next room, tick-tack goes the pen. The eye, there’s the eye, which is also a mouth, a glass voice within it. Mr G. can be as brave a little boy as he wants, running barefoot across the meadow going who knows where away from home – but he can’t escape. A sharp stabbing pain in his feet, the soft vertigo of fear and surprise at himself.
Gram chokes. He coughs. Bely leans forward and hits him hard across his back. The chunk of octopus shoots out of his mouth back on to the plate and fuses with both halves of the cut octopus. Its limbs stir and curl up around the edge of the plate. The octopus on the plate suddenly comes back to life. Its tentacles tremble, begin to move, and a moment later it darts under the table. All that remains on the plate are a few potatoes and the damp meandering tracks of the octopus’s suckers on the newspaper.
This can’t be happening, is Gram’s last thought as he tumbles deeper and deeper. That thought is the last crumbling stone he clings to as he falls through the green vitreous haze. The entire landscape falls deeper into greenness, tick-tack, the meadows keep getting brighter, the hayracks and the trees and the peaks of green mountains in the distance seem to be sucked into the vortex. No, now there is no way back, no home any more. Now Gram can no longer gaze at the grass that trembles and sways in the wind. As if it were alive, as if it were growing all around him, enveloping and submerging him deeper and deeper with no possibility of escape.
‘Listen to my instructions, and you’ll be fine,’ says Bely and removes the plate, the glasses and the cutlery from the table.
Rosa stoops and clicks her tongue twice in Gram’s face.
‘He’s in a deep state of hypnosis,’ says Bely. ‘There’s no way he can lie, but I’ll still plug him into the E-meter.’
Rosa nods in approval.
Bely pulls a leather case out of his black briefcase. In it is a metal box with a few buttons and a gauge, which he connects to a pair of wires that end in cylindrical metal electrodes. He hands them to Gram.
‘Squeeze hard,’ orders Bely.
Gram obeys. He gazes absently, clasping the electrodes.
‘Start recording,’ says Bely.
Rosa retrieves a Dictaphone from her fur coat. She presses the record button.
Bely bows his head and softly asks Gram a question.
‘Who are you?’
‘Samo Gram,’ answers Mr G.
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a customs officer.’
‘What else?’
‘Depending on the situation, I’ve had a number of names, real and fake.’
‘Who do you work for?’
‘Myself. Now I work only for myself.’
‘Who did you work for in the past?’
‘For customs. Also for Yugoslav intelligence, then later for Slovenian.’
During the interrogation, Bely keeps track of the E-meter needle, which floats consistently in the middle of the dial.
‘I see you’re telling the truth,’ says Bely.
Rosa gets up and disappears behind the door.
‘Nothing but the truth,’ says Gram.
‘What comes to mind when you hear the word “lie”?’
‘My kitten. One day he went missing. I searched everywhere, all around the farm where we lived. I searched the fields, even the nearby hills. I cried inconsolably, and Mama promised me he would come back. I knew right off that she was lying.’
‘What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “happiness”?’ asks Bely.
‘I remember. The slaughter at the border.’
‘What was that?’
‘I was a young customs officer then. It happened in Koroška, at the border between what used to be Yugoslavia and Austria. I walked the woods all day long, I made good money and there was lots of messing around. Today when I look back, I know I was happy then, but back then I didn’t know it.’
‘Go on.’
‘There was a farmer who had a house right on the border. It ran right through his kitchen. Technically he needed to use his passport to get from his kitchen, which was in Yugoslavia, over to the other side of the Iron Curtain to take a dump, since his toilet was in Austria. Anyway, this guy wanted to slaughter a pig. To slaughter a pig in a restricted border zone! He asked us, the customs officers, if we could find him an illegal butcher. First, we brought him a butcher and then, a few hours later, when the pig was already open and chopped to pieces, we showed up with some Austrian customs officers and scared the hell out of him. Not only because he had organized the slaughter under the table but because he could have been accused of attempting to help the butcher cross the border illegally, which at the time was punishable by twenty years behind bars. The farmer begged so hard he fell on his knees out of sheer terror and pissed his pants. Jesus, we laughed like crazy, along with the Austrians. But the farmer, he didn’t feel like mucking about. He was kneeling in his piss and just kept pleading. In the end we split the pork between us in exchange for not denouncing him. All we left him was the swine’s head, which lay right on the border. It didn’t make much sense to argue over whether it was Austrian or Yugoslav.’
‘That’s what made you happy?’
‘You have no idea. I also became quite rich. Well, I earned enough after ten years of working in customs to be able to buy this restaurant.’
‘What’s the first thing to cross your mind when you think of something sad?’ asks Bely and stretches in order to see what Rosa is doing. The sound of clattering glasses from behind the bar echoes across the empty space of the restaurant.
‘Football.’
‘I mean, what hurt you on a personal level?’
‘My mother used to beat me up because I would bring home bones. Supposedly they were human. They were all over Pobrežje, where I grew up, sticking out from the ground. Us kids, we would pull them out and play hockey with them in the fields. But I wasn’t allowed to bring them home. I still remember her taking me over her knee and the crackling sound of the bone she hit me with.’
‘That’s as sad as it gets?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘There’s something worse than that. But I don’t know if it happened to me, I mean, me in this life.’
‘Who else then?’
‘It happened to my mother. I can hear her screaming. Everything around me gets tighter, it’s smothering me. I feel something fleshy pushing against my little head.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m
