anything!’ The tighter his embrace, the smaller and more angular her body becomes, until he lets go because he no longer recognizes it. ‘Why?’ He needs to know. After all the youth it cost her to defeat the enemy, why does she want to collaborate with it? Is this a version of the Stockholm syndrome? ‘Why did you lie?’
‘Before I got ill it always seemed as if I was going to lose you.’
He can’t believe she’s saying this.
‘No. Don’t go away now.’ Sure enough, he’s at the door, in the hall, covering the last metre to his van. ‘It’s better to talk about it straight away,’ he hears her call through the half-darkness before the car door cuts off her voice. He thinks so too, in theory, but it seems his foot wants to press the accelerator and he has to flee any delay that could bring him to a halt.
He wonders how come the radio is tuned to a classical channel. ‘Liszt,’ says a voice by way of a starting shot. He knows little about classical music. Is it pure chance that even the music is suddenly different from anything he knows? He’s no idea where he’s driving to, but he does know that he has to drive and that a shaft of beauty is filling the car. The piano sounds so lovely at first, so orderly, to the point of pampering. Night falls over the endless rows of trees—what kind of trees? are they ash?—on both sides of the road, trees whose leaves are changing and then letting go because they’ve been sucked dry by the trees, which made them to store food, to eat from when winter comes, because trees know how to survive. He wants them to embrace what the music says, to pamper him, to make him turn round. But a small rodent has crept up to the highest piano keys and it’s now multiplying and mice are hurrying in dense throngs up the neat stalks, out of the ground into the sky, and when they throw themselves from the branches they become descending bells, then bell-ringing that catches the sky unawares. The twilight dissolves into night.
He turns off the music and leaves the engine running. Was it true what she said, that she might have lost him at any moment before she got sick? It was true. He remembers the turmoil of times past, the thirst, recalls a firework competition he took part in with friends, coincidence really, not even their style, a random detail that strikes him as symbolic of those days: a firework competition. There were loud nights with lots of movement, with stages and audiences, for him, with crowds dancing on the spot, ogling at women, smiling, full of disbelief about how he met his girlfriend.
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