Free Once in Europa by John Berger Page B

in a sickroom. I have a soft spot for you, and so I said to myself, this is a time when he needs his friends and I can help him out. Five million.
    You can have the horses for that.
    Corneille stood with his hand gagging the pile of money.
    If you take my offer, if you have no animals during the winter, my friend, you can sell your hay, you can repair the roof of your barn, and when the spring comes, you’ll have more than enough to buy a new flock. Five million.
    Take everything, said Boris. As you say, it’s going to be a long winter. Take everything and leave the money on the table. Six million.
    I don’t even know how many sheep I’m buying, muttered Corneille.
    On this earth, Corneille, we never know what we’re buying. Perhaps there’s another planet where all deals are straight. All I know is that here the earth is peopled by those whom God threw out as flawed.
    Five and a half, said Corneille.
    Six.
    Corneille lifted his hand from the pile and shook Boris’s hand.
    Six it is. Count it.
    Boris counted the notes.
    If you want a tip from a very old King Cole, Corneille spoke evenly and slowly, if you want a tip, don’t spend it all on her.
    For that you’ll have to wait and see, Corneille, just as I am going to do.
    There followed the correspondence between Boris and the blond. This consisted of two letters. The first, with the postmark of October 30th, was from him:
    My darling,
    I have the money for our fares to Canada. I am waiting
    for you—
    always your Boris.
    The second, dated November 1st, was from her:
    Dearest Humpback,
    In another life I might come—in this one forgive
    Marie-Jeanne.
    There were no longer any sheep to feed. The horses had gone from the snow-covered orchard. When the lorry had come to fetch them, there was half a bale of hay lying on the snow and Boris had thrown it into the lorry after his horses. On one small point Marc was right when he said that Boris died like one of his own beasts. Not having to feed his animals gave him the idea of not feeding himself.
    In the icy trough in the yard he hid a bottle of champagne, ready to serve cold. The water detached the label and after a week it floated to the surface. When the police opened the kitchen cupboard, they found a large jar of cherries in eau-de-vie with a ribbon round it, and a box of After Eight chocolates, open but untouched. Most curious of all, on the kitchen floor beneath the curtainless windows, they found a confectioner’s cardboard box with golden edges, and inside it were rose-pink sugared almonds such as are sometimes distributed to guests and friends after a baptism. On the floor too were blankets, dogshit and wet newspapers. But the dogs had not touched the sugared nuts.
    In the house during the unceasing period of waiting he did not listen to the sounds which came from outside. His hearing was as unimpaired as is mine now, registering the noise of my pen on the paper—a noise which resembles that of a mouse at night earnestly eating what its little pointed muzzle has discovered between its paws. His hearing was unimpaired, but his indifference wassuch that the crow of a neighbour’s cock, the sound of a car climbing the road from which one looks down onto the chimney of his house, the shouts of children, the drill of a chain-saw cutting in the forest beyond the river, the klaxon of the postman’s van—all these sounds became nameless, containing no message, emptier, far emptier than silence.
    If he was waiting and if he never lost for one moment, either awake or asleep, the image of what he was waiting for—the breast into which his face at last fitted—he no longer knew where it would come from. There was no path along which he could look. His heart was still under his left ribs, he still broke the bread into pieces for the dogs with his right hand, holding the loaf in his left, the sun in the late afternoon still went down behind the same mountain, but