A Friend in the Dark

When Haisam asked me, on the first morning back at school after the Christmas holidays, why I had a big bandage around my hand, I was tempted to tell him everything – the whole truth – and to ask his advice about helping Marie. But in the end I just told him I’d trapped my hand in the bonnet of the Panhard. He gave me an odd look, as though to say: why are you lying to me, since you know there’s no point? He was playing chess with his father and every now and then they would toss out bizarre terms that still meant absolutely nothing to me: the East Indian Defence, the Nimzo-Indian Defence, the Rubinstein Attack, the Sämisch Variation, the Spielmann Variation, the Sicilian Defence. For the first time, I was beginning to hate the game: it seemed as complicated and nerve-racking as the world itself. School was also beginning to feel like a big chessboard full of traps, which Marie and I would have to struggle across, just as we’d struggled to get through the maze at the fair. For the last few days I’d had a knot in my stomach and it had been getting tighter as the end of the holidays approached. As for Haisam, his father had given him a book of theory for Christmas, all about the “hypermodern revolution in chess”. But I think my anxiety about Marie meant that I no longer admired his freakish intelligence quite so much.

The game finished and we began to munch Turkish delight. Haisam’s father started telling us about Istanbul, the city of his birth, and its attractions: the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus, the Galata Bridge and all that stuff. It wasn’t really the best time to be reminiscing, because all the kids were pouring into school, although that didn’t seem to bother him much. In general I was a bit wary of putting questions to my noble Egyptian’s Turkish father, but on that day I did ask him whether he ever felt like going back to his roots.

“Turkey isn’t Turkey any more… It’s a shadow of its former self. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is! There’s nothing to be done but dream about its glorious history…”

I could see that he was feeling melancholic about his ancestral lands and I too began to daydream, lulled by all those strange names he kept mentioning: Istanbul … Kassim Pasha … the Galata Bridge … the famous Princes’ Islands, where he’d lived as a child and which he was clearly trying to recreate in his lodge, on a smaller scale.

I looked out for Marie, feeling desperately anxious. I bumped into Marcel and Etienne, who were on their way to a different class. I’d honestly thought that they would be in a strop with me for ever and would never speak to me again, but in fact they just asked me how my hand was. The cancellation of the concert hadn’t bothered them too much, because around that time their father had tried to strangle their mother with a string from Etienne’s bass guitar and in self-defence their mother had broken Marcel’s drumsticks over her husband’s head. It was all-out war, and the atmosphere was post-nuclear.

In class, I noticed that the maths teacher was looking really pretty, with a bow in her hair, which showed she was taking a new interest in her personal appearance. She still limped, but you didn’t notice it so much because her face was nicer to look at. Marie wasn’t there, and the worst possible thoughts went through my mind. Perhaps they’d already put her, against her will, in the special college for the blind.

The teacher wished us a happy new year, and said she hoped that it would bring us everything we wanted. For the first time ever, those words actually meant something specific to me. Marie still hadn’t arrived and I was getting seriously worried. We made a start on an exercise. It was a right pain in the backside:

I couldn’t get my head around it. I will always wonder why mathematicians are so obsessed with multiplying out if they then want to go straight ahead and simplify. I mean, get real.

We all had our heads down, when there was a knock on the door and Marie came in. And yes, I could see straight away that something had changed. She apologized for being late and took three careful steps to the teacher’s desk to hand in a late note, planting her feet flat on the floor, a bit like an astronaut. She looked as though she was staring, but I knew that her eyes were empty. Watching her feet, I could see that she was concentrating on taking very regular steps. She sat down calmly and got her things out in the normal way, except there was nothing normal about it. I didn’t know what to say to her and her composure put the wind up me – a radioactive wind, that’s what I thought at the time. While the others were slogging away, she whispered to me, “Quick, tell me what we’re supposed to do.”

“Multiply out and simplify: A = 3 (x + 1) + (x + 2) (x – 3)” I muttered as quietly as possible.

