Aco started writing a letter. At least that was what he intended to do, but when he finally found a pencil and a few blank sheets of paper and wrote a few words, he realised how he was completely out of the habit and, what was even worse, how much time it would take to explain everything.
Time he did not have.
He limited the letter to a few short sentences. The people he was writing to knew what it was about anyway. They had been there.
He took a few paces around the kitchen then walked to the window and looked into the night. The moon shone through the edge of a cloud and sparkled on the sea. He had to decide what and how much to tell his niece.
He would wait for her and tailor his story as he went along, judging her reaction after each sentence.
Max took a gulp out of the bottle and missed a number:
“thirty eight…, gulp…, forty…”
Raf was watching the rhythmical movement of Samo’s body going up and down, irrespective of the counting. Apparently he did fifty push-ups every evening and he was not going to miss one single night, party or no party. Fifty! The nose-touching-the-floor ones! Raf went dizzy. He himself could not do very many and it was only because he was so thin and there was not much weight to lift, rather then because of his strength that he could do any at all. In PE, the teacher tormented them incessantly. All of them, even Samo, who was the personification of a sporty type. With him, the teacher directed his mockery at his brain whereas with all the others at their physical abilities or the lack of them. Raf envied Max and found it encouraging that he never worried about any of it. He just lay on the parquet floor or the sports-ground or wherever it was they were supposed to be doing the exercises and giggled. When the teacher came near him Max would grunt in a terrible effort as a result of straining his vocal cords and facial muscles rather then any other part of his body.
“Forty five…, forty six…”
Once Raf had heard the PE teacher in the changing room threatening Max that he could not care less who his father was, he would still teach him a lesson or two. But he never succeeded.
Alfonz offered Raf the bottle. Raf took a sip and trembled.
“Ha,” said Alfonz, “this brandy would wake even the dead!”
Raf nodded, smiled and returned the bottle. Alfonz too was probably capable of doing quite a few push-ups, he was as strong as a bull. But he never showed off and his strength came from hard work on a farm and in the woods rather than from lifting weights and that showed in his body-shape.
“Fifty!”
Samo picked himself up and applauded himself with the excuse of brushing the dust off his hands. He was not out of breath and there was not even the smallest drop of sweat on his forehead.
“Right,” he said, “and now the party!”
He pulled the table back and sat down. Max immediately put his feet on the table, saying:
“This is quite posh, eh?”
They had split into two groups without really thinking, realised Raf. On the one side of the table there were Samo and Max and on the other him and Alfonz. Max picked up a candle and lit his cigarette.
“I’ve just realised what seems so strange in this house,” said Raf and they all turned towards him.
Ana was fully aware that she had to return to her uncle’s and that was precisely the reason why she was still wandering around the lighthouse. The night was magical, like nights can only be in a strange place, far from home, away from people, when you are lonely and out when you should not be. Considering how many conditions had to be just right, it was no wonder that moments like that were so rare.
The moon had finally overtaken the cloud, revealing itself in all its glory, reflected on the surface of the sea. It was nearly full and Ana wished she could remember which side was full when it went up and which side when it went down.
The light on the lighthouse winked again, but Ana stood outside its reach, in the safety of the shadows. She had walked around the lighthouse a few times trying to work out what the red and white lights were supposed to mean. Slowly, she turned towards the village and stopped next to two fishing boats, which were being prepared for departure. The fishermen nodded to her in a friendly manner and she nodded back. They did not seem to mind her watching them. They arranged the nets, explaining to Ana that the catch would be bad that night because it was nearly full moon and there was no point in using a light to attract the fish. They showed her around one of the boats and the flood lights on it, but above all they kept talking to her in their melodic dialect, which made everything they said sparkle so much that the meaning of their words did not matter at all.
A lazy night. The first stars, the sea and a wonderful feeling that time was hers and she was in no hurry.
“Do you remember when we walked around the house?” started Raf.
They nodded.
“And here too, look! Don’t you find it strange?”
“No.” said Max.
“There are candle holders, cutlery, paintings… Everything.”
“Yes, so?”
“They didn’t steal anything. That’s what seems strange to me.”
“Who?” asked Alfonz and he looked really worried or at least different from Samo and Max who just stared ahead, expressionless.
“Well, I don’t know, the villagers. This house was deserted for…, how long did you say?”
Earlier Raf was turned towards Max but now he looked him straight in the eyes.
“Fifty years?”
Max nodded.
“Something like that, yes.”
“Well,” continued Raf, “all these things sit here for fifty years and nobody takes anything. Nobody! I saw a fluffy toy elephant in the nursery upstairs. I don’t think the villagers have toys like that even now, let alone fifty years ago. But nothing! They didn’t come and take it! Isn’t that strange?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Alfonz. “They didn’t steal anything, even though everything is just sitting around.”
