What They Take

Before that there were two good weeks. So good that when Axel went back over them afterwards he couldn’t find anything concrete to tell: sun, a river, a whole afternoon fixing a zip, and a night when they laughed so much they missed dinner.

They slept in a field on the edge of a large village, beside a dirt track, behind some hedges.

It was a good spot: flat, dry, with water two hundred metres away. The only thing was that it was close. You could see the streetlights over the hedge and hear the occasional car.

“Here?” said Axel.

Eva looked at the verge. The grass was lying flat along the track, from footsteps.

“People come through here.”

“It’s a track, Eva. Tracks are for coming through.”

She stood looking a moment longer.

“All right,” she said.

They had dinner, got in, and Axel took the rucksack out and put it under a hedge, leaning against it, with the rain jacket over the top. He had spent seventy nights doing exactly the same. He didn’t even think about it.

He woke up because Kika was making a noise.

It wasn’t a bark. It was that “oww-woo-woo” of greeting, the one she made when somebody came near the tent in the morning, the one she made when Eva came back from the spring. A happy noise.

Axel opened one eye. It was dark. He looked at the phone: ten past four. He lay listening and heard nothing, only the wind in the hedge, and Kika lay back down with one of her snorts, the whole-body kind.

And Axel went back to sleep.

At half past seven he came out of the tent barefoot, with his eyes half shut, and went straight to the hedge for the rucksack to get the coffee out.

And it wasn’t there.

The first thing he thought was not “I’ve been robbed”. The first thing he thought was “I left it somewhere else”. He spent a minute and a half going round the field, looking behind hedges, looking under the tent, looking in places where a rucksack wouldn’t fit, with that idiotic logic that comes over you when something isn’t where it should be.

Then he stopped.

The rain jacket was on the ground, thrown to one side, in a ball. And on the flattened grass, where the rucksack had been, there was a thing.

The speaker.

A black plastic cylinder, twenty centimetres, standing upright, with the cable’s little elastic wrapped around it.

Upright.

Axel stood looking at it for a good while.

“Everything?” said Eva.

She was on her knees in the tent doorway, with her hair in her face.

“Everything.”

“The pot?”

“Everything, Eva.”

He sat down in the grass and made the list out loud, not because it was any use, but because his body needed to count it. The sleeping bag. The pot. The stove with the gas bottle. The coffee pot. The torch. Not the rain jacket, which was on the ground. The two T-shirts. The trousers. The charger. The first aid kit. The spork. His grandfather’s knife. The money he had on him, which wasn’t much but it was the week’s.

And that was it. He stopped.

Eva waited.

“And the photographs,” he said.

A hundred and seventy-nine photographs in a paper envelope from a corner shop, with an elastic band round them. Bruno with long hair. Bruno with his tongue out. Bruno at sixteen on a bench. His mother crouched down in the shoe shop, guiding somebody’s foot into a shoe. His father in an impossible T-shirt. Himself, at nine, on a beach, pointing at something that wasn’t in the photo. And the one with the two matching hats, which went last in the stack.

He’d had them developed in January, in one of those places you get two of per city, and they had cost him forty-one euros, and it was the best money he had ever spent.

They were the only ones there were.

That was what he said, or what he tried to say, and only the last part came out.

He ran a hand round his neck, for no reason, just to do something with his hand, and felt the cord under his T-shirt. He looked up and Eva was doing exactly the same, her fist closed around hers. They looked at each other for a second. Neither of them said anything.

Then came the part nobody tells you about a robbery, which is the arithmetic. A decent down sleeping bag is a hundred and twenty euros. A stove with its bottle, thirty. A pot that works, twenty. A first aid kit, fifteen. Two T-shirts and a pair of trousers that will last, forty. A torch, twelve.

Axel added it up on his phone sitting in the grass and got two hundred and thirty-seven euros, and then he remembered the charger and the coffee pot and left it at two hundred and sixty. He looked at his balance. And then he looked at Eva, who had spent a year and a half living with what fits in a school rucksack, and he didn’t say the figure out loud.

Then he looked at the tent. Inside, on the floor, was Eva’s rucksack, flattened on one side, with the mark of a head on top of it.

She had spent seventy nights sleeping with her head on her rucksack. And he had spent seventy nights leaving his under a hedge.

And in seventy nights she hadn’t said a word to him.

They went to the little police station in the village to report it, because it had to be reported, although they both knew perfectly well what for. The officer who dealt with them was kind and told them the truth, which was: that in that area there had been three in a month, that it was usually people passing through, that the rucksack would already be empty in a ditch and that if it turned up they’d let him know.

“Did you have documents inside?”

“No, I keep those on me.”

“Cards?”

“It’s on my phone.”

“Money?”

“Not much.”

The officer nodded, typing.

“Well, it could be worse.”

“Yes.”

“Objects of value?”

Axel was about to answer and realised he didn’t know how you say that.

“No,” he said.

They went out into the street and sat on a bench in front of the station. The sun was splendid, which was disrespectful. Axel had on what he had on: a pair of trousers, a T-shirt, the sweatshirt tied round his waist, the boots and the rain jacket picked up off the ground.

And in his hand, the speaker.

“It’s the only thing he left,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Upright, Eva. He left it upright.”

Eva looked at the speaker.

“They take them out and throw them away,” she said. “They’re worth nothing second hand and they weigh. They empty the rucksack right there and take what sells.”

“Mmh. But upright.”

“They fall like that.”

“They don’t fall like that.”

Eva lifted a shoulder.

“Sometimes they fall like that.”

The two of them stayed on the bench, looking at the device like a pair of idiots. Kika was lying at the foot of the bench, head between her paws, wagging her tail every time somebody went by on the pavement.

“And this one,” said Axel.

“This one what.”

“This one said hello to him.”

Eva scratched her ears without looking at him.

“She’s a husky, Axel. A husky will sell you the house for one stroke.” She lifted an ear and let it drop. “If you wanted a guard, you should have brought Fay.”

The worst of it didn’t come then. The worst of it came at two in the afternoon, when they had spent hours sorting things out, and Axel put his hand in his trouser pocket to get the phone.

And felt the paper.

It was the piece of flour bag, folded in four, with the address written in biro. He had carried it in his pocket since the first day. Not in the rucksack. In his pocket, because he was afraid of losing it.

He stood looking at it in the palm of his hand.

And then it came. Then the whole thing came down on him at once, with the force things have when they fall on you late, and his face went red and his eyes filled, standing there in the middle of a pavement, with a piece of a flour bag in his hand.

“Hey,” said Eva.

“It’s that…”

“I know.”

“It’s that they were all of them.”

Eva didn’t tell him it didn’t matter. She didn’t tell him they were only things. She didn’t tell him they’d buy others.

She stood in front of him, took the speaker out of his other hand, tucked it under her arm, and waited.

She waited the whole time it took.