7

He walked over to the side entrance, hoping that the lanterns would be lit. He couldn’t hear any footsteps behind him. The evening seemed utterly calm and quiet. Suddenly the wind ceased to blow. The clouds stopped in their tracks on the sky, while the sun found itself pinned just under the horizon to scatter a soft and delicate light. In their peculiar stillness, the poplar leaves appeared as if they were momentarily frozen.

One couldn’t even make out the sound of heavy boots treading the gravel alley. Perhaps one couldn’t have even heard if someone snapped their fingers or clapped.

Kosef J was in a state of bliss. There was nothing to make him hurry up or worry. Silence has permeated the very depths of his brain. He was able to spot from afar the two pale dot-like sources of light, and his body started to tremble with excitement. The two lanterns were lit. Perhaps it was someone’s job to light them night after night. ‘But for whom?’ he couldn’t help wondering. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he hastened to answer his own question. What mattered was that there were two live flames, acting as beacons on either side of a gate one couldn’t quite figure out the use of. At least he, Kosef J, couldn’t yet work out the role of this so-called side entrance.

As he was getting closer, the sight started to dominate his imagination more and more. The rays of light stemming from the two spheres lent the sunset an additionally warm and inviting hue, and made this sensation travel far and wide, as if the entire sky had been kitted out in the colours of the prison lanterns. Kosef J slowed his pace down, entirely focusing his gaze on this wondrous experience.

He only noticed with some delay that the gate was wide open.

When this fact dawned on him, Kosef J experienced a staggering reaction. He simply felt like running away. But whereto? He had no idea. Somewhere back, of course. To his own cell perhaps. Or at least to the prison guards’ room, to let them know. Franz Hoss would need to be notified immediately, of course. A gate opened wide in a prison wasn’t something that could be considered normal. Kosef J sensed this and, though unsure why, he felt responsible.

An array of thoughts cropped up in his mind, but he was unable to make a move. After the first few moments of stupefaction he remembered that he was, in fact, a free man. There was no reason for him to be so scared, after all he was free. To prove this: he could even afford to stroll into the relatively out-of-bounds wings of the prison. It was no business of his to wonder whether that gate was meant to be open or not at that particular time. Since the lanterns were lit, someone must have already passed by there. Someone had been tasked with a mission they had accomplished, and that someone had probably also seen the open gate and had chosen not to react, which is why the gate was still open. In conclusion, there was nothing strange and against regulations in the gate being open.

‘To hell with them!’ Kosef J decided, angrily.

He went up to the gate to look beyond it. Again, he realized he should feel something, like he did when he had been told he was free. But he felt nothing. He realized that under normal circumstances he should have felt tremendous curiosity or suffocating emotion. But he hadn’t looked beyond for such a long time, and he felt absolutely nothing.

He stopped right in the gateway and took a good look on the other side. The light had faded in the meantime, so Kosef J focused his attention the best he could in the circumstances. He had to admit that not much could be seen beyond the gate. Yet he wasn’t disappointed. He could make out a country road leading to an orchard. Left and right there were bare fields, dotted about with shortgrass.

Kosef J sat down on the grass. He loved it when his palms would get wet just by touching the grass. He lay on his back and stared at the sky. A puny star had already appeared above the kitchen.

‘It’s OK,’ Kosef J’s brain mused.

‘It’s nice,’ Kosef J said to himself.

‘It’s exactly the way it should be,’ Kosef J’s brain mused again. Then he got startled because he had the impression that he heard some barking.

‘A dog, it must be a dog,’ Kosef J’s brain chuckled.

He quickly got to his feet and tried to scan the horizon. It seemed to him that there must be something beyond the orchard, something lumped together along the horizon itself. ‘The town,’ Kosef J said to himself, this time a little uneasy. So this is where the town was. Odd. For years he had imagined that the town was situated somewhere behind the courtyard where they had their daily walks. In other words, in an entirely different direction, some ninety degrees to the right, if he could put it this way.

Trying to get a glimpse of what was beyond the trees, he realized that the trees were laden with fruit. He couldn’t quite distinguish the exact kind, but he was overwhelmed by a sudden craving, not so much for eating but for picking some fruit. He headed towards what turned out to be an apple orchard. There he found mature trees, with tired branches hanging through and almost touching the ground also because of their abundance of fruit. Kosef J strolled up and down among the hollow trunks like a sleepwalker, careful not to step on the hundreds of fallen fruit or the branches that had reached down to the grass. It took him ages to muster the courage to stretch his hand out and pick an apple he’d so wanted. On the distant horizon, a few lights got switched on in what must have been the town. The dog barked again.

