Fuka walks unsteadily back home along an empty street. He notices a drunken woman sprawled on the pavement opposite. Her handbag is in her lap and she is wearing a kerchief. She's probably from the country.
'I just couldn't make it,' he says to Alina when he returns, 'I had the air tickets, but there was an earthquake. You must have read about it.'
'I know,' she replies without looking at him. 'But I was desperate to have you back. When you didn't come, something happened, something inside me.' She'd lost some weight after the occurrence. She was wearing a yellow kerchief and not a hair on her head was visible. She must have had it cut.
He takes out snapshots showing half-demolished houses, the ruins of a bridge, crushed cars, uprooted trees, sunken pavements, cracked walls and cracked earth and even dead bodies arranged in a row beside a pile of rubble. 'It was spooky,' he says. 'I've never experienced anything like it. You don't really know what's going on. If
you could hear an explosion or something — but there was only the sound of things cracking and then shouts and then a moment of silence and then the cracking sounds again, and everything's trembling and you still don't know what's going on. I ran out into the street and at that moment the first building collapsed. . '
She shakes her head, not wanting to hear any more. 'I'm not accusing you of anything,' she says. 'Something happened, and I don't love you any more. It might have happened even if you'd come back. You're different from how I imagined you, from the person I'd like to live with.'
He wants her to tell him how he is different, but she suddenly begins a strange fit of trembling and begs him to leave her alone, never to call her, never again, to forget all about her.
He is dumbstruck, but he manages to nod. He wants to kiss her one more time. He takes her head in his hands and kisses her cold lips. He smells the perfume of her breath, but she does not reciprocate the kiss and tries to wriggle free of his grip. As she does so, the kerchief slips off her head, and he's stunned to see that she has lost not only the child, but her hair as well.
Fuka pulls his camera out of its case, and he even manages to change its lens and photograph the drunken woman, who may or may not have hair but almost certainly has no home to go back to.
What is a home?
A home is something we carry inside us. Those who do not have a home inside them cannot build one, either from defiance or from stone.
II
He finishes his breakfast. Since his wife died he has breakfasted alone. Alone in spacious dining-rooms, at enormous tables spread with bright white tablecloths, served with generous portions of food he hardly touches, for in the mornings he suffers from a feeling of fullness. But he must
take a few mouthfuls to help him swallow all the pills his doctors have condemned him to take. The nurse, or his faithful maid, always lays them out on a tray beside his glass of milk. They wait until he's put each pill into his mouth and swallowed it. Only then do they wish him a pleasant meal and withdraw. Sometimes he manages to hide some of the pills under his tongue or to shift them into the space between his teeth and his lips and then, when he is alone, he spits them into his glass of milk. But how can he know which of the pills is beneficial and which contains the slow-acting poison they are feeding him to ease him gently out of this world? How can he, when he doesn't even know which of his doctors is real and which merely one of his many executioners in disguise?
He slides his chair back from the table, gets up and walks across the soft carpet to the window. The harsh noonday sun is pouring into the garden. Two men are running a coloured bundle of cloth up a pole. He waits by the window until the bundle reaches the top, breaks open, and fills with wind. He's certain that he's never laid eyes on that kind of flag before. Two goats, or perhaps they're antelopes — at that distance it's hard to tell — face each other on a green-and-white field.
That's the sort who come to visit him. They embroider their flags with goats, elephants or monkeys and they expect him to embrace them, smile at them and be photographed with them. He should look at the map to see exactly where this president of goats comes from.
Sometimes these potentates bring him acceptable presents: lion skins, an interesting weapon, a dagger with an ivory handle or a rifle with a finely carved butt. When his wife was still alive, they would bring her magnificent fabrics, embroideries, ostrich-feather fans, shawls that she could wrap around her whole body, hairpins set with precious stones. Those who were better briefed would bring shoes or handbags made of snakeskin.
He feels like taking a look at some of those old gifts. He leaves the room and walks down an inner staircase to a hall, where he waves away a valet and goes into a room with a high, panelled ceiling and wood-panelled walls.
This is where he keeps both the gifts he likes and those he doesn't care about, gifts whose worth he cannot even guess at and gifts whose value, if any, is symbolic.
Here are glass cases crammed with marble ashtrays, boxes with mounted butterflies, busts of himself, folk carvings from the Cameroon, peasant costumes, a leather saddle from Mongolia, a grandfather clock, crystal goblets, cut-glass chalices, Chinese vases, Japanese plates and also some models: miniature machines and motors, automobiles, rockets, aircraft, spaceships, models of his residence, of factories and blast furnaces, dams and television towers, models of weapons, and, of course, real weapons as well, hunting guns both antique and modern. He stands for a while in this odd junk shop, his very own flea market. He opens one of the cases and takes out a bronze plaque and a diploma bearing an enormous seal. He stares at it for a while, ignoring the obsequious citation in which his vassals, all men of letters at a famous university, award him an honorary doctorate. Then he returns the piece of wrought metal to its bed of velvet. He leaves via the rear doors set almost invisibly in the panelled walls. He walks along a narrow corridor until he comes to a side staircase. He goes down the stairs to another room, in which the windows are covered with ornamental grilles, and the ceiling is vaulted like that of a wine cellar.
This is his room. The walls are white and bare, with no pictures or decorations, only shelves that hold his special collection of strongboxes arranged in rows. These are treasure chests, but they are empty. No coffers could contain his wealth; the entire country belongs to him. Their only value for him is that they can be opened and closed again, that he can admire and investigate their complex, precise mechanisms. Sometimes he pretends to himself that he's lost the key to one of those apparently foolproof boxes, and he has to try to break into it using the methods he was taught by the safe-cracker he shared a cell with when they were both in the hands of the executioners. Not with a blowtorch, in that barbarian way they do it in gangster films, but with fine wires and files.
Of course he collects locks as well. Brand-new locks;
locks with rusty works and complicated systems of levers that operate huge bolts; modern locks in which miniature springs trip small steel-tongues with teeth, and gears that mesh to create apparently solid elements; locks that can be opened with keys, or by setting the right combination of numbers on a dial, or by slipping a card with a magnetic band or a pattern of punched holes into a narrow slit on the face of the mechanism; locking devices that can only be activated by using the right five keys. There are combination locks in which a key can only be inserted after the proper combination is dialled, locks which trigger sirens the moment the wrong key is slipped into them. All these devices thrill him and allow him to forget his ceaseless flow of worries.
Sometimes, when he has the time to linger, he isolates himself completely from the world that surrounds him. He sits down on a round stool. In front of him, on a workbench, are boxes with labels in foreign languages, new and as yet unwrapped packages sent to him by faithful embassy employees. They understand next to nothing, of course, and they usually spend large sums of money buying out the first junk shop they come to — or sometimes they even buy them in a department store.