. .

"You won'tgo to school today," said my mother in the morning, "there's a gale blowing."

A delicate veil of resin-scented smoke filled the room. The stove roared and whistled, as if a whole pack of hounds or demons were held captive in it. The large face painted on its protruding belly made colorful grimaces and its cheeks swelled dramatically.

I ran barefoot to the window. The sky was swept lengthwise by the gusts of wind. Vast and silvery-white, it was cut into lines of energy tensed to breaking point, into awesome furrows like strata of tin and lead. Divided into magnetic fields and trembling with discharges, it was full of concealed electricity. The diagrams of the gale were traced on it which, itself unseen and elusive, loaded the landscape with its power.

One could not see the gale. One could recognize its effect on the houses, on the roofs under which its fury penetrated. One after the other, the attics seemed to loom larger and to explode in madness when touched by its finger.

It swept the squares clean, leaving behind it a white emptiness in the streets; it denuded the whole area of the marketplace. Only here and there a lonely man, bent under the force of the wind, could be seen clinging to the corner of a house. The whole Market Square seemed to shine like a bald head under the powerful gusts of wind.

The gale blew cold and dead colors onto the sky— streaks of green, yellow, and violet—the distant vaults and arcades of its spirals. The roofs loomed black and crooked, apprehensive and expectant. Those under which the wind had already penetrated, rose in inspiration, outgrew the neighboring roofs and prophesied doom under the unkempt sky. Then they fell and expired, unable to hold any longer the powerful breath which then moved farther along and filled the whole space with noise and terror. And yet more houses rose with a scream, in a paroxysm of prediction, and howled disaster.

The enormous beech trees around the church stood with their arms upraised, like witnesses of terrifying visions, and screamed and screamed.

Farther along, beyond the roofs of Market Square, I saw the gable ends and the naked walls of suburban houses. They climbed one over the other and grew, paralyzed with fear. The distant, cold, red glare painted them in autumnal colors.

We did not have our midday meal that day because the fire in the range belched circles of smoke into the kitchen. All the rooms were cold and smelled of wind. About two o'clock in the afternoon a fire broke out in the suburbs and spread rapidly. My mother and Adela began to pack our bedding, fur coats, and valuables.

Night came. The wind intensified in force and violence, grew immeasurably and filled the whole area. It had now stopped visiting the houses and roofs, and had started to build a many-storied, multilevel spiral over the city, a black maze, growing relentlessly upward. From that maze it shot out along galleries of rooms, raced amid claps of thunder through long corridors and then allowed all those imaginary structures to collapse, spreading out and rising into the formless stratosphere.

Our rooms trembled gently, the pictures rattled on the walls, the windowpanes shone with the greasy reflection of the lamp. The curtains swelled with the breath of that stormy night. We suddenly remembered that we had not seen Father since the morning. He must have gone out very early to the shop, where the gale had probably surprised him and cut him off from home.

"He will not have had anything to eat all day," Mother wailed. The senior shop assistant, Theodore, volunteered to venture into the wind-swept night, to take some food to Father. My brother decided to go with him.

Wrapped in large bearskin coats, they filled their pockets with flatirons and brass pestles, metal ballast to prevent them from being blown away by the gale. The door leading into the night was opened cautiously.