Gisela on a snowy night

It's a sunless, cold winter, and the snow is laden with dark memories for Gisela and Kurt

- Tejaswini Apte-Rahm

1975, Clouds hung low and brooding over a village with a church spire in the centre, huddled on a plain under the weight of a colossal night sky. Snow lay thick on the roofs of the houses. The ground was barren and ashen and frozen into an element as hard as iron. No one wandered the plain. For the plain plodded far, far beyond the edges of the fields, and stretched on into nothingness, frosted over by time and ice. And so, the people looked to the spire for comfort, for there was no one else to converse with but the charcoal sky that hovered over them all. No figure to appeal to but the giant, leafless trees that rose so thin and tall into the gloom that the people shivered in horror to think what lonely wraiths must wail and whip through the broken twigs on the topmost arboreal extremities. Better to be small and fearful and wait, for a long winter lay behind and a longer winter lay coiled ahead.

In some houses large-aproned women baked bread and stirred pots of soup. In others sat gruff woodcutters smoking their pipes at the fire. And some of the dwellings were threadbare and worn. In one of these, on the upper floor of an aged cottage, sat a man fondly remembering a breakfast. He sat on a low wooden chair, old and wiry, in a checked brown coat. He leaned forward as he spoke, to emphasise his words.

"In my youth," said the man, "I could eat like a horse. I remember a breakfast I had."

"You remember a breakfast, do you?" said his wife, "Try remembering my birthday."

"But I want to remember this breakfast," he said, "I couldn't forget it even if I wanted to. The way I ate that day-"

"For God's sake," said his wife, "40 years of your eternal stories."