Marcel Moring - In Babylon

‘The fireplace,’ said Nina.

‘What?’

‘You could throw it in the fireplace.’

I went to the hearth and flicked the ash into the blackened hole. ‘Listen. You stay here, I’ll check around the back. And I’ll try to find some wood while I’m at it. If we don’t make a fire in here, we’ll freeze to death.’

She stared down at the floor. ‘I’ve got to go back,’ she said.

‘You can’t.’

‘Let’s call someone.’

‘There’s no phone.’

She raised her head and looked at me, her face expressionless. ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

‘You’ll never find the car, and if you do it’ll probably be buried in the snow by now.’

I walked out of the room. When I looked back through the doorway, she was still sitting, motionless, on the big four-poster bed. She was peering down at her feet, as if she could see something that simply wouldn’t let her go.

The house smelled like an auditorium. I inspected the kitchen and then from the kitchen window, the white lawn with the wooden shed where the gardener kept his tools. The thermometer on the windowsill read seventeen below zero. It must have been about five below in here. None of the doors at the back of the house had been forced, none of the windows were broken. I went to the library and stared into the murky light at the flood of books. The shutters were closed, the windows appeared to be intact. When I was back in the kitchen, I opened the door to the cellar. Behind the door, one foot on the stairs, I fiddled in vain with the light switch. I took the box of matches out of my pocket, lit one, and groped my way into the receding darkness. Slowly the floor came into view, and then the walls, and glass and tin, walls of tin cans, glass jars, bottles, shelves piled high with provisions, a fat red Edam, a smoked cheese, dried meat, sugar, salt, onions, dried apples, a string of garlic, crackers, candied fruits, toilet paper, a large cardboard box with bottles of detergent, bars of soap, indeterminate tubes of toothpaste, two bottles of calor gas with burners and detachable parts, and an assortment of candles. I stared, in the light of the dying match, at the display. Outside of a supermarket, I had never seen this much food at one time.

I dropped the match, it went dark. I sat down on the stairs, elbows on my knees, hands folded, and let the chilly darkness stream around me, the cool, sweet smell I remembered.

Uncle Herman never kept much in stock, because he never stayed at the house for more than three months at a time, and if he was there, he had Mrs Sanders order in as much fresh food as possible. Now the shelves were filled.

‘Herman,’ I said, ‘Nuncle, what the hell is going on here?’

I struck another match, stood up, and walked on. The vaulted cellar extended over the length and breadth of the entire house, divided into rooms that were separated by white stucco walls with semicircular passageways. The first room, a kind of central hall beneath the real hall, was once filled with virtually empty shelves. Now they were crammed. I unpacked the candles and stuck a few in my jacket. I lit another and in the flickering light I inspected the vault to the left of the main hall. One half was taken up by a mountain of potatoes, held together by three partitions. In addition to that: tin cans and glass jars of baked beans, carrots, kidney beans, corn, red cabbage, beets, sauerkraut, ravioli, macédoine, pickled mushrooms, salmon, tuna, sardines, corned beef, canned brie and camembert, dried apples, condensed milk, powdered eggs, chicken soup, stock, green peas, candied fruits, herring in dill sauce. And in addition to that: packets of rice, pasta, potato starch, flour, jars of coriander, dill, thyme, rosemary, marjoram, pepper, oregano, ginger powder, chilli peppers, capers, horseradish, pesto. The vault to the right of the entrance, the wine cellar, was as I remembered it. Racks from floor to ceiling, not a single free patch of wall. Thick, white-grey shreds of cobweb, and fine dust, powdery as ash. There was no cellar book here, but no one would have trouble finding his way around. Everything was carefully arranged, white on the left, red on the right, subdivided by country of origin (France, Spain, Italy), province (Bordeaux, Burgundy, and so on), region (Saint-Émilion, Médoc, Pomerol, Chablis, Margaux) and year.

A barricade at the top of the stairs and enough supplies in the cellar to survive an atomic war. I couldn’t believe that Mrs Sanders had dragged all this into the house by herself. And why should she? Uncle Herman was never coming back and I hadn’t been here in ages. But what disturbed me most was that it looked as if that huge stockpile was there in preparation for something that was yet to happen. I turned round and went back from room to room. Jars and cans, neatly in rows, packets of sugar one behind the other, as if it had all been stocked by a diligent shop assistant. I couldn’t tell whether any portion of this enormous quantity of food had ever been touched. What I did see, when I got back to the stairs, was the old transistor radio I had brought along with me on one of my visits. It was lying behind the bottom step, half-covered with a spider’s web. I switched it on and heard the soft rustling of empty ether. I tucked it under my arm, blew out the candle, and went upstairs.

In the kitchen, I turned the aerial this way and that and twiddled the large dial until I picked up the sound of voices. It was the local station. I put the radio on the counter and listened to the babbling. After a minute or two there were a few bars of music and a bronzy male voice. ‘This is Radio East, on air twenty-four hours a day. We’re here for you. Give us a ring and tell us how you’re enjoying the storm!’ Then I heard a man and a woman, who took turns answering calls from people who were stranded or had something exciting to share with the listeners. A couple of people snowed in at a petrol station phoned to say they had been living on coffee machine coffee, soft drinks, and chocolate bars since the night before and longed desperately for bread and cheese. A police spokesman reported that entire villages were cut off from the outside world, columns of trucks were stranded and disbanded in the middle of nowhere. Everyone was advised against using their cars. Then came the weatherman from the airport. The snow would continue all day and possibly into the night, he said, and the temperature, for the time being, would remain at around fifteen degrees below zero. That night he expected local temperatures to drop to twenty-five below. I stood at the counter and looked out at the endless snow. We had to get wood.

In the horizonless white world that was forming outside, the blizzard snarled and shrieked. I stood knee-deep in the snow. The trees were white, the sky hidden behind a curtain of flakes so thick it was impossible to look up. The wind had blown drifts nearly three feet high against the wall of the verandah. Where the logs should have been, where they had always been, under the lean-to behind the kitchen, I found only the sawhorse and an empty brown wicker basket.

I went to the little gardener’s shed, to the right of the house. There was no wood, but I did find tools, an axe wrapped in burlap, a couple of rakes, a hoe and a shovel, a grindstone, and empty wooden crates that had once held flower bulbs. There were still a few onion-like skins at the bottom. I picked up the crates and the axe and went back out into the snow, towards the kitchen. I stopped briefly to take shelter on the verandah. There, blinded by the blizzard, I wondered what to do. Chop down a tree? How long did you have to wait before green wood was dry enough to burn? White whirlpools spun through the air, snow that had fallen was whipped back up and formed new drifts in other corners. I clasped the axe firmly under my arm and went inside.