"In this country she had every now and then the sense that she had strolled into some picture that she had seen, that she did not know was real. She had taken a train across all of Europe to get here. In Paris and Venice she had stopped for a day or two and seen the sights. She had seen the Corots and Millets in the Louvre, the Renaissance paintings in the Accademia. Then there was the Danube and Bucharest, and another long train journey of a day and a night. She looked out of the window of the train and saw living scenes from the paintings, and when she arrived at the station Constantin Văleanu was there to meet her, and there had been a dusty drive past pale oxen pulling carts and men walking with scythes on their shoulders, and they came to the village and stopped, and a man with a face from a Duccio came to kiss their hands. There was the ploughman from Brueghel's Icarus. There was this boy, standing aside like Brueghel's shepherd. And now there were these men mowing, all dressed in white, the sweeps of their scythes moving in slow waves across the grass. [...]
Constantin stopped before the mowing men. They did not look up but went on working. Their rhythm held, passed down the line: a stroke, a step forward, a geometric passage across the lawn; a pause every now and then to whet a blade. Such a slow, medieval process. He watched and shook his head and idly put out a hand to stroke a restless dog."
From Painter of Silence
