The first book in the Book of Lies series, © 1988
Translated by Alan Sheridan
We arrive from the Big Town. We've been traveling all night. Mother's eyes are red. She's carrying a big cardboard box, and the two of us are each carrying a small suitcase containing our clothes, plus Father's big dictionary, which we pass back and forth when our arms get tired.
We walk for a long time. Grandmother's house is far from the station, at the other end of the Little Town. There are no trams, buses, or cars here. Just a few army trucks driving around.
There aren't many people in the streets. The town is very quiet. Our footsteps echo on the pavement; we walk without speaking, Mother in the middle, between the two of us.
When we get to Grandmother's garden gate, Mother says:
"Wait for me here."
We wait for a while, then we go into the garden, walk around the house, and crouch down under a window where we can hear voices. Mother's voice says:
"There's nothing more to eat at home, no bread, no meat, no vegetables, no milk. Nothing. I can't feed them anymore."
Another voice says:
"So you've remembered me. For ten years you didn't give me a thought. You never came. You never wrote."
Mother says:
"You know why. I loved my father."
The other voice says:
"Yes, and now you remember that you also have a mother. You come here and ask me to help you."
Mother says:
"I'm not asking anything for myself. I just want my children to survive this war. The Big Town is being bombed night and day, and there's no food left. All the children are being evacuated to the country, with relatives or with strangers, anywhere."
The other voice says:
"Then send them to strangers, anywhere."
Mother says:
"They're your grandsons."
"My grandsons? I don't even know them. How many are there?"
"Two. Two boys. Twins."
The other voice asks:
"What have you done with the others?"
Mother asks:
"What others?"
"Bitches have four or five puppies at a time. You keep one or two and drown the others."
The other voice laughs loudly. Mother says nothing, and the other voice asks:
"They have a father, at least? You aren't married, as far as I know. I wasn't invited to any wedding."
"I am married. Their father is at the front. I haven't had any news of him for six months."
"Then you can put a cross over him."
The other voice laughs again. Mother starts crying. We go back to the garden gate.
Mother comes out of the house with an old woman.
Mother says to us:
"This is your Grandmother. You'll be staying with her for a while, till the end of the war."
Grandmother says:
"It could last a long time. But I'll put them to work, don't you fret. Food isn't free here either."
Mother says:
"I'll send you money. Their clothes are in the suitcases. And there are sheets and blankets in the box. Be good, you two. I'll write you."
She kisses us and goes away crying.
Grandmother laughs very loudly and says to us:
"Sheets and blankets! White shirts and patent leather shoes! I'll teach you what life is about!"
We stick our tongues out at Grandmother. She laughs even louder and slaps her thighs.
Grandmother's house is five minutes' walk from the last houses in the Little Town. After that, there is nothing but the dusty road, soon blocked off by a barrier. It is forbidden to go any further, a soldier is on guard there. He has a machine gun and binoculars, and when it rains, he takes shelter in a sentry box. We know that beyond the barrier, hidden by the trees, there's a secret military base, and beyond the base, the frontier and another country.
Grandmother's house is surrounded by a garden at the bottom of which is a stream, then the forest.
The garden is planted with all sorts of vegetables and fruit trees. In a corner, there's a hutch, a henhouse, a pigsty, and a shed for the goats. We have tried to ride the biggest of the pigs, but it's impossible to stay on.
The vegetables, the fruit, the rabbits, the ducks, and the chickens are sold at market by Grandmother, as well as the hens' and ducks' eggs and the goat cheese. The pigs are sold to the butcher, who pays for them with money, and with hams and smoked sausage too.
There is also a dog to keep away thieves, and a cat to keep away mice and rats. We mustn't give the cat anything to eat so that he's always hungry.
Grandmother also owns a vineyard on the other side of the road.
You enter the house through the kitchen, which is large and warm. A fire burns all day long in the woodstove. Near the window there's a huge table and a corner seat. We sleep on the seat.
From the kitchen a door leads to Grandmother's bedroom, but it's always locked. Only Grandmother goes there, only at night, to sleep.
There's another room, which can be reached without going through the kitchen, directly from the garden. This room is occupied by a foreign officer. Its door is also locked.
Under the house there's a cellar full of things to eat, and under the roof, an attic where Grandmother doesn't go anymore since we sawed away one of the rungs of the ladder and she fell and hurt herself. The entrance to the attic is just above the officer's door, and we get up there by means of a rope. That's where we hide the notebook, Father's dictionary, and the other things we're obliged to conceal.
In short order we make a key that opens all the doors in the house, and we bore holes in the attic floor. With the key we can move freely about the house when nobody's in, and through the holes we can observe Grandmother and the officer in their rooms, without their suspecting.
Grandmother is Mother's mother. Before coming to live in her house, we didn't even know that Mother still had a mother.
We call her Grandmother.
People call her the Witch. She calls us "sons of a bitch."
Grandmother is small and thin. She has a black shawl on her head. Her clothes are dark gray. She wears old army shoes. When the weather's nice, she goes barefoot. Her face is covered with wrinkles, brown spots, and warts that sprout hairs. She has no teeth left, at least none that can be seen.
Grandmother never washes. She wipes her mouth with the corner of her shawl when she's finished eating or drinking. She doesn't wear underpants. When she wants to urinate, she just stops wherever she happens to be, spreads her legs, and pisses on the ground under her skirt. Of course, she doesn't do it in the house.
Grandmother never undresses. We have watched her in her room at night. She takes off her skirt and there's another skirt underneath. She takes off her blouse and there's another blouse underneath. She goes to bed like that. She doesn't take off her shawl.
Grandmother doesn't say much. Except in the evening. In the evening, she takes a bottle down from a shelf and drinks straight out of it. Soon she starts to talk in a language we don't know. It's not the language the foreign soldiers speak, it's a quite different language.
In that unknown language, Grandmother asks herself questions and answers them. Sometimes she laughs, sometimes she gets angry and shouts. In the end, almost always, she starts crying, she staggers into her room, she drops onto her bed, and we hear her sobbing far into the night.
We have to do certain chores for Grandmother, otherwise she doesn't give us anything to eat and leaves us to spend the night outdoors.
At first we refuse to obey her. We sleep in the garden, we eat fruit and raw vegetables.
In the morning, before daybreak, we see Grandmother leave the house. She says nothing to us. She goes and feeds the animals, milks the goats, then takes them to the bank of the stream, where she ties them to a tree. Then she waters the garden and picks the vegetables and fruit, which she loads into her wheelbarrow. She also puts in a basket full of eggs, a small cage with a rabbit, and a chicken or duck with its legs tied together.
She goes off to market pushing her wheelbarrow, with the strap around her scrawny neck, which forces her head down. She staggers under the weight. The bumps and stones in the road make her lose her balance, but she goes on walking, her feet turned inwards, like a duck. She walks to the town, to the market, without stopping, without putting her wheelbarrow down once.
When she gets back from the market, she makes a soup with the vegetables she hasn't sold, and jams with the fruit. She eats, she goes and has a nap in her vineyard, she sleeps for an hour, then she works in the vineyard, or if there is nothing to do there, she returns to the house, she cuts wood, she feeds the animals again, she brings back the goats, she milks them, she goes out into the forest, comes back with mushrooms and kindling, she makes cheeses, she dries mushrooms and beans, she bottles other vegetables, waters the garden again, puts things away in the cellar, and so on until nightfall.
On the sixth morning, when she leaves the house, we have already watered the garden. We take heavy buckets full of pigfeed from her, we take the goats to the bank of the stream, we help her load the wheelbarrow. When she comes back from the market, we are cutting wood.
At the meal, Grandmother says:
"Now you understand. You have to earn food and shelter."
We say:
"It's not that. The work is hard, but to watch someone working and not do anything is even harder, especially if it's someone old."
Grandmother sniggers:
"Sons of a bitch! You mean you felt sorry for me?"
"No, Grandmother. We just felt ashamed."
In the afternoon, we go and gather wood in the forest.
From now on we do all the chores we can.
The Forest and the Stream
The forest is very big, the stream is very small. To get to the forest, we have to cross the stream. When there isn't much water, we can cross it by jumping from one stone to another. But sometimes, when it has rained a lot, the water comes up to our waists, and this water is cold and muddy. We decide to build a bridge with bricks and planks that we find around bombed houses.
Our bridge is strong. We show it to Grandmother. She tries it and says:
"Very good. But don't go too far into the forest. The frontier is nearby, the soldiers will shoot at you. And above all, don't get lost. I won't come looking for you."
When we were building the bridge, we saw fish. They hide under big stones or in the shadow of bushes and trees whose branches meet in places over the stream. We choose the biggest fish, we catch them, and we put them in a sprinkling can filled with water. In the evening, when we take them back to the house, Grandmother says:
"Sons of a bitch! How did you catch them?"
"With our hands. It's easy. You just have to stay still and wait."
"Then catch a lot. As many as you can."
Next day, Grandmother puts the sprinkling can on her wheelbarrow and sells our fish at market.
We often go into the forest, we never get lost, we know where the frontier is. Soon the guards get to know us. They never shoot at us. Grandmother teaches us to tell the difference between edible mushrooms and poisonous ones.
From the forest we bring firewood on our backs, and mushrooms and chestnuts in baskets. We stack the wood neatly against the walls of the house under the porch roof, and we roast chestnuts on the stove if Grandmother isn't there.
Once, deep in the forest, beside a big hole made by a bomb, we find a dead soldier. He is still in one piece, only his eyes missing because of the crows. We take his rifle, his cartridges, and his grenades: we hide the rifle inside a bundle of firewood, the cartridges and grenades in our baskets, under the mushrooms.
When we get back to Grandmother's, we carefully wrap these objects in straw and potato sacks, and bury them under the bench in front of the officer's window.
At home, in the Big Town, Mother used to wash us often. In the shower or in the bath. She put clean clothes on us and cut our nails. She went with us to the barber to have our hair cut. We used to brush our teeth after every meal.
At Grandmother's it is impossible to wash. There's no bathroom, there isn't even any running water. We have to go pump water from the well in the yard and carry it back in a bucket. There's no soap in the house, no toothpaste, no washing powder.
Everything in the kitchen is dirty. The red, irregular tiles stick to our feet, the big table sticks to our hands and elbows. The stove is completely black with grease, and the walls all around are black with soot. Although Grandmother washes the dishes, the plates, spoons, and knives are never quite clean and the saucepans are covered with a thick layer of grime. The dishcloths are grayish and have a nasty smell.
At first we didn't even want to eat, especially when we saw how Grandmother cooked the meals, wiping her nose on her sleeve and never washing her hands. Now we take no notice.
When it's warm, we go and bathe in the stream, we wash our faces and clean our teeth in the well. When it's cold, it's impossible to wash properly. There is no receptacle big enough in the house. Our sheets, our blankets, and our towels have disappeared. We have never seen the big cardboard box Mother brought them in again.
Grandmother has sold everything.
We're getting dirtier and dirtier, our clothes too. We take clean clothes out of our suitcases under the seat, but soon there are no clean clothes left. The ones we wear keep getting torn, and our shoes have holes in them. When possible, we go barefoot and wear only underpants or trousers. The soles of our feet are getting hard, we no longer feel thorns or stones. Our skin is getting brown, our legs and arms are covered with scratches, cuts, scabs, and insect bites. Our nails, which are never cut, break, and our hair, which is almost white from the sun, reaches down to our shoulders.
The privy is at the bottom of the garden. There's never any paper. We wipe ourselves with the biggest leaves from certain plants.
We smell of a mixture of manure, fish, grass, mushrooms, smoke, milk, cheese, mud, clay, earth, sweat, urine, and mold.
We smell bad, like Grandmother.
Grandmother often hits us with her bony hands, a broom, or a damp cloth. She pulls our ears and grabs us by the hair.
Other people also slap and kick us, we don't even know why.
The blows hurt and make us cry.
Falls, scratches, cuts, work, cold, and heat cause pain as well.
We decide to toughen our bodies so we can bear pain without crying.
We start by slapping and then punching one another. Seeing our swollen faces, Grandmother asks:
"Who did that to you?"
"We did, Grandmother."
"You had a fight? Why?"
"For nothing, Grandmother. Don't worry, it's only an exercise."
"An exercise? You're crazy! Oh, well, if that's your idea of fun…"
We are naked. We hit one another with a belt. At each blow we say:
"It doesn't hurt."
We hit harder, harder and harder.
We put our hands over a flame. We cut our thighs, our arms, our chests with a knife and pour alcohol on our wounds. Each time we say:
"It doesn't hurt."
After a while, we really don't feel anything anymore. It's someone else who gets hurt, someone else who gets burned, who gets cut, who feels pain.
We don't cry anymore.
When Grandmother is angry and shouts at us, we say:
"Stop shouting, Grandmother, hit us instead."
When she hits us, we say:
"More, Grandmother! Look, we are turning the other cheek, as it is written in the Bible. Strike the other cheek too, Grandmother."
She answers:
"May the devil take you with your Bible and your cheeks!"
We are lying on the corner seat in the kitchen. Our heads are touching. We aren't asleep yet, but our eyes are shut. Someone pushes at the door. We open our eyes. We are blinded by the beam of a flashlight. We ask:
"Who's there?"
A man's voice answers:
"No fear. You no fear. Two you are, or I too much drink?"
He laughs, lights the oil lamp on the table, and turns off his flashlight. We can see him properly now. He's a foreign soldier, a private. He says:
"I orderly of captain. You do what there?"
We say:
"We live here. It's Grandmother's house."
"You grandchildren of Witch? I never before see you. You be here since when?"
"For two weeks."
"Ah! I go on leave my home, in my village. Laugh much."
We ask:
"How is it you can speak our language?"
He says:
"My mother born here, in your country. Come to work in our country, waitress in café. Meet my father, marry with. When I small, my mother speak me your language. Your country and my country be friends. Fight the enemy together. You two come from where?"
"From the Big Town."
"Big Town, much danger. Bang! Bang!"
"Yes, and nothing left to eat."
"Here good to eat. Apples, pigs, chickens, everything. You stay long time? Or only holidays?"
"We'll stay until the end of the war."
"War soon end. You sleep there? Seat bare, hard, cold. Witch no want take you in room?"
"We don't want to sleep in Grandmother's room. She snores and smells. We had blankets and sheets, but she sold them."
The orderly takes some hot water from the cauldron on the stove and says:
"I must clean room. Captain also return leave tonight or tomorrow morning."
He goes out. A few minutes later, he comes back. He brings us two gray army blankets.
"No sell that, old Witch. If she too mean, you tell me. I bang-bang, I kill."
He laughs again. He covers us up, turns out the lamp, and leaves.
During the day we hide the blankets in the attic.
Grandmother says to us:
"Sons of a bitch!"
People say to us:
"Sons of a Witch! Sons of a whore!"
Others say:
"Idiots! Hoodlums! Snot-nosed kids! Asses! Slobs! Pigs! Devils! Bastards! Little shits! Punks! Murderers-to-be!"
When we hear these words, our faces get red, our ears buzz, our eyes sting, our knees tremble.
We don't want to blush or tremble anymore, we want to get used to abuse, to hurtful words.
We sit down at the kitchen table face to face, and looking each other in the eyes, we say more and more terrible words.
One of us says:
"Turd! Asshole!"
The other one says:
"Faggot! Prick!"
We go on like that until the words no longer reach our brains, no longer even reach our ears.
We exercise this way for about half an hour a day, then we go out walking in the streets.
We contrive to have people insult us, and we observe that we have now reached the stage where we don't care anymore.
But there are also the old words.
Mother used to say to us:
"My darlings! My loves! My joy! My adorable little babies!"
When we remember these words, our eyes fill with tears.
We must forget these words because nobody says such words to us now and because our memory of them is too heavy a burden to bear.
So we begin our exercise again, in a different way.
We say:
"My darlings! My loves! I love you… I shall never leave you… I shall never love anyone but you… Forever… You are my whole life…"
By force of repetition, these words gradually lose their meaning, and the pain they carry in them is assuaged.
School
This happened three years ago.
It's evening. Our parents think we are asleep. They're talking about us in the other room.
Mother says:
"They won't bear being separated."
Father says:
"They'll only be separated during school hours."
Mother says:
"They won't bear it."
"They'll have to. It's necessary for them. Everybody says so. The teachers, the psychologists, everybody. It will be difficult at first, but they'll get used to it."
Mother says:
"No, never. I know it. I know them. They are one and the same person."
Father raises his voice:
"Precisely, it isn't normal. They think together, they act together. They live in a different world. In a world of their own. It isn't very healthy. It's even rather worrying. Yes, they worry me. They're odd. You never know what they might be thinking. They're too advanced for their age. They know too much."
Mother laughs:
"You're not going to reproach them with their intelligence, I hope?"
"It isn't funny. Why are you laughing?"
Mother replies:
"Twins are always a problem. It isn't the end of the world. Everything will sort itself out."
Father says:
"Yes, everything will sort itself out if we separate them. Every individual must have his own life."
A few days later, we start school. We're in different classes. We both sit in the front row.
We are separated from one another by the whole length of the building. This distance between us seems monstrous, the pain is unbearable. It is as if they had taken half our bodies away. We can't keep our balance, we feel dizzy, we fall, we lose consciousness.
We wake up in the ambulance that is taking us to the hospital.
Mother comes to fetch us. She smiles and says:
"You'll be in the same class from tomorrow on."
At home, Father just says to us:
"Fakers!"
