Two Cords

The problem started on the fourth day, when they ran out of notes in their pockets.

Not completely. Axel had the account and the card on his phone, and there was enough in the account. What he didn’t have was a cash machine: they’d gone three villages without a bank and the next one was two days away. And what you can buy in a village shop when you have no cash and the woman has no card reader is exactly nothing.

And on top of that the gas ran out.

It ran out the way gas runs out, which is halfway through something: with the water half boiled, with a pfff that goes out and a strange smell, and with Axel turning the regulator with that absurd faith of somebody who believes there might be a bit left hidden in a corner. The stove they had bought after the robbery was a piece of rubbish from an ironmonger’s, the small-thread kind, and the small bottle lasts eight days.

Eight days had passed.

“And now?” said Axel.

“Now a fire.”

“This grass wouldn’t light with petrol.”

Eva looked around, looked at the sky, looked at the grass, and reached the same conclusion he had.

“I’ll sing tomorrow,” she said.

“There’s nobody here to sing to.”

“Mmh. Tomorrow.”

The car arrived on the second day, which by then was three hours of driving.

He found out about the money in four minutes, because Eva said it without giving it any importance and because he asked little but found out everything that interested him.

“Come off it.”

“I’m telling you.”

“How much do you need?”

He got his wallet out right there, standing in the middle of a threshing floor, and it was one of those wallets that don’t quite close.

“No,” said Axel.

“It’s nothing, mate.”

“I know it’s nothing. No.”

“Why?”

And there Axel didn’t know how to answer, and what came out was a stupid thing.

“Because then we’re not doing it.”

The bloke from the car put his wallet away with the face people get when they decide, privately, that the other one is an idiot and that it doesn’t matter. He stayed for lunch. He ate.

Before he left he said, with the door already open:

“I played it to a mate of mine.”

Eva lifted her head.

“Played what?”

“The river one.” He got into the car. “He says who is she.”

And he started the engine.

Eva stood a good while looking at the place where the car had been, and then she started folding up the plastic sheet and said nothing all afternoon.

They had the previous day’s bread with a tomato for dinner.

The next morning they went past a house with an enormous vegetable garden. It was the last one in the village, with a wire fence and, behind it, four rows of tomato plants loaded to the ground and squashes the size of a dog. A man was inside, working a hoe.

Axel stopped at the fence and did nothing else.

“What are you doing?” said Eva.

“Nothing.”

“Ask him.”

“What?”

“Ask him.”

Axel looked at her as though she had proposed breaking in.

“How am I going to ask him?”

“With your mouth.”

“It’s just…” He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “It’s just no. It’s just that you don’t do that.”

There Eva saw something, and said it:

“You have never asked for anything.”

“Of course I’ve asked.”

“For what?”

Axel started searching. He thought about loans, about favours, about things he might have asked somebody for at some point. And what came to him were all the times he had given: rounds of drinks, money lent that he never asked for back, cars he had driven, house moves he had turned up for without anybody calling him.

From the other column nothing came.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Eva put the rucksack on the ground, went over to the fence and spoke to the man. And she didn’t do anything special, and that was what dismantled Axel: she didn’t put on a pitiful face, she didn’t tell any story, she didn’t say they had been robbed.

She said:

“Good morning. Listen, have you got tomatoes to spare?”

The man straightened up, leaned on the hoe and looked at her.

“I’ve got a hundred kilos to spare.”

“Would you give us two?”

“Two kilos?”

“Two tomatoes.”

The man laughed, put down the hoe, took four tomatoes off a plant and came over to the fence.

“Take four, woman.”

“Thank you very much.”

“And take a couple of peppers, or they’ll rot on me. And if you like courgette tell me, because I’ve got a plant that’s causing me distress.”

And that was that. It took forty seconds.

When she came back with the tomatoes in the hem of her T-shirt, Axel was still in the same spot.

“Here.”

“Yes, but it’s that…”

“Axel.” She put them in his hand. “He had them to spare. And he enjoyed giving them.”

She said that last part while slinging on her rucksack, without making anything of it, and carried on walking. And Axel stayed three paces behind turning that sentence over, which was exactly what he felt when he bought a round and which had never occurred to him worked the other way too.

