You did an absolutely professional job, he says, and explains: A matador strike.
What’s that? she asks.
The connection between the neck and the collarbone. Soft tissue all the way, from the lung and the aorta straight to the heart.
I didn’t know what I was doing, she says. And suddenly she has second thoughts:
Hey, if one of us is professional, it’s apparently you. But you don’t say much. I have to guess everything.
What do you want to know? he asks.
You won’t tell me the truth anyway, she says.
What do you like hearing before you go to sleep, the truth, or a bedtime story?
Tell me a story, she says, and snuggles further into his big body.
Imagine a hilly landscape, he says.
Is it winter or summer? she asks.
Which do you prefer? he replies with a question.
Winter, she presses against him and nestles into him, everything covered with snow.
Yes, he says, deep fluffy snow, and the sky resting like a blanket of gray cotton-wool on the mountain tops and the white forests, and a snowy road winds between abandoned log cabins around which big rusty cogwheels are scattered, only their upper halves peeping out of the snow, and coils of steel cable whose wooden spools are sunk in the snow, and the road disappears into a gaping hole in the mountainside.
An abandoned mine shaft, she says, I like it already. Go on.
Through the opening you can see narrow rails, leading into a tunnel hewn out of the rock, lower than the height of a man and no wider than his outspread arms, and the pale light filtering in through the tunnel entrance soon fades, and the darkness is absolute, and from here on you can only continue by lamplight.
Don’t stop, she requests, and he goes on leading her down the tunnel, and stops for a minute to tell her that the tunnel was quarried by copper miners in the Middle Ages, between five and ten centimeters a day, the traces of their chisels are still etched in the rock—and after ten long minutes of stooped walking in the tunnel you reach a little square, which we’ll call Andreus Square, a square roofed with iron beams supporting its ceiling, and from Andreus Square three new tunnels branch out, the one on the left half full of water, the lake tunnel.
A lake in the bowels of the mountain? she asks.
Yes, he confirms. A lake the color of Bordeaux soup.
What kind of soup is that? she wonders. I’ve never eaten Bordeaux soup.
Of course not. If you’d eaten Bordeaux soup, you wouldn’t be here now.
Is it a kind of poison?
It’s a kind of fungicide used against leaf blight, once it was also used to spray potato and tomato fields.
Where do you get all this information from?
I grew up in a country village, he replies.
What’s its color? She goes on questioning him.
The houses are white, with red-tiled roofs.
No, she says, I mean the Bordeaux soup.
A kind of venomous blue, he says, a kind of turquoise.
Go on, she requests.
Where were we? he asks.
In Andreus Square, she reminds him. You said there were three tunnels branching off from it, and the left one was half-f of water—
Yes, he confirms.
And the central tunnel? she asks and in her mind’s eye she sees the three tunnels branching off from the underground square.
The central one is the track tunnel, because of the rail tracks.
And the one on the right?
The machine-hall tunnel, he recalls.
Go into the tunnel of the turquoise lake, she requests, and her fingers stroke his feet, feeling for something hidden there, and her electrifying touch sends currents through him that make the roots of his hair tingle and stiffen his nipples.
He takes her into the lake tunnel. Walking is difficult and progress is very slow.
Why, she asks, and he explains that at the entrance to the tunnel the water reaches only to the ankles, but the floor is very slippery, and the ceiling is so low that you have to walk at a crouch. But the deeper you penetrate into this tunnel, the more the water gradually rises. At first you don’t feel it, because the slope is very mild, almost imperceptible, but after advancing slowly for five minutes, you find that the water is already above your ankles, and after another five minutes you’re splashing in the water that reaches halfway up your calves. And you have to move in absolute silence.
Why in silence? she wonders and her fingers focus on a very specific area on the arch of his foot, next to the ball of the big toe, and the currents advance to the bottom of his stomach, close to the surface of the skin.
You have to keep quiet in order not to disclose your location.
To who? she asks.
To the character guarding the person you went into the belly of the mountain for.