Soon he leaves for the front. He's a journalist, a war correspondent.
We go to school for two and a half years. The teachers also leave for the front; they are replaced by women teachers. Later, the school closes because there are too many air raids. We have learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. At Grandmother's we decide to continue our studies without a teacher, by ourselves.
At Grandmother's there is no paper, there are no pencils. We go looking for some at a shop called Booksellers and Stationers. We choose a packet of graph paper, two pencils, and a big thick notebook. We place all that on the counter in front of the fat gentleman standing on the other side. We say to him:
"We need these things, but we have no money."
The bookseller says:
"What? But… you have to pay."
We repeat:
"We have no money, but we absolutely need these things."
The bookseller says:
"The school is closed. Nobody needs notebooks or pencils."
We say:
"We are having school at home. All alone, by ourselves."
"Ask your parents for money."
"Father is at the front, and Mother has stayed in the Big Town. We live at Grandmother's, she doesn't have any money either."
The bookseller says:
"You can't buy anything without money."
We don't say anything else, we just look at him. He looks at us too. His forehead is damp with sweat. After a while he shouts:
"Don't look at me like that! Get out!"
We say:
"We are quite prepared to effect certain tasks for you in exchange for these things. We could water or weed your garden, for example, carry parcels…"
He shouts again:
"I don't have a garden! I don't need you! And in the first place, can't you talk normally?"
"We do talk normally."
"Is it normal, at your age, to say 'quite prepared to effect'?"
"We speak correctly."
"Yes, too correctly. I don't care at all for the way you talk! Nor for your way of looking at me! Get out!"
We ask:
"Do you have any chickens, sir?"
He dabs his white face with a white handkerchief. He asks, without shouting:
"Chickens? Why chickens?"
"Because if you don't have any, we have at our disposal a certain quantity of eggs and can supply you with them in exchange for these things, which are indispensable to us."
The bookseller looks at us and says nothing.
We say:
"The price of eggs increases day by day. On the other hand, the price of paper and pencils…"
He throws our paper, our pencils, and our notebook in the direction of the door and yells:
"Get out! I don't need your eggs! Take all that, and don't come back!"
We pick the things up carefully and say: "We shall be obliged, however, to come back when we have used up all the paper and pencils."
For our studies, we have Father's dictionary and the Bible we found here at Grandmother's, in the attic.
We have lessons in spelling, composition, reading, mental arithmetic, mathematics, and memorization.
We use the dictionary for spelling, to obtain explanations, but also to learn new words, synonyms and antonyms.
We use the Bible for reading aloud, dictation, and memorization. We are thus learning whole pages of the Bible by heart.
This is how a composition lesson proceeds:
We are sitting at the kitchen table with our sheets of graph paper, our pencils, and the notebook. We are alone.
One of us says:
"The title of your composition is: 'Arrival at Grandmother's.' "
The other says:
"The title of your composition is: 'Our Chores.' "
We start writing. We have two hours to deal with the subject and two sheets of paper at our disposal.
At the end of two hours we exchange our sheets of paper. Each of us corrects the other's spelling mistakes with the help of the dictionary and writes at the bottom of the page: "Good" or "Not good." If it's "Not good," we throw the composition in the fire and try to deal with the same subject in the next lesson. If it's "Good," we can copy the composition into the notebook.
To decide whether it's "Good" or "Not good," we have a very simple rule: the composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do.
For example, it is forbidden to write, "Grandmother is like a witch"; but we are allowed to write, "People call Grandmother the Witch."
It is forbidden to write, "The Little Town is beautiful," because the Little Town may be beautiful to us and ugly to someone else.
Similarly, if we write, "The orderly is nice," this isn't a truth, because the orderly may be capable of malicious acts that we know nothing about. So we would simply write, "The orderly has given us some blankets."
We would write, "We eat a lot of walnuts," and not "We love walnuts," because the word "love" is not a reliable word, it lacks precision and objectivity. "To love walnuts" and "to love Mother" don't mean the same thing. The first expression designates a pleasant taste in the mouth, the second a feeling.
Words that define feelings are very vague. It is better to avoid using them and stick to the description of objects, human beings, and oneself, that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.
Our neighbor is not as old as Grandmother. She lives with her daughter in the last house of the Little Town. It is a completely dilapidated shack with several holes in the roof. Around it there is a garden, but it is not cultivated like Grandmother's garden. Nothing grows there but weeds.
The neighbor spends all day sitting on a stool in her garden looking straight in front of her at who knows what. In the evenings or when it rains, her daughter takes her by the arm and leads her indoors. Sometimes her daughter forgets her or isn't there, and then the mother spends the whole night outside, whatever the weather.
People say that our neighbor is mad, that she lost her mind when the man who made her pregnant abandoned her.
Grandmother says that the neighbor is simply lazy and prefers to stay poor rather than get down to work.
The neighbor's daughter is no taller than we are, but she is a bit older. During the day, she begs in the town, outside cafés and at street corners. At the market, she picks up vegetables and rotten fruit that people throw away and takes them home. She also steals anything she can. Several times we have had to chase her out of our garden when she was trying to take fruit and eggs.
Once, we catch her drinking milk by sucking the udder of one of our goats.
When she sees us, she gets up, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, steps back, and says:
"Don't hurt me!"
She adds:
"I run very fast. You won't catch me."
We look at her. It's the first time we've seen her close up. She has a harelip, she's cross-eyed, she has snot in her nose and yellow dirt in the corners of her red eyes. Her legs and arms are covered with pimples.
She says:
"I'm called Harelip. I like milk."
She smiles. Her teeth are black.
"I like milk, but what I like best is sucking the udder. It's good. It's hard and soft at the same time."
We say nothing. She approaches us.
"I like to suck something else, too."
She stretches out her hand. We step back. She says:
"Don't you want to? Don't you want to play with me? I'd really like to. You're so handsome."
She lowers her head and says:
"I disgust you."
We say:
"No, you don't disgust us."
"I see. You're too young, too shy. But you don't have to be embarrassed with me. I'll teach you some very amusing games."
We say:
"We never play."
"Then what do you do all day long?"
"We work and study."
"I beg, steal, and play."
"You also look after your mother. You're a good girl."
She comes up to us and says:
"You think I'm a good girl? Really?"
"Yes. And if you need anything for your mother or for yourself you have only to ask us. We'll give you fruit, vegetables, fish, and milk."
She starts shouting:
"I don't want your fruit, your fish, or your milk! I can steal all that. What I want is for you to love me. Nobody loves me. Not even my mother. But I don't love anybody either. Not my mother and not you! I hate you!"
We put on dirty, torn clothes, we take off our shoes, we soil our faces and hands. We go out into the street. We stop, we wait.
When a foreign officer passes us, we raise our right hands in salute and extend our left hands. Usually the officer walks by without seeing us, without looking at us.
Finally an officer stops. He says something in a language we don't understand. He asks us questions. We don't answer. We stand motionless, one arm raised, the other held out. Then he fumbles in his pockets, places a coin and a bit of chocolate in our dirty hands, and goes off, shaking his head.
We go on waiting.
A woman passes by. We hold out our hands. She says:
"Poor kids. I have nothing to give you."
She strokes our hair.
We say:
"Thank you."
Another woman gives us two apples, another some biscuits.
A woman passes by. We hold out our hands. She stops and says:
"Aren't you ashamed to beg? Come with me, I've got a few easy little jobs for you. Cutting wood, for example, or cleaning up the terrace. You're big enough and strong enough for that. Afterward, if you work well, I'll give you some bread and soup."
We answer:
"We don't want to work for you, madam. We don't want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry."
She asks:
"Then why are you begging?"
"To find out what effect it has and to observe people's reactions."
She walks off shouting:
"Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!"
On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside.
It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.
We are fishing in the stream. Harelip runs by. She doesn't see us. She lies down in the grass and lifts her skirt. She isn't wearing underpants. We see her bare buttocks and the hair between her legs. We don't have hair between our legs yet. Harelip has some, but not very much.
Harelip whistles. A dog arrives. It's our dog. She takes him in her arms and rolls with him in the grass. The dog barks, gets loose, shakes himself, and runs off. Harelip calls him gently as she strokes her sex with her fingers.
The dog comes back, sniffs Harelip's sex several times, and starts to lick it.
Harelip spreads her legs and presses the dog's head to her belly with both hands. She breathes very deeply and wriggles.
The dog's sex becomes visible, it gets longer and longer, it is thin and red. The dog raises his head and tries to climb onto Harelip.
Harelip turns over, she is on her knees, she offers her backside to the dog. The dog places his front paws on Harelip's back, his hindquarters trembling. He feels around, gets closer and closer, puts himself between Harelip's legs, and sticks himself against her buttocks. He moves very quickly backward and forward. Harelip gives a cry, and after a moment she falls on her stomach.
The dog walks off slowly.
Harelip lies on the ground for a while, then gets up, sees us, and blushes. She shouts:
"Dirty little spies! What did you see?"
We answer:
"We saw you playing with our dog."
She asks:
"Am I still your friend?"
"Yes. And we'll allow you to play with our dog as much as you like."
"And you won't tell anybody what you saw?"
"We never tell anybody anything. You can depend on us."
She sits down in the grass and cries:
"Only animals love me."
We ask:
"Is it true your mother is mad?"
"No. She's just deaf and blind."
"What happened to her?"
"Nothing. Nothing special. One day she went blind, and later on she went deaf. She says it'll be the same for me. Have you seen my eyes? In the morning, when I wake up, my eyelashes are stuck together and my eyes are full of pus."
We say:
"It's certainly an illness that medicine can cure."
She says:
"Maybe. But how can you go to a doctor without money? Anyway, there aren't any doctors. They're all at the front." We ask:
"And what about your ears? Do they hurt?" "No, I don't have any problem with my ears. And I don't think my mother has either. She pretends not to hear anything, that suits her when I ask her questions."
Exercise in Blindness and Deafness
One of us pretends to be blind, the other deaf. To begin with, by way of training, the blind one ties one of Grandmother's black shawls over his eyes and the deaf one stuffs his ears with grass. The shawl smells bad, like Grandmother.
We hold hands and go out walking during air raids, when people are hiding in their cellars and the streets are deserted.
The deaf one describes what he sees:
"The street is long and straight. It is lined with low singlestory houses. They are white, gray, pink, yellow, and blue. At the end of the street, I can see a park with trees and a fountain. The sky is blue, with a few white clouds. I can see planes. Five bombers. They are flying low."
The blind one talks slowly so that the deaf one can read his lips:
"I can hear the planes. They are making a deep sputtering noise. Their engines are laboring. They are full of bombs. Now they've passed over. I can hear the birds again. Otherwise everything is quiet."
The deaf one reads the blind one's lips and answers:
"Yes, the street is empty."
The blind one says:
"Not for long. I can hear footsteps in the side street on the left."
The deaf one says:
"You're right. It's a man."
The blind one asks:
"What is he like?"
The deaf one answers:
"Like all of them. Poor, old."
The blind one says:
"I know. I recognize old men's footsteps. I can also hear that he's barefoot, so he's poor."
The deaf one says:
"He's bald. He's wearing an old army jacket. His trousers are too short. His feet are dirty."
"What about his eyes?"
"I can't see them. He's looking down."
"And his mouth?"
"His lips are too drawn. He must have lost all his teeth."
"And his hands?"
"They're in his pockets. The pockets are huge and filled with something. Potatoes or walnuts, there are bumps showing. He's raising his head, he's looking at us. But I can't make out the color of his eyes."
"Can you see anything else?"
"Lines, deep lines on his face, like scars."
The blind one says:
"I can hear the sirens. The raid is over. Let's go home."
Later, with time, we no longer need a shawl over our eyes or grass in our ears. The one playing the blind man simply turns his gaze inward, and the deaf one shuts his ears to all sounds.
We find a man in the forest. A living man, a young man, without a uniform. He is lying behind a bush. He looks at us without moving.
We ask him:
"Why are you lying there?"
He answers:
"I can't walk anymore. I've come from the other side of the frontier. I've been walking for two weeks. Day and night. Especially night. I'm too weak now. I'm hungry. I haven't eaten for three days."
We ask:
"Why haven't you got a uniform? All young men have a uniform. They are all soldiers."
He says:
"I don't want to be a soldier anymore."
"You don't want to fight the enemy anymore?"
"I don't want to fight anyone. I have no enemies. I want to go home."
"Where is your home?"
"Still a long way off". I'll never get there if I don't find something to eat."
We ask:
"Why don't you go and buy something to eat? Don't you have any money?"
"No, I don't have any money, and I can't be seen. I must hide. No one must see me."
"Why?"
"I left my regiment without leave. I ran away. I'm a deserter. If they found me, I'd be shot or hanged."
We ask:
"Like a murderer?"
"Yes, exactly like a murderer."
"And yet you don't want to kill anyone. You just want to go home."
"Yes, I just want to go home."
We ask:
"What do you want us to bring you to eat?"
"Anything."
"Goat's milk, hard-boiled eggs, bread, fruit?"
"Yes, yes, anything."
We ask:
"And a blanket? The nights are cold, and it often rains."
He says:
"Yes, but you mustn't be seen. And you won't say anything to anybody, will you? Not even to your mother."
We answer:
"No one will see us, we never say anything to anybody, and we have no mother."
When we come back with the food and blanket, he says:
"You're very kind."
We say:
"We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all."
He says again:
"I don't know how to thank you. I'll never forget you."
His eyes fill with tears.
We say:
"Crying is no use, you know. We never cry, even though we aren't men yet, like you."
He smiles and says:
"You're right. Excuse me, I won't do it anymore. It's just because of the exhaustion."
We announce to Grandmother:
"Today and tomorrow we won't eat. We'll only drink water."
She shrugs her shoulders:
"I couldn't care less. But you'll work as usual."
"Of course, Grandmother."
The first day, she kills a chicken and roasts it in the oven. At midday, she calls us:
"Come and eat!"
We go to the kitchen, it smells very good. We're a bit hungry, but not too much. We watch Grandmother carve up the chicken.
She says:
"It smells good. Can you smell how good it smells? Do you want a leg each?"
"We don't want anything, Grandmother."
"That's a pity, because it's really very good."
She eats with her hands, licking her fingers and wiping them on her apron. She gnaws and sucks the bones.
She says:
"Very tender, this young chicken. I can't imagine anything betteï."
We say:
"Grandmother, since we've been in your house, you have never cooked a chicken for us."
She says:
"I've cooked one today. Now's your chance."
"You knew we didn't want anything to eat today or tomorrow."
"That's not my fault. This is just more of your damn nonsense."
"It's one of our exercises. To get us used to bearing hunger."
"Then get used to it. Nobody's stopping you."
We leave the kitchen and go out to do our chores in the garden. By the end of the day, we are really very hungry. We drink a lot of water. In the evening, we find it hard to get to sleep. We dream of food.
Next day, at midday, Grandmother finishes the chicken. We watch her eating it in a kind of fog. We're no longer hungry. We feel dizzy.
In the evening, Grandmother makes pancakes with jam and cream cheese. We feel sick and have stomach cramps, but as soon as we go to bed, we fall into a deep sleep. When we get up, Grandmother has already left for the market. We want to have our breakfast, but there is nothing to eat in the kitchen. No bread, no milk, no cheese. Grandmother has locked everything away in the cellar. We could open it, but we decide not to touch anything. We eat raw tomatoes and cucumbers with salt.
Grandmother comes back from the market and says: "You haven't done your work this morning." "You should have woken us up, Grandmother." "You should have woken yourselves up. But just this once, I'll give you something to eat all the same."
She makes us a vegetable soup with what she brings back from the market, as usual. We don't eat much. After the meal, Grandmother says:
"It's a stupid exercise. And bad for the health."
One day, we see Grandmother leave the house with her sprinkling can and her gardening tools. But instead of going to the vineyard, she sets off in a different direction. We follow her at a distance to find out where she is going.
She goes into the cemetery. She stops in front of a grave and puts down her tools. The cemetery is deserted. There is nobody but Grandmother and us.
Hiding behind bushes and tombstones, we get closer and closer. Grandmother is shortsighted and hard of hearing. We can observe her without her knowing.
She pulls up the weeds on the grave, digs with a spade, rakes the soil, plants flowers, fetches water from the well, and comes back to water the grave.
When she has finished her work, she gathers her tools together, then kneels down in front of the wooden cross, but sitting back on her heels. She joins her hands over her belly as if to say a prayer, but what we hear are mainly oaths:
"Shit… bastard… pig… scum… demon…"
When Grandmother leaves, we go see the grave: it is very well maintained. We look at the cross: the name written on it is Grandmother's. It is also Mother's maiden name. The Christian name is double, with a hyphen, and those two Christian names are our own Christian names.
On the cross, there are also dates of birth and death. We calculate that Grandfather died at the age of forty-four, twenty-three years ago.
In the evening, we ask Grandmother:
"What was our Grandfather like?"
She says:
"What? You don't have a Grandfather."
"But we used to have."
"No, never. He was already dead when you were born. So you never had a Grandfather."
We ask:
"Why did you poison him?"
She asks:
"What are you talking about?"
"People say you poisoned Grandfather."
"People say… people say… Let them tell their tales."
"You didn't poison him?"
"Leave me alone, sons of a bitch! Nothing was proved! People will say anything."
We go on:
"We know you didn't like Grandfather. So why do you look after his grave?"
