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.
The Officer's Friend
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.
Our First Show
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 wa
nt 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 Expand Our Repertoire
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.
Theater
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."
The Air Raids
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 contemptuousl
y. 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.
The Human Herd
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.
The Book of Lies Page 6
