‘How’s life?’ I said in greeting.
‘Bearable,’ replied the Dentist with a broad smile, which reminded me of the old adage ‘Physician, heal thyself’. ‘You haven’t been here for ages. I think the last time we met was when you were looking for your…’
‘Yes, yes,’ I interrupted him. ‘It was impossible to walk this far in the winter. By the time I’d dug myself out of the snow it would be dark.’
He went back to his drilling and I stood with the other onlookers, pensively watching the drill working in the man’s mouth.
‘Have you seen the white foxes?’ one of the men asked me. He had a beautiful face. If his life had turned out differently I’m sure he’d have been a film star. But now his good looks were disappearing beneath a network of furrows and wrinkles.
‘They say Innerd let them out before he ran off,’ said a second man.
‘Maybe he had pangs of conscience,’ I added. ‘Maybe the Foxes ate him.’
The Dentist glanced at me with curiosity. He nodded and sank the drill into the patient’s tooth. The poor man jolted in the chair.
‘Isn’t it possible to fill a tooth without all that drilling?’ I asked.
But no one seemed particularly concerned about the patient.
‘First Big Foot, then the Commandant, now Innerd…’ sighed the Beautiful Man. ‘A man’s afraid to leave the house. After dark I tell my old woman to deal with everything outside.’
‘You’ve found an intelligent solution,’ I said, and then slowly added: ‘Animals are taking revenge on them for hunting.’
‘You must be joking… Big Foot didn’t hunt,’ said the Beautiful Man doubtfully.
‘But he was a beater,’ said someone else. ‘Mrs Duszejko’s right. And he was the biggest poacher around here, wasn’t he?’
The Dentist smeared a bit of white paste onto a little plate and put it into the drilled tooth with a spatula. ‘Yes, it’s possible,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It really is possible – there has to be some justice, doesn’t there? Yes, yes. Animals.’
The patient moaned pitifully.
‘Do you believe in divine providence?’ the Dentist suddenly asked me, coming to a standstill over the patient. There was a note of provocation in his voice.
The men sniggered, as if they had heard something improper. I had to think about it.
‘Because I do,’ he said, without waiting for an answer. He gave the patient a friendly clap on the shoulder, and the man leaped from the chair, happy. ‘Next,’ he said. One of the group of onlookers stepped forward and reluctantly sat in the chair.
‘What’s up?’ asked the Dentist.
In reply the man opened his mouth, and the Dentist peeked into it. He instantly recoiled, saying: ‘What the fuck!’ which must have been the shortest possible assessment of the state of the patient’s dentition. For a while he prodded with his fingers to check how secure the man’s teeth were, and then reached behind him for a bottle of vodka. ‘Here, drink up. We’ll pull it out.’
The man mumbled something indistinct, utterly disheartened by this unwelcome verdict. He accepted the near full tumbler of vodka proffered by the Dentist and downed it in one. I was sure he wouldn’t feel any pain after that much anaesthetic.
While we were waiting for the alcohol to take effect, the men excitedly began to talk about the quarry, which apparently is going to be reopened. Year by year it will swallow the Plateau, until it has devoured the whole thing. We’ll have to move away from here. If they do actually reopen it, the Dentist’s hamlet will be the first to be relocated.
‘No, I don’t believe in divine providence,’ I said. ‘Form a protest committee,’ I advised them. ‘Organise a demonstration.’
‘Après nous le déluge,’ said the Dentist, sticking his fingers into the mouth of his patient, barely conscious by now. Then, with ease, without effort, he extracted a blackened tooth. All we heard was a slight crack. It made me feel faint.
‘They should take revenge for all of it,’ said the Dentist. ‘Animals should fuck it all to buggery.’
‘Quite so. Sodding well screw it into oblivion,’ I followed his lead, and the men glanced at me with surprise and respect.
I went home by a roundabout route; by now it was well into the afternoon. And that was when, at the edge of the forest, I saw the white Foxes, two of them. They were moving slowly, one behind the other. Their whiteness against the green meadow was like something from another world. They looked like the diplomatic service of the Animal Kingdom, come here to reconnoitre.
At the start of May the dandelions flowered. In a good year they were already in bloom on the holiday weekend, when the owners arrived at their houses for the first time after the winter. In a less good year they didn’t carpet the meadows in yellow spots until Victory Day, on the eighth. Every year, Dizzy and I admired this miracle of miracles.
Unfortunately, for Dizzy it was a harbinger of tough times; two weeks later his various allergies would hit him – tears streamed from his eyes, he choked and suffocated. In town it was just about bearable, but on Fridays when he came to see me I was obliged to shut all the doors and windows tight to stop the invisible allergens from getting inside his nose. In June, when the grasses were flowering, we had to move our translation sessions to his place in town.
After such a long, tiring, barren winter, the Sun was having an exceptionally bad effect on me too. I couldn’t sleep in the mornings, I’d get up at dawn and never stop feeling anxious. All winter I’d had to defend myself against the wind eternally blowing on the Plateau, but now I threw the windows and doors wide open to let it come inside and blow away my musty anxieties and every possible Ailment.
Everything was starting to crackle, I could sense a feverish vibration under the grass, under the layer of earth, as if vast, underground nerves, swollen with effort, were just about to burst. I was finding it hard to rid myself of the feeling that under it all lurked a strong, mindless will, as repulsive as the force that made the Frogs climb on top of each other and endlessly copulate in Oddball’s pond.
As soon as the Sun came close to the horizon, a family of Bats began to make regular appearances. They’d fly in noiselessly, softly; I always thought of their flight as being fluid. Once I counted twelve of them, as they flew around each house in turn. I’d love to know how a Bat sees the world; just once I’d like to fly across the Plateau in its body. How do we all look down here, as perceived by its senses? Like shadows? Like bundles of shudders, sources of noise?
Towards evening I would sit outside and wait for them to appear, to fly in one by one from over the Professor’s house, as they visited each of us in turn. I gently waved to them in greeting. The truth is I had a lot in common with them – I too saw the world in other spheres, upside down. I too preferred the Dusk. I wasn’t suited to living in the Sunlight.
My skin reacted badly to the cruel, harsh rays, not yet tempered by any leaves or fluffy clouds. It became red and irritated. As every year, in the first few days of summer small, itchy blisters began to appear on it. I treated them with sour milk and the burn ointment that Dizzy gave me. I had to fetch out last year’s wide-brimmed hats, which I secured under my chin with ribbons to stop the wind from tearing them off.
One Wednesday when I was coming home from school in one of these hats I took a roundabout route in order to… in fact, I don’t really know why I took the detour. There are places we don’t choose to visit, and yet something draws us to them. Possibly that something is Dread. Maybe that’s why, just like Good News, I like horror stories too.
By some strange chance, that Wednesday I found myself near the Fox farm. I was driving home in the Samurai when suddenly, at the crossroads, I turned in the opposite direction from my usual route. Soon after, the asphalt came to an end, and at this point I could smell the dreadful stench that scared away anyone out for a walk. The nasty smell was still here, though officially the farm had closed down two weeks ago.