I could see she was really concentrating: her lips were moving slightly. Then she tried to write on a sheet of paper, but her writing was going all over the place, up, down, zigzagging like a roller coaster, a real arithmetic big dipper. What with her staring eyes and her jumbled handwriting, she was going to get caught out on the first day, or at least raise serious suspicions. The teacher began to hobble between the desks, still weighed down by her dead baby. A dead child is surprisingly heavy, especially when you have to carry it around all the time. I realized she was going to see Marie’s haphazard writing, so quick as lightning I grabbed the paper from her and put it down on the desk in front of me. As the teacher reached my desk, everyone looked at me. I held the paper out to her.

“Here’s the answer,” I said confidently. “It’s very badly written but I think it’s right.”

“Mathematical passion. An intense feeling: like an instinct. The same phenomenon has often been observed with poetry and music.”

I looked her straight in the eye. Boldly saying the first thing that comes into your head is often the best way out of a tricky situation. She didn’t quite know how to respond and Marie created a diversion by offering to give the answer to the whole class.

“A = 3(x + 1) + (x + 2)(x – 3). Therefore A = 3x + 3 + x² – 3x + 2x – 6 = x² + 2x – 3.”

I was completely astonished, because she’d pulled that out of nowhere with nothing to cling on to except the trapeze of her intelligence and her memory. How pathetic I was in comparison. While all the others were scrabbling to put away their things, Marie leant casually towards me and whispered, “Walk in front of me to clear my way through. Don’t go too far ahead, I’m still not very good at getting my bearings. Try to stamp your feet a bit so that I don’t lose the thread…”

Her face twisted in a wretched smile. As we made our way along the corridors, I stamped my feet like a flamenco dancer. Van Gogh, still with a piece of sticking plaster on his ear, said as he passed by, “Hey, did you go to Spain for the holidays?”

But I didn’t want to stoop to his level, so I simply told him he was a mug. He said I was a mug too, but I was ready for that and came straight back with, “You’re so full of it, you’ve got to be the biggest mug of all.”

I don’t know why, but this retort shuts them up every time. It’s quite something.

Marie and I reached the playground and I left her there, just like a towplane releasing a glider. I watched her walk steadily off. Her lips were moving very slightly and I realized she was counting her steps. She must have done the same thing when she gave her note to the teacher and got back to her own desk. The very thought of it nearly made me keel over in admiration, with tears in my eyes. Well, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you can’t blame me.

After school, on the way home, she confirmed it: she’d been calculating distances for weeks, and now they were all recorded in her brain. She’d turned the school into an immense geometrical plane, divided up into carefully measured squares.

“For instance, you see, it’s twelve steps from your Egyptian friend’s lodge to the lockers. From the school gates to Lucky Luke’s office it’s twenty-eight steps if you go on the right-hand side, thirty-seven if you go on the left. From the toilets to the canteen it’s seventy-eight steps, unless they’ve put up display panels for an exhibition, in which case you have to go round them, making a hundred and seventeen steps.”

We walked on towards the village. I was amazed because Marie seemed to know where she was going. I even wondered for a moment if she was having me on about going blind, but then I felt really guilty. And in any case, just when I was looking the other way and didn’t have time to react, I heard a noise like someone banging a gong: I turned to see her on the ground beside the postbox she’d crashed into. She was rubbing her forehead, where a big red lump was forming, with a bleak look on her face. I could see how despondent she was. She seemed so strong and proud, even more so since she’d been hiding her disability, but all this was a huge deal in terms of her dignity. In actual fact she was like everyone else: lost and all alone in her misfortune. She was trying not to cry. It was odd to see translucent tears forming in those eyes that could no longer see.

I leant towards her and she gripped hold of my arm. I could lift her weight quite easily, just like my poor weak little blackbird. When I think back to that scene it unfolds as though in slow motion. She got to her feet and we continued on our way in silence. She kept a gentle hold on my arm, and I wasn’t sure whether I hoped someone we knew would see us, or whether I dreaded the possibility. I’d often observed old couples taking a walk together just as we were doing, and being tethered to her like that gave me the sense of being more firmly rooted to the earth. I didn’t feel at all blurry any more. It was exactly like Dad’s theory about love and the end of exile. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, because I had the feeling she’d know she was being watched unless I was discreet about it. I’d heard on the radio that blind people have a lot of intuition. I’d even looked it up in the dictionary.