But he can see the light of your lamp, she says.
Only if he has glasses that can distinguish infrared light, he says.
And does he? she asks in suspense.
I don’t know, he says, I’m taking a risk.
Go on, she says and her fingers hover over the sole of his foot, and he doesn’t know any more if they’re touching or not touching, but the heat and the maddening tickle reach the root of his nose.
He goes on advancing at a slow, silent crouch. In the infrared light of the miner’s lamp set in the middle of his forehead the walls of the tunnel look greenish.
Like Shiva’s third eye, she comments.
Exactly, he agrees. Now the water already reaches his knees. But precisely here the ceiling of the tunnel begins to rise, and it seems that the walls too are moving a little further apart. There is no longer any doubt that the tunnel is widening like the neck of a bottle of Beaujolais. Now he is hugging the left wall of tunnel.
Why the left? Her fingers travel down the slope of the arch of his foot, and he abandons himself to the sweetness seeping into his blood like chartreuse and remembers the beginning of the chase, in the mountains next to Grenoble, and since his tongue is heavy now, and his silence continues, she repeats her question, Why are you hugging the left wall of the tunnel?
Because the space suddenly opening out is the ‘Hall of love and creation’, he says, and if you go on doing what you’re doing to me now, we’ll end up fucking.
I see, she says and looks at his penis, do you want to?
Whatever you want, he says.
How about going for a run? she suggests.
Suddenly the axes hidden under their coats come out and land on the German officer’s head, and at exactly the same moment a column of women returning from work outside the camp arrives, and they see the officer with his head split open, his face bathed in blood, and they start screaming and running in all directions—
Don’t you feel like going out for a run? she asks again, interrupting the uprising in Sobibor at the precise moment
when several women faint at the sight of the officer twitching on the ground, and there’s no chance of organizing and imposing order, and his father stands there with the bloody axe and shouts: ‘Forward, comrades! For the motherland, for Stalin, forward!’
Let’s go, he says, let’s go out for a run. I haven’t had a run for two days now.
She rises from the carpet, light as air, opens the closet door, throws him a gray track suit made of a soft, silky synthetic material, and while she herself slips into a snow-white track suit she apologizes for not being able to provide him with running shoes big enough to fit him.
My Eccos will do the job, he reassures her and slips the huge feet he inherited from his father into the means of transportation that undefeated man taught him to value above all, in other words, shoes.
‘Shoes aren’t an article of clothing, sonny. Shoes are vehicles. Never put on shoes that you can’t set out in at any moment on a thousand kilometer march’, his father passed on to him the wisdom that had saved his life, and at this moment, as he ties the laces of his Ecco shoes—with the shock-absorbers under the ball of the foot and the heel, the soles whose angle of contact with the ground is precisely calculated, to facilitate the movement of the foot from the heel to the toe and soften as much as possible the shocks to the spinal cord with the landing of the foot on the ground, and thus to reduce to a minimum the fatigue of the body systems when running—at that moment six hundred exhausted and humiliated people break out to life and liberty with a cry of ‘Hurrah’, but the dash for the armory is cut
short by a burst of machine-gun fire from the watch towers. People fall. The body of runners splits into two. One group makes for the main gate, where they kill the sentries with the guns they seized from the soldiers whose heads they smashed with their axes, and run towards the forest. Others turn left, to the fence. They cut the barbed wire and run through the minefield. And what did you do, Daddy? I attacked the officers’ barracks with a group of prisoners. One of the officers, who opened the door and came out to meet me on the steps, got it from me with an axe on the head. I grabbed his revolver, and we attacked the fence behind the barracks with axes and wire cutters. The fence is behind us, the minefield is behind us. We run forward. The fence is already a hundred meters behind us. Another hundred. Another hundred. Faster, faster! To cross the open ground. To get outside the range of the machine-gun fire. To reach the forest. Here are the first trees, but the firing goes on, Daddy, don’t stop, run, run deep into the forest. What’s that? Gunfire? No, it’s the branches breaking under the soles of our shoes, blessed art thou, Luka the shoemaker, who made these shoes, blessed art thou and blessed be thy name, because the minute you discover that your shoes aren’t up to it, will be a minute too late.
