Agota Kristof - The Book of Lies

Another woman says:

"You're never satisfied. The ones I've seen dying in the hospital all say, 'Whatever state I'm in, I want to survive, go home, see my wife, my mother. I'd give anything to live a little longer.' "

A man says:

"You shut up. Women have seen nothing of the war."

The woman says:

"Seen nothing? Idiot! We have all the work and all the worry: children to feed, wounds to tend. Once the war is over, you men are all heroes. The dead: heroes. The survivors: heroes. The maimed: heroes. That's why you invented war. It's your war. You wanted it, so get on with it-heroes, my ass!"

Everybody starts talking and shouting. Near us, the old man says:

"Nobody wanted this war. Nobody, nobody."

We leave the cellar and decide to go home.

The moon lights the streets and the dusty road that leads to Grandmother's house.

We learn to juggle with fruit: apples, walnuts, apricots. First two, that's easy, then three, four, until we manage five.

We invent conjuring tricks with cards and cigarettes.

We also train ourselves in acrobatics. We can do cartwheels, somersaults, handsprings backward and forward, and we can walk on our hands with perfect ease.

We dress up in really old clothes way too big for us that we found in the attic trunk: loose-fitting, torn checked jackets and wide trousers, which we tie at the waist with string. We also found a hard, round black hat.

One of us sticks a red pepper on his nose, and the other a false mustache made out of corn silks. We get hold of some lipstick and draw our mouths out to our ears.

Dressed up as clowns, we go to the marketplace. That's where there are the most shops and the most people.

We begin our show by making a lot of noise with our harmonica and a hollow gourd made into a drum. When there are enough spectators around us, we juggle tomatoes or even eggs. The tomatoes are real tomatoes, but the eggs have been emptied and filled with fine sand. People don't know this, so they exclaim, laugh, and applaud when we pretend we've nearly dropped one.

We continue our show with conjuring tricks, and we end it with acrobatics.

While one of us keeps doing cartwheels and somersaults, the other makes the rounds of the spectators walking on his hands with the old hat between his teeth.

In the evening we do the cafés without our costumes.

We soon know all the cafés in the town, the cellars where the proprietor sells his own wine, the bars where you drink standing up, the smarter cafés frequented by well-dressed people and a few officers looking for girls to pick up.

People who drink part easily with their money. They also part easily with their confidences. We learn all kinds of secrets about all kinds of people.

Often people offer us drinks, and we are gradually getting used to alcohol. We also smoke the cigarettes people give us.

Wherever we go we are very successful. People think we have good voices; they applaud us and call us back several times.

Sometimes, if people are attentive, not too drunk and not too noisy, we put on one of our little dramas, for example, The Story of the Poor Man and the Rich Man.

One of us plays the poor man, the other the rich man.

The rich man is sitting at a table smoking. Enter the poor man:

"I've finished cutting up your wood, sir."

"Good. Exercise is very good for you. You look very well. Your cheeks are all red."

"My hands are frozen, sir."

"Come here! Show me! That's disgusting! Your hands are all chapped and covered with sores."

"They're chilblains, sir."

"You poor people are always getting disgusting illnesses. You're dirty, that's the trouble with you. Here, this is for your work."

He throws a pack of cigarettes to the poor man, who lights one and starts to smoke it. But there's no ashtray where he's standing, near the door, and he doesn't dare approach the table. So he flicks the ash from his cigarette into the palm of his hand. The rich man, who would like the poor man to leave, pretends not to see that he needs an ashtray. But the poor man doesn't want to leave the premises so soon, because he is hungry. He says:

"It smells good in your house, sir."

"It smells of cleanliness."

"It also smells of hot soup. I haven't eaten anything all day."

"You should have. Myself, I'm dining out in a restaurant because I've given my cook the day off."

The poor man sniffs:

"It smells of good hot soup all the same."

The rich man shouts:

"It can't smell of soup here; nobody is making soup here; it must be coming from one of the neighbor's, or else you're just imagining it! You poor people think of nothing but your stomachs; that's why you never have any money; you spend all you earn on soup and sausages. You're pigs, that's what you are, and now you're dirtying my floor with your cigarette ashes! Get out of here, and don't let me see you again!"

The rich man opens the door and kicks the poor man, who sprawls on the sidewalk.

The rich man shuts the door, sits down in front of a plate of soup, and says, joining his hands:

"I give thanks to Thee, Lord Jesus, for all Thy blessings."

When we arrived at Grandmother's, there were very few air raids in the Little Town. Now there are more and more of them. The sirens start to wail at all hours of the day and night, exactly as in the Big Town. People run for shelter, hide in cellars. Meanwhile, the streets are deserted. Sometimes the doors of houses and shops are left open. We take advantage of this to go in and quietly steal whatever we like.

We never hide in our cellar. Grandmother either. During the day, we keep doing whatever we're doing, and at night we go on sleeping.

Most of the time, the planes only fly over our town on their way to bomb the other side of the frontier. But sometimes a bomb falls on a house anyway. In which case we locate the spot by the direction of the smoke and go see what has been destroyed. If there's anything left to take, we take it.

We have noticed that the people in the cellar of a bombed house are always dead. On the other hand, the chimney is almost always standing.

Sometimes, too, a plane goes into a dive to machine-gun people in the fields or in the street.

The orderly has taught us that we must be very careful when a plane is moving toward us, but that as soon as it is over our heads, the danger is past.

Because of the air raids, it is forbidden to light lamps at night unless the windows are completely blacked out. Grandmother thinks it is more practical not to light them at all. Patrols circulate all night to make sure the regulation is obeyed.

During a meal, we mention a plane we saw fall in fiâmes. We also saw the pilot parachute from it.

"We don't know what happened to him, the enemy pilot."

Grandmother says:

"Enemy? They are friends, our brothers. They'll be here soon."

One day, we are out walking during an air raid. A terrified man dashes up to us:

"You shouldn't be out during air raids."

He grabs our arms and pulls us toward a door:

"Go in, get inside."

"We don't want to."

"It's a shelter. You'll be safe there."

He opens the door and pushes us in front of him. The cellar is full of people. Complete silence reigns there. The women are clutching their children to them.

Suddenly, somewhere, bombs go off. The explosions get nearer. The man who brought us to the cellar runs over to a pile of coal in one corner and tries to bury himself in it.

Several women snigger contemptuously. An elderly woman says:

"His nerves are shot. He's on leave because of it."

All of a sudden we find it difficult to breathe. We open the cellar door; a big fat woman pushes us back and shuts the door again. She shouts: