Rombo Read online

  ‘In Esther Kinsky’s new novel, language becomes the highest form of compassion and solidarity – not only with us human beings, but with the whole world, organic, non-organic, speaking out with many mouths and living voices. A miracle of a book; should be shining when it gets dark.’

  — Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory

  ‘In Esther Kinsky, German literature has an author whose books are full of poetic intelligence. … A brilliant new novel.’

  — Neue Zürcher Zeitung

  ‘Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality. … [T]he radical view of the loner resumes its place in literature: wandering, observing, feeling their way out of an initial state of strangeness, Kinsky’s narrators regard human stories as a mere part of the natural history in which they are embedded. Although the Earth’s movements and geology, flora and fauna are given uncommon attention, the popular term “nature writing” by no means adequately describes this work. As far as setting is concerned, the author deems no material unworthy … it is always clear that for her the only landscape worth describing is the one in which she is currently situated. Far from “eco-dreaming”, without sorrow or critique, Kinsky’s novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.’

  — 2022 Kleist Prize jury

  Praise for River

  ‘A magnificent novel.’

  — New Yorker

  ‘An extraordinary book and a major writer.’

  — Nelly Kapriélan, Les Inrockuptibles

  ROMBO

  ESTHER KINSKY

  Translated by

  CAROLINE SCHMIDT

  ‘Finito questo, la buia campagna tremò sì forte, che dello spavento la mente di sudore ancor mi bagna. La terra lagrimosa diede vento, che balenò una luce vermiglia la qual mi vins ciascun sentiment.’

  — Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, Inferno, Canto III, v. 130–135.

  ‘Unbeknownst to me at the time, I just wanted to be seen.’

  — C. Fausto Cabrera, The Parameters of Our Cage

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  Appendix

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  I

  ‘One of the few phenomena that almost always accompany an earthquake, and often announce its arrival shortly beforehand, consists of a curious subterranean sound, seemingly of the same nature almost everywhere it is given mention. This sound consists of the rolling tones of a row of suspended explosions, and is often compared to the rolling of thunder, when it occurs with less intensity, with the rattling of many carts, travelling hastily over bumpy cobblestones.… In Peru the intensity of this curious clamour appears to correlate directly with the intensity of the quake that follows; the same is said in Calabria, where they call this dreaded phenomenon il rombo.’

  — Friedrich Hoffmann, A History of Geognosy and an Account of Volcanic Phenomena (1838)

  LANDSCAPE

  All around: a dwindling moraine landscape. Soft hills, fields, peat moss bogs in outlying depressions, karst protuberances with oak groves, chestnut trees, blades of grass sharp and thin, growing on ridges less mountainous than they appear, which nevertheless offer a view: over the hill country, the crests dotted with churches and villages, here and there a castle-like ruin that is in reality a mouldering vestige of the First World War. For its mellifluousness the landscape has a tremendous material shift to thank; glaciers, boulders, matter that it carried all the way here with an inevitable clamour that far exceeded the rumble of a rombo. Not a preluding roar, as it was referred to, two hundred years ago, but rather an ongoing rage that no human ear could have endured.

  To the south the hills surrender to flatland, to the magnitude of the sky, the openness of the sea. Giant cornfields, industrial strips, highways, gravel quarries at the rivers emptying into the Adriatic Sea. Piave, Tagliamento, Isonzo, each river carrying off its part of the Alps, dolomite metamorphic rocks, pre-alpine conglomerates, the Isonzo’s karstic limestone, whose dazzling white colour people still attribute to the many bones of the soldiers fallen in the Battles of Isonzo. On clear days one can see from the hillcrests all the way to the sea, to the Grado Lagoon with dabs of island bushes, to the chiselled hotels of resort towns, like sharp, uneven teeth on the horizon.

  The river that defines this hilly region is the Tagliamento. A wild river, as they say. Yet, aside from the few weeks of high water from snow melt and torrential downpours, the wild thing about it is rather the emptiness, the vastness of the unregulated stone bed, the caprice of the sparse rivulets, always seeking out new paths and courses. At the point where it exits the mountains and enters the moraine landscape, the river changes course, abandoning its eastward path and veering south, taking along with it the Fella from the north – hesitantly, both wavering, turquoise and white; a wavering that produced a giant triangular field of pebbles and scree, which separates the Carnic Alps from the Julian Alps, a bright plane like a wound, a space of procrastination before a backdrop of mountain valleys, before the secluded zones with their own languages, dulled by waning use, their own shrill, helpless songs and tricky dances.

  The cemeteries of the hill country villages all have their own small, secluded summits with little churches and a view to the north, to the mountains, the trench of the Tagliamento valley, the narrow passage of the Fella valley, which the Romans passed through, heading north, and the Celts, heading south. To the northwest lie the Carnic Alps, cleft peaks behind pre-Alpine mountain chains, a picture book of the violence that certainly transpired in order for these mountains to be formed. The picture book is located precisely at the unstable point where two lithospheric plates collide, uneasy about their positions. Their discontent radiates eastward, into the mountain valleys of Italia Slava and the mellifluous hill country north of the coastal strip.

  To the northeast one’s gaze is met by the Julian Alps and the Alps, the defensive wall of Monte Musi, appearing grey, blue, violet or orange, depending on the light and clarity. The cliffs are sheer in any light: a dark barrier, unclimbable, insurmountable, at the eastern end a mountain peak arching over it, that is, Monte Canin, white from chalk or snow, the dull eye tooth, the border tooth of the valley behind.

  Two zones meet before the mountains, continental and Mediterranean climates, the winds, precipitations and temperatures of two migratory fields, to the land and to the sea. Thunderstorms, gales, deluges, earthquakes that all tirelessly abrade the traces of human migration running through this region that – no matter how worn down they may become – still never allow themselves to be erased. The sky falls into a dark mood, the rombo is never far away.

  QUAKE

  The earthquake is everywhere. In the rubble of collapsed houses overgrown by ivy on Statale 13, in the cracks and scars on the large buildings, in the shattered gravestones, in the crookedness of reconstructed cathedrals, in the empty lanes of the old villages, interconnected like honeycomb, in the ugly new houses and developments modelled on the dream location of suburbia found in American television series. The new houses stand out in the open on the field, at a distance from the rattled towns, often with only a single story – here the main point being to minimize the material that might fall on one’s head, in case once again there is… as there was that year, the earthquake year of 1976. Now it’s half a lifetime ago or more, but the script it inscribed in everyone’s memories has not faded: it is forever being notched anew by the act of recollection, by speaking of all the wheres and hows, of searching for shelter and the fear and listening out for furthe
r rumblings – in garages, in the open air, squeezed into the family Fiat, buried beneath rubble, among the dead, a cat in one’s arm. If one laid them out, all these evoked images would stretch from here, the cemetery with a view to the north, all the way to the harshly hatched line of Monte Musi, purple-blue in the distance, more a peak-of-muzzle-and-snout than a mountain of muses, jags around the muzzle for the eye tooth Monte Canin. Everything spelled in the language of the mountains. Perhaps at the end there would be an unexpected trail leading up to its ridge, from where one could look down onto the valley at the foot of Monte Canin, a small river valley which would form a right angle with the path of evoked images from the earthquake. One would hope for doldrums on such a day in order to read the images, for a celebratory calm to walk in along the path of images.

  But today it is windy. Right by the wall with a view to the mountains that look as if folded together in this light without shadow, beside a grave sealed by a layer of cement smooth and white with a faded wreath of plastic flowers on it, stands a short man with white hair and bad teeth, talking into his phone. He is describing the grave, emphasizing that it is clean and orderly, and he slowly pronounces the name on it, even mentioning the wreath – on the fadedness of the flowers, however, he does not comment – and in conclusion, as if responding to the voice at the other end of the line, he says: Memory is an animal, it barks with many mouths.

