ECK IS INTERRUPTED

Michael Aliprandini

Upon his return from the lower village, Eck found a pile of logs blocking the narrow path. The woodcutter had brought the deaf-mute's delivery for the winter. As Eck wobbled over the sour-smelling wood, the old man stood bellowing on the other side, stood in his curious habit, stooped with hands on knees, breathing heavily. Then he put a hand on his back and winced. His nose was dripping in the chill.

Eck started bringing armloads into the deaf-mute’s yard, down the steps, to the pallet near the back door, making sure not to slip in either the fresh yellow feces or the crimson splat of blood. The deaf-mute dragged one log at a time. When he had finished, Eck pointed to the blood. The deaf-mute shrugged. Eck waved a hand in front of his nose. The old man said in his strangulated tone the word for dog, and sprinkled the blood and the feces with a handful of sawdust.

Eck and the deaf-mute had met the day he’d pushed open the door of Eck's house, unannounced, and bellowed a noise of greeting, of strange familiarity. As on that day, so today. The deaf-mute thrust a tube of cream into Eck's hand, pulled up his shirt, and unwound the musty bandage encircling his torso. Gently Eck applied the cream to his back. The deaf-mute winced, grumbled and occasionally gestured to a spot. Eck had never seen skin so white, had never touched skin so weirdly soft, would never have guessed what the clothes hid: a prodding spine, sides girded beneath the ribcage.

They lived at the highest point of the village, Eck and the deaf-mute. Their houses and the ancient ruins were the only structures on the hilltop, a mountain really, a mountain sloping into shade-darkened valleys and surrounded by higher mountains. Eck's house of tawny native stone overlooked the terraces at the base of the village.

Table, chair, cot, and rawhide suitcase made up his furnishings. The open book on the table seemed to have flipped back several pages while he had been out, though the window was closed and it was not a windy day. Eck sat down at his desk. He closed the book. He touched a pencil but quickly drew away. The cuffs of his sweater were flared. No matter how carefully washed and dried, the knit would never regain its form. Such local details had been cropping up with a force that interrupted the texture of his days and the course he had planned out for them. He knew, for example, the exact chill of the scorched clay tiles of his house at various hours of the day. He knew that the underside of his desk was constructed of one smooth and one rough-hewn plank. He knew that these abandoned rooms had been used for roasting chestnuts, hence the pale scent of smoke. It was Eck’s landlord who had swept out the husks and ashes, killed the rats, and plastered the charred walls.

A weak voice summoned him to the door. The frail man in a fedora had managed to make his way to the upper village. He was preparing rabbit for dinner and asked whether he could pick some of the herbs sprouting out of a nearby wall. He parted with what seemed a reminder: that he had been born in Eck's house ninety-three years before.

The storm broke just before sunrise. All day and into evening the white mist whirled by and rain seeped inside from beneath the window-frame, while leaves and petals, old mortar and even small stones whipped past. The clouds were heavy, herniating, gray and sulfurous. If he opened a window, the mist would roil into the room. He heard a deep rumble that was not thunder, it was too close to the ground, and as a gale parted the mist he saw that a sinkhole had opened behind one of the terrace walls. Eck banked the fire. For all the storm's intensity and sudden evolutions, it wasn't very cold. He wondered if he should check on the deaf-mute. No, he decided. The deaf-mute and all of the other old people in the village would be safe beside their own stoves or fireplaces. He closed his eyes and listened. The wind was shrill. He shivered because outside it looked cold and sounded colder still.

The storm had passed sometime during the night, and the air seemed rinsed. Placid though it was now, many of the trees held the shape of wind.

An old man waved to him from atop the one section of the ruins still standing after the earthquake a century before. Eck climbed the embankment up to the squat tower. Half of the slanted floor was pooled with rainwater, and the man explained that he had to sluice it off through a drain in the wall. Otherwise the floor might collapse.

Eck retrieved a stick, threw a plank onto the water and leapt on. He was immediately soaked up to his ankles. Again and again he rammed the stick into the intersection between wall and floor at the point indicated, and soon felt the blockage give way. He reached into the water, feeling silt and roots. After a few tugs, the water cascaded down the side of the tower. It left behind sediment and spools of dirty foam. Eck’s hands were stung red.