"For that very reason! Because of what people say. To stop them telling their tales! And how do you know I look after his grave, eh? You've been spying on me, sons of a bitch, you've been spying on me again! May the devil take you!"
Exercise in Cruelty
It's Sunday. We catch a chicken and cut its throat as we have seen Grandmother do. We bring the chicken into the kitchen and say:
"You must cook it, Grandmother."
She starts shouting:
"Who gave you permission? You have no right! I give the orders here, you little shits! I won't cook it! I'd rather croak first!"
We say:
"All right. We'll cook it ourselves."
We start to pluck the chicken, but Grandmother snatches it from our hands:
"You don't know how to do it! You filthy little bastards, you'll be the death of me, you're God's punishment on me, that's what you are!"
While the chicken is cooking, Grandmother cries:
"It was the most beautiful one. They took the most beautiful one on purpose. It was just ready for the Tuesday market."
As we eat the chicken, we say:
"It's very good, this chicken. We'll eat chicken every Sunday."
"Every Sunday? Are you crazy? Do you want to ruin me?"
"We shall eat a chicken every Sunday, whether you like it or not."
Grandmother starts crying again:
"But what have I done to them? Woe is me! They want to kill me. A poor old defenseless woman. I don't deserve this. And I've been so good to them!"
"Yes, Grandmother, you are good, very good. So it is out of goodness that you will cook a chicken for us every Sunday."
When she calms down a bit, we say to her again:
"When there's something to be killed, you must fetch us. We'll do it."
She says:
"You like that, eh?"
"No, Grandmother, as a matter of fact, we don't like it. It's for that reason that we must get used to it."
She says:
"I see. It's a new exercise. You're right. It's good to know how to kill when you have to."
We begin with fish. We pick them up by the tail and bang their heads against a stone. We soon get used to killing animals intended to be eaten: chickens, rabbits, ducks. Later, we kill animals that it would not have been necessary to kill. We catch frogs, nail them down on a board, and slit their bellies open. We also catch butterflies and pin them to a piece of cardboard. Soon we have a fine collection.
One day we hang our cat, a ginger tom, from the branch of a tree. As he hangs, he stretches and grows enormous. He has spasms and convulsions. When he isn't moving anymore, we cut him down. He lies sprawled on the grass, motionless, then suddenly gets up and runs off.
Ever since then, we sometimes see him at a distance, but he no longer comes near the house. He doesn't even come to drink the milk we put in front of the door on a little plate.
Grandmother says:
"That cat is getting wilder and wilder."
We say:
"Don't worry, Grandmother, we'll take care of the mice."
We make traps and drown the mice we catch in boiling water.
We meet other children in the Little Town. As the school is closed, they are out all day long. There are big ones and little ones. Some have their homes and mothers here, others are from elsewhere, like us. Especially from the Big Town.
A lot of these children are living with people they didn't know before. They have to work in the fields and vineyards; the people who look after them are not always nice to them.
The big children often attack the smallest ones. They take all they have in their pockets, and sometimes even their clothes. They beat them up too, especially those who come from elsewhere. The young ones from here are protected by their mothers and never go out alone.
We are not protected by anybody, so we learn to defend ourselves against the big ones.
We make weapons: we sharpen stones, we fill socks with sand and gravel. We also have a razor, which we found in the chest in the attic, next to the Bible. We have only to take out our razor and the big boys run away.
One very hot day, we are sitting beside the fountain where people who have no well of their own come to get water. Nearby, some boys who are bigger than us are lying in the grass. It is cool here under the trees near the water, which runs without stopping.
Harelip arrives with a bucket that she places under the spout, which is discharging a thin trickle of water. She waits for her bucket to fill.
When the bucket is full, one of the boys gets up and goes over and spits in it. Harelip empties the bucket, rinses it, and puts it back under the spout.
When the bucket is full again, another boy gets up and spits in it. Harelip puts the rinsed bucket back under the spout. She doesn't wait for the bucket to fill, she fills it only halfway and quickly tries to escape.
One of the boys runs after her, catches her by the arm, and spits in the bucket.
Harelip says:
"Stop it, will you? I have to take clean drinking water back."
The boy says:
"But the water is clean. I just spat in it. Are you saying my spit is dirty? My spit is cleaner than anything in your house!"
Harelip empties her bucket and cries.
The boy opens his fly and says:
"Suck it! If you suck me off, we'll let you fill your bucket."
Harelip kneels down. The boy steps back:
"Do you think I'm going to put my cock into your disgusting mouth? Filthy slut!"
He kicks Harelip in the chest and does up his fly.
We go over. We pick Harelip up, take her bucket, rinse it well, and put it under the fountain spout.
One of the boys says to the other two:
"Come on, we have better things to do."
Another says:
"Are you crazy? This is when the fun starts."
The first one says:
"Drop it! I know them. They're dangerous."
"Dangerous? Those little cunts? I'll take care of them, you'll see."
He comes up to us and tries to spit in the bucket, but one of us trips him up, the other hits him on the head with a bag of sand. The boy falls down. He lies on the ground, stunned. The other two look at us. One of them takes a step toward us. The other says:
"Watch out! Those little bastards are capable of anything. Once they split my head open with a stone. They've got a razor too, and they don't hesitate to use it. They'd slit your throat as soon as look at you. They're completely crazy."
The boys leave.
We hand the filled bucket to Harelip. She asks us:
"Why didn't you help me right away?"
"We wanted to see how you defended yourself."
"What would I have been able to do against three big boys?"
"Throw your bucket at their heads, scratch their faces, kick them in the balls, shout and yell. Or run away and come back later."
It's getting colder and colder. We rummage in our suitcases and put on almost everything we find: several pullovers, several pairs of trousers. But we can't put a second pair of shoes on over the holes in our worn-out town shoes. Anyway, we don't have any others. We don't have gloves or hats either. Our hands and feet are covered with chilblains.
The sky is dark gray, the streets of the town are empty, the stream is frozen, the forest is covered with snow. We can't go there anymore. So we'll soon be out of wood.
We say to Grandmother:
"We need two pairs of rubber boots."
She answers:
"And what else do you need? Where do you expect me to find the money?"
"Grandmother, there's hardly any wood left."
"Then we'll have to go easy on it."
We don't go out anymore. We do all kinds of exercises, we carve various objects out of wood, like spoons and breadboards, and we study late into the night. Grandmother stays in bed almost all the time. She seldom goes into the kitchen. We are left in peace.
We eat badly, there are no more vegetables and fruit, the hens aren't laying anymore. Every day Grandmother brings some dried beans and a few potatoes up from the cellar- which is full of smoked meats and jars of jam.
The postman comes sometimes. He rings his bicycle bell until Grandmother comes out of the house. He then moistens his pencil, writes something on a bit of paper, and hands the pencil and paper to Grandmother, who puts a cross at the bottom. The postman gives her some money, a package, or a letter and goes off toward town whistling.
Grandmother locks herself in her room with the package or the money. If there's a letter, she throws it into the fire.
We ask:
"Grandmother, why do you throw the letter away without reading it?"
She answers:
"I can't read. I never went to school, I've never done anything but work. I wasn't spoiled like you."
"We could read you the letters you get."
"Nobody must read the letters I get."
We ask:
"Who sends the money? Who sends the packages? Who sends the letters?"
She doesn't answer.
Next day, while she is in the cellar, we scour her room. Under the bed we find an open package. In it there are pullovers, scarves, hats, and gloves. We say nothing to Grandmother, because if we did she would realize that we have a key to her room.
After the evening meal, we wait. Grandmother drinks her brandy, then staggers over to open her bedroom door with the key that hangs from her belt. We follow her and push her from behind. She falls on her bed. We pretend to search and find the package.
We say:
"That's not very nice, Grandmother. We're cold, we have no warm clothes, we can't go out anymore, and you want to sell everything Mother has knitted and sent for us."
Grandmother says nothing, she cries.
We say again:
"It's Mother who sends the money, Mother who writes you letters."
Grandmother says:
"It isn't me she writes. She knows very well I can't read. She never used to write me. Now that you're here, she writes. But I don't need her letters! I don't need anything that comes from her!"
From now on we wait for the postman in front of the garden gate. He's an old man with a cap. He has a bicycle with two leather pouches attached to the carrier.
When he arrives, we don't give him time to ring: very quickly we unscrew his bell.
He says:
"Where's your grandmother?"
We say:
"Don't worry about her. Give us what you've brought."
He says:
"There's nothing."
He tries to get away, but we give him a push. He falls in the snow. His bicycle falls on top of him. He swears.
We search his pouches and find a letter and a money order. We take the letter and say:
"Give us the money!"
He says:
"No. It's addressed to your grandmother."
We say:
"But it's intended for us. It's been sent to us by our Mother. If you don't hand it over, we'll keep you from getting up until you freeze to death."
He says:
"All right, all right. Help me get up, one of my legs is crushed under the bike."
We pick up the bicycle and help the postman get up. He is very thin, very light.
He takes the money out of one of his pockets and gives it to us.
We ask:
"Do you want a signature or a cross?"
He says:
"A cross will do. One cross is as good as another."
He adds:
"You're right to stand up for yourselves. Everybody knows what your grandmother's like. There's nobody stingier than her. So it's your mother who sends you all that? She's very nice. I knew her when she was a little girl. She did well to leave. She would never have been able to marry here. With all the gossip…"
We ask:
"What gossip?"
"Like how she was supposed to have poisoned her husband. I mean, your grandmother poisoned your grandfather. It's an old story. That's why they call her the Witch."
We say:
"We don't want anyone to speak ill of Grandmother."
The postman turns his bicycle around:
"All right, all right, but you ought to be informed."
We say:
"We were already informed. From now on you will give the mail to us. Otherwise we'll kill you. Understand?"
The postman says:
"You'd be quite capable of it, you've got the makings of murderers. You'll have your mail, it's all the same to me. I couldn't care less about the Witch."
He leaves, pushing his bicycle. He drags his leg to show that we hurt him.
Next day, warmly dressed, we go off to town to buy rubber boots with the money Mother has sent us. We take turns carrying her letter under our shirts.
The cobbler lives and works in the basement of a house near the station. The room is enormous. In one corner is his bed, in another his kitchen. His workshop faces the window, which is at ground level. The cobbler is sitting on a low stool surrounded by shoes and tools. He looks at us over his spectacles; he looks at our cracked patent-leather shoes.
We say:
"Good morning, sir. We would like warm, waterproof rubber boots. Do you sell them? We have money."
He says:
"Yes, I sell them. But the lined ones, the warm ones, are very expensive."
We say:
"We absolutely need them. Our feet are cold."
We put what money we have on the low table.
The cobbler says:
"It's just enough for one pair. But one pair should do you. You're the same size. You can take turns going out."
"That isn't possible. One of us never goes out without the other. We go everywhere together."
"Ask your parents for more money, then."
"We have no parents. We live with our Grandmother, whom they call the Witch. She won't give us any money."
The cobbler says:
"The Witch is your grandmother? Poor kids! And you've come from her house all the way here in those shoes!"
"Yes, we have. We can't get through the winter without boots. We have to go into the forest to find wood; we have to clear the snow. We absolutely need…"
"Two pairs of warm, waterproof boots."
The cobbler laughs and hands us two pairs of boots:
"Try them on."
We try them on; they fit us very well.
We say:
"We'll keep them. We'll pay you for the second pair in the spring when we'll be selling fish and eggs. Or if you prefer, we'll bring you wood."
The cobbler hands us back our money:
"Here, take it. I don't want your money. Buy yourselves some good socks with it. I'll give you the boots because you absolutely need them."
We say:
"We don't like to accept presents."
"And why not?"
"Because we don't like to say thank you."
"Nobody's making you say anything. Be off with you. No.
Wait a moment! Take these slippers and these sandals for the summer and these shoes too. They're very strong. Take whatever you like."
"But why are you giving us all this?"
"I don't need them anymore. I'll be going away soon."
We ask:
"Where are you going?"
"Who knows? They'll take me away and kill me."
We ask:
"Who wants to kill you, and why?"
He says:
"Don't ask questions. Leave now."
We pick up the shoes, the slippers, and the sandals. We have the boots on our feet. We stop at the door and say:
"We hope they won't take you away. Or if they do take you away, we hope they won't kill you. Goodbye, sir, and thank you, thank you very much."
When we get back, Grandmother asks:
"Where did you steal all that, you punks?"
"We didn't steal anything. It's a present. Not everybody is as stingy as you, Grandmother."
With our boots and our warm clothes, we can go out again. We slide on the frozen stream, we go look for wood in the forest.
We take an axe and a saw with us. We can no longer collect the dead wood lying on the ground; the layer of snow is too thick. We climb trees, saw off the dead branches, and chop them up with the axe. During this work, we aren't cold. We even sweat. So we can take off our gloves and put them in our pockets so that they won't wear out too quickly.
One day, coming back with our two bundles of firewood, we make a detour to go see Harelip.
The snow in front of the shack has not been cleared, and there are no footprints leading to it. The chimney is not smoking.
We knock on the door, no one answers. We go in. At first we see nothing, it is so dark, but our eyes soon adjust to the gloom.
It's a room that serves as kitchen and bedroom. In the darkest corner, there's a bed. We approach. We call out. Someone moves under the blankets and old clothes; Harelip's head emerges.
We ask:
"Is your mother there?"
She says:
"Yes."
"Is she dead?"
"I don't know."
We put down our wood and light a fire in the stove, because it's as cold in the room as outside. Then we go back to Grandmother's and get some potatoes and dried beans from the cellar. We milk one of the goats and come back to our neighbor's. We heat the milk. We melt some snow in a saucepan and cook the beans in it. We bake the potatoes in the oven.
Harelip gets up and totters over to a chair by the fire.
Our neighbor isn't dead. We pour some goat's milk into her mouth. We say to Harelip:
"When all this is ready, eat and give some to your mother. We'll be back."
With the money the cobbler gave back to us, we have bought a few pairs of socks, but we haven't spent it all. We go into a grocer's to buy some flour, and take some salt and sugar without paying for them. We also go to the butchers's; we buy a small slab of bacon and take a big sausage without paying for it. We return to Harelip's. She and her mother have already eaten everything. The mother is still in bed, Harelip is washing up.
We say to her:
"We'll bring you a bundle of firewood every day. Some beans and potatoes too. But for the rest, you need money. We don't have any more. Without money, you can't go into a shop. You have to buy something if you're going to steal something else."
She says:
"You really are smart. You're right. They don't even let me into the shops. I'd never have thought you were capable of stealing."
We say:
"Why not? It will be our exercise in cunning. But we need a little money. Absolutely."
She thinks about it and says:
"Go ask the parish priest. He used to give me money sometimes when I let him see my slit."
"He asked you to do that?"
"Yes. And sometimes he put his finger in. And afterward he gave me money not to tell anybody. Tell him Harelip and her mother need money."
We go see the parish priest. He lives next to the church in a big house.
We pull on the bellpull. An old woman opens the door:
"What do you want?"
"We want to see the parish priest."
"Why?"
"It's for someone who is going to die."
The old woman takes us into a waiting room. She knocks on a door:
"Father," she shouts, "it's for an extreme unction."
A voice answers from behind the door:
"I'm coming. Tell them to wait."
We wait a few minutes. A tall, thin man with a severe face comes out of the room. He is wearing a sort of white and gold cloak over his dark clothes. He asks us:
"Where is it? Who sent you?"
"Harelip and her mother."
He says:
"What is the precise name of these people?"
"We don't know their precise name. The mother is blind and deaf. She lives in the last house in town. They are dying of hunger and cold."
The priest says:
"Although I know absolutely nothing about these people, I am willing to give them extreme unction. Let's go. Lead the way."
We say:
"They don't need extreme unction yet. They need a little money. We've brought them wood, a few potatoes, and some dried beans, but we can't do any more. Harelip has sent us here. You used to give her a little money sometimes."
The priest says:
"It's quite possible. I give money to a lot of poor people. I can't remember all of them. Here!"
He fumbles in his pockets under his cloak and gives us a few coins. We take them and say:
"That's not very much. It's too little. It isn't even enough to buy a loaf of bread."
He says:
"I'm sorry. There are a lot of poor people. And the faithful have almost stopped giving offerings. Everybody is in difficulties at the moment. Off with you now, and God bless you!"
We say:
"We can accept this sum for today, but we will have to come back tomorrow."
"What? What is that supposed to mean? Tomorrow? I shan't let you in. Get out of here immediately."
"Tomorrow we will ring the bell until you let us in. We will knock at the windows, we will kick at your door and tell everybody what you did to Harelip."
"I never did anything to Harelip. I don't even know who she is. She must be making these things up. The stories of a mentally deficient child will not be taken seriously. No one will believe you. Everything she says is untrue!"
We say:
"It hardly matters whether it's true or false. The point is the slander. People love scandal."
The priest sits down on a chair and mops his face with a handkerchief.
"It's monstrous. Have you any idea what you're doing?"
"Yes, sir. Blackmail."
"At your age… It's deplorable."
"Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money."
The priest gets up, takes off his cloak, and says:
"It is a trial sent from God. How much do you want? I'm not rich, you know."
"Ten times what you have already given us. Once a week. We aren't asking you for the impossible."
He takes the money out of his pocket and gives it to us:
"Come every Saturday. But don't imagine for a moment that I'm doing this because I'm giving in to your blackmail. I'm doing it out of charity."
We say:
"That's exactly what we expected of you, Father."