  ANSELMO

  The short man with white hair and bad teeth is named Anselmo. He is a council worker who always requests work at the cemetery. There is a lot to do there the layer of dirt, covering the mound of rock is thin, and the number of graves limited. The columbaria have to be expanded, graves need to be levelled, remains brought into the ossuary, trees pruned and cut down, the stability of the grave plaques and stones tested. Anselmo knows his way around. He is familiar with the locations where the graves are sinking, knows what kind of damage gravestones can incur and which cemetery plot would be safest in case of an earthquake. He advises against mausoleums, pointing to the cracks in the walls of the showy family burial units. He banters with grave visitors and offers himself up as a confidant to bereaved persons visiting from out of town.

  The cemetery is a recommended stop for hikers and cyclists passing through: on the northwest side of the wall there is a long panorama board where one can read the name of every peak. There the semicircle formed by the peaks and crests, surrounding the moraine landscape as if holding it in a rescuing embrace – on the west, north, and east – stretches out like a straight chain before the beholder, who first has to get used to the distortion of the landscape, letting their gaze wander back and forth between the image and the mountain range, while they graze with their fingertips the peaks on the panorama board, as if they could thus feel their constitution. Anselmo is wont to approach these day-trippers, as well, and tell them about the landscape. He always directs their gaze to Monte Canin and its summit, covered in snow into spring, and mentions that he grew up in the shadow of this mountain. When the peak is hidden behind clouds, Anselmo says: It doesn’t want to show itself today. A moody one, that Canin.

  6 MAY

  On the morning of 6 May a rosy light falls on the snow clinging to Monte Canin’s peak. It soon fades, the sun lies low. The slopes are quiet in the valley on this morning in early May, chalk white and green from beeches and hazelnut bushes, metallic grey from silverberry at the riverside. Beneath thin clouds the heat disperses.

  —

  Olga leaves the house early, heading down the road to the bus. When asked later, she will say: That morning as I walked down the steps to the road I saw a snake, a carbon, the kind you usually find down below along the river, and not up in the village. It lay on a piece of the wall, as if to sun itself, a black stick, yet the sun wasn’t shining, although it was warm. The cuckoo was calling ceaselessly, already in the morning. The cuckoo and this snake and all the stories I’d ever heard about this kind of snake came to my mind then, all this I can remember very well.

  —

  In the afternoon Anselmo helps scythe. It is still early in the year to be cutting. He will remember that Thursday. I still remember it exactly, he will say. We got out of school early on Thursdays. I still remember that it was hot outside, and after lunch my sister and I had to help down below, in the valley on the hillside, with the first mowing. The grass was already high.

  The sun is a lurid hole in the clouds that day, it burns the children’s necks until they hurt. The crickets chat thinly, hastily, as if they have somewhere to be. Their grandmother cuts the grass with a scythe. The grass is heavy, she sweats, and the scythe becomes dull again and again, more often than usual, and the blade has to be whetted. The children hurry with their raking and piling. Get it done already! one can hear the grandmother calling out again and again, Do it faster!

  Anselmo will remember that she was angry at the children for being slow, but she is also angry at the grass, which appears so dry and bristly and yet dulls the scythe, as if it were wet. The whetting stone strikes the blade without an echo, as if the air had swallowed the sound. That whole time, Anselmo will later report, we heard our neighbour’s greenfinch all the way down in the meadow.

  It’s screaming as if there were a fire, says the man mowing the meadow lot next to theirs. He swings his scythe back broadly and drives it into the blades, and the sweet grass sinks down onto the earth. Still he has to pause and whet the blade just as often as Anselmo’s grandmother.

  —

  On 6 May snow on the peak shimmers into the shadowless morning light. The smallest mechanical action would be enough to cause the snow fields to slide into the valley. An imprudent hiker, falling rocks – that would already be enough. But this time of year there is no one out in the mountains.

