Our Elsewheres: Excerpt From The Postman of Abruzzo, By Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Those who have a view of the mountain watch her go from the train station to the house she had rented for a week. The others who have a view of the valley and who see nothing adopt the opinions of others, they have no reason not to. Her arrival at high noon in the month of August when the sun hammers nails into one’s head doesn’t surprise them, but they find it bizarre that she doesn’t stop in front of the cemetery or the cafe, if only to drink a glass of water before continuing up the steep path. 

‘The last house on the left, below the ruins,’ the woman at the rental agency had told her. ‘And above all don’t get lost, there’s no one to help, since the inhabitants of Malaterra move to the valley during the summer. The mountain top is left to the vultures and the snakes.’ 

The key in her hand weighs a ton, as heavy as her legs as she attacks the steep path. The woman she has just left is gesturing wildly as if she were jumping rope. 

‘The key,’ she shouts, ‘is pro forma, the door doesn’t have a lock any more, and you have to go down below to get supplies. Everything is down below.’ 

And she points to the valley. 

‘Is there a stationery shop?’ 

‘Porqué una papèteria? The old people who knew how to write are all dead, the young have left. Unless you want to try your luck with the old Kosovar, he opens on Sunday after mass. What’s your name?’ she asks before walking away. 

‘Laure,’ says Luc’s wife over her shoulder without turning around. 

The crushing heat slows her steps, slows her thoughts. She can’t remember the exact reason that propelled her to this steep village and its inhabitants who speak a language that they alone can understand, a mixture of Italian and Albanian. Is it because it looks like Eboli, or to close the circle of her mourning that she travelled for an entire night? 

Studying the genetics of men and women who live in a closed community, marry only amongst themselves and crossed the Adriatic to change their lives stopped Luc’s heart. Samples taken during the day, analysed at night, notes written between wakefulness and sleep, deciphered and rewritten the next day. 

Luc’s writing is as torturous as the steep, arduous path. 

The same houses carved out of the rocky mountainside, the same rusty facades. The sun and snow of Malaterra make the rocks bleed. They’re caves more than houses with blind windows. The only open shutters are on the hastily rented house. 

Lined up in front of the door are five soot-coloured kittens who seem to have been waiting for her to arrive. They lead her to their mother who is sprawled on the crochet bedspread. Madame mother who is recovering from giving birth yawns wide enough to dislocate her jaws, then follows with an anxious gaze the comings and goings of Laure between her open suitcase and the armoire where she puts away two dresses and Luc’s folder of notes. Tomorrow she will read the pages in which are entangled in great disorder illnesses, immune deficiencies, intermarriages or incest—the father impregnating his daughter with the mute collusion of the mother, sometimes the brother who has gone very far away and who no longer sends home news. 

Tomorrow she will put some order into the geneticist’s hastily written notes. 

It has been ten years since he was evacuated to Rome in a blinding snowstorm, ten years since he returned to Paris in an ambulance plane transporting a half-dead man in a coma. Two ironed shirts sent a month later by a certain Helena still smelt like him. Touched, smelt, eyes shut tight out of fear that her tears would dissolve his sweat, the two shirts hanging in a closet swelled with the dead man’s presence whenever the slightest gust of air reached them. 

From her balcony hanging over the void, Laure makes out a steeple, a square, a tree with trimmed branches, and the red tiles of the roofs. The lake’s evaporating water masks the houses, not the ravine, a gaping chasm, one of the seven doors of hell, says a railroad notice. Why had Luc chosen this village and its inhabitants to study? Did an entire population’s common blood group merit so many years of research, staying with the locals, with his death at the end? 

And who is this Helena who returned her husband’s two shirts washed and ironed by her own hands? No address or phone number, only a sprig of bitter-smelling lavender included in the package.