The Notebook + The Proof + The Third Lie

by Agota Kristof

  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.

  Exercise to Toughen the Body

  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!"

  The Orderly

  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.

  Exercise to Toughen the Mind

  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 migh
t 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.

  Purchase of Paper, Notebook, and Pencils

  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."

  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.