She didn’t respond. It was difficult to talk to her. Finally I asked her to lend me her book. The most frightening one. She promised she’d ask Agata to bring it. Dusk was falling, but she didn’t put on the light. Once we were both plunged in darkness, I said goodbye and went home.
Now, confident that the houses were back in the care of their owners, I enjoyed going on longer and longer walks, though I still called these expeditions my round. I was widening my estates, like a solitary She-Wolf. I was thankful to leave behind the views of the houses and the road. I would go into the forest – I could wander around it endlessly. Here things were quieter; the forest was like a vast, deep, welcoming refuge in which one could hide. It lulled my mind. Here I didn’t have to conceal the most troublesome of my Ailments – the fact that I weep. Here my tears could flow, bathing my eyes and improving my sight. Maybe that’s why I could see more than people with dry eyes.
First I noticed the lack of Deer – they had vanished. Or perhaps the grass was so high that it hid their perfect red backs? What it actually meant was that the Deer had already started to calve.
On the same day when I first came upon a Young Lady with a beautiful spotted Fawn, I saw a man in the forest. At quite close range, though he did not see me. He had a backpack with him, green with an external frame, like the ones they used to make in the 1970s, so it occurred to me that the man must be of a similar age to me. And to tell the truth, he looked it too – old. He was bald, and his face was covered in grey stubble, trimmed short, probably with one of those cheap Chinese clippers bought at the street market. His oversized, faded jeans bulged unattractively on the buttocks.
This man was moving down the road that ran along the forest, cautiously, gazing underfoot. That was probably why he let me come so close. When he reached the intersection, where felled pine trunks were stacked, he took off his pack, leaned it against a tree, and went into the forest. My binoculars showed me a wobbly, out-of-focus image, so I could only guess what he was doing there. I did see him leaning down to the forest floor and rummaging in the pine needles. One might have thought he was a mushroom picker, but it was too early for mushrooms. I watched him for about an hour. He sat on the grass, ate sandwiches and wrote something in a notebook. For thirty minutes or so he lay on his back with his arms folded behind his head and stared into the sky. Then he took the backpack and disappeared into the greenery.
From the school I called Dizzy to tell him this news – that I’d seen a stranger roaming about in the forest. I also told him what people were saying at Good News’ shop, which was that the Commandant was mixed up in the illegal transportation of terrorists across the border. Some suspicious types had been caught not far from here. But Dizzy reacted rather sceptically to these revelations. And refused to be persuaded that the stranger could be wandering about the forest in order to erase potential evidence. Maybe a weapon was hidden there?
‘I don’t want to worry you, but the investigation is probably going to be shelved, because nothing has been found that could cast new light.’
‘What do you mean? What about the Animal prints around the site? It was the Deer that pushed him down the well.’
There was silence, and then Dizzy asked: ‘Why do you keep telling everyone about those Animals? No one believes you anyway, and they take you for a bit of a…a…’ he faltered.
‘A nutter, right?’ I said, to help him.
‘Well, yes. Why do you keep going on about it? You know perfectly well it’s impossible,’ said Dizzy, and it occurred to me that I really would have to explain it to them clearly.
I was outraged. But when the bell rang for lessons, I quickly said: ‘One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.’
I didn’t sleep too well that Night, knowing that a stranger was lurking so close to the house. But the news of the potential closure of the investigation prompted stressful, disagreeable anxiety too. How could it be ‘shelved’ just like that? Without checking all the possibilities? And what about those prints? Had they taken them into consideration? After all, a Person had died. How could they ‘shelve’ it, for goodness’ sake?
For the first time since moving here I locked the door and windows. At once the house felt stuffy. I couldn’t get to sleep. It was early June, so the Nights were already warm and scented. I felt as if I had been locked for life in the boiler room. I listened out for footsteps around the house, analysed every rustle, and jumped at every snap of a twig. The Night magnified the subtlest sounds, changed them into grunts, groans, voices. I think I was terrified. For the first time since coming to live here.
The next morning I saw the same man with the backpack standing outside my house. At first I was paralysed by fear and started reaching a hand into the secret closet for the pepper spray.
‘Good morning. Excuse me for disturbing you,’ he said in a low baritone, which set the air quivering. ‘I’d like to buy some milk from the cow.’
‘From the Cow?’ I said in amazement. ‘I don’t have milk from a Cow, only from the Froggy, will that do?’ The Froggy was the name of the village grocery store.
He was disappointed.
Now, in the daylight, he looked perfectly agreeable. I wouldn’t have to use my spray. He had a white linen shirt with a mandarin collar, the sort people wore in the good old days. Close up, it was also plain to see that he wasn’t bald after all. He still had some hair left at the back of his head, and he’d plaited it into a skinny little pigtail, which looked like a grubby shoelace.
‘Do you bake your own bread?’
‘No,’ I replied in surprise. ‘I buy that at the shop down the hill too.’
‘Aha. Good, all right.’
I was already on my way to the kitchen, but I turned round to inform him: ‘I saw you yesterday. Did you sleep in the forest?’
‘Yes, I did. May I sit here a while? My bones are rather stiff.’
He seemed distracted. The back of his shirt was green with grass stains. He must have slipped out of his sleeping bag. I giggled to myself.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
He flapped his hands. ‘I don’t drink coffee.’
Plainly, he wasn’t very bright. If he were, he’d have known that I wasn’t interested in his culinary likes and dislikes.
‘Then maybe you’d like a piece of cake,’ I said, pointing to the table, which Dizzy and I had recently brought outside. There was a rhubarb tart on it, which I had baked the day before yesterday and had almost entirely eaten.
‘May I please use the bathroom?’ he asked, as if we were bargaining.
‘Of course,’ I said, letting him into the house ahead of me.
He drank some tea and ate a slice of tart. He was called Borys Sznajder, but he pronounced his first name funnily, stretching the vowels: ‘Boorooos’. And for me, that name stuck. He had a soft, eastern accent, and his next few remarks explained its origin – he was from Białystok.
‘I’m an entomologist,’ he said with his mouth full of cake. ‘I’m studying a particular species of flat bark beetle, endangered, rare and beautiful. Do you know that you live at the southernmost site in Europe where Cucujus haematodes is found?’