He stepped in front of him and started speaking without stopping, afraid of even the smallest pause, barely managing to catch his breath. He recounted everything, from the first night to the flight and the fire at the centre of which he had lost consciousness. The Old Fool’s eyes were closed, but the boy knew he was listening to him. When he finished, the Old Fool opened his eyes and looked at him for the first time. He was old, very old indeed; the wrinkles around his eyes were colourless and deep. He was also insane, beyond any question; nothing of this world could be seen in those grey eyes.
‘Does that carpet really exist?’ the Old Fool asked him.
‘Of course it does,’ he replied, a little offended.
‘It exists, yes, yes, it surely does. But it doesn’t mean that it’s real.’
The boy didn’t understand – and never will – what the Old Fool wanted to tell him in that moment; he attributed it to the man’s craziness, which would be comprehensible only if he himself were to cross to the other side of reason.
‘You see this rock I’m sitting on. In a way, it exists. But if I were to believe that it was indeed real, if I were to accept that possibility, then I would no longer be able to sit on it; if I were to sit on it with the idea that it was real, the rock would come alive and be too dangerous.’
The Old Fool went on to say a few more things the boy understood, then started laughing, lengthily and unsuitably, which signalled that the conversation was over.
*
His Friend’s father, who, like his own father, went somewhere with a rifle during the night, had a workshop. There, he found a small canister of fuel, which he stole when night fell.
He dragged the carpet out of the house, dragging it as far as he could, for as long as he had the strength. He stopped at a meadow. The houses were still close; he hadn’t got very far. Had he been thinking, he wouldn’t be doing any of this. Thus, in those moments when he gathered dry branches and leaves, it was very important not to think. He made a pyre, making sure it was as wide as possible, then squirted a bit of liquid from the canister onto it. He threw the rolled carpet over the pyre and spilled the rest of the can’s contents on it. He used a matchstick he had stolen from his house to light the pyre. The flame surprised him; it erupted fiercely, and he felt the warmth spill over his face and eyes. He took a step back. The carpet didn’t fight it. He had taken it out of the house before the time of its usual nightly waking, and it hadn’t shown any sign of resistance, as if it knew what was coming from the beginning. It was calmly coming to terms with its fate in the broad wall of flames.
The fire was too big. He soon heard voices. There was no point in running. He took a few more steps back as the female voices became closer. Then he saw them; arms spread wide, they were shouting as if uttering incantations at the fire but didn’t dare to approach it. Soon, another sound could be heard: a motor vehicle. It drowned out the women’s voices, heading straight towards them. The glare of the big military jeep’s two headlights intersected with the light from the fire. He still wasn’t thinking, for if he were to start thinking now, everything would fall apart into meaninglessness. That scene had to keep unfolding, without interpretation: armed men rushing out of the car, women holding their heads and gasping for air, sparks from the fire flying, and he, standing in the shadows, trying not to be noticed. He couldn’t think, and he couldn’t move, not even when he recognised his Friend’s father among the men from the jeep, and then his own father, too. The latter came closer to the fire than anyone else had, and he was able to recognise what was burning in it, as an occasional green shape could still be seen before being swallowed by nothingness. In his eyes, the boy saw anger, and humiliation, and sorrow, the likes of which he had never seen before; then his father turned his head away from the fire and scanned the meadow until he saw him, his own son, who was trying to be a shadow.
‘You. You,’ he said loudly enough for the latter to hear him, then he went towards him, dropping his rifle on the ground and clenching his fists, and he would have reached the boy in two strides if it hadn’t been for another sound that suddenly rang out through the night, the loudest one, which drowned out the fizzling of the fire, the women’s voices and the sound of the jeep. It was laughter, maniacal, hysterical and so loud that it could no longer even be called laughter; one would probably need to come up with a new word to describe what was heard at that moment. Everyone turned towards the source of this new piercing sound and saw the Old Fool, who was laughing and jumping around the fire, moving his stick through the flames. He laughed relentlessly as he danced.
His father stopped, too, and turned towards the Old Fool. As if forgetting his son, he now turned his full attention to the laughter and went towards the man, striding as decisively as he had a few moments earlier. He approached the Old Fool and punched him with a fist that had long turned pale from being clenched, temporarily stopping the laughter. The Old Fool fell on the ground. For a moment, everything was silent; the women went still, one of the men turned off the engine, and only the crackling of the fire could be heard, until the laughter returned. It was quieter and intermittent, but equally inexplicable and disturbing. The father picked up the stick the Old Fool had dropped and started hitting him with it. He struck him over his head, hands, back… The laughter stopped again and didn’t return, but the father didn’t stop. The swooshing of the stick cut the night until the stick broke, but the father continued, kicking the Old Fool in the stomach and the chest, stomping on his head, the soles of his military boots digging into his forehead, nose and chin; every movement was accompanied by increasingly quiet moaning, as well as the cracking of bones, skin and muscles. Now, there was no light except from the flames, and one could no longer see the effects of those kicks, but the force with which they were delivered, as well as the sounds which accompanied them, made one think.
And he started thinking.