The gas bottle was a different matter. Anybody could ask for tomatoes. A gas bottle costs eight euros and doesn’t grow on a plant, and Axel knew that perfectly well when he walked into the only shop in the next village with the empty thing in his hand.

He spent two minutes looking at shelves he wasn’t interested in. The woman behind the counter was eighty and was doing a crossword.

“Can I get you something?”

“Er… do you have these gas bottles?” He held it up.

“I’ve got two.”

“Right.”

“Eight euros.”

“Mmh.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “It’s that… look, I’m going to tell you a very silly thing.”

He told her. And it came out badly, with a lot of explaining and an apologetic tone that made the woman extremely uncomfortable. The woman listened to all of it without looking up from the crossword.

And when he finished, she said:

“Take one.”

“No, no, what I wanted was to know if you…”

“Take one, son, you’re blocking my light.”

Axel took one.

“And if you’ve got eight euros spare on the way back, put them in the church collection box and that’s that,” she said. “Or don’t. I don’t like the priest either.”

And she went back to the crossword.

Axel went out into the street with a gas bottle in his hand and a tightness in his throat that lasted him a hundred metres.

They went eleven days without money on them and they didn’t go hungry a single day. Eva sang in a market and made her bit. On a threshing floor they were let sleep under a roof for helping to move some bales. A woman gave them half a dozen eggs just because. A lad at a petrol station filled their bottles and gave them two coffees which he charged to himself.

In case it sounds pretty: the day they got to a cashpoint, Axel took out two hundred euros and spent them in four days. Gas bottle, food, a blanket, two pairs of wool socks and a night in a guesthouse with a shower, because they had gone eleven days without one and there are things you don’t fix by asking.

Eleven days with no money you can take. Eleven weeks you can’t. And both of them knew that and neither of them said it, because saying it meant talking about how much was left in an account.

And Axel learned to ask. It cost him the crossword woman and it cost him twice more, and on the fourth he got it. You get it straight away: it’s like the map of the verges, somebody shows you and then you see it.

What never went away was the little moment before. That went on hurting the same all eleven times, and then he stopped minding that it hurt, which is a different thing from it stopping hurting.

The night by the river was the good one.

They had stopped at a pool, with the water very cold and very clean, and they got in to wash because they had gone too long. Eva got out first and sat on a stone to dry her hair with the blanket. And Axel, coming out of the water, saw that she was looking at something she wore round her neck.

It was the first time he had seen it. The closed fist over it he had seen plenty of times, on the road, at the police station, the night of the robbery. What was underneath, never. A thin cord, terribly worn, with something small hanging off it. A flake of grey stone, flat, with a natural hole in the middle.

“And that?”

Eva closed her hand over it.

“Nothing.”

“No, seriously.”

She thought about it.

“A stone with a hole,” she said, and lifted it a little so it could be seen. “I found it in a river when I was nine. And somebody told me stones with holes bring luck.”

“Who told you?”

“Some kid from the camps.” She closed her hand again. “And I kept it. And I took it everywhere I went from then on, and at seventeen I lost it and spent a week looking for it round my room, and it was in a coat pocket.”

She let go of it again and it fell onto her T-shirt.

“It’s the only thing I have from before.”

Axel sat on the stone next to her, dripping, and pulled his out from under his T-shirt.

“Look.”

Eva came closer. It was a slice of branch about three centimetres across, sanded on both faces, with the wood’s rings perfectly marked and the edge rounded.

“What is this?”

“A branch.”

“I can see it’s a branch.”

“I cut it myself.” He turned it over with his thumb. “I was fifteen and I was in my father’s workshop being a nuisance, and he told me that if I wanted to do something I should do something. And I cut off a slice and spent the whole afternoon sanding it.”

“And why that one?”

“Because it counts the years.”

Eva took it between two fingers, without taking it off him, and looked at it close up.

“Eight,” she said.

“Nine. There’s one right up against the edge.”

She looked at it a while longer. Then she let it go and leaned back on the stone.

Neither of them said anything about swapping them. They stayed sitting there, with wet hair, each with their own thing hanging, looking at the river until it got dark.

And that night the fire was his. It took him three goes and it went out on him once, and when it finally caught he said absolutely nothing, but he stirred the pot with a dignity that wouldn’t fit on his face.