Intuition an ability to understand something immediately, without conscious reasoning. An instinctive feeling, more or less precise, about something that cannot be verified or that has not yet happened.

When we were in sight of the church, she asked, “What did you do to your left hand? What’s that bandage?”

She turned towards me. Her eyes were staring straight into mine. There was nothing funny about it. It was hard to know what to do – I had no instruction manual for looking into blind eyes.

“Yes, well, I stuck a size twelve fish hook into my hand while I was rummaging through Dad’s fishing equipment. Then I got all tangled up in the line and reeled myself in. I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t like to be a pike.”

I was looking between her eyes, just above her nose, which felt less awkward than looking into her eyes or in a completely different direction. And then I was astounded, because she said, “Yes, I know, don’t worry, it’s really hard to look a blind person in the eyes… Just do what you can. If you like, I can stop looking at you when we’re talking.”

“That’s what you think, because you don’t get it, but I am looking at you. Do you want me to stop?”

She must have been speaking from intuition, that useful ability to understand without conscious reasoning. So what on earth was I supposed to say?

“No, I’d prefer you to go on looking at me… I like it when you look at me…”

Sometimes you only realize things are true after you’ve said them. She smiled and it occurred to me that eyes aren’t the only way to see. Little by little, you do eventually come to understand some very important things in life. It’s hard to believe, because you couldn’t care less about them to start with. Slowly but surely, that’s how you become less small.

The people from the fair had left and the boules players were back in the square. Now and then you could hear the metal balls knocking against each other.

I thought back to the first time I’d shot into that little church. In four months, I’d now been to church more often than in the last twelve years. It was dark and cold inside. Churches aren’t very welcoming places if you’re looking for consolation. Comfort is important for that: it’s no joke if you have to put up with even more suffering before you can be consoled. I know you shouldn’t be too self-indulgent, but still.

In the church, it was now Marie who was leading me, not the other way around. Anyone would have thought that she was able to see perfectly and that I was the blind one. We stopped in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary holding her son, all broken from the crucifixion. I’ve never really liked that sort of religious stuff: speaking bluntly, all that business with the cross, I don’t really get it, to be honest. But in the current situation, I was keen to take an interest and show that I was open to spiritual things. Marie was murmuring in front of the statue and I assumed she was praying.

There was nothing more to say after that. But before leaving her in front of her big square house, I told her not to forget the money for the school trip to Paris. Our art teacher wanted to take us to the Louvre Museum in the spring. Marie pressed her lips together and I could see she was worried, because paintings aren’t the same as maths: it’s a lot more complicated when you can’t see anything at all. I told her I’d give some thought to the problem. Then we said goodbye and I watched her going a little stiffly up the garden path, probably focused on counting her steps. That was her life now: a life counted out in footsteps.

I ran home. Dad was fumbling about with the Panhard’s engine. He asked if I wanted to help him, but I said I’d got work to do. I could see he was trying to hold back a smile. All the same, I suggested that he should check the spring-drive turbine fan, because it seemed to me that the Aerodyne motor was badly overheating. I had a snack and then I leant out of the window and asked him, “Hey, Dad, do you know what paintings there are at the Louvre?”

“The Mona Lisa. That’s what there is at the Louvre. It’s by Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian painter.”

In my bedroom, I got out my art things. I laid the tubes of paint out neatly on my table. A lot of them were squashed flat. They looked like a colony of multi-coloured slugs. I found a picture of the Mona Lisa in Dad’s encyclopaedia and I also learnt that the lady in the picture was known for her serene and enigmatic smile. I had a look in my dictionary:

Serene calm, peaceful; having a tranquillity that comes from an untroubled conscience.

Enigmatic difficult to understand or interpret; mysterious.

Nothing could have reminded me more of my dear Egyptian. So I set to work with a warm and friendly feeling for the Mona Lisa.

I smiled. I felt relieved and really quite pleased with myself. Almost certainly, at the museum, we’d be asked to copy the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting there. If we ran into difficulties, all I’d need to do would be to slip Marie my copy.

“Of course I see what it is. It’s a lovely plate of steaming spaghetti, with a little dish of Parmesan cheese right beside it.”

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