Read Once in Europa for Free Online Page B

ago, I woke up to find all the pastures white. One cannot really talk of the first snow of the year at an altitude of 1,600 metres, because often it snows every month, but this was the first snow which was not going to disappear until the following year, and it was falling in large flakes.
    Towards midday there was a knock on the door. I opened it. Beyond, almost indistinguishable from the snow, were thirty sheep, silent, snow on their necks. In the doorway stood Boris.
    He came in and went over to the stove to thaw out. It was one of those tall stoves for wood, standing free in the centre of the room like a post of warmth. The jacket over his gigantic shoulders was white as a mountain.
    For a quarter of an hour he stood there silent, drinking from the glass of gnôle, holding his huge hands over the stove. The damp patch on the floorboards around him was growing larger.
    At last he spoke in his rasping voice. His voice, whatever the words, spoke of a kind of neglect. Its hinges were off, its windows broken, and yet, there was a defiance in it, as if, like a prospector living in a broken-down shack, it knew where there was gold.
    In the night, he said, I saw it was snowing. And I knew my sheep were up by the peak. The less there is to eat, the higher they climb. I drove up here before it was light and I set out. It was crazy to climb by myself. Yet who would come with me? I couldn’t see the path for the snow. If I’d lost my foothold, there was nothing, nothing at all, to stop me till I reached the churchyard below. For five hours since daybreak I have been playing against death.
    His eyes in their deep sockets interrogated me to check whether I had understood what he was saying. Not his words, but what lay behind them. Boris liked to remain mysterious. He believed that the unsaid favoured him. And yet, despite himself, he dreamed of being understood.
    Standing there with the puddle of melted snow at his feet, he was not in the least like the good shepherd who had just risked his life for his flock. St. John the Baptist, who crowned the Lamb with flowers, was the very opposite of Boris. Boris neglected hissheep. Each year he sheared them too late and they suffered from the heat. Each summer he omitted to pare their hooves and they went lame. They looked like a flock of beggars in grey wool, Boris’s sheep. If he had risked his life that day on the mountain, it wasn’t for their sake, but for the sake of their market price.
    His parents had been poor, and from the age of twenty Boris boasted of the money he was going to make one day. He was going to make
big
money—according to the instructions received at his conception and inscribed in every cell of his body.
    At market he bought cattle that nobody else would buy, and he bought at the end of the day, offering a price which twelve hours earlier would have appeared derisory. I see him, taciturn beside the big-boned animals, pinching their flesh with one of his immense thumbs, dressed in khaki and wearing an American army cap.
    He believed that time would bring him nothing, and that his cunning must bring him everything. When he was selling he never named his price. You can’t insult me, he said, just tell me what you want to offer. Then he waited, his blue, deep-set eyes already on the brink of the derision with which he was going to greet the price named.
    He is looking at me now, with the same expression. I told you once, he says, that I had enough poems in my head to fill a book, do you remember? Now you are writing the story of my life. You can do that because it’s finished. When I was still alive, what did you do? Once you brought me a packet of cigarettes whilst I was grazing the sheep above the factory.
    I say nothing. I go on writing.
    The uncle of all cattle dealers once told me: A ram like Boris is best eaten as meat.
    Boris’s plan was simple: to buy thin and sell fat. What he sometimes underestimated was the work and time