The man told Eck to put his hands in his pockets and descend with him to the village. The man’s house was much like his own, though warmer. His wife was turned to the open fire. From the blackened pot she ladled out three portions, barley soup in a bland broth. Steam rose from Eck's wet shoes as high as the rungs of his chair. Steam also obscured the windows and the glass over the photographs on the mantle. He hadn't come to the village to be curious about its inhabitants. He had come to remain a foreigner among strangers, so he made an effort not to ask any questions. The woman slurped more than her husband, ate faster, but she held her spoon elegantly rather than in her fist. Slimy-looking tears dribbled down her cheeks.

Have you seen the wall below my house? Eck asked. Part of it collapsed in the storm.

The man raised his ear towards Eck. The woman bowed her head.—It is of course we who are becoming weaker, she said, but it seems instead that things have become heavier.

The stones of our grandfathers, the man said. He was searching Eck’s face.—Could I prevail upon you to help me with one thing more?

My feet are wet, Eck said.

The man went into the next room and returned with a pair of wool socks. Eck unlaced his boots, shucked his wet socks.—Let me take care of those, the woman said, and sneezed.

There are two problems, the man said as they went around the back of the house.—Climb up and I'll explain.

Instead of crooking his neck, the man raised his voice. It seemed he was explaining to the wall that at least one row of the tiles had been disturbed by cats. Eck, reaching from the top of the ladder, straightened two of the rows. Next the man put some pieces of slate in a bucket, and Eck descended to take hold of the rope. He had to set the stone along the eaves, atop the tiles. At first they worked together, the man loading the bucket and Eck pulling it up and placing the stone. But the man's energy soon flagged and Eck had to descend the ladder to fill the bucket himself.

Several hours later he plodded back up the hill. A scrap of paper on his desk, in his script, read: Little dwarf. However, in this state he wouldn’t be able to hold his head up, much less a pencil.

From the ceiling of his bathroom hung a dead bat. He knocked the husk down with a broom handle and shifted it onto a sheet of paper. He thought that in its elegant structure there was something important to understand, something more important than the mechanics of flight.

The bat had been reduced to bones and membrane and tiny claws. The peaks of its once-sensitive ears were visible, as was the delicate skin of its face, so delicate that turning the bat over once or twice caused both the face and the ears to slough from the skull. The gray wings, enfolding the body, were almost completely intact beneath a coat of dust. Some sort of dead larvae infested the back. When the larvae began pulsing, Eck blamed his breath until he saw black-headed maggots poking out of the cocoons, quickened by their proximity to the heat of the fire.

He was both enthralled and unnerved by the spectacle of the maggots in their false spring. Yet it was not until after many breathless minutes of observation that he fixated on the elbow-like joint of the bat's wings, raised his own elbows to the level of his head—and directly opened the window and threw the carcass and paper and maggots into the cold outdoors.

One day Eck was observing a pile of junk near the ancient tower. An old crone came along, and he closed his notebook.—Out to see the day, she said. Out to see the hilltop. Out to remember. I live below now but I was born up here. How it changes. There used to be a fountain, for mules and men. There. There used to be a castle. There. Over there used to be an oven for baking bread, and here, once, long ago, ran a mule path. They packed the stones from below to build the village, and the mayor, when there was a mayor, watched from his window. There.

Eck realized that he mustn't interrupt, lest he startle the woman from her momentous reverie. Like a ruined wall, a cause for remembrance, an excuse to recount, he was not meant to respond. Though unlike the wall, he was meant to hear. He was part of the landscape. He was a listening landscape.

The junk pile had a structure too, and structures tangled within. There were the rusty iron bands that had once embraced barrels. There were long heavy beams cloven with age, and handsome lintels. Nor did Eck fail to notice the hewn stones which, if placed together, would form an arch. Even the keystone was there. There.

He pushed through the yellow grass of the terrace. Inevitably, more of the wall would collapse; it already bulged along the center. In their fall the stones had tumbled free of each other. They were round, they were roughly square. Two stones, of softer stuff, had cracked into pieces. All were light shades of brown, soiled on one side, a few with a rosy hint. From the recess behind the wall he brought out a rusty kettle, shards of crockery, a spoon and a shriveled newt.

