The Time of the Cosmonauts

Berger 43 John Berger The Time of the Cosmonauts If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. A word is missing and so the story has to be told. What, for instance, was the relation between the old shepherd Marius and the baby in Danielle's womb when she left the village? Was he the child's godfather? Hardly. The story began and ended in the summer of 1982, high up in the alpage which we call Peniel. Some say that they know the name Peniel comes from the bible. Genesis. Chapter 32. But if you read that, it won't really tell you what happened between Marius and Danielle. Peniel is a plateau at an altitude of 1,600 metres. One edge of the plateau dominates, from a colossal rockface, the village below. From there, when there's a rainstorm and it's sunny, you can look down onto the top of a rainbow—as if it were the arch of a bridge at your feet. The rockface is mostly limestone, occasionally mixed with flysch. The other edges of the plateau are lost in the mountains beyond. Once there was a forest on this plateau and some gigantic tree trunks are still preserved beneath a layer of clay, under the topsoil on which the pastures grow. Where this clay and the ancient forest is nearest to the surface , the earth is oily and damp, and on the rocks a dark green moss grows, which, if you touch it or lie down on it, feels like fur. This is how the rocks become like animals. A number of years ago when the Russian, Gagarin, the first man in space, was circling the earth, every one of the twenty scattered chalets at Peniel housed, each summer, cattle and women and men. So many cattle that there was only just enough grass to go round. By common accord grazing time was limited. You got up at three to milk and you took the cows out to pasture as soon as it was light. At ten, when the sun was beginning to climb high in the sky, you brought them home and made your cheese. In the stable you gave them grass which you'd scythed at midday. After lunch you took a siesta. At four you milked again, and only then did you take the cows out a second time to pasture, and there you stayed with them until you could no longer see the trees but only the forest. You brought the cows back in and when they were bedded down on their straw, you could go outside and peer up into the night, where the Milky Way looked like gauze, and try to spot Gagarin in his circling sputnik. All this 44 the minnesota review was twenty-five years ago. During the summer in question—the summer of 1982—only two of the twenty chalets were inhabited, one by Marius and the other by Danielle, and there was so much grass they could let their animals graze night and day. The two chalets are separated by a pass flanked by two peaks, the St. Pair and the Tete de Duet. It took Danielle half an hour to walk across the pass to Marius' chalet. Why do he-goats smell so strongly? Marius asked her when she arrived the first time. After a winter of ice and snow you go into the stable and you know that last year there was a he-goat here! Rams don't smell like that, bulls don't smell like that, stallions don't smell like that, why do he-goats? The only other smell as strong as the smell of the he-goat Marius continued, is the smell of a tannery. When I came back to the village, it took me six months to get that stench out of my skin. When I came back to the village, you could pluck a hair out of any part of my body— he fixed Danielle with his shrewd unflinching eyes so that what he meant should not escape her...