The Notebook + The Proof + The Third Lie (23 page)

The child tells him his nightmares, always the same ones, which recur regularly to haunt his nights.

One of these dreams is the river dream. The child, lying on the surface of the water, lets himself be carried off by the stream while watching the stars. The child is happy, but slowly something approaches, something frightening, and suddenly that thing, the child doesn't know what it is, explodes and screams and howls and blinds.

Another dream is the dream of the tiger lying next to the child's bed. The tiger appears to be asleep; it seems soft and gentle, and the child has a great desire to stroke it. The child is afraid, but his desire to stroke the tiger grows and the child can no longer resist this desire. His fingers touch the tiger's silky fur, and the tiger, with a swipe of its paw, rips his arm off.

Another dream is the dream of the desert island. The child is there playing with his wheelbarrow. He fills it with sand, transports the sand somewhere else, empties it again, and so on, for a long time. Then suddenly it is dark, it is cold, there is no one, anywhere, only the stars shine in their infinite solitude.

Another dream. The child wants to go back to Grandmother's house. He walks in the streets, but he does not know the streets in the town. He gets lost, the streets are deserted, the house is no longer where it should be, nothing is in the right place, Yasmine is calling for him, she is crying, but the child does not know which street, which alley to take in order to find her.

The most terrible dream is the dream of the dead tree, the black tree in the garden. The child is looking at the tree and the tree stretches out its bare branches toward the child. The tree says, "I am nothing but a dead tree, but I love you just as much as I did when I was alive." The tree speaks with Yasmine's voice, the child approaches, and the blackened, dead branches embrace him and strangle him.

Lucas chops down the dead tree, he saws it up and makes a bonfire in the garden.

When the fire goes out, the child says, "Now it is nothing but a pile of ashes."

He goes to his room. Lucas uncorks a bottle of brandy. He drinks. He is overcome with nausea. He goes back into the garden and he throws up. A plume of white smoke still rises from the black ashes, but then large raindrops begin to fall, and the shower finishes off the work of the fire.

Later, the child finds Lucas in the wet grass, in the mud. He shakes him.

"Get up, Lucas. You have to come in. It's raining. It's dark. It's cold. Can you walk?"

Lucas says, "Leave me here. Go inside. Tomorrow everything will be all right."

The child sits down next to Lucas; he waits.

The sun rises. Lucas opens his eyes.

"What happened, Mathias?"

The child says, "It's just a new nightmare."

5

The insomniac continues to appear at his window every evening at ten o'clock. The child is already in bed. Lucas leaves the house. The insomniac asks him the time, Lucas tells him. Then he goes to Clara's house. At dawn, when he comes home, the insomniac asks him the time again; Lucas tells him and goes to bed. A few hours later the light goes out in the insomniac's room and the pigeons take over his windowsill.

One morning, when Lucas comes home, the insomniac calls out, "Excuse me!"

Lucas says, "It is five o'clock."

"I know. I'm not interested in the time. It's just my way of starting a conversation with people. I just wanted to tell you that the child was very restless last night. He woke up about two o'clock, he went into your bedroom several times, he spent ages looking out the window. He even went out into the street, down to the bar, then he came back and went to bed, I suppose."

"Does he do that often?"

"He often wakes up, yes. Nearly every night. But it's the first time I've seen him leave the house during the night."

"Even during the day he never leaves the house."

"I think he was looking for you."

Lucas goes up to the apartment. The child is sleeping soundly in his bed. Lucas looks out the window. The insomniac asks, "Everything in order?"

"Yes. He's asleep. What about you? Do you never sleep?"

"I doze off now and again, but I never really sleep. I haven't slept for eight years."

"What do you do during the day?"

"I go for walks. When I feel tired I go and sit in a park. I spend most of my time in parks. It's there that I sometimes doze off for a few minutes, sitting on a bench. Would you like to come with me sometime?"

Lucas says, "Now, if you like."

"Fine. I'll feed my pigeons and come right down."