One afternoon the orderly comes into the kitchen. We haven't seen him for a long time. He says:
"You come help unload jeep?"
We put on our boots and follow him out to the jeep, which is parked on the road in front of the garden gate. The orderly hands us crates and cardboard boxes, which we carry into the officer's room.
We ask:
"Is the officer coming this evening? We still haven't ever seen him."
The orderly says:
"Officer no come winter here. Perhaps come never. He unhappy in love. Perhaps find another later. Forget. Stories like that not for you. You bring wood to heat room."
We bring wood and make a fire in the small metal stove. The orderly opens the crates and boxes and puts on the table bottles of wine, brandy, beer, and lots of things to eat: sausages, cans of meat and vegetables, rice, biscuits, chocolate, sugar, and coffee.
The orderly opens a bottle, starts to drink, and says:
"I heat food in mess kit on camp stove. Tonight eat, drink, sing with friends. Celebrate victory against the enemy. We soon win war with new wonder weapon."
We ask:
"So the war will be over soon?"
He says:
"Yes, very soon. Why you look like that at food on the table? If you hungry, eat chocolate, biscuits, sausage."
We say:
"There are people dying of hunger."
"So what? No think of that. Many people die of hunger or other things. We no think. We eat and not die."
He laughs. We say:
"We know a blind, deaf woman who lives near here with her daughter. They won't survive this winter."
"Is not my fault."
"Yes, it is your fault. Yours and your country's. You brought us the war."
"Before the war, how they do to eat, the blind woman and daughter?"
"Before the war, they lived on charity. People gave them old clothes and shoes. They brought them food. Now nobody gives anything anymore. People are all poor or are afraid of becoming so. The war has made them stingy and selfish."
The orderly shouts:
"I no care all that! Enough! Silence!"
"Yes, you don't care, and you eat our food."
"Not your food. I take that in barracks stores."
"Everything on that table comes from our country: the drinks, the canned food, the biscuits, the sugar. Our country feeds your army."
The orderly goes red in the face. He sits down on the bed and holds his head in his hands:
"You think I want war and come to your filthy country? I much better at home, quiet, make chairs and tables. Drink wine of my country, have fun with nice girls at home. Here everybody unkind, you too, little children. You say all my fault. What I can do? If I say I no go to war, no come in your country, I shot. You take all, go take all on table. Celebration finished. I sad, you too mean with me."
We say:
"We don't want to take everything, just a few cans and a little chocolate. But from time to time, at least during the winter, you could bring us some powdered milk, flour, or anything else to eat."
He says:
"Good. That I can. You come with me tomorrow to blind woman's house. But you nice with me after. Yes?"
We say:
"Yes."
The orderly laughs. His friends arrive. We leave. We hear them singing all night.
The Priest's Housekeeper
One morning, towards the end of winter, we are sitting in the kitchen with Grandmother. There is a knock on the door; a young woman comes in. She says:
"Good morning. I've come for some potatoes for…"
She stops speaking and looks at us:
"Why, they're adorable!"
She takes a stool and sits down:
"Come here, you."
We don't move.
"Or you."
We don't move. She laughs:
"Come on, come here. Are you afraid of me?"
We say:
"We're afraid of nobody." We go over to her; she says:
"Heavens! How beautiful you are! But how dirty you are!"
Grandmother asks:
"What do you want?"
"Potatoes for the priest. Why are you so dirty? Don't you ever wash?"
Grandmother says angrily:
"It's none of your business. Why didn't the old woman come?"
The young woman laughs again:
"The old woman? She was younger than you. But she died yesterday. She was my aunt. I'm replacing her at the priest's house."
Grandmother says:
"She was five years older than me. She died, just like that… How many potatoes do you want?"
"Ten kilos, or more, if you have them. And some apples. And also… what else have you got? The priest is as thin as a rake, and there's nothing in his larder."
Grandmother says:
"You should have thought of that in the autumn."
"I wasn't there in the autumn. I've only been there since yesterday evening."
Grandmother says:
"I'm warning you, at this time of year, food of any sort costs plenty."
The young woman laughs again:
"Name your price. We don't have any choice. There's almost nothing left in the shops."
"Soon there'll be nothing left anywhere."
Grandmother sniggers and goes out. We are left alone with the priest's housekeeper. She asks us:
"Why don't you ever wash?"
"There's no bathroom, no soap. It isn't possible to wash."
"And your clothes! What a mess! Don't you have any other clothes!"
"We have some in the suitcases under the seat, but they're all dirty and torn. Grandmother never washes them."
"The Witch is your grandmother? Wonders never cease!"
Grandmother comes back with two sacks:
"That'll be ten silver coins or one gold coin. I don't take bills. They'll soon be worth nothing at all, they're just paper."
The housekeeper asks:
"What's in the sacks?"
Grandmother answers:
"Food. Take it or leave it."
"I'll take it. I'll bring you the money tomorrow. Can the boys help me carry the sacks?"
"They can if they want to. They don't always want to. They don't obey anybody."
The housekeeper asks us:
"You will do that for me, won't you? You'll each carry a sack, and I'll carry your suitcases."
Grandmother asks:
"What's all this about suitcases?"
"I'm going to wash their dirty clothes. I'll bring them back tomorrow with the money."
Grandmother sniggers:
"Wash their clothes? Well, if you've got nothing better to do…"
We go off with the housekeeper. We follow her to the priest's house. We see her two blond braids dancing over her black shawl, two long, thick braids. They reach down to her waist. Her hips dance under her red skirt. We can just see a bit of her legs between the skirt and her boots. Her stockings are black, and the one on the right has a run.
We arrive at the priest's house with the housekeeper. She lets us in by the back door. We put the sacks down in the larder and go to the washhouse. There are lots of ropes stretched across the room to hold the washing. There are receptacles of every kind, including a zinc bathtub of odd shape, like a deep armchair.
The housekeeper opens our suitcases, puts our clothes in cold water to soak, then starts a fire to heat water in two big cauldrons. She says:
"I'll wash what you need for now right away. While you're bathing, it will dry. I'll bring you the other clothes tomorrow or the day after. They also need mending."
She pours hot water into the bathtub; she adds cold water to it:
"Well, who's first?"
We don't move. She says:
"Who's it going to be, you or you? Come on, get undressed!"
We ask:
"Are you going to stay here while we bathe?"
She laughs very loudly:
"What! Of course I'm going to stay here! I'll even rub your backs and wash your hair. You're not going to be embarrassed in front of me, are you? I'm almost old enough to be your mother."
We still don't move. So she starts to undress:
"Oh, well. Then I'll go first. You see, I'm not embarrassed to undress in front of you. You're only little boys."
She hums to herself, but her face goes red when she realizes we're staring at her. She has taut, pointed breasts like overinflated balloons. Her skin is very white, and she has a lot of blond hair everywhere. Not only between her legs and under her arms, but also on her belly and thighs. She goes on singing in the water, rubbing herself with a washcloth. When she gets out of the bath, she quickly slips into a robe. She changes the water in the tub and starts to do the washing with her back turned to us. Then we get undressed and get into the tub together. There's plenty of room for both of us.
After a while, the housekeeper hands us two large white towels:
"I hope you scrubbed yourselves well all over."
We sit down on a bench, wrapped up in our towels, waiting for our clothes to dry. The washhouse is full of steam and very warm. The housekeeper comes over with a pair of scissors:
"Now I'm going to cut your nails. And stop making a fuss; I won't eat you."
She cuts our fingernails and our toenails. She also cuts our hair. She kisses us on the face and on the neck; and she never stops talking:
"Oh! What pretty little feet, how sweet they are, all clean now! Oh! What adorable ears, what a soft, soft neck! Oh! How I'd love to have two pretty, handsome little boys like you all to myself! I'd tickle them all over, all over, all over."
She strokes and kisses our whole bodies. She tickles us with her tongue on our necks, under our arms, between our buttocks. She kneels down in front of the bench and sucks our penises, which swell and harden in her mouth.
She is now sitting between us; she presses us to her:
"If I had two beautiful little babies like you, I'd give them lovely sweet milk to drink, here, like this."
She draws our heads to her breasts, which are sticking out of her robe, and we suck the pink ends, which have become very hard. She puts her hands under her robe and rubs herself between the legs:
"What a pity you aren't older! Oh! How nice it is, how nice it is to play with you!"
She sighs, pants, then stiffens suddenly.
As we are leaving, she says to us:
"You'll come back every Saturday to bathe. You'll bring your dirty clothes with you. I want you to be always clean."
We say:
"We'll bring you wood in exchange for your work. And fish and mushrooms when there are any."
The following Saturday, we go back to have our bath. Afterward, the housekeeper says to us:
"Come to the kitchen. I'll make some tea and we'll have some bread and butter."
We are eating the bread and butter when the priest comes into the kitchen.
We say:
"Good morning, sir."
The housekeeper says:
"Father, these are my protégés. They're the grandsons of the old woman people call the Witch."
The priest says:
"Yes, I know them. Come with me."
We follow him. We go through a room in which there is nothing but a big round table surrounded by chairs, and a crucifix on the wall. Then we go into a dark room whose walls are lined with books from floor to ceiling. Opposite the door, a prie-dieu with a crucifix; near the window, a desk; a narrow bed in a corner, three chairs in a row against the wall: that's all the furniture in the room.
The priest says:
"You've changed a lot. You're clean. You look like two angels. Sit down."
He pulls two chairs up opposite his desk; we sit down. He sits down behind his desk. He hands us an envelope:
"Here's the money."
As we take the envelope, we say:
"Soon you'll be able to stop giving these. In the summer, Harelip manages by herself."
The priest says:
"No. I shall go on helping these two women. I'm ashamed that I did not do so earlier. And now, let's talk about something else, shall we?"
He looks at us; we say nothing. He says:
"I never see you in church."
"We don't go there."
"Do you pray sometimes?"
"No, we don't pray."
"Poor lost lambs. I shall pray for you. Can you read, at least?"
"Yes, sir. We can read."
The priest hands us a book:
"Here, read this. You will find in it beautiful stories about Jesus Christ and the lives of the saints."
"We know these stories already. We have a Bible. We have read the Old Testament and the New."
The priest raises his dark eyebrows:
"What? You have read all of the Holy Bible?" "Yes, sir. We even know several passages by heart."
"Which ones, for example?"
"Passages from Genesis, Exodus, Ecclesiastes, Revelation, and others."
The priest is silent for a while, then he says:
"So you know the Ten Commandments. Do you obey them?"
"No, sir, we do not obey them. Nobody obeys them. It is written, 'Thou shalt not kill,' and everybody kills."
The priest says:
"Alas… it's the war."
We say:
"We would like to read other books besides the Bible, but we don't have any. You have a lot of books. You could lend us some."
"These books are too difficult for you."
"Are they more difficult than the Bible?"
The priest looks at us. He asks:
"What kind of books would you like to read?"
"History books and geography books. Books that tell true things, not invented things."
The priest says:
"By next Saturday, I shall find some books that will be suitable for you. Leave me now. Go back to the kitchen and finish your tea."
The Housekeeper and the Orderly
We are picking cherries in the garden with the housekeeper. The orderly and the foreign officer arrive in the jeep. The officer walks straight past us and goes into his room. The orderly stops near us and says:
"Good morning, little friends. Good morning, pretty maiden. Cherries already ripe? I love much cherries, I love much pretty young lady."
The officer calls from the window. The orderly has to go into the house. The housekeeper says to us:
"Why didn't you tell me there were men in your house?"
'They're foreigners."
"So what? What a handsome man he is, the officer!"
We ask:
"Don't you like the orderly?"
"He's short and fat."
"But he's nice and amusing. And he speaks our language well."
She says:
"I don't care. It's the officer I like."
The officer comes and sits on the bench in front of his window. The housekeeper's basket is already full of cherries, she could go back to the priest's house, but she stays. She looks at the officer and laughs very loudly. She hangs from the branch of a tree, she swings, she jumps, she lies in the grass, and finally she throws a daisy at the officer's feet. The officer gets up and goes back to his room. Soon afterward, he comes out and goes off in his jeep.
The orderly leans out the window and shouts:
"Who come help poor man clean very dirty room?"
We say:
"We'll be glad to help you."
He says:
"Need a woman to help. Need pretty young lady."
We say to the housekeeper:
"Come on. Let's help him a bit."
All three of us go into the officer's room. The housekeeper picks up a broom and starts to sweep. The orderly sits down on the bed and says:
"I dream. A princess, I see in dream. Princess must pinch me to wake up."
The housekeeper laughs and pinches the orderly's cheek very hard.
The orderly shouts:
"I awake now. I also want pinch wicked princess."
He takes the housekeeper in his arms and pinches her bottom. The housekeeper struggles, but the orderly holds her very tight. He says to us:
"You, outside! And shut the door."
We ask the housekeeper:
"Do you want us to stay?"
She laughs:
"What for? I can take care of myself."
So we leave the room and shut the door behind us. The housekeeper comes to the window, smiles at us, draws the shutters, and closes the window. We go up to the attic and watch what is happening in the officer's room through the holes.
The orderly and the housekeeper are lying on the bed. The housekeeper is completely naked; the orderly has just his shirt and socks on. He's lying on the housekeeper, and they're both moving back and forth, right and left. The orderly grunts like Grandmother's pig, and the housekeeper screams as if in pain, but she also laughs at the same time and cries:
"Yes, yes, yes, oh, oh, oh!"
From that day on, the housekeeper comes back often and shuts herself up with the orderly. We sometimes look at them, but not always.
The orderly prefers the housekeeper to bend over or squat on all fours, and he takes her from behind.
The housekeeper prefers the orderly to lie on his back. Then she sits on the orderly's belly and moves up and down, as if she were riding a horse.
The orderly sometimes gives the housekeeper silk stockings or eau de cologne.
We are doing our immobility exercise in the garden. It's hot. We are lying on our backs in the shade of the walnut tree. Through the leaves, we see the sky and the clouds. The leaves of the tree are motionless; the clouds also seem to be, but if we look at them for a long time, very attentively, we notice that they change shape and stretch out.
Grandmother comes out of the house. As she walks past us, she kicks sand and gravel into our faces and over our bodies. She mutters something and goes into the vineyard for her nap.
The officer is sitting, stripped to the waist, his eyes shut, on the bench in front of his room, his head leaning against the white wall, in full sunlight. Suddenly he comes toward us; he speaks to us, but we don't answer, we don't look at him. He goes back to his bench.
Later, the orderly says to us:
"The officer want you come speak to him."
We don't answer. He says again:
"You get up and come. Officer angry if you not obey."
We don't move.
The officer says something, and the orderly goes into the room. We hear him singing as he cleans up.
When the sun touches the roof of the house beside the chimney, we get up. We go over to the officer. We stop in front of him. He calls the orderly. We ask:
"What does he want?"
The officer asks some questions; the orderly translates:
"The officer ask why you not move, why not speak."
We answer:
"We were doing our immobility exercise."
The orderly translates again:
"The officer say you do many exercises. Also other kinds. He have seen you hit each other with belt."
"That was our toughening exercise."
"The officer ask why you do all that."
"To get used to pain."
"He ask you have pleasure in pain."
"No. We only want to overcome pain, heat, cold, hunger, whatever causes pain."
"The officer admiration for you. He think you extraordinary."
The officer adds a few words. The orderly says:
"Good, finished. I must go now. You too, scram, go fishing."
But the officer holds us by the arm, smiling, and makes a sign for the orderly to go. The orderly takes a few steps, then turns back:
"You leave! Quick! Go for walk in town."
The officer looks at him, and the orderly walks on to the garden gate, where he shouts to us again:
"Beat it, you two! No stay! Not understand, fools?"
He goes off. The officer smiles at us and takes us into his room. He sits down on a chair, draws us to him, picks us up, and sits us on his knees. We put our arms around his neck, we press ourselves against his hairy chest. He rocks us to and fro.
Beneath us, between the officer's legs, we feel a warm movement. We look at one another, then we look the officer in the eyes. He gently pushes us away, he ruffles our hair, he stands up. He hands us two whips and lies face down on his belly. He says only one word, which, without knowing his language, we understand.
We hit. First one, then the other.
The officer's back is scored with red lines. We hit harder and harder. The officer moans and, without changing position, pulls his trousers and shorts down to his ankles. We hit his white buttocks, his thighs, his legs, his back, his neck, his shoulders, as hard as we can, and everything gets red.
The officer's body, hair, clothes, the sheets, the rug, our hands, our arms are red. The blood even spurts into our eyes, mingles with our sweat, and we go on hitting until the man utters a final, inhuman cry and we drop, exhausted, at the foot of his bed.
The Foreign Language
The officer brings us a dictionary in which we can learn his language. We learn the words; the orderly corrects our pronunciation. A few weeks later, we speak this new language fluently. We continue to make progress. The orderly no longer has to translate. The officer is very pleased with us. He gives us a harmonica. He also gives us a key to his room so we can get in when we want to (as we were already doing with our key, but secretly). Now we no longer need to hide, and we can do whatever we like there: eat biscuits and chocolate, smoke cigarettes.
We often go into that room, because everything is clean there and it's more peaceful than the kitchen. That's where we usually do our studying.
The officer has a gramophone and records. Lying on the bed, we listen to music. Once, to please the officer, we play his country's national anthem. But he gets angry and smashes the record with his fist.
Sometimes we sleep on the bed, which is very wide. One morning, the orderly finds us there; he isn't happy:
"You very foolish! You no more do silly thing like that. What happen one time if the officer come back at night?"