A dog had crept up through the grass. Eck froze for a moment but the dog was benign, and white, except for its pink shaven rump. It dropped the slobbery stone clacking between its teeth and whined. Eck threw a different stone and the dog went roving.

The deaf-mute appeared several terraces above. Seeing Eck, he made elaborate signals to be secretive. Then he tipped up a wheelbarrow and the corpse of his dog crashed onto the first terrace and rolled onto the next, catching in the branches of a small dead tree, which cracked but held under the new weight.

F operated the village shop. He had on offer everything from writing paper and seasonal vegetables to shots of liquor and stale sweets, and of course firewood and flour. F had one further distinction. At age thirty-four, he was the only village local who hadn't reached his seventh decade.

F was huddled towards the stove. Sweat dripped below his sideburns, and he wore a square bandage on his forehead. Generally nervous, he was agitated all the more by Eck’s request for a bottle of aspirin and two envelopes. F hurried behind the counter.—I chew them for quicker relief, he stuttered.

What happened to your head? Eck asked.

You've heard about love?

Eck dry-swallowed two aspirins. They both turned to look outside when the cupboard crashed into the street. So flimsy were its panels that it collapsed neatly onto itself, sides upon back, doors upon sides, top upon doors. It was followed by a mattress and a large envelope. A small feisty man pitched up his voice.—Bastard! Mud-covered whoreson! My x-rays! You dare evict the custodian?

F shuffled back behind the counter. Eck, by now resigned to the state of affairs, hefted the thin mattress onto his head and began the ascent. Ahead of him the custodian stooped for bits of paper and glass and twice stopped to elevate his shoe and tie it.

The custodian seemed restless during the evenings and spent most of his time examining a series of chest x-rays against the light. He also borrowed a book, a dictionary, the one book on Eck's shelf devoted to words from his own language. One morning Eck woke to find a note. It read: I've gone to represent my case before the council. Watch how I’ll razzle-dazzle them with my new lexicon.

Eck staggered out of bed to leave his door ajar, pausing beneath the lintel between rooms as if the earth had trembled. He felt woozy and feverish, an ailment that was but one of many. His toenails had also become too long, and one nail was cutting into the side of the neighboring toe. Most worrying was that the rotten smell and the ache in his third molar must mean an abscess. The smell had been distracting him for days. Then this morning he had woken beneath his hovel of blankets feeling a warm patch circulating around his body, first above his knee, later on his thigh, and last on his lower back before it descended again to the thigh and hovered there.

Eventually the deaf-mute came in and fell into his usual position, hands on knees. Eck pointed to the dead fire, and he soon had a raging blaze. Eck was sure that he could smell the rotten tooth; he often had to remind himself that the deaf-mute lacked only two of his faculties.

Sleep, like a dark undertow, pulled Eck away again. In his dreams he felt his head enlarging and elongating as though he had water on the brain, and once or twice he bolted upright moaning the word Akhenaton. Had he been dreaming of Cairo? The deaf-mute, posted near the fire, responded enthusiastically. He began imitating Eck’s sudden rise from the cot, and laughing. Sleep, like a dark undertow, pulled him away again.

10.

Months passed. The landlord never came for the rent. Maybe he didn't really own the house and was nervous about pressing his wily luck any further, even with a foreigner. Every time Eck considered the situation, he referred to himself as the rube.

On the last day of this story, another villager knocked on Eck’s door. By and by Eck found himself explaining that he had not borrowed the man’s wheelbarrow.—Well, the man said, shifting the burlap sack slung over his shoulder, good to see you're getting on up here. Of course you'll find the spring more accommodating. Don't forget I have a small greenhouse if you need a source of fresh vegetables. Eck couldn't help but visualize the bright colors, the pigments yellow, red and green. The man caught Eck's elbow in farewell and wended his way down and along the terraces. Eck watched as he dropped the sack and reached inside. Birds dove for the handfuls of seed and corn that he tossed into the air.

A black millipede shot around Eck's feet. There arose a most peculiar, unpleasant odor from the brained carapace. Spring would soon arrive.

about the writer

Michael Aliprandini lives in Italy and works internationally as a curriculum developer and teacher-trainer. His short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several publications, including Columbia Journal, Litro, and Queen Mob's Teahouse. He is a fiction reader for the online edition of Litro.