Only someone badly lost would find himself driving through a village as unremarkable as this, I'm thinking. The lights are on in the post office, but the parking lot is empty: no one, I imagine, is in a hurry to pick up their mail when it consists, mostly, of bills. The two-storey elementary school is quiet: it's as if they're waiting to hear the answer to some question the teacher has posed and it's been a long time coming. All along the road there are small family graveyards. They have stones with barely legible dates that coincide with old and mostly forgotten wars, the short lifespan of the buried indicating that they were the casualties of such conflicts, and their last names that their descendants continued to live in this area and may rest in this same ground, next to these woods and these fields covered with rocks they never quite succeeded in clearing.

LRB 20 January 2011 | PDF Download