"What could happen? There's enough room for him too."
The orderly says:
"You very stupid. One time you pay for stupidity. If the officer hurt you, I kill him."
"He won't hurt us. Don't worry about us."
One night, the officer comes home and finds us asleep on his bed. The light from the oil lamp wakes us. We ask:
"Do you want us to go to the kitchen?"
The officer strokes our heads and says:
"Stay there. Do stay."
He undresses and lies.down between us. He puts his arms around us, he whispers in our ears:
"Sleep. I love you. Sleep in peace."
We go back to sleep. Later, near morning, we want to get up, but the officer holds us back:
"Don't move. Keep sleeping."
"We want to urinate. We have to go."
"Don't go. Do it here."
We ask:
"Where?"
He says:
"On me. Yes. Don't be afraid. Piss! On my face."
We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet. The sun is already rising; we start our morning chores.
Sometimes the officer comes back with a friend, another, younger officer. They spend the evening together, and the friend stays over. We have observed them several times through the hole in the ceiling.
It's a summer's evening. The orderly is making something on the camp stove. He puts a cloth on the table, and we arrange flowers on it. The officer and his friend are sitting at the table; they are drinking. Later, they eat. The orderly eats near the door, sitting on a stool. Then they drink again. Meanwhile, we take care of the music. We change the records and wind up the gramophone.
The officer's friend says:
"These kids annoy me. Send them out."
The officer asks:
"Jealous?"
The friend answers:
"Of them? Don't be absurd! Two little savages."
"They're handsome, don't you think?"
"Perhaps. I haven't looked at them."
"Really, you haven't looked at them. Then look at them."
The friend blushes:
"What do you mean? They annoy me with their sneaky ways. As if they were listening to us, spying on us."
"But they are listening to us. They speak our language perfectly. They understand everything."
The friend goes pale and gets up:
"This is too much! I'm leaving!"
The officer says:
"Don't be a fool. Off you go, kids."
We leave the room and go up to the attic. We look and listen.
The officer's friend says:
"You made me look ridiculous in front of those stupid kids."
The officer says:
"Those are the two most intelligent children I have ever met."
The friend says:
"You're just saying that to hurt me, to make me suffer. You'll do anything to torment and humiliate me. One day I'll kill you!"
The officer throws his revolver on the table:
"If only you would! Take it. Kill me! Go on!"
The friend picks up the revolver and points it at the officer:
"I will. You'll see, I will. The next time you mention him, the other one, I'll kill you."
The officer closes his eyes, smiles:
"He was handsome… young… strong… graceful… delicate… cultivated… tender… dreamy… brave… arrogant… I loved him. He died on the Eastern front. He was nineteen. I can't live without him."
The friend throws the revolver on the table and says:
"Swine!"
The officer opens his eyes, looks at his friend:
"What lack of courage! What lack of character!"
The friend says:
"Then do it yourself if you have so much courage, and so much grief. If you can't live without him, follow him into death. Or do you need me to help you? I'm not crazy! Die! Die alone!"
The officer picks up the revolver and puts it to his temple. We come down from the attic. The orderly is sitting in front of the open door of the room. We ask him:
"Do you think he's going to kill himself?"
The orderly laughs:
"You not fear. They always do that when drink too much. I unload two revolvers before."
We go into the room and say to the officer:
"We'll kill you if you really want us to. Give us your revolver."
The friend says:
"Little bastards!"
The officer smiles and says:
"Thank you. That's very kind of you, but we were only playing. Go to bed now."
He gets up to shut the door behind us and sees the orderly:
"Are you still there?"
The orderly says:
"I haven't been given permission to go."
"Be off with you! I want to be left in peace! Understand?" Through the door we can still hear him saying to his friend: "What a lesson for you, you weakling!" We also hear the noise of a fight, blows, the crash of chairs being knocked over, a fall, shouts, panting. Then there is silence.
The housekeeper often sings. Old popular songs and the latest songs about the war. We listen to these songs and practice them on our harmonica. We also ask the orderly to teach us songs of his country.
Late one evening, when Grandmother is already in bed, we go into town. Near the castle, in an old street, we stop in front of a low house. Noise, voices, and smoke are coming from the door, which opens on a staircase. We go down the stone steps and find ourselves in a cellar converted into a café. Men are standing or sitting on wooden benches and barrels, drinking wine. Most of them are old, but there are also a few young ones and three women. No one takes any notice of us.
One of us starts to play the harmonica, and the other sings a well-known song about a woman waiting for her husband, who has gone to war and will come home soon, victorious.
Gradually everybody turns toward us; the voices die down. We sing and play louder and louder, we hear our melody resound and echo from the vaulted ceiling of the cellar, as if it were someone else playing and singing.
Our song finished, we look up at the tired, hollow faces. A woman laughs and applauds. A young one-armed man says in a husky voice:
"More. Play something else!"
We change roles. The one who had the harmonica hands it to the other, and we begin a new song.
A very thin man staggers up to us and shouts in our faces:
"Silence, dogs!"
He pushes us roughly aside, one to the right, one to the left; we lose our balance; the harmonica falls. The man goes up the stairs holding on to the wall. We can still hear him shouting in the street:
"Why can't they all shut up!"
We pick the harmonica up and clean it off. Someone says:
"He's deaf."
Someone else says:
"He's not only deaf. He's completely mad."
An old man strokes our hair. Tears are flowing from his sunken, black-ringed eyes.
"What misery! What a miserable world! Poor kids! Poor world!"
A woman says:
"Deaf or mad, at least he came back. You too, you came back."
She sits on the one-armed man's lap. The man says:
"You're right, my beauty, I came back. But what am I going to work with? How am I going to hold a board I want to saw? With my empty coat sleeve?"
Another young man, sitting on a bench, laughs and says:
"I too came back. But I'm paralyzed from the waist down. The legs and all the rest. I'll never get it up again. I'd rather have gone quickly, in one fell swoop, and stayed there."
Another woman says:
"You're never satisfied. The ones I've seen dying in the hospital all say, 'Whatever state I'm in, I want to survive, go home, see my wife, my mother. I'd give anything to live a little longer.' "
A man says:
"You shut up. Women have seen nothing of the war."
The woman says:
"Seen nothing? Idiot! We have all the work and all the worry: children to feed, wounds to tend. Once the war is over, you men are all heroes. The dead: heroes. The survivors: heroes. The maimed: heroes. That's why you invented war. It's your war. You wanted it, so get on with it-heroes, my ass!"
Everybody starts talking and shouting. Near us, the old man says:
"Nobody wanted this war. Nobody, nobody."
We leave the cellar and decide to go home.
The moon lights the streets and the dusty road that leads to Grandmother's house.
We learn to juggle with fruit: apples, walnuts, apricots. First two, that's easy, then three, four, until we manage five.
We invent conjuring tricks with cards and cigarettes.
We also train ourselves in acrobatics. We can do cartwheels, somersaults, handsprings backward and forward, and we can walk on our hands with perfect ease.
We dress up in really old clothes way too big for us that we found in the attic trunk: loose-fitting, torn checked jackets and wide trousers, which we tie at the waist with string. We also found a hard, round black hat.
One of us sticks a red pepper on his nose, and the other a false mustache made out of corn silks. We get hold of some lipstick and draw our mouths out to our ears.
Dressed up as clowns, we go to the marketplace. That's where there are the most shops and the most people.
We begin our show by making a lot of noise with our harmonica and a hollow gourd made into a drum. When there are enough spectators around us, we juggle tomatoes or even eggs. The tomatoes are real tomatoes, but the eggs have been emptied and filled with fine sand. People don't know this, so they exclaim, laugh, and applaud when we pretend we've nearly dropped one.
We continue our show with conjuring tricks, and we end it with acrobatics.
While one of us keeps doing cartwheels and somersaults, the other makes the rounds of the spectators walking on his hands with the old hat between his teeth.
In the evening we do the cafés without our costumes.
We soon know all the cafés in the town, the cellars where the proprietor sells his own wine, the bars where you drink standing up, the smarter cafés frequented by well-dressed people and a few officers looking for girls to pick up.
People who drink part easily with their money. They also part easily with their confidences. We learn all kinds of secrets about all kinds of people.
Often people offer us drinks, and we are gradually getting used to alcohol. We also smoke the cigarettes people give us.
Wherever we go we are very successful. People think we have good voices; they applaud us and call us back several times.
Sometimes, if people are attentive, not too drunk and not too noisy, we put on one of our little dramas, for example, The Story of the Poor Man and the Rich Man.
One of us plays the poor man, the other the rich man.
The rich man is sitting at a table smoking. Enter the poor man:
"I've finished cutting up your wood, sir."
"Good. Exercise is very good for you. You look very well. Your cheeks are all red."
"My hands are frozen, sir."
"Come here! Show me! That's disgusting! Your hands are all chapped and covered with sores."
"They're chilblains, sir."
"You poor people are always getting disgusting illnesses. You're dirty, that's the trouble with you. Here, this is for your work."
He throws a pack of cigarettes to the poor man, who lights one and starts to smoke it. But there's no ashtray where he's standing, near the door, and he doesn't dare approach the table. So he flicks the ash from his cigarette into the palm of his hand. The rich man, who would like the poor man to leave, pretends not to see that he needs an ashtray. But the poor man doesn't want to leave the premises so soon, because he is hungry. He says:
"It smells good in your house, sir."
"It smells of cleanliness."
"It also smells of hot soup. I haven't eaten anything all day."
"You should have. Myself, I'm dining out in a restaurant because I've given my cook the day off."
The poor man sniffs:
"It smells of good hot soup all the same."
The rich man shouts:
"It can't smell of soup here; nobody is making soup here; it must be coming from one of the neighbor's, or else you're just imagining it! You poor people think of nothing but your stomachs; that's why you never have any money; you spend all you earn on soup and sausages. You're pigs, that's what you are, and now you're dirtying my floor with your cigarette ashes! Get out of here, and don't let me see you again!"
The rich man opens the door and kicks the poor man, who sprawls on the sidewalk.
The rich man shuts the door, sits down in front of a plate of soup, and says, joining his hands:
"I give thanks to Thee, Lord Jesus, for all Thy blessings."
When we arrived at Grandmother's, there were very few air raids in the Little Town. Now there are more and more of them. The sirens start to wail at all hours of the day and night, exactly as in the Big Town. People run for shelter, hide in cellars. Meanwhile, the streets are deserted. Sometimes the doors of houses and shops are left open. We take advantage of this to go in and quietly steal whatever we like.
We never hide in our cellar. Grandmother either. During the day, we keep doing whatever we're doing, and at night we go on sleeping.
Most of the time, the planes only fly over our town on their way to bomb the other side of the frontier. But sometimes a bomb falls on a house anyway. In which case we locate the spot by the direction of the smoke and go see what has been destroyed. If there's anything left to take, we take it.
We have noticed that the people in the cellar of a bombed house are always dead. On the other hand, the chimney is almost always standing.
Sometimes, too, a plane goes into a dive to machine-gun people in the fields or in the street.
The orderly has taught us that we must be very careful when a plane is moving toward us, but that as soon as it is over our heads, the danger is past.
Because of the air raids, it is forbidden to light lamps at night unless the windows are completely blacked out. Grandmother thinks it is more practical not to light them at all. Patrols circulate all night to make sure the regulation is obeyed.
During a meal, we mention a plane we saw fall in fiâmes. We also saw the pilot parachute from it.
"We don't know what happened to him, the enemy pilot."
Grandmother says:
"Enemy? They are friends, our brothers. They'll be here soon."
One day, we are out walking during an air raid. A terrified man dashes up to us:
"You shouldn't be out during air raids."
He grabs our arms and pulls us toward a door:
"Go in, get inside."
"We don't want to."
"It's a shelter. You'll be safe there."
He opens the door and pushes us in front of him. The cellar is full of people. Complete silence reigns there. The women are clutching their children to them.
Suddenly, somewhere, bombs go off. The explosions get nearer. The man who brought us to the cellar runs over to a pile of coal in one corner and tries to bury himself in it.
Several women snigger contemptuously. An elderly woman says:
"His nerves are shot. He's on leave because of it."
All of a sudden we find it difficult to breathe. We open the cellar door; a big fat woman pushes us back and shuts the door again. She shouts:
"Are you crazy? You can't go out now."
We say:
"People always die in cellars. We want to go out."
The fat woman leans against the door. She shows us her Civil Defense armband.
"I'm in charge here! You'll stay!"
We sink our teeth into her fleshy forearms; we kick her in the shins. She screams and tries to hit us. People laugh. In the end, all red with anger and shame, she says:
"Get out! Beat it! Go get yourselves killed outside! It'll be no great loss."
Outside, we can breathe. It's the first time we have been afraid.
The bombs continue to rain down.
We have come to the priest's house to get our clean clothes. We are eating bread and butter with the housekeeper in the kitchen. We hear shouts coming from the street. We put down our bread and butter and go out. People are standing in front of their houses; they are looking in the direction of the station. Excited children are running around shouting: "They're coming! They're coming!" At a bend in the road an army jeep full of foreign officers appears. The jeep is moving slowly, followed by soldiers carrying their rifles on their shoulders. Behind them is a sort of human herd. Children like us. Women like our mother. Old men like the cobbler.
Two or three hundred of them pass by, flanked by soldiers. A few women are carrying small children on their backs, on their shoulders, or cradled against their breasts. One of them falls; hands reach out to catch the child and the mother; they must be carried, because a soldier has already pointed his rifle at them.
No one speaks, no one cries; their eyes are fixed on the ground. The only sound is the noise of the soldiers' hobnail boots.
Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks:
"Bread."
The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says:
"I'm hungry too."
A soldier who has seen all this gives the housekeeper a slap on the behind; he pinches her cheek, and she waves to him with her handkerchief until all we can see is a cloud of dust against the setting sun.
We go back into the house. From the kitchen we can see the priest kneeling in front of the big crucifix in his room.
The housekeeper says:
"Finish your bread and butter."
We say:
"We aren't hungry anymore."
We go into the room. The priest turns around:
"Do you want to pray with me, my children?"
"We never pray, as you know very well. We want to understand."
"You cannot understand. You are too young."
"You are not too young. That's why we are asking you. Who are those people? Where are they being taken? Why?"
The priest gets up and comes toward us. Closing his eyes, he says:
"The Ways of the Lord are unfathomable." He opens his eyes and places his hands on our heads: "It is unfortunate that you were forced to witness such a spectacle. You are trembling all over." "So are you, Father." "Yes, I am old, I tremble."
"As for us, we're cold. We came here stripped to the waist. We're going to put on the shirts your housekeeper has washed."
We go into the kitchen. The housekeeper hands us our parcel of clean clothes. We each take a shirt. The housekeeper says:
"You're too sensitive. The best thing you can do is to forget what you've seen."
"We never forget anything." She pushes us to the door:
"Off you go, and don't worry! None of that has anything to do with you. It'll never happen to you. Those people are only animals."
We run from the priest's house to the cobbler's house. His windowpanes are broken; his door is smashed in. Inside, everything has been ransacked. Filthy words are written on the walls.
An old woman is sitting on a bench in front of the house next door. We ask her:
"Has the cobbler gone away?"
"A long time ago, the poor man."
"He wasn't among those who went through town today?"
"No, the ones who went today came from somewhere else. In cattle trucks. Him, he was killed here, in his workshop, with his own tools. Don't worry. God sees everything. He will recognize His Own."
When we get home, we find Grandmother lying on her back in front of the garden gate, her legs apart, apples scattered all around her.
Grandmother doesn't move. Her forehead is bleeding.
We run to the kitchen, wet a cloth, and take the brandy down from the shelf. We put the wet cloth on Grandmother's forehead and pour brandy into her mouth. After a while she opens her eyes and says:
"More!"
We pour more brandy into her mouth.
She raises herself up on her elbows and starts shouting:
"Pick up the apples! What are you waiting for, sons of a bitch?"
We pick the apples up from the dusty road. We put them in her apron.
The cloth has fallen from Grandmother's forehead. Blood is trickling into her eyes. She wipes it away with a corner of her shawl.
We ask:
"Are you hurt, Grandmother?"
She sniggers:
"It'll take more than a blow from a rifle butt to kill me off."
"What happened, Grandmother?"
"Nothing. I was picking apples. I came to the gate to watch the procession. My apron slipped; the apples fell and rolled into the road. In the middle of the procession. That's no reason to hit someone."
"Who hit you, Grandmother?"
"Who do you think? You're not fools! They hit them too. They hit people in the crowd. But all the same there were some who were able to eat my apples!"
We help Grandmother get up. We take her into the house. She starts peeling the apples to make a compote, but she falls down, and we carry her to her bed. We take off her shoes. Her shawl slips off; a completely bald skull appears. We put her shawl back on. We stay by her bedside for a long time, holding her hands and watching her breathe.
We are having our breakfast with Grandmother. A man comes into the kitchen without knocking. He shows his police card.
Immediately, Grandmother starts shouting:
"I don't want the police in my house! I've done nothing!"
The policeman says:
"No, nothing, never. Just a few little poisonings here and there."
Grandmother says:
"Nothing was ever proved. You can't do anything to me."
The policeman says:
"Take it easy, Grandmother. We're not going to dig up the dead. We've got enough to do burying them."
"Then what do you want?"
The policeman looks at us and says:
"The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak."
Grandmother looks at us too:
"I should hope not. What have you been doing now, sons of a bitch?"
