23
Still, Kosef J couldn’t figure out what was happening in town. After the elation of his first cart journeys, he started to scrutinize people more carefully.
First of all, he discovered that grown men were absent from this town. He came across old people, ill men loitering about the hospital yard, even a few madmen, but he couldn’t spot any grown men whatsoever. Men who could go out at night, to buy bread and then pop to a beerhouse or suchlike for a short while.
He couldn’t see dogs either. In the old days there used to be dogs at every household, not to mention the stray ones roaming the streets. Now there were hardly any dogs roaming the streets and there were only a handful of them at people’s houses. And anyway, these dogs hardly ever barked.
One could also never hear any music. People rarely went out on the town because there was nothing to do in town. There were very few shops, and even the shops that were still in business would have their shop windows boarded up. All fences had been levelled and all tree trunks had been painted white, up to about the height of an average person. The pavements were very clean, because everyone was obliged to tidy up the pavement in front of their house. Rubbish would be collected once a week, on a Sunday.
There were signs that, years ago, someone had tried to get some work done in town. Sections of a few streets had actually been paved. But then the operation had been abandoned, as if one had run out of asphalt once and for all. In some places pavements had been built, too, in one instance even a very wide one at that.
But even the pavements had met the same fate. There were several streets where the pavements had only been marked out by way of cement edgings, without the actual work ever being completed. And the bits that had nevertheless survived had been damaged beyond repair.
In the town centre a large number of houses had been demolished, and an immense square-shaped area was thus made available to be utilized in some way. It would seem that some foundation had been laid, but the overgrown weeds and scattered about rubbish had suppressed everything. On one side of the square-shaped area a strange building had been erected, sporting several floors and a sophisticated roof. No one lived there and all the windows had been boarded up. The corrugated roof, ornate with several turrets, had rusted, since it had been made of cheap and low-quality metal.
At a crossroads in another area of town, an artesian well had been started. Yet no jet of water would spurt from the rockery laid at the middle of the fountain, however, a considerable amount of rainwater had been gathered which had started to nourish an abundant vegetation.
Kosef J had no understanding of these signs. He sensed though that townlife had been perturbed and that people had been somewhat marked by these building sites. Among the people he discovered hilarious faces, which were somewhat new to him as he hadn’t seen anything of this kind before.
Yet it was his own mother who had surprised him the most. He couldn’t make sense of the fact why his mother would laugh quite so much and that she’d even answer some questions laughing. Most of the time she’d layer laughter with an expression of suffering, especially if it happened to be a case of him being alone with her. It seemed to him as if his mother had been privy to some information that couldn’t be communicated in any other way but through glances further framed by a giggle or a face pull.
The old men at the beerhouse would also pull the most unexpected faces. Some would look at him with a straight face that simply froze one’s blood. Others would have one side of the face light up while the other would suddenly darken, all this within the breath of a single banal sentence.
‘How nice that you managed,’ the man with the short leg would say, his face freezing on a smile imprinted on every single wrinkle. Then his eyelids would slowly start moving up and down, as if he had said YES, YES, YES . . . And soon the rhythm of this moment that tried so hard to make a point had become too painful for the old man to bear, and this pain made its way to the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes and then downwards, to the corner of his mouth. His mouth had opened, as if the man had been in need of extra air, and he remained transfixed in this position, frozen in a large grin of anticipation.
‘I’m glad, honestly, I am,’ the old man would say, placing a hand on Kosef J’s shoulders. Meanwhile his face would turn flushing red, as if these had been his final words. Then this excitement would slowly dissolve into an ironic expression and settle on a wicked smile, about to degenerate into an explosion of hate at any point.
‘Let’s just hope that it will last,’ an elderly man whose name was Adam as Kosef J had found out, kept saying over and over again. Old Adam tended to adopt a most humble stance most of the time, and whenever he uttered the word just in his extremely slow manner, he’d cast his eyes down to the ground. Whenever he uttered the word that, his chin would start to tremble as if his shyness had struck him down, and when it came to the word last, he’d only whisper it, looking rather unsure and seemingly ashamed of himself.
‘What a disgusting creature,’ Kosef J would say to himself.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Kosef,’ Mr Bruno would say, clenching his teeth as if he’d been trying to conceal the fact that he was in a great pain. He’d keep staring at Kosef J with such clenched teeth, his entire face ribbed with jaw tension.
After a while, Kosef J was also taken aback by the comments of the two guards.
‘What an amazing mother you have!’ Fabius cried out and sighed, adopting a melancholy look out of this world. He’d stare at Kosef J, as if expecting some reaction, this delay acting as an indication that Kosef J owed something to the world.
‘You managed something really important,’ the nameless publican would tell him. The man had a pale, gaunt and wilful face, and he looked as if he was only waiting for Kosef J to motion him in order to move to action. He had no idea what the message should contain, and being late didn’t seem to matter either. Who cares that Kosef J had no clarity over these things, the others seemed all too keen to follow him regardless.
Even the child had acquired a strange look every time he’d say, ‘They are waiting for you.’ It would happen more and more often for the child to wait for him at the corner of the pavilion, only to tell him in a very serious and sad voice, ‘They are waiting for you.’ Kosef J would try to make him smile, he’d ask him about small yet fun things but the kid would be in no mood to come out of his shell.
‘Come,’ he’d say in the most serious voice in the world.
Meanwhile, the fugitive, the man with a cheerful face who was awaiting him beyond the abandoned courtyards of the prison compound, would cry out in a voice of trust: ‘You’ve come!’
The things the man with a cheerful face would ask for had also become more and more bizarre. After the string of items purchased in town, Kosef J was asked to keep a closer contact with the kitchen.
‘Why?’ Kosef J asked, somewhat disappointed.
‘You know, we are making preparations for the winter.’
By now Kosef J had stopped finding the use of the plural intriguing. He had already had the opportunity to see for himself that work was going on among the rubbish heaps, and what was being done out there on a daily basis couldn’t possibly be down to a single person. One couldn’t actually see a great deal, of course, but there were signs of hard work carried out underground. He was able to spot, for instance, that the rocks had been moved from one place to another. He’d discover over the course of two or three days that hundreds of rocks had been piled up, which then would simply disappear overnight. Or that fresh heaps of soil would appear, without any trace of actual holes having been dug nearby. What’s more, these would be heaps of fresh, almost warm soil, brought over by someone with the express aim of storing them here.
Kosef J looked at the man with a cheerful face with envy. He envied him because the man with a cheerful face was always busy and focused on some task or other, seemingly optimistic about the job he had to do. His requests were precise and as he put them across he gave the impression that something extremely important was behind it all.
‘Anyway, what could I possibly do at the kitchen?’ Kosef J asked.
The man replied promptly, as if he had been memorizing the various stages of this schedule for days: