Heinrich Böll - Account of a deserted village on Achill (continued)

No one would try to pull down a wall here or take wood (very valuable here) from an abandoned house (we call that cleaning out; no one cleans out here); and not even the children who drive the cattle home in the evening from the meadow above the deserted village, not even the children try to pull down walls or doorways; our children, when we suddenly found ourselves in the village, tried it immediately, to raze to the ground. Here no one razed anything to the ground, and the softer parts of abandoned dwellings are left to feed the wind, the rain, the sun, and time, and after sixty, seventy or a hundred years all that is left is half-finished buildings from which no carpenter will ever again hang his wreath the celebrate the completion of a house: this, then, is what a human habitation looks like when it has been left in peace after death.

Still with a sense of awe we crossed the main street between the bare gables, entered side streets, and slowly the sense of awe lifted: grass was growing in the streets, moss had covered walls and potato plots, was creeping up the houses; and the stones of the gables, washed free of mortar, were neither quarried stone nor tiles, but small boulders, just as the mountain had rolled them down its streams into the valley, door and window lintels were slabs of rock, and broad as shoulder blades were the two stone slabs sticking out of the wall where the fireplace had been: once the chain for the iron cooking pot had hung from them, pale potatoes cooking in brownish water.

We went from house to house like peddlers, and every time the short shadow on the threshold had fallen away from us the blue square of the sky covered us again; in houses where the better-off ones had once lived it was larger, where the poor had lived it was smaller; all that distinguished them now was the size of the blue square of sky. In some rooms moss was already growing, some thresholds were already covered with brownish water; here and there in the front walls you could still see the pegs for the cattle: thighbones of oxen to which the chain had been attached.

"Here's where the stove was" - "the bed's over there" - "here over the fireplace hung the crucifix" - "over there a cupboard": two upright stone slabs with two vertical slabs wedged into them; here in this cupboard one of the two children discovered the iron wedge, and when we drew it out it crumbled away in our hands like tinder: a hard inner piece remained about as thick as a nail which - on the children's instructions - I put in my coat pocket as a souvenir.

We spent five hours in this village, and the time passed quickly because nothing happened; we scared a few birds into flight, a sheep jumped through an empty window socket and fled up the slope at our approach; in ossified fuchsia hedges hung blood-red blossoms, in withered gorse bushes hung a yellow like dirty coins, shining quartz stuck up out of the moss like bones; no dirt in the streets, no rubbish in the streams, and not a sound to be heard. Perhaps we were waiting for the girl with the red pullover and her load of brown peat, but the girl did not come back.

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