I settle the whole business over the phone and get the car dealer to take the old car back and send the box of chocolates that is included in the offer to my friend in maternity ward 22b.
We wait for the brand-new car to arrive across the desert before the evening, before setting off with some hot cocoa in the thermos. I get a thirty-five per cent discount off the hotel bill because of the pellet holes in the curtains, an extra fifteen per cent because of the noise caused by the ball during the night and another fifteen per cent because there were no staff available to enable me to change rooms, thus forcing me to move into the vet’s room for the night.
“Not that it would have changed much,” says the girl at the reception desk, “we were fully booked.” She then offers to wash and dry one load of clothes while we are waiting. The hotel manager hasn’t resurfaced yet, even though we’re well into the afternoon.
The boy shows considerable interest in the jeep when it arrives and gloats on it with the other men, kicking its wheels, as I transfer our things from one car to the other. He has slipped both hands into the pockets of his overalls. The hotel staff are very impressed by this exchange of vehicles out in the middle of nowhere. We don’t have much further to travel now; tonight we’ll be sleeping in the newly planted bungalow on the edge of a ravine.
“Thanks for last night,” a voice close to my ear says, “it was nice to meet you, are you leaving then?”
They all say the same thing, “Thank you for your stay.”
“Sorry about the bird,” I say.
“And the pellet shots,” he adds.
“Yeah.”
“The rest wasn’t so bad.”
“No, the rest wasn’t so bad.”
We formally say goodbye to each other by the car. The hotel staff form a semicircle at the bottom of the steps, like the servants of a manor bidding farewell to a distinguished guest. The boy stands beside me and stares up at us, looking from face to face. He seems anxious:
“Can animals be handicapped?”
Being his personal sworn interpreter, I translate the expert’s answers for my protégé:
“More often than not, they die shortly after birth. If not, they’re normally put down fairly soon. Some of them are stuffed and end up in a natural history museum. A lot of people are fascinated by the sight of two-headed Siamese lambs and five-legged pigs.”
I loosely interpret for him.
“What about deaf horses, are they stuffed too?”
“No, I don’t ever remember coming across that in my work. But some friends of mine have two handicapped dogs that they are very fond of, a mother who is blind and a female puppy who’s a dwarf. Their son is that boy who was with me yesterday.”
“Is he an adopted son?” I think I might have then asked him, but I probably didn’t, because I hear the vet asking me when we can meet again.
“I’m not sure that would be very sensible,” I answer. “I was thinking of spending a month on my own. Alone with Tumi,” I add.
“Well, if you happen to change your mind, I’d be delighted, my wife spends a lot of time away because of her work.”
Before saying goodbye he leans over my shoulder, as if he were peering at the sand desert ahead of us, and murmurs into my ear:
“I know what you’re looking for, but I wouldn’t stir anything up, if I were you. The past should be left in the past. But I can tell you that he has a gift for languages and is scared of heights. He hopes to study abroad one day.”
FORTY-ONE
The boy is asleep in the back seat under two down sleeping bags. Unusually, the kitten is awake and restless; maybe it’s carsick or the tuna fish sandwich, which had passed its expiry date, from the hotel didn’t go down too well in its stomach. As for me, I’m quite content with my lot, my glistening new car, the darkness and the heater that is working full blast.
I slip a disc into the brand-new CD player: a pantomime ballet by Béla Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin. I shove the receipt I’ve folded into eight into the pocket of my flowery trousers.
Apart from the flowery trousers, I mostly dressed as a boy.
“Yes, you were one of the boys,” says Granny. “You cut your hair like them, dressed like them and wore the same chequered brown sweater over your shirt all summer.” I can’t remember whether it was washed in the autumn when I got back to town or thrown away.
In stores I was addressed as a male. There was a constant stream of guests at my gran and grandad’s place. And plenty of room, no matter how much of a squeeze it was. They even lent their own conjugal bed, if the need arose. People weren’t supposed to stay in hotels; that was for foreigners. In August, all the kids from the area would gather, all the children that had been sent to the neighbouring farms in the name of good health and getting in touch with our rural roots, and we would spend the last week of our stay in the east in my granny’s blue house down by the shore. That is where I would pass my time with my cousins, who weren’t necessarily really my cousins, but also the grandchildren of some of Granny’s old friends. No one actually knew exactly how we were supposed to be related to each other. Nevertheless, I called them cousins and they called me cousin too, although most of them were clearly unrelated to me. As the number of people increased in the house, we squeezed in tighter together and moved between bedrooms, as required, or up into the attic, with our synthetic quilts or blankets folded under our arms. Children under the age of fifteen slept without a down quilt. There were often fights for space that stretched long into the night. The main goal was to tightly wrap one’s self in the synthetic duvet without the slightest draught.
I’d promised to get up first in the morning and heat up the cocoa and butter the scones. This meant that I had to stand up in the middle of the mattress and grope my way forward, balancing my arms like a tightrope artist, to avoid stumbling on the crowded mattress and get out of there without stepping on any calves, knees or, worse still, entire bodies.
As soon as I stand up with my hands in the air, I realize that the waistband on my pyjama bottom has snapped and the waist cord has slipped back into the furbelow during the night. I’m wearing nothing underneath because Granny is washing all my clothes. I clutch the waistband in the hope of saving myself any embarrassment and try to avoid waking up my cousins, but then realize that they are both awake and lying stiffly, on either side of the bed, watching my every move with new adult eyes.
I slow down, barely going over forty tonight. The mountain pass road twists and turns. Suddenly there is yet another pile of rubble ahead of us, a landslip that has crumbled from the side of the mountain, which stretches into the sea below. The car skids and adrenaline shoots through my body. There is no mistake about it; a mudslide has fallen onto the road in front of us, forming a pile of stones and sludge. Not a soul in sight and no way of turning back, a sleeping child in the back and a wakeful kitten in the front. There’s a shovel in the trunk, I noticed it when I was packing the car. As soon as I clear away some of those rocks and push all that mud to one side, I should be able to get past. If the kitten and I were to slip, at least I would have someone to hold onto for eternity; but the thought of the fate of my passenger in the back seat is just too overwhelming, the responsibility is paralysing.
I can’t really boast of any clairvoyant powers, but suddenly a man springs out of the darkness and fog — the third man on my road to the east — seemingly materializing out of nowhere. Standing before me, he hurls himself into the beams of my headlights, like the sheep, except that this time the car isn’t moving. He is so real, in fact, that it seems perfectly natural when he grabs the shovel from me and spares me the trouble of having to clear the mud away.