The Return

23

It took some time to get the stove going, but once he’d shifted a few large chunks of soot from the flue, it took hold. Some smoke belched into the room to start with, but it soon cleared.

He tried the faucets, but no water appeared: he had to fetch some buckets from the spring in the woods instead. He put a large cauldron on the burner, and a smaller pot next to it, for the coffee. The refrigerator merely needed switching on. The electricity was on, as he had requested. She had taken care of that.

When the water was sufficiently hot, he filled a bowl, carried it out to the rickety table at the gable end and had a good wash. The sun hadn’t yet sunk below the trees, and it made him feel pleasantly warm as he stood there in nothing but his underpants. Late-summer bumblebees buzzed around in the mignonette standing three feet tall against the house wall; there was a smell of ripe apples, which had already started falling, and he had the feeling that everything was beginning again.

Life. The world.

Once he’d done what he had to do, he would be able to start living up here again; he’d had his doubts, but this afternoon and evening filled with gentle movement and a spirit of welcome could hardly be mere coincidence.

It was a sign. One of those signs.

He poured the last of the water over his head. Didn’t bother about his underpants getting wet, took them off and went back into the house naked.

He put on a completely new set of clothes. The stuff he’d left in his study and in the wardrobe were pristine; maybe they smelled a little bit odd-a trace of jute or horsehair, perhaps-

but what the hell? They’d been untouched for twelve years, after all.

Just like him. The same period of waiting, of being shut in.

He made his evening meal at about seven. Sausage and egg, bread, onion and beer. He ate it on the steps outside the front door, with the plate on his knee and the bottle on the rail, just like he always did. He washed up, lit a fire in the living room and tried to make the television work. There was a loud buzzing noise to accompany silent pictures from some foreign channel. He switched it off and tried the radio instead. That was better. He sat in the basket chair in front of the fire and listened to the eight o’clock news while drinking another beer and smoking a cigarette. He found it difficult to grasp that so much time had passed since he last sat here; it felt like just a few weeks, a couple of months at most, but he knew of course that this was how life stuttered along. No regular progression, nothing continuous. Ups and downs, to-ing and fro-ing. But all the same, the passage of time was inscribed in one’s body: in the weariness one felt, all those increasingly sluggish movements.

And the anger in the soul. The flame refusing to die down.

He understood that he needed to do what he had to do as quickly as possible. Within the next few days, preferably. He knew what he needed to know, after all. There was no reason to put it off any longer.

He waited until there was only the faintest of glows from the fire. Darkness had set in. It was time for bed, but he needed to pay a visit to the henhouse before going to sleep, just to see what it looked like. He had no intention of starting it all up again, certainly not, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink if he didn’t take a quick look at least.

He took the lantern and went outside. He shivered a little when the cold evening air crept up on him, wondered whether to fetch a pullover, but couldn’t be bothered. It was only forty yards at most and he’d soon be back by the warm fire again.

He was only halfway there when it struck him that he

wasn’t alone in the darkness.