The Swan Book Read Online Free PDF

humanity’s past and present had locations stored in her head. That was what the head was for – storing knowledge about the world that you might want to use one day.
    Right! As if!
    As all stories begin with once upon a time, so the old woman always began her story, while looking into the levitating crystal balls she juggled, as though all stories that ever existed originated from these objects. Anything was possible when her snowy hair seemed charged with electricity and flew about wildly in the wind. All about her tall lean frame, the faded red hibiscus flowers of her old dress billowed as if caught in a cyclone. Her hundred-year-old face creased into a hundred more wrinkles. White lines of fog filled the fractured lines in one ball. Red dust swarmed inside the other.
    With eyes the colour of the oceans, she continued staring absentmindedly, perhaps from habits formed on journeys over listless seas, but the scary thing was this gave the impression that she was releasing the words she spoke from inside the mesmerising glass, struck golden by the sun. So transfixing was the power of these objects, it did not occur to anyone that she might be fiddling with their minds, cursing them perhaps with overseas magic. Her trick made people stare straight into each spinning ball as it hung in midair like a miracle, the pivot reached before each slow ascension, while haphazardly heaping into their brains whatever they liked to remember about her story.
    For all anyone in the swamp knew, she might have been Aine, the sun goddess of Ireland. An old woman, mortified from havingbeen dredged out of her lake in haste, and then, having to suffer the indignities of being dragged around the world in stinking boats. The swamp had become the place for reincarnation for all sorts living around the place. For sure, she was grand enough, enticing people, tricking their dreams, and juggling things around the edges of their minds. A goddess who had dragged herself out of the ocean then become an ordinary old woman.
    Her country of origin, Bella Donna had claimed, was where people of the modern world once lived happily by doing more or less nothing, other than looking after themselves from one day to the next to fuel the stories of their life, but they were finished now. Always she returned to the memory of a single white swan feather resting on the spider web outside a window of her childhood home next to a forest where deer lived. She would recite a line from a poet from Hungary, Snow, fog, fingerprints sprouting swans’ feathers on the windowpanes…It was just a childhood memory, she always snapped abruptly on reaching this point of her story, as if her most treasured melancholy thought was not fit enough for this place.
    She claimed that one day, some devil, not a person, but a freak of nature, went to war on her people. Old woman what kind of freak was that? Well! Swamp people wanted to know. Had a right to know. She looked startled, as though she had been asked to describe the inexplicable, of what happened to people affected by the climate changing in wild weather storms, or the culmination of years of droughts, high temperature and winds in some countries, or in others, the freezing depths of prolonged winters. Peace, she said, it was called peace by the governments that called on their people to fight land wars. She had seen its kind rampaging across the gentle lands of her country, destroying everything in its path, and leaving those who survived with a terrible story to tell.
    Listen to what I say: cities, towns, homes, land, as well as animals and crops, were flattened and could be no more. It was badweather that made fanatics like this. Her voice thrilled as though her tongue was on fire while she listed her foes: Dictators! Bandits! People bashers! She could spend all day listing the world’s villains who had destroyed her people’s land. Those willing to push the world into an unstoppable catastrophic slide of