He shook his head in disbelief.
Max took a sip for strength and said:
“Maybe they’re so behind, maybe they’re bonkers, maybe they’re…, how do you call it…, honest?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. They can’t all be weirdos!” Alfonz shook his head. “No, no!”
Raf was quite grateful to him for his support.
“Look,” said Max,” when my father came to see the place, the key hung from a nail in the doorframe on the outside! How mad he was when he saw that! Look, they’ve got the sort of monument that everywhere else was got rid of ages ago. Except maybe somewhere in the middle of Siberia, eh? Maybe they’re frightened of each other and nobody dares steal. In a village like that everybody knows about everything everybody else gets up to!”
“No, Max, that’s not right. They could have all been in on it and taken everything out of the house and nobody would have known.”
“Raf, don’t talk rubbish! These peasants can’t even agree on what time of day it is, otherwise they’d know by now how far behind they are!”
He was overcome by laughter which he interrupted only for his last remark:
“Anyway, what do we care about them anyway? Are we here to party or to attend a summer school for prospective detectives, eh? Ha!”
Raf nodded and gave in. There was no point in going on, but he still thought it was odd. He pushed the puzzle to the back of his mind but only after he had noticed that Alfonz looked like somebody who was getting ready to mention something which bothered him a lot. He opened his mouth a few times, looking towards the cellar (why there?) but when he heard Max asking if anybody else had any other crap to discuss, Alfonz shut up. After the bottle travelled around the circle again, Alfonz started talking, but Raf was certain it was not what he was going to mention earlier. He was telling them about somebody from his village who was a thief and was found out. Raf started listening, first with one and then both ears. He had always liked cruel stories.
Their voices travelled around the cellar, in a gentle murmur and it seemed as if the sound was coming from the names on the ceiling.
Samo stretched his fingers and took hold of the bottle. He could have cracked it in his hands if he wanted to. Just crushed it with his fingers. He glanced around and all his friends seemed busy. Raf and Alfonz were talking. Max was messing around with the cassette player, turning the cassette and cursing and swearing.
Samo squeezed the bottle. Not too much, just a bit. He could feel the glass under his skin and he was hooked. He always avoided alcohol in bottles or glasses because whenever he took a sip from something made of glass it always aroused in him a desire which he found hard to resist. To squeeze, to crush. His muscles would flex, the liquid would splash, his blood would flow freely. When it was all mixed up on the floor it would be impossible to say which was wine and which used to be a part of him.
But he would not do it that night. He would not. Only once had he lost control of himself in the presence of others, and they had taken it as proof of his hard-to-control strength. They bandaged his hand with a handkerchief and took him to the doctor’s. An accident.
Yes.
It was just like what was to him the saddest parting imaginable: the cutting of his nails. He would lock himself in the bathroom, open a newspaper, kneel down and do the business with the little scissors incorporated in his Swiss army knife. Whenever a nail or a fragment of it flew across the bathroom he never gave up until he found it and put it next to the others on the newspaper. When he had finished, he would pick up the paper and get up slowly without moving his eyes away from the crescents. Slowly he would let them slide into the toilet, look at them once more and then flush the toilet. They disappeared in the whirlpool! They no longer existed! Parts of him that used to be and then ceased to be. On him or anywhere else. Or maybe they were everywhere! Somewhere where his mind could not follow.
This was a shock which he needed to live through again and again.
He had just a hint of the same feeling when he had his hair cut and when he defecated, but only a hint, like a shadow, a brief flash, a thought. But nails…, how shocked he had been when he first read that nails continued to grow after death! So independent — neither one’s brain nor one’s willpower could control them. Even when everything else stops, they just go on. In death and beyond. Whenever he heard about the afterlife he always thought of nails.
He put the bottle back on the table. Alfonz and Raf were laughing, the cassette player had chewed up Max’s tape and he was trying to rewind it with his finger, cursing incessantly.
Samo concentrated on the bottle, trying to break it with his eyes. It did not work, it never did. He liked watching films about people whose strength was all in their eyes. Not like his dad’s eyes, which seemed like a sheep’s eyes ever since he could remember. Together with his moaning about Samo’s mother who had left them — she had just walked out. So what? He was sure nobody else had such a wimp for a father. He was all bowels and fat, that was what he was built of. And those eyes… A man should never be such a weed. So, even if he had to spend hours and hours lifting weights, feel the sweat leaving his pores — a sweet feeling, another part of him leaving! — he must never be like his father.
Women: they come and go. It was never possible to understand them so it was better to keep away from them. That was why he was always just accompanying Max on his adventures and never took part in anything that went on but always managed to stage a retreat just in time. It did not matter to him that he was still a virgin. Manhood was about self-control, not about giving yourself to others.
He grabbed the bottle, turned it upside down and took a big gulp, as quickly as he could to avoid temptation.
