Too silly. But… His look as she was getting off the ferry. Offended?
Oh, men, they’re always sulking about something or other, at least that was what her schoolfriends said.
What if…
She would go and look for him and ask him. She would come up with an excuse for going to the other side of the island in spite of her uncle’s strange behaviour. She would ask somebody else for directions, they could not all be strange.
She went back to the path leading towards the village. Only a few houses still had lights on, the others were lit only by the moon. For a moment, she thought she could see something moving among the first trees on the slope but when she looked closer she could not see anything.
Max shouted:
“Alfonz, Serious Alfonz! Go and get the drink! We’re running out of everything.”
Alfonz got up obediently, took the torch from his rucksack lying next to the wall and left the dining room. The cassette player was screeching its tune, Samo was staring at the bottle in his hand thinking, and Raf was wondering why he had come in the first place. He had known exactly how it would all look and he was not wrong. Why did we do predictable things? Because that was when any unforeseen event turned out to be really exciting?
Oh balls, he said and reached for the bottle.
Alfonz went into the cellar and remembered the fear which had attacked him when he first went in. He stepped very carefully onto the fourth step but there was just a very faint repetition of what had happened earlier — it was not like an attack this time, it just seemed as if he had gone through a broken shell. Whatever it was, the danger had passed. He continued his descent and three vivid images appeared simultaneously. They were so real that it seemed as if he was actually there that very moment. Alone in the middle of the pine forest. In church just as the altar boy waves the censer. By the village road onto which the workers had just spread the hot asphalt, getting it ready for the roller. He stood in the middle of the stairs, manically shining the torch all around him. Everything looked just like it did at his first visit. But…
The smell.
The cellar was filled with a smell which evoked all three memories at the same time. Alfonz tried to find its source but could not see anything unusual. Could it be that that was how the woods surrounding the house smelt in a summer night? Was that possible? Could so many scents come through the few gaps in the wooden planks on the windows?
He directed the light onto the ceiling and immediately moved it away again. The drops were gleaming, all in their usual position — they could not have been the source of the smell.
What was happening to him? That sadness! He had to carry out the task he had been given.
He went over to the crate of beer and took out four bottles. He was struggling with them and the torch which was throwing its light haphazardly through the darkness.
In the end, he put each bottle into a separate pocket. His trousers really were not much to look at, but they had deep pockets. Under one of the regular pockets there was another, hidden one that he had sewn in himself, pricking himself with the needle quite a few times in the process.
He went over to get a bottle of brandy when he noticed that the row of bottles along the wooden box with the amber was not undisturbed. Two bottles were lying on the floor, luckily unbroken. He put the torch closer to examine the rubber bottle-top covers and saw that out of one of them a few drops had escaped, leaving a centimetre-wide trail in the dust.
They could not have fallen long ago. But why? The floor was made of stone and he had made sure to put all the bottles onto a smooth and even surface. He had also checked each bottle to see if it stood firmly enough.
He picked them up and felt something irregular under his fingers. He shone the torch onto the drops which had stuck to the glass. Amber? There were drops all over the floor too and they were all still warm. Quite a bit warmer than the wooden crate…
The crate?
He lifted the torch and directed it into the crate. The lid was still leaning against the wall, just as he had left it.
“Oooooh,” he sighed, with his eyes wide open. Quietly, just to himself; his escaping breath making a noise without any effort by his body.
He had found the source of the smell. Heavy, dense, sleep-inducing vapours were coming from the crate. There was a warm glow above the surface and it looked as if the stuff had melted earlier and was now cooling again into its former firmer state.
But the surface lay about a third lower then before.
He reached with his hand: it was too hot to touch. He would have burned himself.
It seemed to him that the light was getting through the amber more evenly as if the thing in the middle was no longer there. The whole of the surface was light yellow, probably because of the higher temperature.
How? From what?
Alfonz got up, shining the torch along the side of the crate. The two overturned bottles had stood by the bottom third of the box and that was where most of the drops were too. The bottles had fallen away from the box as if somebody had pushed them and the ribbons of amber were pointing in the same direction. He shone the light on the floor around his shoes. Among his own footsteps there were some smaller ones, which he had managed to almost completely destroy by trampling all over them. They pointed in the same direction as the bottles and the amber.
To behind his back.
The footsteps suggested a stupid scenario: Alfonz was looking at a bed out of which somebody had just got up and the first move of his feet had knocked the bottles over.
A feeling tickled on his neck and then spread towards his cheeks.
He was not alone.
A crazy idea. How many times had he waded through the snow and the woods… The familiar woods, said a voice inside him, the woods near your home. He knew everybody there and everybody knew him. But here he was a stranger.
And he was not alone.
I’m alone, said Alfonz but the feeling would not disappear.
I’ll turn around and shine the torch. And I’ll be alone.
Alone.
Alone.
He turned and shone.
He was not alone.
4
Ana returned quietly. She did not know what to expect.
She thanked God — there was nothing unusual. The only light which was still on was the one above the table and all the kitchen corners were in semi-darkness, which her eyes were still able to penetrate. There was nobody in the kitchen. She could not see the moon through the window, just its image on the sea.
She noticed a folded piece of paper on the table and immediately thought it had to be a message. It was. Not just one but two. The first sheet of paper was folded so that it had writing on the outside and the message started with her name.
ANA!
IF I’M NOT BACK BEFORE TWO IN THE MORNING GO TO THE VILLAGE, FIRST HOUSE NEXT TO THE BAR. WAKE LUKA. GIVE HIM THE OTHER MESSAGE ON THE TABLE.
YOUR UNCLE LOVES YOU.
ACO
Capital letters and pencil? The effort which he must have put into the writing was almost palpable. Why did he underline “two in the morning” so much?
She looked at the other sheet of paper, folded inwards, with the traces of the writing visible on the other side as a result of too much pressure on the pencil. There were even a few places where it had perforated the paper. The sheet was not sealed in any way, just one move and she could open…
…somebody else’s letter.
And become just like her mother. Ana never got any letters, only post which it seemed right her mother opened and read first: junk mail, advertising brochures, subscription invoices for various children’s magazines and such like. Once — with her schoolfriends — she gave in to what was then a fashionable thing to do and wrote to a girl who was looking for a pen-pal and whose address she got from a magazine. She soon got a reply. It had been opened and read.