A Silly Thing

Four days without signal and coming out of the valley eleven messages arrived at once.

Ten were rubbish. The other was from Hortensia.

Son, one thing. The sister has called me.

Apparently that young officer wrote our names down in his little notebook and from the notebook into the report, and from the report the girl has got it out with two phone calls and a lot of nerve. She’s a lawyer, she told me, I don’t know if that helps or if it’s worse.

She says she only wants to know if she’s all right. I haven’t told her anything. What do I do?

Axel stopped on the verge. He read the message three times, and on the third he remembered something he had seen and not looked at: a lad of twenty-three with his tongue between his teeth, writing a surname in a small and very careful hand, in the middle of a clearing, while Eva asked him where all this was going to end up.

Ahead, thirty metres away, Eva was walking with the dog, not turning round.

He wrote: Don’t tell her anything.

He deleted it.

He wrote: Let me think about it. And he pressed send.

He put the phone away, quickened his pace and caught up with Eva.

“Who was that?”

“Hortensia.”

“And what does she say?”

“That her plait keeps going wrong.”

It was true, she had told him that two messages earlier, and Axel grabbed hold of it the way you grab hold of a true thing so you don’t have to say the other one.

And they carried on walking.

That afternoon, going up a long slope, Eva stopped to reposition her rucksack for the fourth time in an hour. She had it hanging off one shoulder. Then off both, but with the straps enormously long, almost at her backside. Then off one again.

“Is it tight?”

“No.”

“It’s just you’re wearing it terribly.”

“I wear it how I wear it.”

“No, look.” Axel came closer. “If you tighten this bit at the top, the weight goes onto your shoulders and not your back. It’s a second’s work.”

“There’s no need.”

“Eva, you’re carrying it dangling like a handbag.”

“I don’t want it.”

A silence fell in the middle of the hill. Kika pricked her ears.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No, it’s just…”

“I don’t want it,” she repeated, lower. “I carry it because she gave it to me, with mine inside it, folded up, since the first day. But I don’t want it.”

She sat down on a stone at the side of the track. Axel sat on another, a metre and a half away, and said nothing.

“I was fifteen,” said Eva, looking at her feet. “And I made myself a flute.”

“What do you mean, you made yourself a flute?”

“Out of a cane. Bamboo, from some that grew in a neighbour’s garden. I saw a video and I made myself one.” She laughed down her nose. “It took me three months to get it to sound. The holes have to go in an exact spot and I had no idea, so I made about fifteen canes before one came out that was any good. And I made them with a barbecue skewer heated on the kitchen stove, when nobody was in, and I burned my fingers eight times.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Number fifteen sounded.” She looked up for a moment. “It sounded terrible, all right. It sounded like a whistle. But it sounded.”

She went quiet.

“I’d had piano since I was six. With a teacher who came to the house, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with her folder. And I didn’t care about the piano, and I couldn’t say that at home because it was like saying you didn’t like air.” She picked a small stone off the ground and started turning it over. “What I liked was that cane, which I’d made myself, and which was worth nothing, and which nobody had asked for.”

“And what happened?”

“We had a row one day. Over nothing, honestly, I don’t even remember what about. And she picked up the cane off my bed and broke it over her knee.”

She said it calmly.

“And she said to me: round here we do what I say and that’s that.”

Axel felt his jaw close.

“Right. That’s what you expect,” said Eva. “That’s the normal thing, isn’t it? A row between sisters, something gets broken, that’s it.” She threw the stone away. “The other bit was what I didn’t expect.”

“What other bit?”

“That the week after she gave me a flute.”

Axel turned.

“A real concert flute. A proper one. The sort with a case, with the little cloth for cleaning it inside.” Eva was looking straight ahead. “It cost her a fortune, she was twenty-two and worked Saturdays. And she gave it to me at Sunday lunch, in front of my parents and my aunt and uncle and my grandmother.”

She was quiet a moment.

“And everybody said the same thing. ‘What a good sister you have.’ ‘With what it cost her.’ ‘Look how thoughtful.’ And my grandmother, who was a saint, took my face in her hands and said: love, how lucky you are.”

She passed a hand over her face.

“And I had to thank her. In front of everybody. And I did it well, all right. I did it very well, because that’s what I’m good at.”

Axel gritted his teeth.

“And it isn’t that she gave me a flute,” said Eva, and now her voice did shake a little, very little. “It’s that from that day on, the one who had broken a flute was me, for not using hers. Do you see? She turned it round. In a week. And it couldn’t be told any other way any more, because she had the receipt and I had a broken cane in the bin.”

She got up off the stone.

“I never played it. Not one note. It’s at her house, in the hall cupboard, with the case shut.”

She slung the rucksack onto her shoulder. Onto one shoulder, again.

“That’s why,” she said.

And she carried on up the hill.

It took Axel five minutes to get up off the stone. When he got to the top, Eva was waiting for him with her normal face on, talking to the dog, and she didn’t mention it again all day.

They had a good dinner. They laughed about something silly to do with a cow that had stood staring at them.

When Eva was already asleep, snoring like a lorry, Axel got the phone out inside his sleeping bag, with the screen on minimum, and spent a while with Hortensia’s conversation open.

What he thought was this: that the woman had done that at fifteen. At fifteen. And that people change. And that she had spent a year and four months looking for her, and that that, however you look at it, means she cares. What he thought was that maybe they were just misunderstanding each other, nothing more.

There was a moment, one only, when he was on the point of doing it right.

It came with the phone in his hand, inside the sleeping bag, and it came out so clearly that he even heard the voice: he could wake her. He could say “your sister has called Hortensia” and that’s that. Eight words. And then whatever had to happen would happen, and maybe that was that she’d get up and leave, but it would happen in front of him and not behind his back.

He had it for five seconds.

On the fifth he thought she was asleep and that waking somebody up for that is a cruelty, which was true, and that is why it worked so well.

And from there to the other thing was one step: that this gets sorted out if somebody from outside, somebody calm, somebody with nothing to do with it, sits down in the middle and talks to both parties.

Somebody like him.

He wrote:

Give me her number. I’ll talk to her. Just to find out what she wants. Eva doesn’t need to know anything about it.

He read the last sentence three times.

And he pressed send.