There was no sign of Ana. Aco squeezed his hands into fists and took a deep breath.
How much longer could he wait? Maybe at that very moment one of the boys was walking down to the cellar, looking up, noticing the names and starting to read them out. Some stuck in his throat and he would try to pronounce them out loud.
Louder.
Would anything happen? What Aco had seen years ago looked like a beginning, a preparation.
A trap.
He had two feelings simultaneously: yes, it would happen and he would be too late.
The pensioners were no longer sitting on the bench. They must have gone to bed as there was nothing else for them to do. She should really get back. She did not have a watch but it felt late. The two fishing boats had set off and the bay was filled with the noise of their engines. She waited on the pier until the noise became just a reminder of the presence of the ships which had already disappeared out of sight.
Her best friend had said to her: the uncle you are going to stay with is probably similar to your parents. The first evening is the most important one. If you go to bed early, then he will expect you to go to bed early for the rest of your holiday. The rules have to be established straight away and they have to be established by you.
Ana had always admired her friend’s decisiveness, but she did not approve of her insulting attitude towards her parents.
But her advice was not bad.
She stopped on the junction between the way to her uncle’s and the way to the monument. She looked at its shiny outline and again it seemed very ugly to her.
She went closer.
Aco put on black clothes. He stood in front of the mirror and slowly and with great care did up all the buttons on his shirt and tightened the belt on his trousers. He pushed his hair under a black beret and smiled bitterly at himself as he said goodbye to his image. Vain to the very end, he thought.
He went back to the kitchen table and started writing a note. The first word was Ana’s name.
When he was finished he put it in the middle of the table, under the light.
She would not miss it.
He went over to the photograph and picked it up. He looked at it and then kissed it.
“Thank you,” he said before putting it back down.
He unlocked the cabinet. Deep in thought, he slid the palm of his hand over the shotguns standing upright, then lowered his eyes to the pistols arranged under the guns. He chose an officer’s beretta, checked it carefully, inserted the chamber, put bullets into the barrel and put the weapon in his pocket.
Just before he reached the door, he allowed his eyes to say goodbye to all the little everyday things that he was so used to that he normally never even noticed them.
When he looked at Jesus on the cross in the corner — which had been put there by his parents (or grandparents?) and where he had been, out of respect for them not him, lighting candles for all those years just because they used to do it — he crossed himself. His hand just did it automatically and he let it, even though he knew it would not make any difference.
Jesus had nothing to do with it all and the Saviour would not be able to save one single soul from Hell’s gates that night.
Max took a long sip from the bottle and belched.
“This is the business,” he said. He wanted to repeat the procedure but he managed to stop himself. If he got drunk then he would throw up in half an hour and cry ten minutes later. He remembered his father’s lecture and immediately added the fact that they were on a more or less deserted island, a few hundred kilometres away from his father and that surely he did not have to watch his behaviour.
He continued with the interrupted move. He would have to go for a piss soon, he was the only one who had not been to sprinkle the grass yet.
The tape had just reached the end of a song, the audience started clapping and the singer thanked them:
“You’re beautiful!”
That made Max laugh loudly.
Aco stopped just for a moment in the middle of the harbour and looked around. There was no sign of Ana. Where could she have gone? He looked towards the bar and the empty bench and restrained himself. It was best to do what he had decided earlier. He had to go and check it out himself first. He did not really know anything for sure, there was just this desperate feeling of doom and gloom forcing him into the night. It would probably all turn out to be nothing.
There was no need to go and wake up his comrades.
He crossed the square and started walking up the hill.
It made him angry when he realised that he was saying goodbye to the houses and everything around them just like he had earlier said goodbye to his home.
Smoke started coming from the wooden crate and there was a barely detectable tremor on the surface of its strange contents. Not as if something inside had moved, but as if somebody had sighed.
Ana stood next to the tank, on the side facing the sea. At first, she wanted just to walk around it, to waste as much time as she could and then she stopped in front of the trap-door and she trembled. No, there was no danger, she was just managing to frighten herself. She often did that with her friend. They would tell each other horror stories and soon they would both be scared to death.
She imagined the lid suddenly opening and a man’s head popping up, his eyes gleaming, on his head the sort of cap she saw tank-drivers wearing in films. A leather one, with headphones or whatever it was that covered their ears.
With headphones?
Her fear suddenly subsided and the trap-door remained firmly shut.
With headphones? was that possible?
She pictured herself on the ferry, the rail, the white wall, the seagull in the air. A figure walking away from her, soon to disappear behind the corner.
Was it possible? Could something so silly really have happened?
She ran her fingers through her hair, touching her ears. Maybe he had spoken to her, but she had not heard him?
Too silly. But… His look as she was getting off the ferry. Offended?
