To provide a basis for the comparison there was his smile, too.
47. Niko crawls to the outside. When he arrives at the edge of the small basin where he can quench his thirst, he sees that the luminous full moon is perfectly reflected in the mirror the water forms. He brings his lips to it, gently, so as not to disrupt the sublime vision. When at last he decides to listen to his senses rather than to his delight and drinks, his head, his stomach, and the nausea settle down.
48. It’s not so much the water per se, he makes himself think, but the bits of moon steeping in it that bring such comfort. He lies on the ground, legs and arms spread wide, chin planted firmly on the muddy edge of the basin, his eyes unseeing and his tongue extended at regular intervals to lap up the delicious water. He would be perfectly happy if time could stop and freeze him in this position, in this feeling. If he had no stomach, if the daylight wouldn’t come, and if he weren’t afraid to be attacked or to rot in this pose, he could undoubtedly live like this forever. To see the image of the moon floating before him, blur it from time to time as he dips his tongue, feel the coolness flow through his body, and wait for the image to find its purity again before disturbing it anew. To not be concerned with time. If happiness exists it must be something like this. The thought glistens in his head like the moon’s reflection in the basin in front of him.
49. Night has fallen, and the moon in the black water has become a small, gleaming lozenge whose radiance is heightened by the stars that look like motionless bubbles. Niko ends up seeing it as a manifold blur.
50. Happiness is what you are forced to abandon. That’s what he tells himself when he finally gets up.
51. How much time passed as he lay there, stretched out, with empty head and belly, distracted by the image of the water mirror? Long enough that he’d grown unaccustomed to standing upright and had to stay seated for a moment as he readjusted to keeping his head higher than the rest of his body. He tries to steady his feet. That’s when he hears a familiar ruckus. On a rocky mound the monkeys get restless when Niko appears behind a hillock not far from them. They come hurtling down the slope, and Niko staggers after them, just a few strides behind. A voice deep inside tells him to trust the monkeys. His heart seems sure that their destinies will be linked from now on. He’s certain they will guide him to the closest food.
52. “He who doesn’t know how to act observes, listens, and becomes kind,” confirms a saying he’s not thinking of.
53. On the ground, melons roll on their juicy curves, and bunches of bananas give off an enticing perfume high up. The monkeys pounce on the bananas, and, since it’s what he’d rather have but also to keep his distance and stay on the ground, Niko eats the melons. He grabs one fruit after another and splits them against a large stone beside him before scraping out the seeds and the flesh with his teeth. As he eats his fill, he’s in less of a hurry, choosing the heaviest and most aromatic fruit. In the end he even takes the time to slice them properly with the machete he’s still wearing on his belt and to throw the seeds away. The monkeys are devouring the bananas in silence. They seem uninterested in Niko, who studies them from a distance.
54. Satisfied, Niko lies on his back amidst the melons and their remnants. The rough leaves scratch his arms and legs, but he’s not paying them any mind. He’s looking for the moon in the sky but finds only a vague light veiled by an unmoving cloud. Happiness, he thinks, is a man forgotten by the others, his natural needs properly sorted out, comfortably settled down to feel the regular beating of his heart, listen to the distant noises, and admire the moon and the stars.
55. What’s happening that, without any transition, the images of the killings resurface and stiffen him in that convulsion that always leaves him with the look of a drowning victim who’s just been rescued from the water?
56. At the same time, there’s the rumble of a detonation, and with it the fruit that Niko had dropped beside him explodes. Overwhelmed by a flood of unbearable images and in the grip of tremors, he’s unaware of what’s happening and remains flat on the ground. Dimly some kind of commotion reaches his ears. Another blast and the dust surging forth beside him bring him back to himself and to what’s glaringly obvious: they’re shooting at him. And yet, as if this assessment didn’t really concern him, Niko doesn’t budge, a rock among the rocks, a melon among the melons. In the center of his expressionless face, his eyes, still staring at the sky, reflect the moon’s discarded glow.
57. Another explosion, and this time its discharge penetrates him while a terror tempest lifts him up. He slides behind the rock on which he’d been splitting melons just before. Hugging his bent knees, burying his head inside the ball he’s formed, and holding his breath, he focuses on locating the monkeys by their sound. Could they have left without him? And what if all this were merely a trap meant to eliminate him, the intruder that he is in the cave? Is he right to trust them?
58. Noticing that he’s in the same position in which he had surprised so many of his victims, he’s once again overcome by a flood of memories that sicken and exasperate him to the point that he vomits out everything he’s just eaten. The bits of melon that stream onto the ground are still intact.
59. The firing stops but Niko doesn’t feel safe, and so he waits. Even if he must wait several days before he can be sure it’s safe to stand up, he’s prepared to do so. Patience has always been his primary quality. After a lengthy silence during which, in addition to being watchful, he must avoid falling into the snare of his drifting thoughts, a groan catches his attention, growing weaker and weaker and more disjointed. Like a wary turtle, he carefully exposes his head so he can hear better; then, to pinpoint where the sound is coming from, he crouches to let his sweat-covered forehead, and then his eyes, glance over the rock. A few steps away lies a monkey, a bullet in the back of its head. The flowing blood forms an opaque puddle around him. Its position leads him to infer that the animal was hit as he came running in the direction of the spot where Niko was lying. The scene, sanitized by the pallid light of the moon, doesn’t seem real enough to unleash the avalanche of ominous thoughts lying in ambush deep inside Niko.
She roams around inside her memories as in a place that is both familiar and unknown, a house fallen into darkness where she searches for markers by feeling her way. In this half trance, she sees herself, a different self, stretched out on the bed, intoxicated with confusion and her surrender to sadness. She lies there for a long time, and it is the ringing of her telephone, she recalls, that draws her from her inertia.
A friend suggested they go to the theatre that evening. Since she couldn’t remain lying on her bed indefinitely and had no idea what to do next, she accepted the invitation. The voice on the other end of the line was clearly delighted, and she had trouble responding to it. It was always the same voice that showed up when things weren’t going well with the other one, the voice she also associated with the most substantial discussions: Victor’s voice.
The play presented a man with an incurable disease whose unpronounceable name hinted at a connection to the country that had so harshly regained her attention that morning. She could easily identify her mother tongue even if she didn’t know how to speak it. In the play, the man was visited by his guardian angel, who suggested that, while he was awaiting death, he spend his time collecting inside a small box everything he wanted to leave behind of himself, everything that he’d want to be associated with afterward. The play’s title was In Memory of Him. For some reason she didn’t admit to herself at the time, she thought it was beautiful but hard to take and disturbing. A few years later, sitting at her desk, she thinks she knows why the show had been so gripping. Perhaps that was the moment when the link was formed between the revulsion that had submerged her and the project to which she now devotes herself thousands of kilometers away.
After the play, she invited Victor to have a drink. At first she was
