The Excursion of the Dead Girls

Abstract

The Excursion of the Dead Girls Anna Seghers Translated by Helen Fehervary (bio) and Amy Kepple Strawser (bio) "No, from much farther away. From Europe." The man looked at me with a smile, as if I'd replied, "From the moon." He was the owner of the pulqueria at the edge of the village. He stepped back from the table, and as he leaned against the wall, began to study me as if searching for some sign of my bizarre past. Right then it seemed just as bizarre to me as it did to him that I'd come all the way from Europe and wound up in Mexico.—The village was staked like a fortress with giant cacti. Through a gap, I could see gray-brown mountain slopes, stark and wild like a moonscape, casting off any notion that they had ever borne life. Two pepper trees, more ablaze than abloom, glowed at the edge of a desolate gorge. The man was now squatting on the ground beneath the enormous shade of his hat. He was no longer studying me. Neither the village nor the mountains held his attention. He stared without moving at the only thing that still puzzled him: an absolute void. I leaned back against the wall in the narrow strip of shade. Refuge in this country was much too questionable, much too uncertain for it to be called salvation. Months of illness just past had plagued me here, even though the many dangers of the war hadn't managed to harm me. Thanks to the rescue efforts of my friends, I had been spared the conspicuous calamities as well as the hidden calamities that lay in wait.—Although my eyes burned from heat and fatigue, I could see the stretch of path that led from the village into the wild. The path was so white that as soon as I closed my eyes it remained imprinted [End Page 283] in my eyelids. At the edge of the gorge I saw the corner of the white wall that had captured my attention from the roof of my lodging in the village higher up, from where I'd just come. Right away I had inquired about the wall and the rancho, or whatever it was, with its solitary light fallen from the night sky, but no one could tell me. So I set out the next day. Even though weakness and fatigue forced me to catch my breath here, I had to find out for myself what this rancho was about. Idle curiosity was the last vestige of wanderlust from my youth, an impulse from force of habit. As soon as it was satisfied, I'd hike back up to my prescribed lodging. The bench I was sitting on was at this point the farthest spot on my journey, actually the westernmost spot I'd ever reached on earth. My longing for unusual, outlandish adventures that once made me restless had long since been quenched, beyond measure. There was only one adventure that could inspire me now: the journey home. The rancho and the mountains lay in a shimmering haze. I couldn't tell whether this came from specks of dust or my own fatigue, clouding everything so that the near faded and the distant cleared like a Fata Morgana. When I stood up, since my fatigue was now annoying to me, the haze before my eyes drifted. I walked through the gap in the stakes of cacti, then around a dog asleep on the path with outstretched legs, covered with dust and still as a cadaver. It was shortly before the rainy season. The exposed roots of barren, entwined trees about to turn to stone clung to the precipice. The white wall drew nearer. The cloud of dust—or was it my fatigue?—had lessened a bit, but it now grew thicker, not gloomy as clouds in mountain crevices usually are, but shiny and shimmering. I would have thought I was feverish if a gust of wind hadn't blown the clouds like scraps of fog toward other cliffsides. Behind the long white wall shone green. Likely a well or a diverted stream watered the rancho...