The policeman asks:
"Where were you yesterday evening?"
We answer:
"Here."
"You weren't hanging around the cafés as usual?"
"No. We stayed here because Grandmother had an accident."
Grandmother says very quickly:
"I fell going down to the cellar. The steps are all mossy, and I slipped. I banged my head. The kids brought me back up and looked after me. They stayed by my bedside all night."
The policeman says:
"You've got a bad bump there, I can see. You must be careful at your age. Very well. We're going to search the house. Come with me, all three of you. We'll start with the cellar."
Grandmother opens the cellar door, and we go down. The policeman moves everything, the sacks, the cans, the baskets, and the pile of potatoes.
Grandmother asks us in a whisper:
"What's he looking for?"
We shrug our shoulders.
After the cellar, the policeman searches the kitchen. Then Grandmother has to unlock her room. The policeman strips her bed. There is nothing in the bed or in the straw mattress, just a bit of cash under the pillow.
At the door of the officer's room, the policeman asks:
"What's in here?"
Grandmother says:
"It's a room I rent to a foreign officer. I don't have the key."
The policeman looks at the door to the attic:
"You don't have a ladder?"
Grandmother says:
"It's broken."
"How do you get up there?"
"I don't. Only the kids go up there."
The policeman says:
"Well, let's go, kids."
We climb up to the attic by the rope. The policeman opens the chest where we keep the things we need for our studies: Bible, dictionary, paper, pencils, and the Notebook in which everything is written. But the policeman hasn't come to read. He rummages through a pile of old clothes and blankets one more time, and we go down again. Back downstairs, the policeman looks around him and says:
"I obviously can't dig up the whole garden. Right. Come with me."
He takes us into the forest, to the edge of the big hole where we found the corpse. The corpse isn't there anymore. The policeman asks:
"Have you ever been here before?"
"No. Never. We would have been afraid to go so far."
"You've never seen this hole or a dead soldier?"
"No, never."
"When they found that dead soldier, his rifle, his cartridges, and his grenades were missing."
We say:
"He must have been very absentminded and careless, that soldier, to have lost all those things so indispensable to a soldier."
The policeman says:
"He didn't lose them. They were stolen from him after he died. You often come into the forest, don't you have any ideas on the matter?"
"No. No ideas at all."
"Yet someone certainly took that rifle, those cartridges, and those grenades."
We say:
"Who would dare to touch such dangerous things?"
We are in the policeman's office. He is sitting at a table, we are standing in front of him. He gets paper and pencil. He is smoking. He asks us questions:
"How long have you known the priest's housekeeper?"
"Since the spring."
"Where did you meet her?"
"At Grandmother's. She came for potatoes."
"You deliver wood to the priest's house. How much are you paid for that?"
"Nothing. We take wood to the priest's house to thank the housekeeper for doing our washing."
"Is she nice to you?"
"Very nice. She makes bread and butter for us, cuts our nails and hair, and lets us have baths there."
"Like a mother, in fact. And the parish priest, is he nice to you?"
"Very nice. He lends us books and teaches us a lot of things."
"When did you last take wood to the priest's house?"
"Five days ago. On Tuesday morning."
The policeman walks up and down the room. He closes the curtains and turns on his desk lamp. He draws up two chairs and tells us to sit down. He shines the lamp in our faces:
"You're very fond of the housekeeper?"
"Yes, very."
"Do you know what's happened to her?"
"Has something happened to her?"
"Yes. Something horrible. This morning, as usual, she was lighting the fire, and the kitchen stove blew up. It hit her full in the face. She's in the hospital."
The policeman stops talking; we say nothing. He says:
"You have nothing to say?"
We say:
"If something blows up in your face, you're bound to end up in the hospital, or even in the morgue. She's lucky she isn't dead."
"She's disfigured for life!"
We are silent. The policeman too. He looks at us. We look at him. He says:
"You don't look particularly sad about it."
"We're glad she's alive. After such an accident!"
"It wasn't an accident. Someone hid an explosive in the firewood. A cartridge from an army rifle. We've found the case."
We ask:
"Why would anyone do that?"
"To kill her. Her or the priest."
We say:
"People are cruel. They like to kill. It's the war that has taught them that. And there are explosives lying around everywhere."
The policeman starts to shout:
"Stop trying to be clever! You're the ones who deliver wood to the priest's house! You're the ones who hang around all day in the forest! You're the ones who strip the corpses! You're capable of anything! You have it in your blood! Your Grandmother has a murder on her conscience too. She poisoned her husband. With her it's poison, with you it's explosives! Admit it, you little bastards! Admit it! It was you!"
We say:
"We aren't the only ones who deliver wood to the priest's house."
He says:
"That's true. There's also the old man. I've already questioned him."
We say:
"Anyone can hide a cartridge in a pile of wood."
"Yes, but not anyone can have cartridges. I'm not interested in your housekeeper! What I want to know is where the cartridges are. And the grenades? And the rifle? The old man has admitted everything. I've questioned him so well that he's admitted everything. But he couldn't show me where the cartridges, the grenades, and the rifle are. He's not the guilty one. It's you! You know where the cartridges, the grenades, and the rifle are. You know, and you're going to tell me!"
We don't respond. The policeman hits us. With both hands. Right and left. We are bleeding from the nose and mouth.
"Admit it!"
We say nothing. He goes white, he hits us over and over again. We fall off our chairs. He kicks us in the ribs, in the kidneys, in the stomach.
"Admit it! Admit it! It was you! Admit it!"
We can no longer open our eyes. We can no longer hear. Our bodies are covered with sweat, blood, urine, and excrement. We lose consciousness.
We are lying on the hard dirt floor of a cell. Through a tiny barred window, a little light is coming in. But we don't know what time it is, or even if it is morning or afternoon.
We hurt all over. The slightest movement makes us fall back into semiconsciousness. Our vision is fuzzy, our ears are ringing, our heads are pounding. We are terribly thirsty. Our mouths are dry.
Hours go by this way. We don't speak. Later, the policeman comes in and asks us:
"Do you need anything?"
We say:
"Something to drink."
"Talk. Confess. And you'll have as much as you want to eat and drink."
We don't answer. He asks:
"Grandfather, do you want something to eat?"
Nobody answers. He goes out.
We realize we aren't alone in the cell. Carefully we raise our heads a little and see an old man lying huddled in a corner. Slowly we crawl over to him and touch him. He is stiff and cold. We crawl back to our place near the door.
It is already night when the policeman comes back with a flashlight. He shines it at the old man and says:
"Sleep well. Tomorrow morning you can go home."
He shines it at us too, straight in our faces, one after the other:
"Still nothing to say? It's all the same to me. I can wait. You'll either talk or die here."
Later that night the door opens again. The policeman, the orderly, and the foreign officer come in. The officer bends down and looks at us. He says to the orderly:
"Telephone the base for an ambulance!"
The orderly goes out. The officer examines the old man. He says:
"He's beaten him to death!"
He turns to the policeman:
"You'll pay dearly for this, you vermin! If you only knew how you'll pay for all this!"
The policeman asks us:
"What did he say?"
"He said that the old man is dead and that you'll pay dearly for it, you vermin!"
The officer strokes our foreheads:
"My poor little boys. How dare he hurt you, that filthy pig!"
The policeman says:
"What's he going to do to me? Tell him I've got children… I didn't know… Is he your father or something?"
We say:
"He's our uncle."
"You should have told me. How could I have known? Please forgive me. What can I do to…"
We say:
"Pray to God."
The orderly arrives with other soldiers. They put us on stretchers and carry us out to the ambulance. The officer sits beside us. The policeman, flanked by several soldiers, is taken off in a jeep driven by the orderly.
At the army base, a doctor examines us immediately in a big white room. He disinfects our wounds, gives us shots for pain and tetanus. He also takes X-rays. We haven't broken anything except a few teeth, but they're only baby teeth.
The orderly takes us back to Grandmother's. He puts us in the officer's big bed and lies down on a blanket beside the bed. In the morning, he goes to fetch Grandmother, who brings us warm milk in bed.
When the orderly has left, Grandmother asks us:
"Did you confess?"
"No, Grandmother. We had nothing to confess."
"That's what I thought. And what happened to the policeman?"
"We don't know. But he certainly won't come back anymore."
Grandmother sniggers:
"Deported or shot, eh? The pig! We'll celebrate that. I'll go heat up the chicken I cooked yesterday. I haven't eaten any of it either."
At midday, we get up and go to the kitchen to eat. During the meal, Grandmother says: "I wonder why you wanted to kill her. You had your reasons, I suppose."
Just after the evening meal, an old gentleman arrives with a girl who is bigger than us.
Grandmother asks him:
"What do you want?"
The old gentleman speaks a name, and Grandmother says to us:
"Go out. Go for a walk in the garden."
We go out. We circle the house and crouch down under the kitchen window. We listen. The old gentleman says:
"Have pity."
Grandmother replies:
"How can you ask me such a thing?"
The old gentleman says:
"You knew her parents. They entrusted her to me before they were deported. They gave me your address in case she was no longer safe with me."
Grandmother asks:
"You know what I'd be risking?" "Yes, I know, but it's a matter of life and death." "There's a foreign officer in the house." "Precisely. No one will look for her here. All you'll have to say is that she's your granddaughter, the cousin of those two boys."
"Everyone knows I have no other grandchildren but those two."
"You can say she's from your son-in-law's family." Grandmother sniggers: "I've never even seen my son-in-law!" After a long pause, the old gentleman goes on: "I'm only asking you to feed the little girl for a few months. Till the end of the war."
"The war may go on for years." "No, it won't last much longer now." Grandmother starts to snivel:
"I'm just a poor old woman killing herself with work. How can I feed so many mouths?" The old gentleman says:
"Here's all the money her parents had. And the family jewels. It's all yours if you'll save her." A little later, Grandmother calls us in: "This is your cousin." We say:
"Yes, Grandmother." The old gentleman says:
"You'll play together, the three of you, won't you?" We say:
"We never play." He asks:
"What do you do, then?"
"We work, we study, we do exercises."
He says:
"I understand. You're serious men. You don't have time to play. You'll look after your cousin, won't you?" "Yes, sir. We'll look after her." "Thank you." Our cousin says: "I'm bigger than you." We answer:
"But there are two of us." The old gentleman says:
"You're right. Two are much stronger than one. And you won't forget to call her 'cousin,' will you?" "No, sir. We never forget anything." "I'm depending on you."
Our cousin is five years older than us. Her eyes are black. Her hair is reddish because of something called henna.
Grandmother tells us that our cousin is the daughter of Father's sister. We say the same thing to those who ask questions about our cousin.
We know that Father has no sister. But we also know that without this lie, our cousin's life would be in danger. And we've promised the old gentleman to look after her.
When the old gentleman has gone, Grandmother says:
"Your cousin will sleep with you in the kitchen."
We say:
"There's no more room in the kitchen."
Grandmother says:
"Straighten it out yourselves."
Our cousin says:
"I'm quite willing to sleep on the floor under the table if you give me a blanket."
We say:
"You can sleep on the seat and keep the blankets. We'll sleep in the attic. It's not very cold now." She says:
"I'll come sleep in the attic with you."
"We don't want you. You must never set foot in the attic."
"Why?"
We say:
"You have a secret. We have one too. If you don't respect our secret, we won't respect yours." She asks:
"Would you be capable of denouncing me?" "If you go up to the attic, you die. Is that clear?" She looks at us for a moment in silence, then she says: "I see. You two little bastards are completely crazy. I'll never go up to your filthy attic, I promise."
She keeps her promise and never goes up to the attic. But everywhere else, she bothers us all the time. She says:
"Bring me some raspberries." We say:
"Go in the garden and get some yourself." She says:
"Stop reading out loud. You're splitting my ears." We go on reading. She asks:
"What are you doing there, lying on the floor for hours without moving?"
We continue our immobility exercise even when she throws rotten fruit at us. She says:
"Stop being so quiet, you're getting on my nerves!"
We continue our silence exercise without answering.
She asks:
"Why aren't you eating anything today?"
"It's our fasting day."
Our cousin doesn't work, doesn't study, doesn't do exercises. Often she stares at the sky, sometimes she cries.
Grandmother never hits our cousin. She never swears at her either. She doesn't ask her to work. She doesn't ask her to do anything. She never speaks to her.
The same evening our cousin arrives, we go and sleep in the attic. We take two blankets from the officer's room and lay hay on the floor. Before going to bed, we look through the holes. In the officer's room there is nobody. In Grandmother's room there is a light on, which doesn't happen very often.
Grandmother has taken the oil lamp from the kitchen and hung it over her dressing table. It's an old piece of furniture with three mirrors. The one in the middle is stationary, the other two move. You can adjust them to see yourself in profile.
Grandmother is sitting in front of the dressing table, looking at herself in the mirror. On her head, over her black shawl, she has placed something shiny. Around her neck hang several necklaces, her arms are covered with bracelets, her fingers with rings. She is talking to herself as she contemplates her reflection:
"Rich, rich. It's easy to be beautiful with all this. Easy. The wheel turns. They're mine now, the jewels. Mine. It's only fair. How they shine, how they shine!"
Later, she says:
"And what if they return? What if they want them back? Once the danger is over, they forget. They don't know what gratitude is. They promise the moon and the stars, and then… No, no, they're already dead. The old gentleman will die too. He said I could keep everything.… But the girl… She saw everything, heard everything. She'll want them back, that's for sure. After the war, she'll claim them. But I don't want to give them back, I can't. They're mine. Forever.
"She'll have to die too. Then there'll be no proof. No one'll be any the wiser. Yes, the girl will die. She'll have an accident. Just before the end of the war. Yes, it will have to be an accident. Not poison. Not this time. An accident. A drowning in the stream. Hold her head under the water. Difficult. Push her down the cellar steps. Not high enough. Poison. There's only poison. Something slow. Small doses. An illness that eats away at her slowly, for months. There's no doctor. A lot of people die like that in wartime for lack of care."
Grandmother raises her fist and threatens her image in the mirror:
"You won't be able to do a thing to me! Not a thing!"
She sniggers. She takes off the jewelry, puts it in a canvas bag, and stuffs the bag in her straw mattress. She goes to bed, we do too.
Next morning, when our cousin has left the kitchen, we say to Grandmother:
"Grandmother, we have something to tell you."
"What now?"
"Pay close attention, Grandmother. We promised the old gentleman to look after our cousin. So nothing will happen to her. No accidents, no illnesses. Nothing. Or to us either."
We show her a sealed envelope:
"Everything is written here. We are going to give this letter to the priest. If anything happens to any of the three of us, the priest will open the letter. Do you understand, Grandmother?"
Grandmother looks at us, her eyes almost shut. She is breathing very heavily. She says very quietly:
"Sons of a bitch, a whore, and the devil! Cursed be the day you were born."
In the afternoon, when Grandmother goes off to work in her vineyard, we search her mattress. There is nothing in it.
Our cousin is becoming serious. She doesn't bother us anymore. Every day she washes in the big tub we bought with the money we earned in the cafés. She washes her dress a lot, and her underpants too. While her clothes are drying, she wraps herself in a towel or lies in the sun with her underpants drying on top of her. She is very brown. Her hair covers her to her buttocks. Sometimes she turns over on her back and hides her breasts with her hair.
Toward evening, she goes off to town. She stays longer and longer in town. One evening, we follow her without her knowing.
Near the cemetery, she joins a group of boys and girls, all much older than us. They are sitting under the trees smoking. They've also got bottles of wine. They drink straight from the bottle. One of them keeps watch by the side of the path. If someone comes, the lookout sits quietly and whistles a well- known tune. The group disperses and hides in the bushes or behind the tombstones. When the danger is over, the lookout whistles a different tune.
The group talks in whispers about the war, and about desertions, deportations, resistance, and liberation.
According to them, the foreign soldiers who are in our country and who claim to be our allies are in fact our enemies, and those who will be here soon and win the war are not enemies but on the contrary our liberators.
They say:
"My father has gone over to the other side. He'll come back with them."
"My father deserted when war was declared."
"My parents joined the partisans. I was too young to go with them."
"Mine were taken away by those bastards. Deported."
"You'll never see them again, you know. Me either. They're all dead now."
"You can't be sure. There'll be survivors."
"And we'll avenge the dead."
"We were too young. Too bad. We couldn't do anything."
"It'll be over soon. They will be here any day now."
"We'll be waiting for them in the Town Square with flowers."
Late at night, the group breaks up. Everybody goes home.
Our cousin leaves with a boy. We follow her. They go into the little lanes around the castle and disappear behind a ruined wall. We can't see them, but we can hear them.
Our cousin says:
"Lie down on me. Yes, like that. Kiss me. Kiss me."
The boy says:
"You're really beautiful! I want you."
"Me too. But I'm afraid. What if I get pregnant?"
"I'll marry you. I love you. We'll get married after the Liberation."
"We're too young. We must wait."
"I can't wait."
"Stop! You're hurting me. You mustn't, darling, you mustn't."
The boy says:
"Yes, you're right. But touch me. Give me your hand. Touch me there, like that. Turn around. I want to kiss you there, there, while you touch me."
Our cousin says:
"No, don't do that. I'm ashamed. Oh! Go on, go on! I love you, I love you so much."
We go home.
We have to go back to the priest's house to return the books we've borrowed.
The door is opened by an old woman again. She lets us in and says:
"Father is expecting you."
The priest says:
"Sit down."
We put the books on his desk. We sit down.