‘Quite some apples!’ Kosef J indulged himself.

The sun had set below the horizon but the sky was still quite bright, partly aided by the sparkling reflection of the stars and of the city.

Kosef J finally brought himself near an apple, and without picking it from its branch, he took a bite. He slowly chewed that sweet and scented matter that sneakily spread out from his palate into his bloodstream and into his entire being. He kept looking at the bitten apple, still hanging from its branch, and laughed.

‘Good God, why am I laughing?’ Kosef J wondered, also anxious of the fact that he had instinctively appealed to God. He, Kosef J that is, was an atheist. Could he possibly turn into such a fool? To allow himself to be bothered by such simple things as the night, the grass, the dog, the apples. ‘It must be late,’ someone surmised in his inner self, ‘Franz Hoss must have gone to bed.’ A sense of deep concern had immediately lodged in his heart that made him turn around and cast his glance towards the walls from behind which he had come. His concern increased further when he realized how far he’d ventured from the prison. He couldn’t believe that he had moved away quite so much.

‘This is no good,’ Kosef J inferred.

Sure enough, he was now a free man. But strictly speaking his release hadn’t been completed. ‘This is my fault, and my fault alone,’ he blamed himself. Take, for instance, that he had moved away in a completely irresponsible manner from the prison building while still wearing a prison uniform. The fact of the matter was that anyone could have believed just about anything in such a situation. Whoever would meet him could believe anything. They could even shoot him because whoever would meet him could easily believe that they were dealing with a prisoner on the run.

‘This is bad. Really, really bad.’ Kosef J reasoned and started to run.

He had no other wish but to re-enter the prison courtyard, his shelter. Perhaps Fabius and Franz Hoss were playing dice. What a relaxing treat a game of dice with Fabius and Franz Hoss would have been!

He kept running as fast as he could but the prison walls were still quite far away. Behind him he could hear the barking of dogs. This could only come from the town nearby.

‘Now there’s several of them,’ his brain registered.

‘And so many stars,’ Kosef J said to himself, casting a glance at the sky while running.

Right ahead, one could make out the dark and still distant outline of the prison building.

‘There it is,’ his brain rejoiced, as if it had finally found relief in the idea that the walls, the office wing, the clothing-supply room, the kitchen and the various floors housing the narrow and perfectly aligned cells were all firmly there where they belonged. This represented a certainty in the universe, a point where one could always depart from and return to.

When he arrived at the gate and saw that in the meantime someone had closed it, Kosef J could barely stifle a howl of anger.

He was angry with himself, above all, for having allowed to be lured into such a bad plight. The term lured was actually too vague a description, since he had allowed himself to be dragged by a primal instinct, a childish illusion, a chimera, in fact. He had staked his entire situation, everything that had just started to bud in his new capacity as a free man. How will he justify himself in front of the two elderly guards? How will they regard him from now on? Will he be able to make use of their basin and eat at the kitchen? Will Rozette allow him to help out with the dishes?

Overwhelmed by a profound sense of despair he decided to cling on to the gate and try to open it. This side entrance though, and the gate that he had become so fond of because of the two lanterns and the privileged place it occupied at the top of the poplar alley, the gate he had longed to at least set his eyes on, well, this gate was now well and truly bolted.

‘This isn’t right,’ Kosef J muttered.

He charged with all his might into the cold metal of the gate, but no matter how often his flesh hit the metal plates, the gate produced no sound.

‘Mr Franz Hoss,’ Kosef J shouted in depair, having given up hope but nevertheless hanging on by virtue of the fact that he had done this very same thing over the last forty-eight hours.

He tried to gauge the height of the gate and wall. As one would expect, when viewed from the outside, both the gate and the wall appeared higher, more solid and less accessible.

‘It’s me, Kosef J!’ he screamed, ravaged and sweaty, and with bloodshot eyes due to the considerable effort of trying to see in the dark.

He stepped back a few paces to gain impetus. He smashed against the metal side entrance, but the impact of his haggard body on the gate produced no sound, not even an extremely feeble noise, which made him come to terms with the fact that his attempt was an utter flop. He turned around and ran along the wall for a few yards, searching for an opening, an inlet, a window of some sort. He then changed direction and explored about ten yards the other way. After a further flop, he stopped right in front of the gate.

