from Grove: A Field Novel
by Esther Kinsky

translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt

In Olevano Romano I am staying for a time in a house on a hill.

When approaching town on the winding road that leads up from the plain, the building is recognizable in the distance. To the left of the hill with the house is the old village, vaulting the steep slope. It is the color of cliffs, a different shade of gray in every light and weather. To the right of the house, somewhat farther uphill, is the cemetery—angular, whitish cement-gray, surrounded by tall, slender black trees. Cypresses. Sempervirens, the everlasting tree of death; a defiant answer to the unexacting pines, projected sharply into the sky.

I walk along the cemetery wall until the road forks. To the southeast it leads through olive groves, becomes a dirt road be- tween a bamboo thicket and vineyards, and grazes a sparse birch grove. Three or four birch trees, scattered messengers, vagrants among olive trees, holm oaks and vines, stand at a slant on a kind of protuberance, which rises up beside the path. From this protuberance one looks to the hill with the house. The village lies once again on the left, the cemetery on the right. A small car moves through the village lanes, while someone hangs laundry on a line beneath the windows. The laundry says: vii.

In the nineteenth century, this protuberance might have served as a good lookout point for those who came here to paint. Perhaps the painters, pulling their handkerchiefs from their jacket pockets, carelessly and unwittingly scattered birch seeds brought from their northern-colored homelands. A birch blossom, picked in passing and long forgotten, spread rootlets here between blades of grass. The painters would have wiped the sweat from their brows and continued painting. The mountains, the village, perhaps the small columns of smoke rising above the plain as well. Where was the cemetery then? The oldest grave that I can find in the cemetery belongs to a German from Berlin, who died here in 1892. The second-oldest grave is for a man with a bold expression and a hat, of Olevano, born in 1843, died in 1912.

Below the vagrant birch trees, a man works in his vine- yard. He cuts bamboo, trims the stalks, burns off the ragged wisps, brings the lengths of the stalks into line. He’s building scaffolding out of them, complicated structures made of poles, formed around the burgeoning grapevines. He weighs down with stones the points where the interlocked stalks met. Here the viti thrives between the vii in the distance, on the left, and the morți, somewhat nearer, on the right.

It is winter, evening comes early. When darkness fals, the old village of Olevano lies in the yellow warmth of streetlights. Along the road to Bellegra, and throughout the new settle- ments on the northern side, stretches a labyrinth of dazzling white lamps. Above on the hillside the cemetery hovers in the glow of countless perpetually burning small lights, which glim- mer before the gravestones, lined up on the ledges in front of the sepulchers. When the night is very dark, the cemetery, illuminated by luces perpetuae, hangs like an island in the night. The island of the morți above the valley of the vii.