It’s all right, he reassures his father who stops for a moment between the trees, to take a breath, and turns his head to look for Luka, for Mishka. It’s all right, Daddy, I’ve got my shoes on—
Are you ready? she asks and finishes lacing her Nikes.
I’m ready, he says and ties the laces of his Eccos with a double knot.
They step out of the elevator into the ground floor lobby, and the dark-skinned doorman, gazing sleepily at the midnight mass being broadcast from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, stares at them in astonishment:
Now you’re going jogging? You know how cold it is outside?
We’ll heat up the night, Melissa reassures him.
Fare you well, says the doorman, and adds in concern: Your suit is cold.
You’re from Morocco, states Shakespeare.
Right! exclaims the doorman. How did you know?
By the text, says the author of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and leaves the doorman open-mouthed behind him. He opens the thick glass door for Melissa and invites her to go out into the cold with a theatrical flourish, continuing to quote the Prince of Morocco:
Farewell heat and welcome frost!
And they run out into the freezing deserted street.
Now we have to run. As fast as we can. Spilt up into small units and take different directions. The Polish Jews run in the direction of Chelm. To the area and the language they know. Us Soviets run East. The machinegun fire is behind us, getting further away all the time, giving us the exact location of the camp we’re escaping from. Fire away, bastards. All you’re doing is helping us find the right direction. The sounds of the firing grow fainter and fainter. Until silence falls.
At first the cold stings their faces and penetrates their track suits, but after fifteen minutes of running up the deserted Fifth Avenue, as they cross 40th Street, she suddenly says:
You run fast.
Should I slow down? he asks.
Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?
No, he says to her, we’re already out of the range of fire.
Then slow down a bit, she requests, without asking what fire he’s talking about.
You set the pace, he suggests, I’ll coordinate myself with you, Luka.
Luka? She’s bewildered. Who’s Luka?
Someone thanks to whom I’m here.
Thanks to him you came to New York?
Thanks to him I came into the world.
Is it your mother?
It’s someone who made my father shoes that saved his life.
Luka, she says, I love him.
So do I, he says.
You don’t know what you did to me, she says. All the time I’m in the belly of the mountain. Inside the tunnels of the mine. I can’t find my way out.
Maybe it’s the roundness of the space surrounding you like half a globe, he says.
No, she says, it’s the lake.
Ah, you’re still with the lake …
I can see it, she says. The color of Bordeaux soup. In the air there isn’t even the faintest movement to disrupt the absolute stillness freezing the surface of the water.
Exactly, he confirms.
Take me further, she says.
You advance slowly, along a narrow path, which slopes slightly upwards and curves at the corner of the left wall of the space, goes round the lake and leads to a tunnel that leads into the hall of the fingers, if you’re following me—
I can see every detail, she whispers, panting from the run: You have an awfully long breath. You talk as if you’re not running.
Are we running? he asks. I never noticed.
Don’t be mean, she says. Take me further.
Where are we? he asks.
In the hall of the fingers, she reminds him.
Its name on the map is Ignatius Cavern, he says, but I call it the hall of the fingers. The name of the hall of love and creation too is actually Karol Cavern. But everything in the world can have many different names, depending on your point of view, one man calls a certain woman ‘my wife’, another calls her ‘my mother’ and a third ‘my lover’.
Let’s get back to Ignatius Cavern, she says. Why did you call it the hall of the fingers?
Because it’s a fan of five narrow paths stretching over a deep chasm, which start out from a crescent and end in a single track that disappears into a dark winding tunnel.
A threatening place, she remarks.
Threatening and dangerous, he agrees. It’s almost like walking a tightrope. Especially when you have to cross one of those narrow paths with the help of the infrared lamp on your forehead and infra-glasses.