The Cement Garden
“I was in the garden of one of the abandoned prefabs, poking around, bored. The building itself had been gutted by fire six months before. I stood inside the blackened living room where the ceiling had collapsed and the floorboards burnt away. One partition wall remained and in its centre was a serving hatch connected with the kitchen. One of its small wooden doors was still on its hinges. In the kitchen broken sections of water pipe and electrical fittings clung to the wall, and on the floor was a smashed sink. In all the rooms tall weeds were struggling for the light. Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do – here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. But in this burned-out place there was no order, everything had gone. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared. There was a mattress... in one room, buckled between the blackened, broken joists.MoreLess
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