling of things, the breathing that becomes almost a hum, a soft shrillness answering from within. Would the track reach the mountains, if I followed it? This dream, of all tracks merging, everything connecting, drawing you …
    ~
    As the priest delivered the eulogy I was looking at the stones. The cracks in them, the spaces between, the broken places. Filled with crumbled mortar. Here and there droppings that Danaja’s broom didn’t catch. Of mice, not rats. Too small for rats. Evicted temporarily but watching from somewhere. Rafters, cracks in the walls. To come out and re-occupy when all was finished. This chapel not much used. Another year, two, before the next disturbance. Light filtering through dust motes. Tiredness in the priest’s voice, or just a studied calm, as he went through the formulae, holding something at bay. That hugeness inside us, outside us.
    ~
    She had fallen. I had been working at my desk and there’d been a commotion below, muted: I couldn’t hear any sign of panic. A dragging of furniture, metal frame on tile, that can only have been her bed. Without the language I can’t help much, think I am only in the way. And others were there in any case. And then, ten minutes later, Aldo, asking for Katia though he knew she wasn’t here. And explained, although I only half-understood. Except that he needed to tell. I understood that. That she had fallen. Hurt herself. And went away, with a kind of shrug. His shrug. As much to the world as to me.
    A few minutes later an ambulance arrived. I watched from the upstairs window as they brought her out. She looked unconscious, head back as if in mid-gasp, a wound on her cheek, another above her eye. Not much blood. Why do I think it thickens, in the elderly, almost reluctant to leave?
    ~
    He had been there, Aldo, in the hospital, at her bedside. She’d complained of feeling sick, wanting to vomit, and he’d called for a nurse. By the time someone came she’d passed out and her eyes had rolled back. They had taken her away, and left him there waiting. Soon they returned and told him she had died. He told this to Katia that night, late, after I had gone to bed. They would not use the church for the funeral, nor the priest, not this one. No surprises there. They’d use the small chapel in the cemetery instead, and arrange for someone else to come. They’d have to spend the next day cleaning. The chapel stank of mice – or rats, who knew? Katia thought rats – and there were droppings everywhere. I offered to help, but no, she’d do it with Danaja. It was all arranged.
    ~
    I don’t remember when it was I saw the moth. On the light-fitting over the sink. There are moths here day and night during the summer, as there are anywhere when you leave the doors and windows open to catch the night air. Souls, people say. Psyche. This one of a bright green I’ve never seen on a moth before. Uniform, unvariegated, the colour of a grass-blade in late-summer sun. An after-image of day. But why? So that I would see it? Carry it into my sleep? As if it needed a ride somewhere, and I were a psychopomp.
    ~
    Katia is at