The Weight of Snow. Christian Guay-Poliquin

for you.

      I give him a questioning look. Matthias picks up the gold cylinder from the table and hands it to me. He gives me a big smile. The cylinder is heavy and telescopic. Its ends are covered in glass. I examine it from all angles. It is a spyglass. Like the ones sailors used long ago to pick out the thin line of the coast, or the enemy’s ships.

      Look outside.

      I sit up in bed, extend the sliding tube, and place it against my eye. Everything moves toward me and each object takes on precise dimensions. As if I were on the other side of the window. The black flight of the birds, the footsteps in the snow, the unreal calm of the village, the edge of the forest.

      Keep looking.

      I know this landscape by heart. I have been watching it for some time now. I do not really remember the summer because of the fever and the drugs, but I did see the slow movement of the landscape, the grey autumn sky, the reddening light of the trees. I saw the ferns devoured by frost, the tall grass breaking when a breeze rose up, the first flakes landing upon the frozen ground. I saw the tracks of the animals that inspected the area after the first snow. The sky has swallowed everything up ever since. The landscape is in waiting. Everything has been put off until spring.

      Nature with no respite. The mountains cut off the horizon, the forest hems us in on all sides, and the snow blinds us.

      Look harder, Matthias tells me.

      I examine the long stick that Matthias set up in the clearing. He has added minute graduation marks on it.

      It’s for measuring snow, he announces, triumphant.

      With the spyglass, I can see the snow has reached forty-one centimetres. I consider the whiteness of the landscape a moment, then slump back on my bed and close my eyes.

      Great, I tell myself. Now we can put numbers to our distress.

      FORTY-TWO

      Matthias is preparing black bread. A kind of brick made of buckwheat flower and molasses. According to him, it’s filling and nutritious. And the best thing, since we have to ration our supplies as we wait for the next delivery.

      Like an old shaman, he mixes, kneads, and shapes the dough with a striking economy of effort. When he finishes, he shakes off his clothes in a cloud of flour and cooks the cakes of black bread directly on the stovetop.

      The weather has cleared. I observe the houses in the village, among the trees, at the foot of the hill. Most of them show no signs of life, though a few chimneys send up generous plumes of smoke. The grey columns rise straight into the sky as if refusing to melt into the vastness. There are twelve houses. Thirteen with ours. With the spyglass the village seems close by, but that is an illusion. I would need more than an hour to walk there. And I still can’t get out of bed.

      I believe the solstice has passed. The sun’s path through the sky is still short, but the days have grown longer without us really noticing. New Year’s Day must be behind us. Though I am not really sure. It makes no difference. I lost all notion of time long ago. Along with the desire to speak. No one can resist the silence, chained to broken legs, in the winter, in a village without electricity.

      We still have a good supply of wood, but it is going down fast. We live in a porch made of drafts, and several times a night Matthias wakes up to feed the stove. When the wind blows, we can feel the cold holding us in the palm of its hand.

      They will be sending us wood and supplies in a few days. In the meantime, I keep repeating that even if I survived a terrible car wreck, I still can’t do anything for myself.

      FORTY-TWO

      A crescent moon embraces the black sky. A thick, shiny crust has formed on the snow. In the glow of the night, it is like a calm, shimmering sea.

      In the room, the oil lamp casts its light on the walls, sketching out golden shadows. Matthias comes to me with a bowl of soup and a piece of black bread. It is all we eat. The end of one soup is the beginning of the next. When we reach the bottom of the kettle, Matthias adds water and anything else he can get his hands on. When we have meat, he boils the bones and gristle to make broth. Vegetables, dry bread, it all ends up in the soup. Every day, at every meal, we eat that bottomless soup.

      Matthias sits at the table, hands clasped carefully, in an attitude of contemplation, as I swallow down as much as I can. Often I finish my meal before he has started his.

      At the beginning, Matthias had to force me to eat so I would recuperate and get my strength back. He would help me sit up and feed me patiently, one spoonful at a time, like a child. Now I can lean back on the pillows by myself. The pain and fatigue persist, but my appetite has returned. When he gets his hands on a few litres of milk, he makes cheese with the rennet he found in the creamery in the stable. Sometimes he gives cheese to the villagers, but often it is so good we devour all of it in a few days, right out of the cloth it has drained in.

      Getting over my injuries takes a lot of energy. So does evaluating the passage of time. Maybe I should be like Matthias and just say before the snow or since the snow. But that would be too easy.

      There has not been electricity for months. At the beginning, I was told, there were blackouts in the village. Nothing too worrisome. People practically got used to it. It would last a few hours, then the power would return. One morning, it did not come back. Not here, and not anywhere else. It was summer. People looked on the bright side. But when autumn came, they had to think about what to do next. As if they had been taken by surprise. It is winter now, and no one can do anything about it. In the houses, everyone gathers around the woodstove and a few blackened kettles.

      Matthias finishes his bowl of soup and pushes it toward the centre of the table.

      For a moment, nothing happens. I have a particular affection for these time outs that follow our meals.

      They do not last long.

      Matthias stands, picks up the dishes, and scours them in the sink. Then he wraps the pieces of bread in a plastic bag, folds the clothes that were drying on the line above the stove, extends the wick on the oil lamp, takes out the first aid kit, and brings over a chair.

      FORTY-TWO

      Matthias clears his throat as if he was preparing to read aloud. But he says nothing, and turns his neck right and left to get rid of the tension. Then he pulls away the quilt that covers my legs.

      I look away. Maybe Matthias thinks I am looking outside, but I can see his reflection perfectly in the dark window. One by one, he unties the straps from my right side. He slips his hand under my heel and raises my leg.

      My heart beats faster. The pain roars and stares me down like a powerful, graceful beast.

      Patiently, Matthias unwraps my bandages. He is slow and methodical. When he reaches the last layers of gauze, I feel the cloth sticking to my skin because of the humidity and the blood, and the infection too. He cuts off the rest of the bandage with scissors and pulls it away with calculated care. I breathe in deeply and concentrate on the air that fills my rib cage. Matthias moves his head back. I picture him evaluating the redness, the swelling, the bony callus, the shape of the tibia and the knee.

      Pretty soon it will be time to take out the stitches, he says, disinfecting the wound.

      The burning sensation is intense. I feel like my flesh is melting off my bones.

      Don’t move! Matthias thunders. Let me do my work.

      I try to look away as far as possible from my legs, toward the back of the room and the two doors. The front door and the one that leads the other way. I look at the heavy, squatting woodstove, the objects on the shelves, the ceiling with its beams squared off with an axe. Two light bulbs hang there like dinosaur skeletons in a museum.

      Matthias takes a tube out of the first aid kit and tries to decipher the label.