While the Gods Were Sleeping Read Online Free PDF Page B

fact that there was a cool room in the cellar, where water flowed down the whole length of the white-tiled walls, apart from the doorway, into a marble basin, channelled from a spring near the courtyard, which at the basin end came out of a zinc pipe and at the other end disappeared into a drain, together with the heat it had absorbed en route. And on the wide edges of the basin stood earthenware jugs for the milk, with high necks in which the cream could float to the top. And the cream was skimmed off with special scoops and kept in other, smaller, rounder jugs. And there were small basketsin which strawberries and other berries stayed fresh longer, and only up by the ceiling were there two narrow windows, sufficient to admit a bluish light. It reflected glacially on the smooth surface of the white stone cool block in the centre, on which butter was rolled into shape with spatulas and porridge, cakes or soft cheese were protected from going off too quickly.
    In the kitchen there was sugar in hard cones on the surface of the long work table, held in a contraption with a wheel attached that you had to turn, whereupon a tool scraped sugar loose and it was caught in a dish. And there were mortars for coarse salt or peppercorns, and scores, hundreds, thousands of scoops and scrapers and hooks and clamps and forks and tongs and studs and screws… With an extensive range of instrumentation, from explosives to tweezers as fine as women’s hair, the world could be mined, melted, distilled, reforged, and with each way in which it was attacked, it revealed different facets of itself. Today you have to consult the physicists, or the astronomers with their arcane instruments, in order still to be able to experience the world as elemental; today’s world—a favourite saying of my mother’s—comes to us completely streamlined, while in my youth there were not yet any peaches grown which were able to travel round the world unscathed, even without padded boxes, because they never really ripen.
     
    The house was like a termites’ nest, managed by workers whose queen had long since wasted away in her bridal chamber, but around whose absence a daily life still developed. A stubborn, possibly millennia-old matriarchy ruled over the seasons. In my early childhood this coincided with the stony contours of Moumou, my mother’s mother’s mother, over 100 when shefinally died when I was about eight. I thought she was old enough, almost prehistoric, to bear the whole of humanity. The vast stretch of her existence took my breath away.
    During the long autumn of her life the home in which she had borne her offspring contained her like a reliquary shrine. Deep in the heart of the house she lay for most of the day on a thick, eternally rustling mattress in an alcove right next to a chimney breast. When the shutters of her sleeping compartment were closed and she lay behind them snorting in her eternal slumber, I imagined that the alcove hid a basin in which a mysterious marine mammal was being kept alive. I imagined that every so often Moumou had expelled a hunk of slime and blood from her gigantic body which her older daughters had caught and rubbed clean with linen cloths, and in that way, as they rubbed, modelled into the more or less recognizable shape of a human being. At least that was what I saw happen in the stall, when a cow had given birth, and with her tongue piled the lump of membranes and blood into a calf.
     
    On Sunday two of Moumou’s granddaughters put her into a dark-blue or black dress of a cut that had once, long before the Franco-Prussian War, been fashionable, manoeuvred her with some difficulty into a wheelchair with a woven seat and pushed the whole huge contraption into the large drawing room, where every so often I, the youngest, had to greet the matriarch, the oldest of all.
    She was virtually deaf. Over one eye, no more than a chink in the geometrical pattern of wrinkles round her eye sockets, lay an alarming