Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories Read online

  Thus we embarked on that joyful treat washing is when it is rare and hard to come by. The pool, which we could scarcely both fit in, bubbled over with foam and roaring, as though we were elephants bathing.

  On the riverbanks there were willows and shrubs and houses with waterwheels; and so unreal were they, in contrast to the concreteness of this water and these stones, that with the grey of evening filtering through they took on the air of a faded arras.

  My companion was washing his feet, now, in strange manner: without taking off his shoes but soaping the stockings and shoes on his feet.

  Then we dried ourselves and dressed. When I picked up a sock a tadpole jumped out.

  Laid on the bank, my companion’s glasses must have been thoroughly splashed. And—as he put them on—so gay must the muddle of that world have seemed to him, coloured as it was by the last gleams of the sunset, seen through a pair of wet lenses, that he started to laugh, and to laugh, without letting up and when I asked him why he said: ‘It’s such a hell of a mess!’

  And, neat and tidy now, a warm weariness in our bones to replace the dull tiredness of earlier on, we said farewell to our new river friend and set off along a little track that followed the bank, reasoning upon our own affairs and upon when we would return, and keeping our ears open, alert to the distant sounding of a bugle.

  Conscience

  Came a war and a guy called Luigi asked if he could go, as a volunteer.

  Everyone was full of praise. Luigi went to the place where they were handing out the rifles, took one and said: ‘Now I’m going to go and kill a guy called Alberto.’

  They asked him who Alberto was.

  ‘An enemy,’ he answered, ‘an enemy of mine.’

  They explained to him that he was supposed to be killing enemies of a certain type, not whoever he felt like.

  ‘So?’ said Luigi. ‘You think I’m dumb? This Alberto is precisely that type, one of them. When I heard you were going to war against that lot, I thought: I’ll go too, that way I can kill Alberto. That’s why I came. I know that Alberto: he’s a crook. He betrayed me, for next to nothing he made me make a fool of myself with a woman. It’s an old story. If you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you the whole thing.’

  They said fine, it was okay.

  ‘Right then,’ said Luigi, ‘tell me where Alberto is and I’ll go there and I’ll fight.’

  They said they didn’t know.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Luigi said. ‘I’ll find someone to tell me. Sooner or later I’ll catch up with him.’

  They said he couldn’t do that, he had to go and fight where they sent him, and kill whoever happened to be there. They didn’t know anything about this Alberto.

  ‘You see,’ Luigi insisted, ‘I really will have to tell you the story. Because that guy is a real crook and you’re doing the right thing going to fight against him.’

  But the others didn’t want to know.

  Luigi couldn’t see reason: ‘Sorry, it may be all the same to you if I kill one enemy or another, but I’d be upset if I killed someone who had nothing to do with Alberto.’

  The others lost their patience. One of them gave him a good talking to and explained what war was all about and how you couldn’t go and kill the particular enemy you wanted to.

  Luigi shrugged. ‘If that’s how it is,’ he said, ‘you can count me out.’

  ‘You’re in and you’re staying in,’ they shouted.

  ‘Forward march, one-two, one-two!’ And they sent him off to war.

  Luigi wasn’t happy. He’d kill people, offhand, just to see if he might get Alberto, or one of his family. They gave him a medal for every enemy he killed, but he wasn’t happy. ‘If I don’t kill Alberto,’ he thought, ‘I’ll have killed a load of people for nothing.’ And he felt bad.

  Meantime they were giving him one medal after another, silver, gold, everything.

  Luigi thought: ‘Kill some today, kill some tomorrow, there’ll be less of them, that crook’s turn is bound to come.’

  But the enemy surrendered before Luigi could find Alberto. He felt bad he’d killed so many people for nothing, and since they were at peace now he put all his medals in a bag and went around enemy country giving them away to the wives and children of the dead.

  Going around like this, he ran into Alberto.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘better late than never,’ and he killed him.

  That was when they arrested him, tried him for murder and hanged him. At the trial he said over and over that he had done it to settle his conscience, but nobody listened to him.

  Solidarity

  I stopped to watch them.

  They were working, at night, in a secluded street, doing something with the shutter of a shop.

  It was a heavy shutter: they were using an iron bar for a lever, but the shutter wouldn’t budge.

  I was walking around, going nowhere in particular, on my own. I got hold of the bar to give them a hand. They made room for me.

  We weren’t pulling together. I said, ‘Hey up!’ The one on my right dug his elbow into me and said low: ‘Shut up! Are you crazy! Do you want them to hear us?’

  I shook my head as if to say it had just slipped out.

  It took us a while and we were sweating but in the end we levered the shutter up high enough for someone to get under. We looked at each other, pleased. Then we went in. I was given a sack to hold. The others brought stuff over and put it in.

  ‘As long as those skunky police don’t turn up!’ they were saying.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘They really are skunks!’

  ‘Shut up. Can’t you hear footsteps?’ they said every few minutes. I listened hard, a bit frightened. ‘No, no, it’s not them!’ I said.

  ‘Those guys always turn up when you least expect it!’ one of them said.

  I shook my head. ‘Kill ’em all, that’s what,’ I answered.