They walk down the deserted streets of the sleeping town toward Grandmother's house. The insomniac stops by a few square meters of yellow grass with two old trees spreading out their bare branches.

"Here's my park. The only place I can manage a moment's sleep."

The old man sits on the solitary bench next to a dried-up fountain covered in moss and mildew.

Lucas says, "There are nicer parks in town."

"Not for me."

He lifts his walking stick and points to large, beautiful house. "We used to live there, my wife and I."

"Is she dead?"

"She was killed by several shots from a revolver three years after the end of the war. One evening at ten o'clock."

Lucas sits down next to the old man.

"I remember her. We used to live by the border. When we came home from town we used to stop here to have a drink of water and rest. When your wife saw us from her window she would come down and bring us large lumps of potato sugar. I've never eaten it since. I remember her smile and her accent, and also her murder. The whole town talked about it."

"What did they say?"

"They said she was killed so they could nationalize the three textile factories that belonged to her."

The old man says, "She inherited those factories from her father. I worked there as an engineer. I married her and she stayed here. She loved this town very much. But she retained her nationality, and they were forced to kill her. It was the only solution. They killed her in our bedroom. I heard the gunshots from the bathroom. The assassin got in and out by the balcony. She was shot in the head, the chest, and the stomach. The inquiry concluded that it was an embittered employee who did it for revenge and then fled across the border."

Lucas says, "The border was already sealed, even then, and a worker wouldn't have owned a revolver."

The insomniac closes his eyes; he is silent.

Lucas asks, "Do you know who is living in your house now?"

"It's full of children. Our house has been turned into an orphanage. But you must get back, Lucas. Mathias will soon be waking up and you must open the bookshop."

"You're right. It's already half past seven."

***

Sometimes Lucas goes back to the park to chat with the insomniac. The old man talks about the past, about the happy times with his wife.

"She was always laughing. She was happy, carefree as a child. She loved the fruits, the flowers, the stars, the clouds. At sunset she would go out onto the balcony to look at the sky. She claimed that nowhere else in the world were sunsets as wonderful as in this town, were the colors in the sky so brilliant and beautiful."

The man closes his bloodshot eyes, heavy with sleeplessness. He continues in a different tone of voice, "After her murder, the authorities requisitioned the house and everything in it: all my wife's furniture, crockery, books, jewelry, clothes. All they let me take away was a suitcase with a few clothes. They told me I should leave town. I lost my job at the factory. I had no work, no house, and no money.

"I went to see a friend, a doctor, the same one I telephoned the night of the murder. He gave me some money for a train ticket. He said, 'Never come back to this town. It's a wonder they let you live.'

"I took the train, I arrived in the next town. I sat down in the waiting room in the station. I still had enough money to go farther, maybe even to the capital. But there was nothing for me to do in the capital, or in any other town. I bought a ticket at the booking office and came back here. I knocked at the door of a small house opposite the bookshop. I knew all the workers in our factories. I knew the woman who opened the door. She didn't ask any questions. She told me to come in, she led me to a room. 'You can stay here as long as you like, sir.'

"She is an old woman, she lost her husband, her two sons, and her daughter during the war. Her daughter was only seventeen.

She died at the front, where she had signed up as a nurse after being disfigured in a horrible accident. My landlady never speaks about it, and in fact she hardly speaks at all anymore. She leaves me alone in my room, which looks out onto the street. She herself lives in a smaller room which looks out onto the garden. The kitchen is also in back. I can use it when I want, and there is always something hot on the stove. Every morning I find my shoes polished, my shirts washed and ironed, lying over the back of a chair in the corridor outside my door. My landlady never comes into my room, and I see her rarely. We don't keep the same hours. I don't know what she lives on. On her war widow's pension and her garden, I suppose.