  —

  The snake that Olga sees on the wall in the morning is black as coal. It loves dampness. It lives in water and on land and is not poisonous. In the spring when they mate, the male and female snakes entwine, as if to form a coiled rope. If they fear being interrupted, they close themselves off, thus coiled, forming a ring that can transfer an electric shock if touched from the outside. After mating, the two carbon snakes remain together until death do them part.

  —

  Lina is nervous this morning. The siskin calls out wretchedly. Her brother is looking for a job, and she knows he won’t find one. But something else remains in her memory.

  What I still remember about 6 May, she later begins one day, as if writing an essay for school: Because it had been so warm, on that day we were already mounding up the soil on the potato plants, that is certain. We heard sparrow hawks, their brief, tight tones calling out to one another, we talked about it. There were three of us in the field. My brother was back from living abroad. He always liked to tell us scary stories. On that day it was a snake that someone had driven over, by the village entrance. He saw it. If it was a female snake and had not yet laid its eggs, it will bring bad luck, he said. Then the male snakes will slither through the village, searching for the guilty person. Must have been the bus driver, he said. I know the bus driver now, I also knew him then. He didn’t live in our village. After his afternoon drive he always parked outside the cemetery, where he enjoyed his lunch. As my brother told his story, I wondered whether a snake would be capable of finding the bus driver. While we worked, a sudden gust of cold wind came, very brief. The wind comes from the snow, still lying up there, my brother said. The snow and this heat, they don’t go together.

  —

  On 6 May a thin white layer of clouds blankets the sky, causing the beams of sunlight to become particularly sharp, broken frequently as they are by tiny drops of steam. In the afternoon a peculiar phenomenon occurs. In a doubled reflection, two pale suns briefly grace the sky directly above the snowy peak of Canin, standing eye to eye with the sun, which glides in mist over the valley. The double sun soon dissipates.

  —

  In the meadows are already spurges, knapweeds, campions; on the waysides is
blue bugle. And pale pink catchflies. Here they call it sclopit. The bloom consists mainly of a two-part bladder. Children pick the blossoms and crush them in their balled-up fists, letting them explode in two brief cracks. It sounds like sclo-pit. The flower is named after the sound of the blooms bursting. The leaves of sclopit are harvested before the flowers. They are pointy and narrow and of a pale, somewhat dull green colour. Everyone has their own sclopit spot. Some people divulge theirs, others keep it for themselves.

  Mara gathers sclopit on 6 May. Before she goes out, she has to lock in her mother, who has already half-forgotten the world. She had always acquiesced calmly, but that morning she cries out from behind the locked door, as if it were a matter of life and death. Mara walks uphill, away from the cries. When later the conversation turns to 6 May, she does not mention her cries: I reached a meadow at the edge of the forest above a steep slope, where the sclopit was everywhere, not a blossom yet in sight, she says. Jays called out among the pines. I filled my cloth, until I could hardly tie it shut. When I arrived home, the sclopit was wilted and droopy, as if someone had sat on it. It smelled like cut grass. I heard a child cry out and was startled. So came the evening.

  —

  In the afternoon on 6 May the sky above the mountain ridge turns grey-blue and dark in the southwest, as if a storm were coming from that direction, as rarely occurs. This pseudo-wall of clouds remains motionless for a while, then dissipates, and the sun rests white and lurid and large in the sky. Below it the snow plane facing the valley lies as if submerged in a tempestuous yellow.

  —

  At night in front of their doors some people place hollowed out slabs of wood filled with milk for the black snakes. In the morning the bowl is always empty, so they say. It brings luck. The carbon is a clever snake. One story goes like this: Once a sparrow hawk snatched up a carbon. In its talons the bird carried it back to its nest. Before the bird knew what had happened, the young snake had devoured all the eggs in the nest. I’ll return them to you if you bring me back, said the snake. The sparrow hawk promised, and the snake spewed out the eggs. Then the sparrow hawk brought back the snake, and since then in the valley sparrow hawks no longer snatch up snakes.