The Notebook + The Proof + The Third Lie (30 page)

I'm not a criminal. I'm here because my papers are not in order; my visa has expired. I've also run into debt.

In the morning my guard brings me breakfast-milk, coffee, bread. I drink some coffee and then shower. My guard finishes my breakfast and cleans my cell. The door is left open; I can go out into the courtyard if I want. The courtyard is enclosed by high walls covered with ivy and wild vines. Behind one of these walls, the one to the left as you leave my cell, is a school playground. I hear the children laughing, playing, and shouting during recess. The school was there when I was a child, as I recall, although I never went. The prison was here, on the other hand, as I also recall because I went there once.

For one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening I walk around the courtyard, a habit I developed during my childhood, when at the age of five I had to learn how to walk again.

This annoys my guard, because while I'm doing it I don't speak a word and don't hear the questions he asks me.

I pace with my eyes to the ground, my hands behind my back, turning and following the line of the walls. The ground is paved, but grass grows in the gaps between the stones.

The courtyard is almost square. Fifteen paces long, thirteen paces wide. Supposing I take three-foot strides, the courtyard's area must be
195
square yards. But my stride is probably not that long.

In the middle of the courtyard is a round table with two garden chairs; against the back wall is a wooden bench.

It is by sitting on that bench that I am able to see the greatest amount of my childhood sky.

The bookseller came to visit me on the very first day, bringing my personal effects and some vegetable soup. She continues to show up every day around noon with soup. I tell her I'm well fed here, that my guard brings me a full meal twice a day from the restaurant across the street, but she keeps coming with her soup. I eat a little out of politeness and I pass the pot to my guard, who finishes it.

I apologize to the bookseller for the mess that I left in the apartment.

She says, "Don't mention it. My daughter and I have already cleaned everything up. Mostly there was a lot of paper. I burned every sheet that was crumpled or thrown in the wastebasket. I left the others on the table, but the police came and took them."

I remain silent for a moment and then say, "I still owe you two months' rent."

She laughs. "I asked you far too much for that little apartment. But if you mean it, you can pay me when you come back. Next year, maybe."

I say, "I don't think I'll be coming back. My embassy will pay."

She asks me if there is anything I want, and I say, "Yes, paper and pencils. But I have no money."

She says, "I should have thought of it myself."

I say to her, "Thank you. The embassy will reimburse you for everything."

She says, "You're always going on about money. I wish you'd talk about something else. What are you writing, for instance?"

"What I write is absolutely meaningless."

She insists. "What I want to know is whether you write things that are true or things that are made up."

I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can't—I don't have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened.

She says, "Yes. There are lives sadder than the saddest of books."

I say, "Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life."

After a silence she asks, "Your limp, is it from an accident?" "No, from an illness when I was very small."

She adds, "You can hardly even notice it."

I laugh.

I have things to write with again, but I haven't got anything to drink or any cigarettes either, aside from the two or three my guard offers me after dinner. I request an interview with the chief of police, who sees me immediately. His office is upstairs. I go. I sit down in a chair across from him. He has red hair and his face is covered with red spots. A game of chess is set up on the table in front of him. The policeman looks at the board, advances a pawn, jots the move down in a notebook, and raises his pale blue eyes.

"What do you want? The inquiry isn't over yet. It will be several weeks, a month, perhaps."

I say, "I'm not in any hurry. I'm very comfortable here. Except that I need one or two little things."

"Such as?"

'The embassy wouldn't mind if you added a bottle of wine and two packs of cigarettes a day to my prison tab."

He says, "It probably wouldn't. But that would be bad for your health."

I say, "Do you know what happens to alcoholics when they're forced to stop drinking?"

He says, "No, and I don't give a damn."

I say, 'There's a risk of delirium tremens. I could die at any moment."

"No kidding."

He turns his eyes back to the board. I tell him, "The black knight."

He keeps staring at the board. "Why? I don't understand."

I advance the knight. He notes it down in his book. He ponders for a long time, then picks up his rook.

"No."

He sets down the rook and looks at me. "You play? Well?"

"I don't know. It's been a long time. But at any rate I'm better than you."

He turns redder than his spots. "I only started three months ago. And without anyone to teach me. Could you give me a few lessons?"

I say, "Gladly. But don't get angry when I win."

He says, "I'm not interested in winning. What I want is to learn."

I stand up. "Bring your set whenever you want. Ideally in the morning. The mind then is sharper than it is in the afternoon or evening."

"Thank you," he says.

He looks at the board; I wait, then cough. "What about the wine and cigarettes?"

He says, "No problem. I'll give the orders. You'll have your cigarettes and wine."

I leave the policeman's office. I go back downstairs and into the courtyard. I sit on the bench. The autumn is very mild this year. The sun sets and the sky takes on colors—orange, yellow, violet, red, and others for which there are no names.

For around two hours almost every day I play chess with the policeman. The games are long; the policeman thinks a lot, notes everything down, and always loses.

Every afternoon, after the bookseller has put away her knitting and gone off to reopen her shop, I also play cards with my guard. The card games in this country are unlike anything anywhere else. Although they are simple and there is a large element of chance to them, I always lose. We play for money, and since I don't have any my guard writes my losses down in a ledger. After every game he laughs loudly and repeats, "I'm screwed! I'm screwed!"

