19

 19

PEOPLE SHOUTING, dogs yapping in the distance. It sounds like there are a lot of them, calling Silvia! perhaps. But that’s no concern of hers. She’s no longer certain about answering to that name, barely recognizes it, as if it were a foreign word whose meaning she grasps only obliquely. She has a premonition, though, that the shouting and yapping are forerunners in a series of events: being seen by human eyes, picked up, put in a car and then a bathtub. She doesn’t comprehend these circumstances in a separate and linear way but as a generic fumbling of hands and voices in a sack. And she is that sack.

With immense effort she drags herself out in the driving rain, and everything goes dark and indistinct.

She opens her eyes again. Her nostrils are full of mud; she spits some out of her mouth. She starts crawling again and plants herself under a blackberry bush which has grown into the hazelnut copse. She lies there in the thick of it where no one can save her.

When the silence swells to reclaim the woods, she crawls back inside the hut.