The priest looks at us for a moment, then says:
"I've been waiting for you. You haven't come for a long time."
We say:
"We wanted to finish the books. And we've been very busy."
"And what about your bath?"
"We have all we need to wash ourselves now. We bought a tub, soap, scissors, and toothbrushes."
"With what? Where did you get the money?"
"With the money we earn playing music in the cafés."
"The cafés are places of perdition. Especially at your age."
We don't answer. He says:
"You haven't been for the blind woman's money either. It amounts to a considerable sum now. Take it."
He hands us the money. We say:
"Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work. We have helped her dig her garden and plant potatoes, beans, squash, and tomatoes. We have given her chicks and rabbits to raise. She looks after her garden and her animals. She doesn't beg anymore. She doesn't need your money anymore."
The priest says:
"Then take this money for yourselves. That way you will not have to work in the cafés."
"We like working in the cafés."
He says:
"I heard you were beaten and tortured."
We ask:
"What happened to your housekeeper?"
"She went to the front to care for the wounded. She died."
We say nothing. He asks:
"Would you like to confide in me? I am sworn to keep the secrets of the confessional. You have nothing to fear. You can confess."
We say:
"We have nothing to confess."
"You are wrong. Such a crime is very hard to bear. Confession will relieve you. God forgives all those who are sincerely sorry for their sins."
We say:
"We are sorry for nothing. We have nothing to be sorry for."
After a long silence, he says:
"I saw it all through the window. The piece of bread… But vengeance belongs to God. You have no right to do His work for Him."
We say nothing. He asks:
"Can I bless you?"
"If you want to."
He places his hands on our heads:
"Almighty God, bless these Thy children. Whatever their crime, forgive them. Poor lambs who have lost their way in an abominable world, themselves victims of our perverted times, they know not what they do. I beg Thee to save their child's souls, to purify them in Thy infinite goodness and mercy. Amen."
Then he says to us again:
"Come back and see me from time to time, even if you don't need anything."
From one day to the next, posters appear on the walls of the town. One poster shows an old man lying on the ground, his body pierced by the bayonet of an enemy soldier. A second shows an enemy soldier striking a child with another child, whom he is holding by the feet. Yet another shows an enemy soldier pulling at a woman's arm and tearing her blouse off with his other hand. The woman's mouth is open, and tears are streaming from her eyes.
The people who look at the posters are terrified.
Grandmother laughs and says:
"It's all lies. You mustn't be afraid."
People are saying that the Big Town has fallen.
Grandmother says:
"If they've crossed the Big River, nothing will stop them. They'll be here soon."
Our cousin says:
"Then I'll be able to go home."
One day, people say that the army has surrendered, that there is an armistice and the war is over. Next day, people say that there is a new government and the war is going on.
A lot of foreign soldiers arrive by train or truck. Soldiers from our country too. There are many wounded. When people ask the soldiers from our country questions, they reply that they don't know anything. They pass through town. They are going to the other country along the road that runs by the camp.
People say:
"They're running away. The country has collapsed."
Others say:
"They're withdrawing and regrouping behind the frontier. They'll stop them here. They'll never let the enemy cross the frontier."
Grandmother says:
"We'll see."
Many people pass by Grandmother's house. They too are going to the other country. They say they are leaving our country forever, because the enemy army is coming and will take its revenge. It will reduce our people to slavery.
There are people fleeing on foot with sacks on their backs, others pushing bicycles laden with various objects: a down quilt, a violin, a piglet in a cage, saucepans. Others are perched on horse-drawn carts: they are taking all their furniture with them.
Most of them are from our town, but some have come from further away.
One morning, the orderly and the foreign officer come to say goodbye.
The orderly says:
"It's all over. But it's better to be beaten than dead." He laughs. The officer puts a record on the gramophone. We listen to it in silence, sitting on the big bed. The officer holds us tightly in his arms and cries. "I'll never see you again." We say:
"You'll have children of your own." "I don't want any."
Then he says, pointing to the records and the gramophone: "Keep these to remember me by. But not the dictionary. You'll have to learn another language."
One night, we hear explosions, rifle volleys, and machine- gun fire. We go outside to see what is happening. A big fire is raging on the site of the camp. We think the enemy has arrived, but next day the town is silent; all we can hear is the distant rumble of cannons.
At the end of the road leading to the base, there is no sentry anymore. A thick cloud of smoke with a sickening smell rises up into the sky. We decide to go see.
We enter the camp. It is empty. There isn't a soul in sight. Some of the buildings are still burning. The stench is unbearable, but we hold our noses and keep going. A barbed-wire fence stops us. We climb a watchtower. We see four tall black pyres rising on a big square. We spot an opening, a gap in the fence. We come down from the watchtower and find the entry. It's a big iron gate, left open. Above it is written in the foreign language: "Transit Camp." We go in.
The black pyres we saw from above are burned bodies.
Some of them are thoroughly burned, only the bones remain. Others are barely blackened. There are many of these. Big and small. Adults and children. We think that they killed them first, then piled them up, poured gasoline over them, and set them on fire.
We vomit. We run out of the camp. We go home. Grandmother calls us in to eat, but we vomit again.
Grandmother says:
"You've been eating junk again."
We say:
"Yes, green apples."
Our cousin says:
"The camp has burned down. We ought to go see it. There can't be anybody left there."
"We've already been. There's nothing of interest."
Grandmother sniggers:
"The heroes didn't forget something? They took everything with them? They didn't leave anything useful at all? Did you take a good look?"
"Yes, Grandmother. We took a good look. There's nothing there."
Our cousin leaves the kitchen. We follow her. We ask her:
"Where are you going?"
"To town."
"Already? You usually don't go till evening."
She smiles:
"Yes, but I'm expecting someone. If you don't mind!"
Our cousin smiles at us again, then runs off toward town.
We are in the garden. An army jeep stops in front of the house. Our Mother gets out, followed by a foreign officer. They rush across the garden. Mother is holding a baby in her arms. She sees us and calls:
"Come along! Get into the jeep quickly. We're going. Hurry up. Leave everything and come!"
We ask:
"Whose baby is that?"
She says:
"It's your little sister. Come on! There's no time to waste."
We ask:
"Where are we going?"
"To the other country. Stop asking questions and come along."
We say:
"We don't want to go there. We want to stay here."
Mother says:
"I have to go there. And you're coming with me."
"No. We're staying here."
Grandmother comes out of the house. She says to Mother:
"What are you doing? What have you got there in your arms?"
Mother says:
"I've come for my sons. I'll send you money, Mother."
Grandmother says:
"I don't want your money. And I won't give the boys back."
Mother asks the officer to take us by force. We quickly climb up to the attic by the rope. The officer tries to catch us, but we kick him in the face. The officer swears. We pull the rope up.
Grandmother sniggers:
"You see, they don't want to go with you."
Mother shouts at us:
"I order you to come down immediately!"
Grandmother says:
"They never obey orders."
Mother starts to cry:
"Come, my darlings. I can't leave without you."
Grandmother says:
"Your foreign bastard isn't enough?"
We say:
"We're fine here, Mother. Go, and don't worry. We're really fine at Grandmother's."
We hear cannons and machine-gun fire. The officer takes Mother by the shoulders and leads her toward the car. But Mother pulls free:
"They're my sons, I want them! I love them!"
Grandmother says:
"I need them. I'm old. You can still have others-as we can see!"
Mother says:
"I beg you, don't keep them."
Grandmother says:
"I'm not keeping them. Hey, you boys, come down at once and go with your mother."
We say:
"We don't want to go. We want to stay with you, Grandmother."
The officer takes Mother in his arms, but she pushes him away. The officer goes and sits in the jeep and starts the engine. At precisely that moment, there is an explosion in the garden. Immediately afterward, we see Mother on the ground. The officer runs toward her. Grandmother tries to hold us back. She says:
"Don't look! Go back in the house!"
The officer swears, runs to his jeep, and drives off at top speed.
We look at Mother. Her guts are coming out of her belly. She is red all over. So is the baby. Mother's head is hanging in the hole made by the shell. Her eyes are open and still wet with tears.
Grandmother says:
"Go get the spade!"
We put a blanket at the bottom of the hole, we lay Mother on it. The baby is still pressed to her breast. We cover them with another blanket, then fill in the hole.
When our cousin comes back from town, she asks: "Did something happen?" We say:
"Yes, a shell made a hole in the garden."
All night we hear gunfire and explosions. At dawn, everything is suddenly quiet. We are sleeping in the officer's big bed. His bed has become our bed, and his room our room.
In the morning we go to the kitchen for breakfast. Grandmother is standing in front of the stove. Our cousin is folding her blankets.
She says:
"I really slept badly."
We say:
"You'll sleep in the garden. There's no more noise, and it's warm."
She asks:
"Weren't you afraid last night?"
We shrug our shoulders and say nothing.
There's a knock at the door. A man in civilian clothes enters, followed by two soldiers. The soldiers have machine guns and are wearing a uniform we have never seen before.
Grandmother says something in the language she speaks when she's drinking her brandy. The soldiers answer. Grandmother flings her arms around their necks and kisses them one after the other as she goes on talking to them.
The civilian says:
"You speak their language, madam?"
Grandmother replies:
"It's my mother tongue, sir."
Our cousin asks:
"Are they here? When did they arrive? We wanted to welcome them in the Town Square with bouquets of flowers."
The civilian asks:
"Who's 'we'?"
"My friends and I."
The civilian smiles:
"Well, it's too late. They arrived last night. And I came just after them. I'm looking for a girl."
He speaks a name; our cousin says:
"Yes, that's me. Where are my parents?"
The civilian says:
"I don't know. My job is just to find the children on my list. First we'll go to a reception center in the Big Town. Then we'll try to find your parents."
Our cousin says:
"I have a friend here. Is he on your list too?"
She says the name of her lover. The civilian consults his list:
"Yes. He's already at army headquarters. You'll travel together. Get your things ready."
Our cousin joyfully packs her dresses and gathers all her toiletries together in her bath towel.
The civilian turns to us: "And what about you? What are your names?"
Grandmother says:
"They're my grandsons. They'll stay with me."
We say:
"Yes, we'll stay with Grandmother."
The civilian says:
"I'd like to have your names all the same."
We tell him. He looks at his papers.
"You're not on my list. You can keep them, madam."
Grandmother says:
"What do you mean I can keep them? Of course I can keep them!"
Our cousin says:
"I'm ready. Let's go."
The civilian says:
"You're certainly in a hurry. You might at least thank this lady and say goodbye to these little boys."
Our cousin says:
"Little boys? Little bastards, you mean."
She gives us a big hug.
"I won't kiss you, I know you don't like that. Don't screw around too much. Take care."
She gives us an even bigger hug and starts crying. The civilian takes her by the arm and says to Grandmother:
"I thank you, madam, for everything you have done for this child."
We all go out together. In front of the garden gate is a jeep. The two soldiers sit in front, the civilian and our cousin in back. Grandmother shouts something. The soldiers laugh. The jeep moves off. Our cousin doesn't look back.
After our cousin has left, we go into town to see what's happening.
There is a tank at every street corner. On the Town Square, there are trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, sidecars, and everywhere lots of soldiers. In the Market Square, which is not paved, they are pitching tents and setting up open-air kitchens.
When we go by, they smile at us, they talk to us, but we can't understand what they're saying.
Apart from the soldiers, there is nobody in the streets. The doors of the houses are closed, the shutters drawn, the shop blinds lowered.
We go home and say to Grandmother:
"Everything is quiet in town."
She sniggers:
"They're resting for the moment, but this afternoon, you'll see!"
"What's going to happen, Grandmother?"
"They'll carry out searches. They'll go into everybody's house and ransack it. And they'll take whatever they like. I've lived through one war already, I know what happens. But we don't have anything to be afraid of: there's nothing to take here, and I know how to talk to them."
"But what are they looking for, Grandmother?"
"Spies, weapons, ammunition, watches, gold, women."
Sure enough, in the afternoon, the soldiers begin systematically searching the houses. If there is no answer, they fire a shot in the air, then batter down the door.
A lot of houses are empty. The residents have left for good or are hiding in the forest. These uninhabited houses are searched just like the others, along with all the stores and shops.
After the soldiers have gone, thieves invade the abandoned shops and houses. The thieves are mainly children and old men, and a few women too, those who are fearless or those who are poor.
We meet Harelip. Her arms are full of clothes and shoes. She says to us:
"Hurry up while there's still something left. This is the third time I've done my shopping."
We go into the Booksellers and Stationers, whose door is smashed in. There are only a few children inside, younger than us. They are taking pencils and colored chalk, erasers, pencil sharpeners, and schoolbags.
We take our time choosing what we need: a complete encyclopedia in several volumes, pencils, and paper.
In the street, an old man and an old woman are fighting over a smoked ham. They are surrounded by people laughing and urging them on. The woman scratches the old man's face, and in the end she goes off with the ham.
The thieves are guzzling stolen alcohol, picking fights with each another, smashing the windows of the houses and shops they've looted, breaking crockery, flinging to the floor whatever they don't need or can't carry off with them.
The soldiers are also drinking and returning to the houses, but this time to find women.
Everywhere we hear gunshots and the cries of women being raped.
On the Town Square, a soldier plays the accordion. Other soldiers dance and sing.
For several days now, we haven't seen our neighbor in her garden. Nor have we met Harelip. We go and investigate.
The door of the shack is open. We enter. The windows are small. It is dark in the room, even though the sun is shining outside.
When our eyes get used to the darkness, we can make out our neighbor lying on the kitchen table. Her legs are dangling, her arms are covering her face. She doesn't move.
Harelip is lying on the bed. She is naked. Between her spread legs there is a dried pool of blood and sperm. Her eyelashes are stuck together forever, her lips are curled up over her black teeth in an eternal smile; Harelip is dead.
Our neighbor says:
"Go away."
We approach her and ask:
"You aren't deaf?"
"No. And I'm not blind either. Go away."
We say:
"We want to help you."
She says:
"I don't need help. I don't need anything. Go away."
We ask:
"What happened here?"
"You can see for yourself. She's dead, isn't she?"
"Yes. It was the new foreigners?"
"Yes. She called them. She went out on the road and waved at them to come in. There were twelve or fifteen of them. And as they took her, she kept shouting: 'Oh, I'm so happy, I'm so happy! Come, all of you, come on, another one, again, another one!' She died happy, fucked to death. But I'm not dead! I've been lying here without eating or drinking for I don't know how long. And death hasn't come. It never does come when you call it. It enjoys torturing us. I've been calling it for years and it pays no attention."
We ask:
"Do you really want to die?"
"What else could I want? If you'd like to do something for me, set fire to the house. I don't want anyone to find us like this."
We say:
"But you'll suffer terribly."
"Don't worry about that. Just set the fire, if you're capable of it."
"Yes, madam, we are capable of it. You can depend on us."
We slit her throat with a stroke of the razor, then we go and siphon some gasoline from an army vehicle. We pour the gasoline over both bodies and on the walls of the shack. We set fire to it and go home.
In the morning, Grandmother says: "The neighbor's house burned down. They were both inside, her daughter and her. The girl must have left something on the fire, ninny that she is."
We go back to get the hens and the rabbits, but other neighbors have already taken them during the night.
For weeks now, we have seen them marching past Grandmother's house, the victorious army of the new foreigners, which we now call the army of the Liberators.
Tanks, cannons, armored cars, and trucks cross the frontier day and night. The front is moving further and further into the neighboring country.
In the opposite direction comes another procession: the prisoners of war, the conquered. Among them are many men from our own country. They are still wearing their uniforms, but they have been stripped of weapons and rank. They march, heads down, to the station, where they are sent off in trains. Where and for how long, nobody knows.
Grandmother says they are being taken very far away, to a cold, uninhabited country where they will be forced to work so hard that none of them will come back. They will all die of cold, exhaustion, hunger, and all kinds of diseases.
A month after our country has been liberated, the war is over everywhere, and the Liberators move into our country, for good, people say. So we ask Grandmother to teach us their language. She says:
"How can I teach it to you? I'm not a teacher."
We say:
"It's simple, Grandmother. All you have to do is talk to us in that language all day, and in the end we'll understand."
Soon we know enough to act as interpreters between the local inhabitants and the Liberators. We take advantage of the fact to trade in articles that the army has plenty of, like cigarettes, tobacco, and chocolate, which we exchange for what the civilians have: wine, brandy, and fruit.
Money has no value anymore; everyone barters.
Girls sleep with soldiers in exchange for silk stockings, jewelry, perfume, watches, and other articles that the soldiers have stolen in the towns along their way.
Grandmother doesn't go to market with her wheelbarrow anymore. Instead well-dressed ladies come to Grandmother's and beg her to trade a chicken or a sausage for a ring or a pair of earrings.
Ration coupons are distributed. People start lining up in front of the butcher's and baker's as early as four in the morning. The other shops stay closed because they have nothing to sell.
Everybody is short of everything.
As for Grandmother and us, we have everything we need.
Later, we have our own army and government again, but our army and our government are controlled by our Liberators. Their flag flies over all the public buildings. Their leader's picture is displayed everywhere. They teach us their songs and their dances, they show us their films in our cinemas. In the schools, the language of our Liberators is compulsory, other foreign languages are forbidden.
It is strictly forbidden to criticize or make jokes about our Liberators or our new government. On the strength of a mere denunciation, anyone at all can be thrown into prison without trial, without sentence. Men and women disappear without anyone knowing why, and their families will never hear from them again.