"A few months after I moved in I went to the council office to look for any sort of work. The officials sent me from one office to another. They were afraid to make a decision about me, I was an object of suspicion because of my marriage to a foreigner. Finally, it was the Party Secretary, Peter, who took me on as a handyman. I was a caretaker, a window cleaner, a sweeper of dust, dead leaves, and snow. Thanks to Peter I am now entitled to a retirement pension like everyone else. I didn't have to beg, and I can end my days in the town where I was born and where I have spent my whole life.

"I left my first wages on the kitchen table. It was a paltry amount, but to my landlady it was a lot of money, too much, according to her. She left half of it on the table, and we went on like that: I leave my small pension next to her plate every month; she leaves exactly half of it next to mine."

A woman wrapped in a large shawl comes out of the orphanage. She is thin and pale; her huge eyes shine in her bony face. She stops in front of the bench, looks at Lucas, smiles, and says to the old man, "I see you've found yourself a friend."

"Yes, a friend. This is Lucas, Judith. He runs the bookshop in the main square. Judith is in charge of the orphanage."

Lucas gets up. Judith shakes his hand.

"I should buy some books for the children, but I'm overwhelmed with work and my budget is very tight."

Lucas says, "I can send some books around with Mathias. How old are your children?"

"Between five and ten. Who is Mathias?"

The old man says, "Lucas is looking after an orphan."

Lucas says, "Mathias isn't an orphan. His mother has gone away. He's mine now."

Judith smiles. "My children aren't all orphans either. Mostly their fathers are unknown and they have been abandoned by their mothers, who are rape victims or prostitutes."

She sits down next to the old man, rests her head on his shoulder, closes her eyes.

"We'll need the heating soon, Michael. If the weather doesn't change we'll start the stoves on Monday."

The old man holds her close to him.

"Fine, Judith. I'll be there at five o'clock on Monday morning Lucas looks at the woman and the man, holding each other tight, their eyes closed, in the damp cold of an autumn morning, in the complete silence of a forgotten little town. He starts to tiptoe away, but Judith shivers, opens her eyes, gets up.

"Stay, Lucas. The children will be waking up. I have to make their breakfast." She kisses the old man on the forehead.

"Until Monday, Michael. See you, Lucas, and thanks in advance for the books."

She goes back to the house. Lucas sits down again.

"She is very beautiful."

"Very beautiful, yes." The insomniac laughs. "At first, she was suspicious of me. She saw me here every day, sitting on this bench. Maybe she took me for a pervert. One day she came and sat next to me and asked me what I was doing here. I told her everything. It was at the beginning of last winter. She asked me to help her with the heating in the rooms, she couldn't manage it alone, she only has a sixteen-year-old to help in the kitchen. There's no central heating in the building, just stoves in each room, seven of them. If you only knew what joy I felt to be able to go back into our house, our rooms! And also to be able to help Judith. She's had her trials. Her husband disappeared during the war, she herself was deported, she's been to hell and back. I mean that literally. There was a real fire behind those doors, lit by human beings to burn the bodies of other human beings."

Lucas says, "I know what you're talking about. I saw things like that with my own eyes, right here in this town."

"You must have been very young."

"I was no more than a child. But I forgot nothing."

"You will forget. Life is like that. Everything goes in time. Memories blur, pain diminishes. I remember my wife as one remembers a bird or a flower. She was the miracle of life in a world where everything seemed light, easy, and beautiful. At first I came here for her, now I come for Judith, the survivor. This might seem ridiculous to you, Lucas, but I'm in love with Judith. With her strength, her goodness, her kindness toward these children who aren't hers."

Lucas says, "I don't think it's ridiculous."

"At my age?"

"Age is irrelevant. The essential things matter. You love her and she loves you as well."

"She's waiting for her husband to return."

"Many women are waiting for or mourning their husbands who are disappeared or dead. But you just said, 'Pain diminishes, memories blur.' "

The insomniac raises his eyes to Lucas.

"Diminish, blur, I said, not disappear."

That same morning, Lucas picks out some children's books. He puts them in a box and says to Mathias, "Can you take these books to the orphanage next to the park on the way to Grandmother's house? It's a big house with a balcony, there's a fountain in front."