Skaters in the Snow

I found New England in Vienna and the winter world in Bruegel // In my headphones: Deap Vally, Soko—Digital Dream (2021)

Skaters returning from the hunt.

One brisk night in Vienna, we hurried out of the subterranean gastropub laughing and full. We’d only had an hour to eat, so we stuffed ourselves with schnitzel and pumpkin soup. We walked home through an unfamiliar part of town before suddenly finding ourselves in the very familiar, clean-cut palace grounds. The Kunsthistorisches Museum glowed orange in the low evening hours, with people still visible in its high sashed windows. We rushed through her doors in search of shelter and art. Around the rotunda we climbed, just as arrows spiral toward their marks.

The halls which held the Old Masters were empty by night. We revelled in the intimacy and padded on near-silent feet. The particular painting we gazed upon had been a favorite of mine since I was nine years old. With its vivid greys and continuous moors, I was glad to be older, for I could now match its charms with the fallow winter scenes up North: I thought of school, of the pond overlooking the ridge, where the trees sit gaily grey and the steeple stands still. I thought of a pale evening, with splotches of murky-white easing the bitter constancy of the sky.

~

I saw a crowd of deer shock-still in their tracks. A red-tufted woodpecker battered its beak, while a group of robins skittered and squeaked. They all turned wide before diving deep. As I made my way across the ice, the glassy surface reflected all kinds of vice…

I spied a girl who pulled a sled. Another knelt upon it. The former’s tall back was hunched in a crescent, waning as she tried to stay upright on the soles of her saddle shoes. The rider, in a red scarf, gripped the burlap rope. They looked straight ahead, afraid of making accidental eye contact.

Lids lowered, a woman looked on as they passed. Then she gazed over and around them until her eyes at last found rest: A wild-haired girl twirled like a sprite, spinning again as the day turned to night. The woman looking on wondered whether the spinning girl couldn’t stand her. She admired the girl’s sharp skates with a start and a fright, seeing a friend who she never could get back at just right. Then she wished she weren’t alone but nearer to the center of the ice.

One boy, by the bridge overlooking the pond, watched the girl spinning, she who watched no one. He thought she looked familiar, until he remembered he had one just like her in his jewelry box, standing naked at home atop his favorite chest of drawers.

~

The longer I stared at the painting, the more I figured I’d better get a clue. Over the ridge, a solitary figure skated alone. He moved gracefully along the serpentine flow, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes relaxed, with crow’s feet, in wintry contemplation.

I could just make out an ice cave at the close end of the pond, surrounded by low drifts of snow and a craggy mouth full of interlocking icicles. The jaw arched toward me from behind the blue-inflected paint, and I stared back.

You, poor fool, resided on the soft, padded tongue between the two fearsome halves of that craggy maw. You sat forever in the cave, scratching lines. You picked at the ground with piquant dots and unwrinkled curves in the freezing cold sludge. You were writing. You wrote, and had written, thus:

Good time, bad time, up time, down time. It’s something primordial. It’s evil, it’s old. It’ll eat you if you let it! The light fades—fast!—as the purple snow combusts in the light at five before six. That’s ancient. Obliteration after obliteration, the cold blows in, and stays there. But it doesn’t have to, not if you’re in the mood to dance. For if you brush it back long enough, you can spin, sled, and skate on it without a second glance back to the meager day’s catch.

Skaters in the snow.

~

📍Hunters in the Snow (Winter) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, somewhere in upper New England

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