I am woken by a clatter of footsteps on the stairway. It is daylight: confused, thick-headed, I cower back in my den. Someone opens the kitchen door. From all corners chickens come scurrying. It is only a matter of time before I am discovered.
As boldly as I can, but wincing despite myself, I mount the stairs. How must I look to the world with my dingy shirt and trousers, my bare feet, my unkempt beard? Like a domestic, I pray, an ostler come home after a night's carousing.
The passageway is empty, the door to the girl's room open. The room is neat and tidy as ever: the fleecy skin on the floor beside the bed, the red chequered curtain drawn over the window, the kist pushed against the far wall with a rack of clothes above it. I bury my face in the fragrance of her clothes and think of the little boy who brought my food, of how when my hand rested on his shoulder I would feel the healing power of the touch run through a body grown stiff with unnatural solitude.
The bed is made up. When I slip my hand between the sheets I imagine I can feel the faint afterglow of her warmth. Nothing would please me more than to curl up in her bed, lay my head on her pillow, forget my aches and pains, ignore the hunt that must by now have been launched for me, and like the little girl in the story tumble into oblivion. How voluptuously I feel the attraction of the soft, the warm, the odorous this morning! With a sigh I kneel and coax my body in under the bed. Face down, pressed so tightly between the floor and the slats of the bed that when I move my shoulders the bed lifts, I try to compose myself for a day in hiding.
I doze and wake, drifting from one formless dream to another. By mid-morning it has become too hot to sleep. As long as I can, I lie sweating in my close dusty retreat. Then, though I postpone it, the time comes when I have to relieve myself. Groaning I inch my way out and squat over the chamberpot. Again the pain, the tearing. I dab myself with a filched white handkerchief, which comes away bloody. The room stinks: even I, who have been living for weeks with a slop pail in the corner, am disgusted. I open the door and hobble down the passageway. The balcony looks over rows of roofs, then beyond them over the south wall and the desert stretching into the blue distance. There is no one to be seen except a woman on the other side of the alleyway sweeping her step. A child crawls on hands and knees behind her pushing something in the dust, I cannot see what. Its neat little bottom points up in the air. As the woman turns her back I step out of the shadows and hurl the contents of the pot out on to the refuse-heap below. She notices nothing.
À torpor is already beginning to settle over the town. The morning's work is over: anticipating the heat of midday, people are retiring to their shaded courtyards or to the cool green of inner rooms. The babble of water in the street-furrows dies down and stops. All I can hear is the clink of the farrier's hammer, the cooing of turtledoves, and somewhere far away the wail of a baby.
Sighing I lay myself down on the bed in the sweet remembered scent of flowers. How inviting to join the rest of the town in its siesta! These days, these hot spring days already becoming summer-how easy I find it to slip into their languorous mood! How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles? It takes no effort to believe that when the shadows begin to lengthen and the first breath of wind stirs the leaves, I will wake up and yawn and dress and descend the stairs and cross the square to my office, nodding to the friends and neighbours I pass, that I will spend an hour or two there, tidy my desk, lock up, that everything will go on being as it has always been. I must actually shake my head and blink my eyes to realize that as I lie here I am a hunted man, that in the course of their duty soldiers are going to come here and haul me away and lock me up again out of the sight of the sky and of other human beings. "Why?" I groan into the pillow: "Why me?" Never has there been anyone so confused and innocent of the world as I. A veritable baby! Yet if they can they will shut me away to moulder, subject my body to their intermittent vile attentions, then one day without warning fetch me out and rush me through one of the closed trials they conduct under the emergency powers, with the stiff little colonel presiding and his henchman reading the charges and two junior officers as assessors to lend the proceedings an air of legality in an otherwise empty courtroom; and then, particularly if they have suffered reverses, particularly if the barbarians have humiliated them, they will find me guilty of treason-need I doubt that? From the courtroom to the executioner they will drag me kicking and weeping, bewildered as the day I was born, clinging to the end to the faith that no harm can come to the guiltless. "You are living in a dream!" I say to myself: I pronounce the words aloud, stare at them, try to grasp their significance: "You must wake up!" Deliberately I bring to mind images of innocents I have known: the boy lying naked in the lamplight with his hands pressed to his groins, the barbarian prisoners squatting in the dust, shading their eyes, waiting for whatever is to come next. Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.
There is a flurry of voices, men's and women's, from the yard below. As I scuttle into my hiding-place I hear the tramp of footsteps on the stairs. They recede to the far end of the balcony, then come slowly back, pausing at each door. The walls separating the cubicles on this upper floor where the servants sleep and where a soldier of the garrison can buy a night's privacy are mere slats papered over: I can hear clearly as my hunter throws open each door in turn. I press myself against the wall. I hope he does not smell me.
The footsteps round the corner and come down the passage. My door is opened, held open for a few seconds, closed again. So I have passed one test.
There is a quicker, lighter tread: someone runs down the passage and enters the room. My head is turned the wrong way, I cannot even see her feet, but I know it is the girl. This is the moment at which I ought to come into the open, beg her to hide me till night falls and I can find my way out of the town and down to the lakeside. But how can I do it? By the time the bed has stopped heaving and I have emerged she will have fled screaming for help. And who is to say that she would offer refuge to one of the many men who have spent time in this room, one of many passing men from whom she earns a livelihood, a man in disgrace, a fugitive? Would she even recognize me as I am? Her feet flutter about the room, stopping here, stopping there. I can make out no pattern in their movements. I lie still, breathing softly, sweat dripping off me. All at once she is gone: the stairs creak, there is silence.
A lull falls over me too, a spell of lucidity in which I see how ridiculous it is, all this running and hiding, what a silly thing it is to be lying under a bed on a hot afternoon waiting for a chance to sneak away to the reed-brakes, there to live no doubt on birds' eggs and fish that I catch with my hands, sleeping in a hole in the earth, biding my time till this phase of history grinds past and the frontier returns to its old somnolence. The truth is that I am not myself, I have been terror-stricken, I perceive, since the moment in my cell when I saw the guard's fingers clamp over the shoulder of the little boy to remind him not to speak to me, and knew that, whatever it was that had happened that day, I was to bear the blame for it. I walked into that cell a sane man sure of the Tightness of my cause, however incompetent I continue to find myself to describe what that cause may be; but after two months among the cockroaches with nothing to see but four walls and an enigmatic soot-mark, nothing to smell but the stench of my own body, no one to talk to but a ghost in a dream whose lips seem to be sealed, I am much less sure of myself. The craving to touch and be touched by another human body sometimes comes over me with such force that I groan; how I looked forward to the single brief contact which was all I could have with the boy, morning and evening! To lie in a woman's arms in a proper bed, to have good food to eat, to walk in the sun-how much more important these seem than the right to decide without advice from the police who should be my friends and who my enemies! How can I be in the right when there is not a soul in the town who approves of my escapade with the barbarian girl or who would not feel bitter against me if young men from here were killed by my barbarian protégés? And what is the point of suffering at the hands of the men in blue if I am not iron-hard in my certainty? No matter if I told my interrogators the truth, recounted every word I uttered on my visit to the barbarians, no matter even if they were tempted to believe me, they would press on with their grim business, for it is an article of faith with them that the last truth is told only in the last extremity. I am running away from pain and death. I have no plan of escape. Hiding away in the reeds I would starve within a week, or be smoked out. I am simply seeking ease, if the truth be told, fleeing to the only soft bed and friendly arms I have left to me.