While the Gods Were Sleeping Read Online Free PDF

and with one of the maids puts the wash through the wringer.
    I don’t listen. I am a crazy recluse in Sinai. I imagine I can hear the stones humming; their voice resonates as a deep buzzing at the bottom of the word aeons, which my father taught me. Every year he joins us in the hottest weeks of August, when our town is virtually deserted and his shops can do without his supervision.
    According to him the slabs of stone, with their dark sheen that absorbs all heat, are nothing less than polished slivers of the bed of a long-vanished sea. He shows me the traces of molluscs in their surface. The calcified elegance of ammonites and sponges, the branches of coral loom bright white against the blue, like the dark on a photographic negative.
    I am filled with pity for those creatures. At that time I follow an intuitive animism, of which my mother has her own opinion, which she doesn’t exactly keep to herself. I regard everything as animate, even the fossils of those uninhabited skeletons,congealed in the depths of their stone ocean. In those years I also hope that one night my mother’s people’s house will continue its stalled transformation and will afford me the pleasure of waking up one morning in a real palace. At the same time I have enough of my mother’s earthy nature in me to find the true reason for the ambiguous appearance of her birthplace at least as exciting. One of my ancestors, a farmer with money, had once cherished plans that turned out to extend far beyond his purse. He had wanted to build a sumptuous country house, scrape the smell of earth and dung from under his nails and start living the life of a grand seigneur.
    My mother and her brothers still had a very cool attitude to his memory, which surprised me. My ancestor had been dead for almost 150 years, and, moreover, had been considerate enough to give up the ghost before all the money had been squandered on expensive stone and craftsmen. Yet I was never able to view his likeness, painted without much talent, anywhere except on the wall in the corridor between the dining room and the kitchen in our summer residence, in the tall, narrow servants’ passage, his place of exile. The portrait caught the steam from the ovens. The changing temperatures of the fires, stoked up in the mornings and dying down in the course of the day, warped the frame and with the frame the canvas. Varnish had been struck blind; the palette had faded, so that the man literally had a green laugh beneath his
craquelé
moustache. He regarded all who passed by in front of his eyes, with tureens of hot soup, dishes of roast meat, bowls of boiled vegetables and me too, empty-handed and curious, with a lofty stoicism that even then I thought ridiculous. He looked like statesman in the wings of power, in full regalia, tailcoat or gala costume,without suspecting a foreground role was no longer to be his. I found it easy to pity in those days.
     
    What struck me about the world back then, but perhaps I should say: what strikes me about it only now is its unprecedented particularity, its details, its multiplicity of forms. I’m astonished by the little lead pellets in the linen cupboards that kept the ribbons of dresses or skirts or blouses free of creases through their weight, and by the door handles, solid brass in the best rooms but elsewhere, in the kitchens and in all places intended for those serving, good old iron—even doors seem to know their place.
    Perhaps I used to be more observant, I don’t know, but I’m amazed by the fact that, now I close my eyes and wander through those vanished rooms, there were such things as button-backed boxes, just big enough to accommodate the velvety vulnerability of a peach, picked at the right moment, without bruising, and to deliver it unscathed via an unbelievably fine mesh of postal services and rail connections, if necessary within twenty-four hours, at the tradesman’s entrance of the residence of a nephew or niece in Paris. Or the