He picked up a stone and smashed it against the gate a few times, hoping that this would lead to an echo, a signal, something or other.

‘Mr Franz, Mr Franz,’ he shouted a few more times, feeling strangled and exhausted.

He tried to climb on the metal gate but only managed to hurt his palms and knees. Then he remembered that the next day he was meant to receive his new clothes, as a mark of his release. Yes, it was absolutely necessary for him to return, to be there within, and make it beyond the walls by sunrise at the very latest. He had already lost all sense of time. He stood still for a few minutes hoping that some sound from within the walls would give him an indication as to what the prisoners were doing at that time, and what aspect of their daily routine they were carrying out. But there was nothing except complete silence.

‘The main entrance, of course. The main entrance!’ The revelation of something as common sense as this reassured him a little. All he had to do was go to the main entrance where there was surely someone. There is no way not to have anyone there. He, Kosef J, being now released had no reason to be concerned about showing up at the main entrance and explaining the whole situation, since he hadn’t done anything wrong. Such things do happen and that’s that, they won’t happen again from now on, but what happened, happened. He’ll be very frank and give all the details. And the person who’ll be there will have the opportunity to verify the truthfulness of his words. So many people used to know him. He had been a model prisoner. He’d done such a great job in the vegetable garden. His cell, cell number 50, was open. Anyone could verify this.

‘This is what I deserve,’ he said to himself as he set off along the wall to find the main entrance.

Unfortunately, he was no longer able to rely on his sense of direction. He had never had a very clear mental map of the prison anyway. He had a very vague idea of key locations, and he knew roughly in what direction this or that particular wing was. Nothing more though. Right now, for example, he wouldn’t have been able to ascertain whether it was best to turn left or right in order to find the main entrance. More than that, there were parts of the prison that were entirely unknown to him, as he’d had the sudden surprise to discover over the last couple of days. He took off in a random direction, and, as usual, soon received confirmation that he had chosen the longest and most troublesome road.

The walls were supported by buttresses and he had to go around them. Often enough he had to descend and then climb again because what had initially looked like a vast plain had gradually turned into a rugged terrain, with ravines, mounds, deep ditches and dangerous rocky protrusions. Kosef J couldn’t help being amazed at how large a surface the prison, in which he had stayed for so long, occupied. He couldn’t spot any paths along the walls so he had no choice but to carve his own way among the weed, rocks and shrubs. The ground was marshy in places, and the recent rainfalls have left a number of puddles behind that he had to jump over or go round. Every so often he’d stop, step back from the wall and look up hoping that he’d catch a glimpse of a lit-up window or a watchman. But he could see nothing and hence became increasingly agitated and hurried. He not only didn’t spot any lit-up windows but he didn’t see any windows whatsoever, not even a crenel or an opening. The wall stretched on ruthlessly without any interruptions, giving the impression that it surrounded an immense but lifeless space.

After a few hours’ walk (at least Kosef J’s impression was that he had been walking for hours) he took a break to catch his breath. Judging by the number of bends Kosef J arrived at the conclusion that the prison had a most irregular shape, and this was probably the outcome of successive extensions. As a rule of thumb, turning four times at a ninety-degree angle takes you back to your starting point. He had the impression though that he’d taken countless bends and there was no sign of returning to the side entrance.

The landscape around the walls had also changed. The ill-lit and near-illusory outline of the town, occasionaly punctuated by barking, had disappeared for some time. The horizon didn’t have the same luminosity, and the stars didn’t have the same impact. Only the walls gave off some light, and, though increasingly feeble, this was just about enough for Kosef J to keep track of their presence.

Hardened, he set off again. He really regretted that he hadn’t picked more apples, because if he had, he could replenish his energies now. The night got more and more humid and cold. His boots repeatedly got soaked in mud and he felt the cold reaching the tip of his toes. It was already too dark to figure out how to get around puddles and water-filled ditches. Not to waste time, he decided to just charge straight through them and, at times, he found himself treading knee-high in water or mud. Yet there were also sections where the tall grass made it easier for him to move forward, offering him respite and cleansing him of the mud at the same time.

When he finally heard a banging sound, as if someone had knocked together a couple of stones, he was overjoyed and would have liked to actually give a hug to these sounds. ‘I’m saved,’ he said to himself. In his mind, he experienced an even more powerful emotion, amounting to nothing less than a sheer sense of salvation.