Peter and the Wolf-2
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Her lips opened up as she howled so that she offered him, without her own iion or volition, a view of a set of ese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret pla which destinatioually receded before him, his first, devastating, vertiginous intimation of infinity.She howled.
A on howling until, from the mountain, first singly, then in a plex polyphony, answered at last voices in the same language. She tio howl, though now with a less tragic resonance. Soon it was impossible for the octs of the house to deny to themselves that the wolves were desded on the village in a pack.
Then she was soled, sank down, laid her head on her forepaws so that her hair trailed in the cooling soup, and so closed up her forbidden book without the least notion she had ever ope or that it was banned. Her heavy eyelids closed on her brown, bloodshot eyes. The household gun hung on a nail over the fireplace where Peters father had put it when he came in but when the ma his foot o of the ladder in order to e down for his on, the girl jumped up, snarling and showing her long yellow es.
The howling outside was now mixed with the agitated dismay of the domestic beasts. All the other villagers were well locked up at home. The wolves were at the door.
The boy took hold of his grandmothers uninjured hand. First the old woman would not budge but he gave her a good tug and she came to herself. The girl raised her head suspiciously but let them by. The boy pushed his grandmother up the ladder in front of him and drew it up behind them. He was full of nervous dread. He would have given anything to turn time back, so that he might have run, shouting a warning, when he first caught sight of the wolves, and never seehe door shook as the wolves outside jumped up at it and the screws that held the socket of the bolt to the frame cracked, squeaked and started to give. The girl jumped up, at that, and began to make excited little sallies bad forth in front of the door. The screws tore out of the frame quite soon. The pack tumbled over one ao get inside.
Dissoerror. The clamour within the house was that of all the winds of wirapped in a box. That which they feared most, outside, was now indoors with them. The baby in to read.
The boy became very pious, so much so that his family were startled and impressed. The younger children teased him and called him "Saier" but that did not stop him sneaking off to church to pray whenever he had a spare moment. I, he fasted to the bone. On Good Friday, he lashed himself. It was as if he blamed himself for the death of the old lady, as if he believed he had brought into the house the fatal iion that had taken her out of it. He was ed by an imperious passion for ato. Eaight, he pored over his book by the flimsy dlelight, looking for a clue to grace, until his mother shooed him off to sleep.
But, as if to spite the four evas he nightly io protect his bed, the nightmare regularly disordered his sleeps. He tossed and turned on the rustling straw pallet he shared with two little ones.
Delighted with Peters precocious intelligehe priest started to teach him Latier visited the priest as his duties with the herd permitted. When he was fourteen, the priest told his parents that Peter should now go to the seminary iown in the valley where the boy would learn to bee a priest himself. Ri sons, they spared oo God, since his books and his praying made him a strao them. After the goats came down from the high pasture for the winter, Peter set off. It was October.
At the end of his first days travel, he reached a river that ran from the mountain into the valley. The nights were already chilly; he lit himself a fire, prayed, ate bread and cheese his mother had packed for him and slept as well as he could. In spite of his eagero pluo the white world of penand devotion that awaited him, he was anxious and troubled for reasons he could not explain to himself.
In the first light, the light that no more than clarifies darkne..ss like egg shells dropped in cloudy liquid, he went down to the river to drink and to wash his face. It was so still he could have been the ohing living.
Her forearms, her loins and her legs were thick with hair and the hair on her head hung round her fa such a way that you could hardly make out her features. She crouched oher side of the river. She was lapping up water so full of mauve light that it looked as if she were drinking up the dawn as fast as it appeared yet all the same the air grew pale while he was looking at her. Solitude and silence; all still.
She could never have aowledged that the refle beh her in the river was that of herself. She did not know she had a face; she had never known she had a fad so her face itself was the mirror of a different kind of scioushan ours is, just as her nakedness, without innoce or display, was that of our first parents, before the Fall. She was hairy as Magdalen in the wilderness a repentance was not within her prehension.
Language crumbled into dust uhe weight of her speechlessness. A pair of cubs rolled out of the bushes, cuffing one another. She did not pay them any heed.
The boy began to tremble and shake. His skin prickled. He felt he had been made of snow and now might melt. He mumbled something, or sobbed.
She cocked her head at the vague, river-washed sound and the cubs heard it, too, left off tumbling and ran to burrow their scared heads in her side. But she decided, after a moment, there was no danger and lowered her muzzle, again, to the surface of the water that took hold of her hair and spread it out around her head.
When she finished her drink, she backed a few paces, shaking her wet pelt. The little cubs fasteheir mouths on her dangling breasts.
Peter could not help it, he burst out g. He had not cried since his grandmothers funeral. Tears rolled down his fad splashed on the grass. He blundered forward a few steps into the river with his arms held open, intending to cross over to the other side to join her in her marvellous and private grace, impelled by the access of an almost visionary ecstasy. But his cousin toht at the sudden movement, wrenched her teats away from the cubs and ran off. The squeaking cubs scampered behind. She ran on hands a as if that were the only way to run towards the high ground, into the bright maze of the unpleted dawn.
When the boy recovered himself, he dried his tears on his sleeve, took off his soaked boots and dried his feet and legs oail of his shirt. Thee something from his pack, he scarcely knew what, and tinued on the way to the town; but what would he do at the seminary, now? For now he khere was nothing to be afraid of.
He experiehe vertigo of freedom.
He carried his boots slung over his shoulder by the laces. They were a great burden. He debated with himself whether or not to throw them away but, when he came to a paved road, he had to put them on, although they were still damp.
The birds woke up and sang. The cool, rational sun surprised him; m had broken on his exhilaration and the mountain now lay behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw, how, with distahe mountain began to acquire a flat, two-dimensional look. It was already turning into a picture of itself, into the postcard hastily bought as a souvenir of childhood at a railway station or a border post, the neer cutting, the snapshot he would show in straowns, straies, other tries he could not, at this moment, imagine, whose names he did not yet know, places where he would say, in strange languages, "That was where I spent my childhood. Imagine!"
He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self, so, for the first time, he saw the primitive, vast, magnifit, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain. As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much sery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old try tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman<samp>藏书网</samp>.
Theerminedly set his face towards the town and tramped onwards, into a different story.
"If I look back again," he thought with a last gasp of superstitious terror, "I shall turn into a pillar of salt."
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