The World Goes On
Page 17
DOWNHILL ON A FOREST ROAD
For the first time ever he had some difficulty in getting the key into the ignition and eventually forced it, if only because there was no way but force, then he turned the engine which sprang to life and reversed onto the hill road, forgetting all about the key problem, though he did wonder while still maneuvering whether everything was all right, for after all there shouldn’t have been a problem getting the key into the ignition of a car as new as this, but the thought vanished as soon as he started downhill, not a shred of it remaining, and he concentrated on driving in second gear before switching to third then climbing again to reach the highway above the village, the highway that would still be deserted because half past eight was too early for tourists and too late for locals, not that he knew the exact time because when he looked at the car’s clock it showed eight minutes to nine and he thought, oh, better get a move on, and he stepped lightly on the gas while on either side of him the branches formed a tent over the winding lane, the whole scene was so beautiful with sunbeams penetrating the boughs, the light sprinkling the road, everything trembling, and the highway ahead; quite marvelous, he thought, and he could almost smell the scent of the greenery still wet with dew, he now being at the straight part of the road, some three hundred meters leading straight down where the car naturally picked up speed, and he thought it would be nice to have some music, and was just reaching for the car radio when suddenly he saw, some hundred or hundred and fifty meters ahead of him—that is to say about half way or two-thirds of the way down the straightaway—a patch on the road that made him frown and peer trying to guess what it might be, a discarded piece of clothing, a machine part, or what?—and it flashed through his mind that it looked exactly like an animal, though it had to be a rag of some sort, something thrown from, or dropped from a truck, a rag that had remained curiously tangled, but when he saw that there was something at the side of the road as well as in the middle, he leaned forward on the steering wheel and tried to get a better look at it but couldn’t quite see where one form stopped and the other started, so he slowed down just in case, because if there were two of them he didn’t want to drive over either, and it was only once he was very close that he could make them out and was so surprised he could hardly believe his eyes and put his foot down on the brake, since the thing didn’t just look like an animal, it was one, a young dog, a puppy, sitting perfectly still on the white line in the middle of the road, a rather thin creature with a patchy coat and an innocent look there in the middle of the road watching him in the car, quite calmly sitting on its butt, keeping a straight back and what was even more frightening than the fact of its presence was the look in its eyes, the way it didn’t move, the quite incomprehensible way it just sat there despite the big car, what the hell was it doing there with the car practically on top of it so you could see the dog wasn’t going to move even if he or his big car did, because this dog wasn’t interested in the car or its proximity though he was almost touching it; and it was only then he noticed that to the left of the dog sitting on the white line there was another dog at the side of the road, its flattened corpse apparently hit by a car that had sliced it open, its stomach visible, and though his own car had reached them, the companion of the dead dog—what was the relationship between them? were they companions?—hadn’t moved an inch so he was forced to drive around it very slowly on its right side, his right wheel off the road so he could get by, only just avoiding it by a few centimeters if that, the dog was still sitting there straight-backed, and now he could look directly into its face though it would have been better if he hadn’t, because, having carefully passed it, the dog was slowly following him with its eyes, with its sad eyes that showed no trace of panic or wild fury or of being traumatized by shock, the eyes simply uncomprehending and sad, sadly gazing at the driver of the car moving around and away from him, still not moving from the white line in the middle of the forest road, and it didn’t matter whether it was fifteen miles from Los Angeles, eighteen miles from Kyoto, or twenty miles to the north of Budapest, it simply sat there, looking sad, watching over its companion, waiting for someone to come along to whom it might explain what had happened or just sitting and waiting for the other to get up at last and make some movement so that the pair of them might vanish from this incomprehensible place.