  Then they told me to go out for a bit, as far as the corner, to see if anyone was coming. I went.

  Outside, at the corner, there were others hugging the wall, hidden in the doorways, coming towards me.

  I joined in.

  ‘Noises from down there, near those shops,’ said the one next to me.

  I took a look.

  ‘Get your head down, idiot, they’ll see us and get away again,’ he hissed.

  ‘I was looking,’ I explained, and crouched down by the wall.

  ‘If we can circle round without them realizing,’ another said, ‘we’ll have them trapped. There aren’t that many.’

  We moved in bursts, on tiptoe, holding our breaths: every few seconds we exchanged glances with bright eyes.

  ‘They won’t get away now,’ I said.

  ‘At last we’re going to catch them red-handed,’ someone said.

  ‘About time,’ I said.

  ‘Filthy bastards, breaking into shops like that!’ the other said.

  ‘Bastards, bastards!’ I repeated, angrily.

  They sent me a little way ahead, to take a look. I was back inside the shop.

  ‘They won’t get us now,’ one was saying as he slung a sack over his shoulder.

  ‘Quick,’ someone else said. ‘Let’s go out through the back! That way we’ll escape from right under their noses.’

  We all had triumphant smiles on our lips.

  ‘They’re going to feel really sore,’ I said. And we sneaked into the back of the shop.

  ‘We’ve fooled the idiots again!’ they said. But then a voice said: ‘Stop, who’s there,’ and the lights went on. We crouched down behind something, pale, grasping each other’s hands. The others came into the backroom, didn’t see us, turned round. We shot out and ran like crazy. ‘We’ve done it!’ we shouted. I tripped a couple of times and got left behind. I found myself with the others running after them.

  ‘Come on,’ they said, ‘we’re catching up.’

  And everybody raced through the narrow streets, chasing them. ‘Run this way, cut through there,’ we said an
d the others weren’t far ahead now, so that we were shouting: ‘Come on, they won’t get away.’

  I managed to catch up with one of them. He said: ‘Well done, you got away. Come on, this way, we’ll lose them.’ And I went along with him. After a while I found myself alone, in an alley. Someone came running round a corner and said: ‘Come on, this way, I saw them. They can’t have got far.’ I ran after him a while.

  Then I stopped, in a sweat. There was no one left, I couldn’t hear any more shouting. I stood with my hands in my pockets and started to walk, on my own, going nowhere in particular.

  The Black Sheep

  There was a country where they were all thieves.

  At night everybody would leave home with skeleton keys and shaded lanterns and go and burgle a neighbour’s house. They’d get back at dawn, loaded, to find their own house had been robbed.

  So everybody lived happily together, nobody lost out, since each stole from the other, and that other from another again, and so on and on until you got to a last person who stole from the first. Trade in the country inevitably involved cheating on the parts both of buyer and seller. The government was a criminal organization that stole from its subjects, and the subjects for their part were only interested in defrauding the government. Thus life went on smoothly, nobody was rich and nobody was poor.

  One day, how we don’t know, it so happened that an honest man came to live in the place. At night, instead of going out with his sack and his lantern, he stayed home to smoke and read novels.

  The thieves came, saw the light on and didn’t go in.

  This went on for a while: then they were obliged to explain to him that even if he wanted to live without doing anything, it was no reason to stop others from doing things. Every night he spent at home meant a family would have nothing to eat the following day.

  The honest man could hardly object to such reasoning. He took to going out in the evening and coming back the following morning like they did, but he didn’t steal. He was honest, there was nothing you could do about it. He went as far as the bridge and watched the water flow by beneath. When he got home he found he had been robbed.

  In less than a week the honest man found himself penniless, he had nothing to eat and his house was empty. But this was hardly a problem, since it was his own fault; no, the problem was that his behaviour upset everything else. Because he let the others steal everything he had without stealing anything from anybody; so there was always someone who got home at dawn to find their house untouched: the house he should have robbed. In any event after a while the ones who weren’t being robbed found themselves richer than the others and didn’t want to steal any more. To make matters worse, the ones who came to steal from the honest man’s house found it was always empty; so they became poor.

  Meanwhile, the ones who had become rich got into the honest man’s habit of going to the bridge at night to watch the water flow by beneath. This increased the confusion because it meant lots of others became rich and lots of others became poor.

  Now, the rich people saw that if they went to the bridge every night they’d soon be poor. And they thought: ‘Let’s pay some of the poor to go and rob for us.’ They made contracts, fixed salaries, percentages: they were still thieves of course, and they still tried to swindle each other. But, as tends to happen, the rich got richer and richer and the poor got poorer and poorer.

  Some of the rich people got so rich that they didn’t need to steal or have others steal for them so as to stay rich. But if they stopped stealing they would get poor because the poor stole from them. So they paid the very poorest of the poor to defend their property from the other poor, and that meant setting up a police force and building prisons.

  So it was that only a few years after the appearance of the honest man, people no longer spoke of robbing and being robbed, but only of the rich and the poor; but they were still all thieves.

  The only honest man had been the one at the beginning, and he died in very short order, of hunger.

