Distant Light (8 page)

It had disappeared in a flash when it heard me coming, with its long tail amidst the undergrowth.

I approached the house, reached the door and looked inside.

The boy wasn’t there.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call him as I didn’t even know his name.

The door was open but I didn’t feel I could go in without being asked.

I sat down on the broken bench beside the door and waited.

After a while I heard a light sound of feet coming down the wooden stairs, slowly, one by one, since the steps were a long way apart for his little legs.

I stood up and turned toward the door.

Step by step, the boy arrived at the bottom of the stairs. When he saw me his eyes opened wide and he came almost running toward me. He arrived almost at the doorway, then stopped.

He looked at me. His eyes were red, as though he’d been crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He said nothing. But he was shaking slightly, uncertain whether to tell me something or keep quiet.

Then he turned. He went and took an abrasive sponge from the sink, poured a few drops of detergent on it and set about cleaning the oven.

He worked away inside with both hands, and I could hear him scrubbing with the rough side of the sponge and then cleaning away the soap with the other.

“You use the oven as well?” I asked in surprise, standing at the open door.

“Yes, of course!” he replied, on all fours in front of the oven, with his head in the open space of the door.

“What do you make?”

“Oh, lots of things …”

His little voice arrived rather indistinctly from inside.

“That’s impossible!” I blurted.

The little boy pulled his head out from the oven.

He looked offended.

“And what do you make, for example?” I asked him again.

“Today I did a potato pie!” he exclaimed.

“I don’t believe it!” I blurted again.

The little boy got up and went to the dresser. He lifted an open napkin covering a plate.

Beneath it was a pie.

He took the plate and brought it toward me, holding it in his little hands.

“Do you want to try some?” he asked.

And so I went in.

I took one step inside, barely breathing. I looked about me, in that kitchen where everything was so tidy: the table clear, the dishes washed and all neatly lined up on the draining rack, the cutlery standing in the cutlery basket so that it would dry properly, a cloth folded over the back of one of the wooden chairs, another hanging from a small nail near the sink.

He put the plate with the pie on the edge of the table.

“See how good it is!” he added.

I bent down to look at it. One slice was missing, which the boy must have eaten.

Taking a knife that was nearby, I cut a slice and lifted a piece to my mouth.

I began eating it slowly, with an enormous thrill. I felt its texture in my mouth, crumbling between my teeth, against my palate and my tongue.

“It’s very good!” I said eventually.

“You see?” he replied, content.

I looked about me once again, in the kitchen. Around a corner there was also a fireplace, which couldn’t be seen from outside, and pieces of wood piled up by it and a box full of bundles of broken twigs.

“You have a fireplace as well!” I said. “And you light it?”

“Sure!” he said. “When it’s cold.”

His answer was clear enough, but I could see he had something else on his mind, he was thinking about something else from which I had distracted him on arriving.

“Will you let me see your house?” I asked.

He remained silent for a moment.

“Alright …” he said eventually, with a sigh.

He turned and began to climb the wooden stairs, lifting high the little legs that stuck out of his shorts so he could reach each step as he went up.

I followed him without a word, and watched his back and his little shaved head in front of me that moved in silence up the stairs.

We reached the floor above.

There was a single large room that was lower around the sides,
where the roof sloped, a small metal bed with sheets neatly folded back, with a pair of slippers by it, wooden floorboards, a wooden nightstand by the bed. Nothing else.

“Just one room …” I murmured. “Perhaps it was a hay loft at one time …”

“A man stored chestnuts here, they told me.”

I glanced at the boy.

“Who told you?”

He didn’t answer.

I looked around, in that large bare room.

“There’s not even a toilet!”

The little boy made a gesture with his hand.

“I go in the woods,” he replied.

I heard the sound of my feet on the floorboards as I moved across to the small window, the only one in the room.

I looked out. All I could see was that green vastness, uninhabited and covered with trees. There was no sign of my village. But looking more carefully on the other side of the gorge I could make out one corner of my little house sticking out of the vegetation.

I turned to the boy.

“You can see it as well, when it’s dark, the little light from that house over there in the distance?”

He hesitated a moment before answering.

“Yes” he said, eventually, in a whisper.

I felt a slight shudder, in that large empty room, in front of the boy who watched me in silence, looking up at me with his round swollen eyes.

“There, now you’ve seen everything!” he said quietly, before turning round and starting toward the staircase.

I followed him. We reached the top, he in front and me behind. He went down slowly, his small legs climbing down the steep steps, at a slight angle, supporting himself with his hand against the wall.

Once we were back in the kitchen, the boy pulled his exercise books from his schoolbag without saying a word, opened them on the table and sat down before them.

I didn’t know what to do, whether to stay or whether this was a sign that I ought to go.

I watched him as he opened his exercise book, his head bent, his eyes still rather red and swollen, running the palm of his little hand over it several times from the bottom upward.

“You’re always alone!” I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming.

“I’m used to it,” he replied without lifting his head.

He began to sharpen a pencil, more and more slowly, biting his lips as he was doing so.

“Yesterday they put me behind the blackboard!” he suddenly exclaimed, uncontrollably.

I was standing rigid.

“So that’s why it took him so long to come downstairs when I arrived!” I thought. “He was crying, ashamed, up there in the big room, alone …”

I sank down onto the other chair, close by.

“And why did they put you behind the blackboard?”

He remained silent for a while. He was trembling.

“I never understand anything! I never learn anything!” he exclaimed again, and I could see he was clenching his teeth and biting his lips so as not to cry in front of me. “I can never do the homework!”

“So let me help you!”

He shook his head two or three times without looking at me.