Oh, men, they’re always sulking about something or other, at least that was what her schoolfriends said.
What if…
She would go and look for him and ask him. She would come up with an excuse for going to the other side of the island in spite of her uncle’s strange behaviour. She would ask somebody else for directions, they could not all be strange.
She went back to the path leading towards the village. Only a few houses still had lights on, the others were lit only by the moon. For a moment, she thought she could see something moving among the first trees on the slope but when she looked closer she could not see anything.
Max shouted:
“Alfonz, Serious Alfonz! Go and get the drink! We’re running out of everything.”
Alfonz got up obediently, took the torch from his rucksack lying next to the wall and left the dining room. The cassette player was screeching its tune, Samo was staring at the bottle in his hand thinking, and Raf was wondering why he had come in the first place. He had known exactly how it would all look and he was not wrong. Why did we do predictable things? Because that was when any unforeseen event turned out to be really exciting?
Oh balls, he said and reached for the bottle.
Alfonz went into the cellar and remembered the fear which had attacked him when he first went in. He stepped very carefully onto the fourth step but there was just a very faint repetition of what had happened earlier — it was not like an attack this time, it just seemed as if he had gone through a broken shell. Whatever it was, the danger had passed. He continued his descent and three vivid images appeared simultaneously. They were so real that it seemed as if he was actually there that very moment. Alone in the middle of the pine forest. In church just as the altar boy waves the censer. By the village road onto which the workers had just spread the hot asphalt, getting it ready for the roller. He stood in the middle of the stairs, manically shining the torch all around him. Everything looked just like it did at his first visit. But…
The smell.
The cellar was filled with a smell which evoked all three memories at the same time. Alfonz tried to find its source but could not see anything unusual. Could it be that that was how the woods surrounding the house smelt in a summer night? Was that possible? Could so many scents come through the few gaps in the wooden planks on the windows?
He directed the light onto the ceiling and immediately moved it away again. The drops were gleaming, all in their usual position — they could not have been the source of the smell.
What was happening to him? That sadness! He had to carry out the task he had been given.
He went over to the crate of beer and took out four bottles. He was struggling with them and the torch which was throwing its light haphazardly through the darkness.
In the end, he put each bottle into a separate pocket. His trousers really were not much to look at, but they had deep pockets. Under one of the regular pockets there was another, hidden one that he had sewn in himself, pricking himself with the needle quite a few times in the process.
He went over to get a bottle of brandy when he noticed that the row of bottles along the wooden box with the amber was not undisturbed. Two bottles were lying on the floor, luckily unbroken. He put the torch closer to examine the rubber bottle-top covers and saw that out of one of them a few drops had escaped, leaving a centimetre-wide trail in the dust.
They could not have fallen long ago. But why? The floor was made of stone and he had made sure to put all the bottles onto a smooth and even surface. He had also checked each bottle to see if it stood firmly enough.
He picked them up and felt something irregular under his fingers. He shone the torch onto the drops which had stuck to the glass. Amber? There were drops all over the floor too and they were all still warm. Quite a bit warmer than the wooden crate…
The crate?
He lifted the torch and directed it into the crate. The lid was still leaning against the wall, just as he had left it.
“Oooooh,” he sighed, with his eyes wide open. Quietly, just to himself; his escaping breath making a noise without any effort by his body.
He had found the source of the smell. Heavy, dense, sleep-inducing vapours were coming from the crate. There was a warm glow above the surface and it looked as if the stuff had melted earlier and was now cooling again into its former firmer state.
But the surface lay about a third lower then before.
He reached with his hand: it was too hot to touch. He would have burned himself.
It seemed to him that the light was getting through the amber more evenly as if the thing in the middle was no longer there. The whole of the surface was light yellow, probably because of the higher temperature.
How? From what?
Alfonz got up, shining the torch along the side of the crate. The two overturned bottles had stood by the bottom third of the box and that was where most of the drops were too. The bottles had fallen away from the box as if somebody had pushed them and the ribbons of amber were pointing in the same direction. He shone the light on the floor around his shoes. Among his own footsteps there were some smaller ones, which he had managed to almost completely destroy by trampling all over them. They pointed in the same direction as the bottles and the amber.
To behind his back.
The footsteps suggested a stupid scenario: Alfonz was looking at a bed out of which somebody had just got up and the first move of his feet had knocked the bottles over.
A feeling tickled on his neck and then spread towards his cheeks.
He was not alone.
A crazy idea. How many times had he waded through the snow and the woods… The familiar woods, said a voice inside him, the woods near your home. He knew everybody there and everybody knew him. But here he was a stranger.
And he was not alone.
I’m alone, said Alfonz but the feeling would not disappear.
I’ll turn around and shine the torch. And I’ll be alone.
Alone.
Alone.
He turned and shone.
He was not alone.