  Good for Nothing

  Already high, the sun shone obliquely into the street, lit it confusedly, projecting shadows from the roofs on to the walls of houses opposite, kindling fancy shop windows in dazzling gleams, popping out from unsuspected cracks to strike the faces of people bustling past each other on the crowded pavements.

  I first saw the man with the light-coloured eyes at a crossroads, standing or walking, I can’t rightly recall: he was getting nearer and nearer to me, that’s for sure, so either I was walking towards him or vice versa. He was tall and thin, wore a light-coloured raincoat, and carried a tightly rolled umbrella hanging neatly from one arm. On his head he had a felt hat, once again light-coloured and with a wide round brim; immediately beneath were the eyes, large, cold, liquid, with a strange flicker at the corners. Thin as he was, with close-cropped hair, it was hard to tell how old he might be. In one hand he held a book, closed, but with a finger inside, as if to keep his place.

  Immediately, I had the impression that his eyes were upon me, motionless eyes that took me in from head to toe, that didn’t spare my back either, nor my insides. I looked away at once, but every few steps as I walked, I felt the urge to dart a glance at him, and each time I would find him nearer, and looking at me. In the end he was standing in front of me, an almost lipless mouth on the point of creasing into a smile. The man pulled a finger from his pocket, slowly, and used it to point downwards to my feet; it was then that he spoke, with a thin, rather humble voice.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘your shoelace is undone.’

  It was true. Trodden and bedraggled, the two ends of the lace dangled at the sides of my shoe. I blushed a little, mumbled a ‘Thank you’, bent down.

  Stopping in the street to tie up a shoe is annoying: especially when you stop as I did in the middle of the pavement, without a step or wall to put my foot on, kneeling on the ground, with people knocking against me. The man with the light-coloured eyes muttered a vague goodbye and went off at once.

  But it was destiny that I should meet him again: not a quarter of an hour had passed before once again I found him standing in front of me, looking in a shop window. As soon as I saw him I was seized by an inexplicable urge to turn round and retreat, or better still to pass by as quick as I could, while he was intent on the window, in the hope he wouldn’t notice. But no: already it was too late, the stranger had turned, had seen me, was looking at me, had something else he wanted to say to me. I stopped in front of him, afraid. The stranger had an even humbler tone.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s undone again.’

  I wanted to vanish into thin air. Without answering, I bent down to tie the lace with angry diligence. My ears were singing and I somehow felt the people passing by and knocking against me were the same people as had knocked against me and noticed me the first time, and that they were muttering ironic remarks to themselves.

  But the shoe was tied good and tight now and I was walking along with a light sure step. Indeed, with a sort of unconscious pride, I was even hoping I’d run into the stranger again now, to recover my reputation as it were.

  Yet no sooner had I taken a turn around the square to find myself a few yards away from him again, on the same pavement, than quite suddenly the pride that had been urging me on was replaced by dismay. For as he looked at me the stranger had an expression of regret on his face, and he came towards me gently shaking his head, as one pained by some natural fact beyond human control.

  As I stepped forward, I squinted with apprehension at the guilty shoe; it was still as tightly tied as before. Yet to my dismay the stranger went on shaking his head for a while, then said:

  ‘Now the other is undone.’

  I felt the way you do in nightmares when you want to scrub the whole thing out, to wake up. I forced a grimace of rebellion, biting a lip as though to hold back a curse, then started yanking frantically at my laces again, crouched down in the middle of the street. I stood up, cheeks flushed beneath my eyes, and
walked off head down, wanting nothing better than to escape the gaze of the crowd.

  But the day’s torture wasn’t over yet: as I toiled home, hurrying, I could feel the loops of the bow slowly slipping over one another, the knot getting looser and looser, the laces very gradually coming undone. At first I slowed down, as though a little care would be enough to sustain the tangle’s uncertain equilibrium. But I was still far from home and already the tips of the laces were trailing on the pavement, flopping this way and that. Then my walking became breathless, I was fleeing, as though from a wild terror: the terror that I would yet again come upon that man’s inexorable gaze.

  It was a small compact town where one went endlessly up and down the same few streets. Walking round it, you’d meet the same faces three or even four times in half an hour. Now I was marching across it as though in a nightmare, torn between the shame of being seen about with my shoelace yet again untied, and the shame of being seen bending down yet again to tie it. Eyes seemed to thicken and throng around me, like branches in a wood. I dived into the first doorway I found, to hide.

  But at the back of the porch, in the half-light, hands resting on the handle of his tightly rolled umbrella, stood the man with the light-coloured eyes, and it was as though he were waiting for me.

  At first I gaped in amazement, then hazarded something like a smile and pointed to my untied shoe, to stop him.

  The stranger nodded with that sadly understanding expression he had.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘they’re both undone.’

  If nothing else the doorway was a quieter place to do up a shoelace, and, with a step to rest my foot on, more comfortable too, though standing behind and above me I had the man with the light-coloured eyes watching, missing not one move of my fingers, and I sensed his gaze in amongst them, muddling them up. But after all I’d been through, it didn’t bother me any more now; I was even whistling as I tied those damned knots for the nth time, but tying them better now, being relaxed.