“No, it’s no use! The teacher knows if you haven’t done it yourself!”

I was watching him, watching him as he gritted his teeth in despair.

There was a long silence.

“They told me in the village that there’s only the day school …” I stammered, all at once, in a low voice.

The little boy looked up at me.

“That’s for the other children …” he answered, looking at me, fixing me with his round, wide eyes.

“The other children? What children?”

He hesitated for a moment before answering.

“The ones still alive.”

There’s a bird somewhere down below, in the woods in front of my house, that sounds like a door creaking.

At first, I couldn’t work out what it was, where that strange noise was coming from, like an old door that creaks slowly, very slowly, on its rusty hinges when you open it, but with each creak quite separate from the others, except that it came from the woods, where there are no hinges, no doors.

Then, I don’t know how, I realized it was the sound of an animal, of a bird.

I hear it every now and then. I heard it a short while ago, and then I asked, speaking out in the middle of all this silence:

“And you, what kind of bird are you?”

It made no reply, but I imagined instead that it did reply:

“I’m the creaky door bird.”

“But why don’t I ever see you? I search among the foliage when I hear your sound, but I don’t see you …”

“Isn’t it just the same with creaky doors? You turn round and look and no one’s ever there.”

“But someone will have made them creak, even if they’ve then quickly hidden themselves so they can’t be seen!”

“Sometimes there’s no one, it’s just the wind.”

“So you’re the wind then?”

“No, I’m the door that’s made to creak by the wind.”

“So why do I sometimes hear you even when there’s no wind?”

“I’m the bird that also makes the wind creak.”

The swallows have left. Their shrieks are no longer to be heard in the sky after the sun has gone behind the ridge, in the very last moments of light, when they used to launch themselves for the last time onto their pasture of insects and other tiny lives suspended above the horizon line, before disappearing into their nests among the blocks of stone and on the roofs, before the bats came out from the cracks in the ruins and launched themselves in turn onto their meal, in the dark sky, with their wide-open, tooth-filled mouths. I waited for their arrival, once the swallows had disappeared one by one from the sky, and this meant it was also time for me to go back inside and eat my simple meal alone, in this deserted place.

The bats are now arriving earlier, it seems, perhaps because the days are getting shorter and it’s getting dark sooner.

I stay there for a while watching them, sitting on the metal chair, the soles of my shoes against the low balustrade, my knees bent. I watch their shapes which emerge from the darkness in their crooked flight. They’re always going in the wrong direction, especially those smaller
ones that have just been born and start learning to fly with the membranes of their wings of skin. They come right up close and, just when it seems they’re going to hit me on the head, they suddenly veer away, continuing their asymmetrical flight, blind, in the darkness, and then they come straight back at you again, like rags coming at your face.

Yesterday evening, when it was dark, instead of going indoors to get something to eat, I took the car and went down to the village.

I drove slowly, with the headlights on, the windows down. After one of the curves I saw the cemetery lamps that flickered in the dark. The night was black. There was a slight breeze. A bird flapped its wings loudly in the undergrowth, perhaps woken with a start by the sound of the motor in that absolute silence. There must have been a covering of swollen black clouds in the sky, since there were no stars to be seen.

I carried on down, coasting in neutral every so often on the long descents. An animal crossing the road only spotted my car at the last moment as I was going silently down and suddenly turned its head toward the headlights, dazzled.

No other cars were about. I turned onto the larger road that led to the village. The few houses had their shutters closed, no light filtered out. They would all have been inside eating, or in front of the television, or getting ready for bed, since people in places like this go to sleep early.

I arrived in the village. I parked the car in the open space just as you
enter. I got out and walked a little. I’d never been here at this hour. There was no one in the narrow lanes wedged between the stone houses. Nor even in the larger street that crossed the village from side to side. The only bar was also closed. All that could be heard, every now and then, was the sound of the odd television set coming from one or other of the shuttered windows, and a tenuous glow filtered through the cracks, while all the others were silent, switched off, the occupants already in their beds in the darkness.

I turned the corner and went under an archway. I took a few more steps, then stopped dead, my heart beating fast.

The school was in complete darkness. No light came from its large windows on either the ground or the upper floor.

“And yet, if there are lessons going on there, there ought to be some light …” I thought. “The windows have no shutters, perhaps they’re covered from inside with thick curtains that a janitor closes when it gets dark, once the lessons have finished, as he passes down the corridor one last time before closing up the school …”

I stood there rigid, my mind a blank, hardly breathing.

The building was completely dark, not even the smallest light or the smallest sound came from inside.

I couldn’t manage a single step, to get back to where I’d left the car, to walk through the deserted village. I remained there, still, rigid, not knowing what to do, in that place faintly lit by a streetlamp that swung in the wind in the middle of the street.

I don’t know how much time went by like this. I only knew that, all of a sudden, just as I was finally about to turn and retrace my steps, or so it seemed, unless the thought had merely passed through my mind, I felt something, like a small rush of air behind me.

I turned back toward the school. But I could see nothing.

The silence was such that I could hear the slight hum of the bulb in the streetlamp above my head.

A few moments later it seemed as though the front door was opening slowly, noiselessly, in the dark.

I don’t know why, but instinctively I stepped aside, so no one would catch sight of me. I went and stood around the corner of the building opposite, from where I could see without being seen.

The door was now completely open, but no one came out.

There was still that enormous silence. Something was rattling somewhere, up above, perhaps the streetlamp in the breeze.

I peered out from around the corner, from where I could see a large part of the double doors of the main entrance that were completely open, the whole school building still in darkness, even the ground floor, even the corridor there must have been beyond the entrance.