He is a young newly wed and his wife is expecting a baby in a few months. He often says, "If it's a boy and you're still here, I'll forgive your debt."

He talks a lot about his wife, telling me how pretty she is, especially now that she has gained weight and her buttocks and breasts have almost doubled in size. He also tells me in detail about how they met, about their "going together," their lovers' walks in the forest, her resistance, his victory, and their quick marriage, which became urgent because of the baby on the way.

But what he talks about in even greater detail and with even more pleasure is last night's dinner—how his wife prepared it, with which ingredients in what way and for how long, because "the longer it simmers the better it is."

The policeman does not speak, does not relay anything. The only disclosure he has made is that he replays, by himself and based on his notes, all of our games—once during the afternoon in his office, once again at home that night. I asked him if he was married and he replied with a shrug, "Married? Me?"

The bookseller relays nothing either. She says she has nothing to say, that she has raised two children and that she has been a widow for six years, that's all. When she asks me questions about my life in the other country, I answer by saying I have even less to tell than she, since I have raised no children and have never had a wife.

One day she says to me, "We're about the same age."

I protest: 'I'd be surprised. You seem much, much younger than me."

She blushes. "Come on, I'm not fishing for compliments. What I meant was, if you grew up in this town we must probably have gone to the same school."

I say, "Yes, only me, I never went to school."

"That's impossible. School was mandatory even then."

"Not for me. I was mentally retarded at the time."

She says, "It's impossible to talk seriously with you. You're always joking."

I am seriously ill. I have known this for exactly one year today.

It began in the other country, in my adoptive country, one morning at the beginning of November. At five.

Outside it is still night. I am having trouble breathing. An intense pain keeps me from inhaling. The pain starts in my chest and spreads to my sides, back, shoulders, arms, throat, neck, jaws. As though a huge hand were trying to crush the upper part of my body.

Stretching out my arm slowly, switching on the bedside lamp.

Gingerly sitting up. Waiting. Rising. Getting to the desk, to the telephone. Sitting down on the chair. Calling for an ambulance. No! No ambulances. Waiting.

Going to the kitchen, making coffee. Not hurrying. Taking no deep breaths. Inhaling and exhaling slowly, softly, calmly.

After my coffee, showering, shaving, brushing my teeth. Returning to the bedroom, getting dressed. Waiting eight hours and then calling not an ambulance but a taxi and my regular doctor.

He sees me on an emergency basis. He listens to me, takes an X ray of my lungs, examines my heart, measures my blood pressure.

"Get dressed."

We are now face-to-face in his office.

"Do you still smoke? How much? Do you still drink? How much?"

I answer truthfully. I don't think I have ever lied to him. I know that he doesn't give a damn, neither about my health nor my illness.

He writes in my file and looks at me. "You're doing everything you can to kill yourself. That concerns only you. It has been ten years since I formally forbade you to smoke or drink. You keep on doing both. But if you want to live another few years, you have to stop immediately."

I ask, "What do I have?"

"Cardiac angina, probably. It was to be expected. But I'm no heart specialist."

He hands me a piece of paper. "I am referring you to a well-known cardiologist. Take this to his clinic for a more in-depth examination. The sooner the better. Meanwhile, take these in case of pain."

He hands me a prescription. I ask, "Will they operate on me?"

He says, "If there's still time."

"If there isn't?"

"You could have a heart attack at any moment."

I go to the nearest pharmacy and am given two vials of pills. One of them contains ordinary painkillers; on the other I read, '"Irinitrine. For cardiac angina. Active ingredient: Nitroglycerine."

I go home, take a pill from each vial, and lie down on my bed. The pain quickly disappears and I fall asleep.

I walk through the streets in the town of my childhood. It is a ghost town; the doors and windows of the houses are shut and the silence is complete.

I reach a wide older street lined by wooden houses and tumbledown barns. The ground is dusty and it feels good to walk barefoot through the dust.

There is, however, a strange tension in the air.

I turn around and see a puma at the other end of the street. A beautiful animal, khaki-colored and golden, whose silken fur shines under the burning sun.

Suddenly everything is on fire. The houses and barns burst into flames but I must continue down the burning street because the puma too has begun to walk and follows me at some distance, with majestic slowness.

Where to turn? There's no way out. It's either fire or teeth.

Maybe at the end of the street?

It has to end somewhere, this street, all of them do, flowing into a square, another street, fields, the open countryside, unless the street happens to be a dead end, which must be the case here and is.

I can feel the puma's breath very close behind me. I don't dare turn around but I can go no farther; my feet are rooted to the ground. I wait in horror for the puma to leap onto my back, ripping me from shoulders to thighs, clawing my head, my face.

But the puma passes me by; it walks on complacently and lies at the feet of a child at the end of the street, a child who wasn't there before but is now, and it strokes the puma lying at its feet.

The child says to me, "He isn't mean. He belongs to me. Don't be scared of him. He doesn't eat people, he doesn't eat meat. He just eats souls."