"This is where my treasure is hidden."
She hands us the sheet of paper. On it she has drawn a rectangle, a cross, and under the cross, a circle. Grandmother asks:
"Do you understand?"
"Yes, Grandmother, we understand. But we knew already."
"What! What did you know already?"
We reply in a whisper:
"That your treasure is hidden under the cross on Grandfather's grave."
Grandmother is silent for a moment, then she says:
"I might have suspected as much. Have you known for a long time?"
"For a very long time, Grandmother. Ever since we saw you tending Grandfather's grave."
Grandmother breathes very heavily:
"There's no point in getting excited. Anyway, it's all yours. You're clever enough now to know what to do with it."
We say:
"For the moment, there's not much we can do with it."
Grandmother says:
"No. You're right. You must wait. Will you be able to wait?"
"Yes, Grandmother."
All three of us are silent for a moment, then Grandmother says:
"That isn't all. The next time I have an attack, I don't want any part of your bath, your rubber pants, or your diapers."
She gets up and rummages around on the shelf among her bottles. She comes back with a small blue flask:
"Instead of all your filthy medicines, you'll pour the contents of this flask into my first cup of milk."
We say nothing. She shouts:
"Do you understand, sons of a bitch?"
We say nothing. She says:
"Maybe you're afraid of the autopsy, you little brats? There won't be any autopsy. Nobody's going to make a fuss when an old woman dies after a second attack."
. We say:
"We aren't afraid of the autopsy, Grandmother. We just think that you may recover a second time."
"No. I won't recover. I know it. So we must put an end to it as soon as possible."
We say nothing, Grandmother starts to cry:
"You don't know what it's like to be paralyzed. To see everything, hear everything, and not be able to move. If you aren't even capable of doing this simple little thing for me, then you're ingrates, vipers I have nursed in my bosom."
We say:
"Don't cry, Grandmother. We'll do it; if you really want us to, we'll do it."
Our Father
When our Father arrives, the three of us are working in the kitchen because it's raining outside.
Father stops in front of the door, arms folded, legs apart. He asks:
"Where's my wife?" Grandmother sniggers:
"Well, well! So she really did have a husband." Father says:
"Yes, I'm your daughter's husband. And these are my sons."
He looks at us and adds:
"You really have grown up. But you haven't changed." Grandmother says:
"My daughter, your wife, entrusted the children to me." Father says:
"She'd have done better to entrust them to someone else. Where is she? I've been told she went abroad. Is that true?"
Grandmother says:
"That's old news, all that. Where have you been all this time?"
Father says:
"I've been a prisoner of war. And now I want to find my wife again. Don't try to hide anything from me, you old witch."
Grandmother says:
"I really appreciate your way of thanking me for what I've done for your children."
Father shouts:
"I don't give a damn! Where's my wife?"
Grandmother says:
"You don't give a damn? About your children and me? All right, I'll show you where your wife is!"
Grandmother goes out into the garden, and we follow her. With her stick, she points to the flower bed that we have planted over Mother's grave:
"There! That's where your wife is. In the ground."
Father asks:
"Dead? From what? When?"
Grandmother says:
"Dead. From a shell. A few days before the end of the war."
Father says:
"It's forbidden to bury people just anywhere."
Grandmother says:
"We buried her where she died. And that isn't just anywhere. It's my garden. It was also her garden when she was a little girl."
Father looks at the wet flowers and says:
"I want to see her."
Grandmother says:
"You shouldn't. The dead must not be disturbed."
Father says:
"In any case, she'll have to be buried in a cemetery. It's the law. Get me a spade."
Grandmother shrugs her shoulders:
"Get him a spade."
In the rain, we watch Father demolish our little flower garden, we watch him dig. He gets to the blankets, he pulls them away. A big skeleton is lying there, with a tiny skeleton pressed to its breast.
Father asks:
"What's that, that thing on her?"
We say:
"It's a baby. Our little sister."
Grandmother says:
"I did tell you to leave the dead in peace. Come and wash your hands in the kitchen."
Father doesn't answer. He stares at the skeletons. His face is wet with sweat, tears, and rain. He climbs laboriously out of the hole and walks off without turning around, his hands and clothes all muddy.
We ask Grandmother:
"What shall we do?"
She says:
"Fill the hole in again. What else can we do?"
We say:
"You go back into the warm, Grandmother. We'll take care of all this."
She goes in.
We carry the skeletons up to the attic in a blanket and spread the bones out on straw to dry. Then we go down and fill in the hole where nobody is lying anymore.
Later, we spend months smoothing and polishing the skull and bones of our Mother and the baby, then we carefully reassemble the skeletons by attaching each bone to thin pieces of wire. When our work is done, we hang Mother's skeleton from one of the attic beams with the baby's skeleton clinging to her neck.
Our Father Comes Back
We don't see our Father again until several years later.
In the meantime, Grandmother has had a new attack, and we have helped her die as she asked us to do. She is now buried in the same grave as Grandfather. Before they opened the grave, we recovered the treasure and hid it under the bench in front of our window, where the rifle, the cartridges, and the grenades still are.
Father arrives one evening and asks:
"Where's your Grandmother?"
"She's dead."
"You live alone? How do you manage?"
"Very well, Father."
He says:
"I've come here in hiding. You must help me."
We say: "We haven't heard from you in years."
He shows us his hands. He no longer has any fingernails. They have been torn out at the roots:
"I've just come out of prison. They tortured me."
"Why?"
"I don't know. For no particular reason. I'm a politically suspect person. I'm not allowed to practice my profession. I'm under constant surveillance. My apartment is searched regularly. It's impossible for me to live much longer in this country."
We say:
"You want to cross the frontier."
He says:
"Yes. You live here, you must know..
"Yes, we know. The frontier is impassable."
Father lowers his head, looks at his hands for a moment, then says:
"There must be a weak spot somewhere. There must be a way of getting through."
"At the risk of your life, yes."
"I'd rather die than stay here."
"You must make up your own mind when you know all the facts, Father."
He says:
"I'm listening."
We explain:
"The first problem is to get as far as the first barbed wire without meeting a patrol or being seen from one of the watch- towers. It can be done. We know the times of the patrols and the positions of the watchtowers. The fence is one and a half meters high and a meter wide. You need two boards. One to climb onto the fence, the other to put on top so that you can stand up on it. If you lose your balance, you fall into the wire and you can't get out."