The Notebook + The Proof + The Third Lie (3 page)

"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."

Our Studies

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 and Her Daughter

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!"

Exercise
in Begging

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.

Harelip

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."