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Late-autumn leaves
1.
It is a day in late-September, towards evening. Early in the morning a fine drizzle has fallen, but around midday the clouds thinned out, and now they lie only like wispy smoke that spreads a pale greyness out over the surrounding area. The earth has turned dark from the moisture; a fresh, humid scent is rising in the strangely silent air that almost has the mild warmth of spring.
The countryside is quite flat, with marshland and some hills. Among clusters and rows of elms and chestnut trees one can just make out the village. The trees are growing bare, their crowns are shrinking, their leaves turning yellow. Between their erect, bare trunks, yellow stacks and whitewashed walls are gleaming.
The garden over there seems bare and deserted. The beds and lawns are strewn with fallen fruit and large heaps of leaves torn off by the wind – green, juicy leaves and withered brown ones. Stems of plants meander over the flowerbeds, weeds thriving among them. Only asters and a cluster of flamboyant dahlias are still flowering. People are busy picking fruit right now, thin, dark branches are snapping and cracking, here and there a pear comes loose, rustles through the foliage and falls.
And then there are the fields, fringed with willows. They seem so deserted and bare, with rectangles of brownish-yellow stubble, newly ploughed, damp topsoil and juicy green clover. The country road winds its way forward, gravel-grey, with waterlogged wheel tracks and green ditches. But the willows that were pollarded in March are now topped by slender, green, lush summer sprigs.
And the stubble has been ploughed down, the black, fertile topsoil uncovered. The horses pull and strain, yoked in pairs, up the fields and down again, with the farmhands urging them on. A herd of cattle is grazing over in the clover meadow. A cow has got in among the tender shoots of the winter crop; the cattle boy rushes after it, shouting and yelling, and flings his knobbed club at it.
A hunting dog is bounding back and forth in the stubble, snuffling and scenting the air. Then a flock of partridges flies up, screeching shrilly, with noisily flapping wings, and the deep silence is broken by a sudden gunshot.
On the lea outside the stone wall of the garden, under the bushy, lush plum trees, a young girl is busy tying into bundles the linen that has been laid out on the field to stiffen. She has hitched up her dark dress, revealing clogs and red stockings – –
But the air is so mild and humid; and so quiet, so strangely and sadly quiet!
And now, yes, one can see – for it is slightly shady under the trees – that the girl is slim and elegant and that she has a small, fine face with a pair of large, shining eyes framed by the small black shawl, stretched across her forehead. But beneath it a broad, light-brown plait snakes down her back.
And then she starts to sing, quietly at first, just to herself, almost inaudibly, then increasingly more loudly. A simple song, known to no one perhaps, a sad little tune with words that speak of the profound melancholy of September days:
And now the day grows cold and grey
With empty heart I’m roaming.
Alone, sad thoughts cause me to stray,
Although I would be homing.
How quiet everything is! Mild and damp and so strangely quiet. The cattle is being driven home. The cows are lowing and shambling slowly along, the sheep trotting and tramping, the pigs grunting hither and thither.
A cawing flock of rooks is circling over the winter crop, sinking in large, slow swirls, lower and lower, and finally landing in the field.
The farmhands ploughing on a slope some way away are whistling and shouting. A cart is grating in the gravel of the country road.
Apart from that, silence. And dusk is beginning to fall.
The girl finishes her work, binds the shawl more tightly under her chin and starts to walk along the road, singing her song. She moves slowly up the slope. Now her silhouette is faintly outlined against the dark backdrop. Her song gradually fades away.
Alone, sad thoughts cause me to stray,
Although I would be homing.
She disappears behind the slope. Twilight falls swiftly over the surrounding countryside.