The frontier has been rebuilt. It is now impassable.
Our country is surrounded by barbed wire; we are completely cut off from the rest of the world.
In the autumn, all the children go back to school, except us.
We say to Grandmother:
"Grandmother, we never want to go to school again." She says:
"I should hope not. I need you here. And what more could you learn at school anyway?"
"Nothing, Grandmother, absolutely nothing." Soon we receive a letter. Grandmother asks: "What does it say?"
"It says that you are responsible for us and that we must report to the school." Grandmother says:
"Burn the letter. I can't read, and you can't either. No one ever read that letter."
We burn the letter. Soon we get a second. It says that if we don't go to school, Grandmother will be punished by law. We burn that letter too. We say to Grandmother:
"Grandmother, don't forget that one of us is blind and the other deaf."
A few days later, a man turns up at our house. He says:
"I am the inspector of primary schools. You have in your house two children of compulsory school age. You have already received two warnings about this matter."
Grandmother says:
"You mean letters? I can't read. The children can't either."
One of us asks:
"Who is it? What's he saying?"
"He's asking if we can read. What's he like?"
"He's tall and looks mean."
We both shout:
"Go away! Don't hurt us! Don't kill us! Help!"
We hide under the table. The inspector asks Grandmother:
"What's the matter with them? What are they doing?"
Grandmother says:
"Oh! The poor things are afraid of everybody! They've lived through such terrible things in the Big Town. What's more, one of them is deaf and the other blind. The deaf one has to explain to the blind one what he sees, and the blind one has to explain to the deaf one what he hears. Otherwise, they don't understand anything."
Under the table, we yell:
"Help, help! It's blowing up! It's making too much noise! It's blinding my eyes!"
Grandmother explains:
"When someone frightens them, they hear things and see things that aren't there."
The inspector says:
"They have hallucinations. They should be treated in a hospital."
We yell even louder.
Grandmother says:
"Nothing could be worse! It was in a hospital that the misfortune happened. They were visiting their mother, who worked there. When the bombs fell on the hospital, they were there, they saw the wounded and the dead; they themselves were in a coma for several days."
The inspector says:
"Poor kids. Where are their parents?"
"Dead or missing. Who knows?"
"They must be a very heavy burden for you."
"What can you do? I'm all they have in the world."
Before leaving, the inspector shakes Grandmother's hand:
"You're a very brave woman."
We receive a third letter that says we are exempted from attending school because of our infirmity and our psychic trauma.
An officer comes to Grandmother's to ask her to sell her vineyard. The army wants to put up a building on her land for the frontier guards. Grandmother asks:
"And what will you pay me with? Money is worth nothmg.
The officer says:
"In exchange for your land, we'll install running water and electricity in your house." Grandmother says:
"I don't need your electricity or your running water. I've always lived without." The officer says:
"We could also take your vineyard without giving you anything in exchange. And that's what we're going to do if you don't accept our offer. The army needs your land. It is your patriotic duty to give it to us."
Grandmother opens her mouth to speak, but we intervene:
"Grandmother, you are old and tired. The vineyard gives you a lot of work and hardly brings anything in. On the other hand, the value of your house will increase a great deal with water and electricity."
The officer says:
"Your grandsons are more intelligent than you, Grandmother."
Grandmother says:
"You can say that again! So talk it over with them. Let them decide."
The officer says:
"But I need your signature."
"I'll sign whatever you like. Anyway, I can't write."
Grandmother starts to cry, gets up, and says to us:
"I'll leave it to you."
She goes off to her vineyard.
The officer says:
"Ah, she's very fond of her vineyard, the poor old woman. Well, is it a deal?"
We say:
"As you yourself have observed, that land has great sentimental value to her, and the army would certainly not want to usurp the hard-earned property of a poor old woman who, moreover, is a native of the country of our heroic Liberators."
The officer says:
"Ah, yes? She's a native…"
"Yes. She speaks their language perfectly. And we do too. And if you have any intention of committing an abuse…"
The officer says very quickly:
"No, no! What do you want?"
"In addition to the water and electricity, we want a bathroom."
"You don't say! And just where do you want this bathroom?"
We take him into our room and show him where we want our bathroom.
"Here, giving onto our room. Seven to eight square meters. Built-in bathtub, washbasin, shower, water heater, toilet."
He looks at us for a long time, then says:
"It can be done."
We say:
"We would also like a wireless set. We don't have one, and it's impossible to buy one."
He asks:
"And is that all?"
"Yes, that is all."
He bursts out laughing:
"You'll have your bathroom and your wireless. But I'd have been better off talking to your grandmother."
One morning, Grandmother doesn't come out of her room. We knock on her door, we call her, but she doesn't answer.
We go to the back of the house and break a pane of glass in her window so we can get into her room.
Grandmother is lying on her bed. She isn't moving. But she is breathing, and her heart is beating. One of us stays with her, the other fetches a doctor.
The doctor examines Grandmother. He says:
"Your Grandmother has had an attack of apoplexy, a cerebral hemorrhage."
"Is she going to die?"
"You can't tell. She's old, but her heart is sound. Give her these medicines three times a day. And she'll need someone to look after her."
We say:
"We'll look after her. What has to be done?"
"Feed her, wash her. She'll probably be permanently paralyzed."
The doctor leaves. We make a purée of vegetables and feed Grandmother with a small spoon. By evening, it smells very bad in her room. We lift her blankets: her straw mattress is full of excrement.
We get some straw from a peasant and buy babies' rubber pants and diapers.
We undress Grandmother, wash her in our bathtub, and make her a clean bed. She is so thin that the babies' pants fit her very well. We change her diapers several times a day.
A week later, Grandmother begins to move her hands. One morning, she greets us with a volley of insults:
"Sons of a bitch! Go roast a chicken! How do you expect me to get my strength back with your plant life and your purées? I want some goat's milk too! I hope you haven't neglected anything while I've been ill!"
"No, Grandmother, we haven't neglected anything."
"Help me get up, you good-for-nothings!"
"Grandmother, you must stay in bed, the doctor said so."
"The doctor, the doctor! That imbecile! Permanently paralyzed, indeed! I'll show him how paralyzed I am!"
We help her get up, accompany her to the kitchen, and sit her down on the seat. When the chicken is cooked, she eats it all herself. After the meal, she says:
"What are you waiting for? Make me a good stout stick, hurry up, you lazybones, I want to go see if everything is in order."
We run off to the forest, we find a suitable branch, and while she watches, we cut the stick to Grandmother's size. She promptly grabs it and threatens us:
"You'll be sorry if everything isn't in order!" She goes out into the garden. We follow her at a distance. She goes into the privy, and we hear her muttering: "Diapers! What an idea! They're completely mad!" When she goes back to the house, we take a look in the privy. She has thrown the rubber pants and diapers down the hole.
One evening, Grandmother says:
"Shut all the doors and windows tight. I want to talk to you, and I don't want anyone to hear us."
"Nobody ever comes this way, Grandmother."
"You know the frontier guards are always prowling around. And they're quite capable of listening at people's doors. And bring me a sheet of paper and a pencil."
We ask:
"You want to write something, Grandmother?"
She shouts:
"Do as you're told! Don't ask questions!"
We shut the windows and doors, we bring the paper and pencil. Sitting at the other end of the table, Grandmother draws something on the sheet of paper. She says in a whisper:
"This is where my treasure is hidden."
She hands us the sheet of paper. On it she has drawn a rectangle, a cross, and under the cross, a circle. Grandmother asks:
"Do you understand?"
"Yes, Grandmother, we understand. But we knew already."
"What! What did you know already?"
We reply in a whisper:
"That your treasure is hidden under the cross on Grandfather's grave."
Grandmother is silent for a moment, then she says:
"I might have suspected as much. Have you known for a long time?"
"For a very long time, Grandmother. Ever since we saw you tending Grandfather's grave."
Grandmother breathes very heavily:
"There's no point in getting excited. Anyway, it's all yours. You're clever enough now to know what to do with it."
We say:
"For the moment, there's not much we can do with it."
Grandmother says:
"No. You're right. You must wait. Will you be able to wait?"
"Yes, Grandmother."
All three of us are silent for a moment, then Grandmother says:
"That isn't all. The next time I have an attack, I don't want any part of your bath, your rubber pants, or your diapers."
She gets up and rummages around on the shelf among her bottles. She comes back with a small blue flask:
"Instead of all your filthy medicines, you'll pour the contents of this flask into my first cup of milk."
We say nothing. She shouts:
"Do you understand, sons of a bitch?"
We say nothing. She says:
"Maybe you're afraid of the autopsy, you little brats? There won't be any autopsy. Nobody's going to make a fuss when an old woman dies after a second attack."
. We say:
"We aren't afraid of the autopsy, Grandmother. We just think that you may recover a second time."
"No. I won't recover. I know it. So we must put an end to it as soon as possible."
We say nothing, Grandmother starts to cry:
"You don't know what it's like to be paralyzed. To see everything, hear everything, and not be able to move. If you aren't even capable of doing this simple little thing for me, then you're ingrates, vipers I have nursed in my bosom."
We say:
"Don't cry, Grandmother. We'll do it; if you really want us to, we'll do it."
When our Father arrives, the three of us are working in the kitchen because it's raining outside.
Father stops in front of the door, arms folded, legs apart. He asks:
"Where's my wife?" Grandmother sniggers:
"Well, well! So she really did have a husband." Father says:
"Yes, I'm your daughter's husband. And these are my sons."
He looks at us and adds:
"You really have grown up. But you haven't changed." Grandmother says:
"My daughter, your wife, entrusted the children to me." Father says:
"She'd have done better to entrust them to someone else. Where is she? I've been told she went abroad. Is that true?"
Grandmother says:
"That's old news, all that. Where have you been all this time?"
Father says:
"I've been a prisoner of war. And now I want to find my wife again. Don't try to hide anything from me, you old witch."
Grandmother says:
"I really appreciate your way of thanking me for what I've done for your children."
Father shouts:
"I don't give a damn! Where's my wife?"
Grandmother says:
"You don't give a damn? About your children and me? All right, I'll show you where your wife is!"
Grandmother goes out into the garden, and we follow her. With her stick, she points to the flower bed that we have planted over Mother's grave:
"There! That's where your wife is. In the ground."
Father asks:
"Dead? From what? When?"
Grandmother says:
"Dead. From a shell. A few days before the end of the war."
Father says:
"It's forbidden to bury people just anywhere."
Grandmother says:
"We buried her where she died. And that isn't just anywhere. It's my garden. It was also her garden when she was a little girl."
Father looks at the wet flowers and says:
"I want to see her."
Grandmother says:
"You shouldn't. The dead must not be disturbed."
Father says:
"In any case, she'll have to be buried in a cemetery. It's the law. Get me a spade."
Grandmother shrugs her shoulders:
"Get him a spade."
In the rain, we watch Father demolish our little flower garden, we watch him dig. He gets to the blankets, he pulls them away. A big skeleton is lying there, with a tiny skeleton pressed to its breast.
Father asks:
"What's that, that thing on her?"
We say:
"It's a baby. Our little sister."
Grandmother says:
"I did tell you to leave the dead in peace. Come and wash your hands in the kitchen."
Father doesn't answer. He stares at the skeletons. His face is wet with sweat, tears, and rain. He climbs laboriously out of the hole and walks off without turning around, his hands and clothes all muddy.
We ask Grandmother:
"What shall we do?"
She says:
"Fill the hole in again. What else can we do?"
We say:
"You go back into the warm, Grandmother. We'll take care of all this."
She goes in.
We carry the skeletons up to the attic in a blanket and spread the bones out on straw to dry. Then we go down and fill in the hole where nobody is lying anymore.
Later, we spend months smoothing and polishing the skull and bones of our Mother and the baby, then we carefully reassemble the skeletons by attaching each bone to thin pieces of wire. When our work is done, we hang Mother's skeleton from one of the attic beams with the baby's skeleton clinging to her neck.
We don't see our Father again until several years later.
In the meantime, Grandmother has had a new attack, and we have helped her die as she asked us to do. She is now buried in the same grave as Grandfather. Before they opened the grave, we recovered the treasure and hid it under the bench in front of our window, where the rifle, the cartridges, and the grenades still are.
Father arrives one evening and asks:
"Where's your Grandmother?"
"She's dead."
"You live alone? How do you manage?"
"Very well, Father."
He says:
"I've come here in hiding. You must help me."
We say: "We haven't heard from you in years."
He shows us his hands. He no longer has any fingernails. They have been torn out at the roots:
"I've just come out of prison. They tortured me."
"Why?"
"I don't know. For no particular reason. I'm a politically suspect person. I'm not allowed to practice my profession. I'm under constant surveillance. My apartment is searched regularly. It's impossible for me to live much longer in this country."
We say:
"You want to cross the frontier."
He says:
"Yes. You live here, you must know..
"Yes, we know. The frontier is impassable."
Father lowers his head, looks at his hands for a moment, then says:
"There must be a weak spot somewhere. There must be a way of getting through."
"At the risk of your life, yes."
"I'd rather die than stay here."
"You must make up your own mind when you know all the facts, Father."
He says:
"I'm listening."
We explain:
"The first problem is to get as far as the first barbed wire without meeting a patrol or being seen from one of the watch- towers. It can be done. We know the times of the patrols and the positions of the watchtowers. The fence is one and a half meters high and a meter wide. You need two boards. One to climb onto the fence, the other to put on top so that you can stand up on it. If you lose your balance, you fall into the wire and you can't get out."
Father says:
"I won't lose my balance."
We go on:
"You have to retrieve the two boards and do the same thing at the next fence, seven meters further on."
Father laughs:
"It's child's play."
"Yes, but the space between the two fences is mined."
Father goes pale:
"Then it's impossible."
"No. It's a matter of luck. The mines are arranged in a zig-zag, in a W. If you follow a straight line, you only risk walking on one mine. And if you take big steps, you have almost a one in seven chance of avoiding it."
Father thinks for a moment, then says: "I'll risk it."
We say:
"In that case, we are quite willing to help you. We'll go with you to the first fence."
Father says:
"Okay. Thanks. You wouldn't have something to eat, by any chance?"
We give him some bread and goat cheese. We also offer him some wine from Grandmother's old vineyard. We pour into his glass a few drops of the sleeping potion that Grandmother was so good at making out of plants.
We take Father into our room and say: "Good night, Father. Sleep well. We'll wake you tomorrow."
We go to bed on the corner seat in the kitchen.
Next morning, we get up very early. We make sure that Father is sleeping soundly.
We cut four boards.
We dig up Grandmother's treasure: gold and silver coins and a lot of jewelry. We put most of it into a linen sack. We also take a grenade each, in case we are surprised by a patrol. By getting rid of the patrol, we can gain time.
We make a reconnaissance tour near the frontier to locate the best place: a dead angle between two watchtowers. There, at the foot of a tall tree, we hide the linen sack and two of the boards.
We go back and eat. Later, we bring Father his breakfast. We have to shake him to wake him up. He rubs his eyes and says:
"It's been a long time since I slept so well."
We put the tray on his knees. He says:
"What a feast! Milk, coffee, eggs, ham, butter, jam! You just can't find these things in the Big Town. How do you do it?"
"We work. Eat up, Father. We won't have time to give you another meal before you leave."
He asks:
"I'm going this evening?"
We say:
"You're going right now. As soon as you're ready."
He says:
"Are you crazy? I refuse to cross that bitch of a frontier in broad daylight! They'll see us!"
We say:
"We have to see too, Father. Only stupid people try to cross the frontier at night. At night, the frequency of the patrols is four times greater and the area is continually swept by searchlights. On the other hand, the surveillance is relaxed around eleven in the morning. The frontier guards think that nobody would be crazy enough to try to get through at that hour."
Father says:
"You're absolutely right. I put myself in your hands."
We ask:
"Will you allow us to search your pockets while you eat?"
"My pockets? Why?"
"You mustn't be identified. If anything happens to you and they learn that you are our father, we'll be accused as accessories."
Father says:
"You think of everything."
We say:
"We have to think of our own safety."
We search his clothes. We take his papers, his identity card, his address book, a train ticket, some bills, and a photograph of Mother. We burn everything in the kitchen stove, except the photograph.
At eleven o'clock, we leave. Each of us carries a board.
Father carries nothing. We ask him just to follow us and make as little noise as possible.
We are getting near the frontier. We tell Father to lie down behind the big tree and not to move.
Soon, a few meters away from us, a two-man patrol passes by. We can hear them talking:
"I wonder what there'll be to eat."
"The same shit as usual."
"There's shit and shit. Yesterday it was disgusting, but it's good sometimes."
"Good? You wouldn't say that if you'd ever tasted my mother's soup."
"I've never tasted your mother's soup. Me, I never had a mother. I've never eaten anything but shit. In the army, at least, I eat well once in a while."
The patrol moves off. We say:
"Go on, Father. We have twenty minutes before the next patrol arrives."
Father puts the two boards under his arm, he moves forward, he places one of the boards against the fence, he climbs up.
We lie face down behind the big tree, we cover our ears with our hands, we open our mouths.
There is an explosion.
We run to the barbed wire with the other two boards and the linen sack.
Father is lying near the second fence.
Yes, there is a way to get across the frontier: it's to make someone else go first.
Picking up the linen sack, walking in the footprints and then over the inert body of our Father, one of us goes into the other country.
The one who is left goes back to Grandmother's house.