John Berger - Lilac and Flag

Murat!

The Turk was face to the ground. For what seemed a year he didn’t stir. At last, he turned his head.

Newborn, don’t fret, he said, I think one of my legs is broken. It’s better I don’t move.

The squall had passed. There appeared the first brief sunshine of the day. Yet both men on the ground were shivering.

Yannis, in his cabin, realised that something unusual had occurred on the ground below. Why was the Turk lying face down in the mud? What was the young man who wanted to be a crane driver doing on his knees beside him? He hauled up and swung the jib to the west. Cato was running towards the cement plant waving his arms. The young man had gotten to his feet and was walking towards Cato. Both of them stopped abruptly, facing one another. Then the young man hit the foreman in the face and the foreman, taken by surprise, stepped backwards, slipped and fell. Now the young man returned to the Turk, who hadn’t moved and was still lying spread-eagled on the yellow mud. It was at this moment that Yannis became convinced there had been an accident.

He had to deliver the hopper to the pouring or the concrete would set. When this was done, he stopped the crane and came out of the cabin. Arching over the city towards the east there was a rainbow. He began to descend the ladder much more slowly than usual. His silhouette against the sky, as he descended, showed a man weighed down by doubt.

Sucus did not really decide in which direction to walk: he just walked. The rain had lessened to a slight drizzle. When taxis pulled up at the Metropole Hotel the hall porters no longer held scarlet umbrellas aloft. In the sky above the building site both cranes were working again, jibs turning. Cato had sacked Sucus on the spot. Murat had been taken away on a stretcher.

Sucus strode down Park Avenue towards Carouge. It was an area full of banks. The banks clustered together, discouraging any building where money might be exchanged for pleasure. In the banks nothing was hidden except money, every pore of these buildings was under surveillance, every one of their surfaces polished as if shaved for an operation. This was why to steal from them was almost as much a challenge as walking on the moon, and the popular heroes in the city were men like Nestor, or Margarlon, or Diomedes, robbers whose hauls had become legendary. As he passed the lunar banks, Sucus grasped the reindeer knife on his belt.

After ten minutes he came to Gentilly, the district of the cloth merchants, with shops, warehouses, wholesalers, and factories. In the narrow streets buyers, sellers, messengers, brokers, tea boys, jostled each other all day. Porters carried piles of garments as high as themselves, bound with string, garments women had finished at home now being returned to their contractors. Everybody Sucus passed or knocked against was busy on a small errand, urgent for somebody somewhere.

The last clouds had been blown away. The buildings on the distant hills looked white in the sunlight. The fishmongers sprinkled more broken ice on their fish, and Sucus on the jostling sidewalk remembered how his father had told him about a shepherd in the alpage. He didn’t remember the man’s name. All he recalled was that the man said something and the air was so still, the man so alone, that the mountain echoed his voice.

As if the sound came from the mountains, a cock crowed. Sucus stopped and looked round. An old woman, toothless, with a nose like a beak, was sitting on an upturned wooden box in a doorway. Between her legs was a basket holding several white chickens. Realising she had stopped in his tracks the young man covered in cement dust, the old woman crowed again and beckoned to him.

A plump young white chicken, she called, three thousand nine hundred!

For that price!.. And Sucus laughed the bargaining laugh.

Come over here and I’ll tell you a story.

Sucus approached.

It happened to my neighbour. She and I live beyond the oil tanks, where the fields start. She has a husband, this neighbour, a husband who likes the booze. On Saturday evening he asks some of his cronies home and they start drinking in the kitchen, drinking and singing. His wife says she’s going to bed. A little later the husband falls asleep in his chair. Are you listening to me, boy? Or are you looking at the white chickens? I’m too blind to see. Listen. One of the husband’s cronies had an idea: Let’s play a joke on him, he said. It’s Easter, he said, they’re bound to have a chicken, look in the ice box. Sure enough, they found one. Cut off its head and give me the neck, said the joker. Okay. Now open his fly and let the little neck hang out as it should! That’s what the old men did in the kitchen. Then they went home. At about five in the morning the wife wakes up in her big bed, she can’t hear any voices, and her husband isn’t beside her. So she gets up. She opens the kitchen door, and what does she see? Do you know what she saw? She saw the cat eating her hubby’s zizi!..

I’ll give it to you, young man, because you laughed so much, for twenty-five hundred!

Sucus carried the live white chicken upside down by its legs along the Shepherd’s Bush Road. It was the chicken he was holding that told him where to go.

He passed a woman pushing a pram with a grown-up man in it. He stopped to watch. The woman bent down to speak to the man in the pram.

Are you too hot, my love? I don’t want you sweating, it always puts you in a bad mood. Is the sun in your eyes? We’ve got to get to Lions so we can pick up the music sheets, otherwise I won’t have enough. Bend your knee now. Be good and bend your knee. Then I can pull up your trouser bottom, my love. We have a lot of music to write …

The paths up Rat Hill were muddy and Sucus slipped several times. Once he fell on the chicken who started to cackle very loud, hoping that all the cocks in the world would come to her aid. Outside the Blue House there was nobody, but the door was open. Inside, Naisi was sitting on a chair by the window, wiping with an oily cloth a Zig submachine gun which lay across his knees.

What did you do, Brother-in-Law?

I hit the boss.

You shouldn’t have done that, he said.

It happened before I could stop it.

Never hit the boss unless you kill him. He can always hit harder. Besides, it’s too intimate.

I knocked him down.

And you got sacked, no? He got up off the ground and you got put down in the shit, no? You can read, I suppose?

Sucus nodded.

Zsuzsa can’t read.

And you, asked Sucus, you read?

Me? I’m the first reading member of the family. They kept me four years in their zaouia. They taught me how to read and they taught me about God. You can’t fiddle with him. That’s what I learnt about God … in one sentence. It was in this zaouia I first touched a piano. The piano was in a cellar where they made yoghurt, and the cook, he was black, he taught me the notes. He loved to play a number of his own called “Your Balls Are Hanging Out.” To this day I can’t play it without smelling damp cloth and heated milk. Then I got pregnant.

You’re joking.

I got found with Indian hemp.

Naisi smiled a smile as enigmatic as the Buddha’s. It was hard to know whether it was a smile of regret, of humor, or of courage before the worst possible news.

This is what I wanted to show you.

Naisi handed a folded newspaper to Sucus, who read the small headline: TORTOISE HILL DEFIES INTERPOL. ESCAPE NETWORK UNFOLLOWABLE SAYS IDENTITY MAN.

Whatever happens, Brother-in-Law, don’t forget, Zsuzsa can’t read.

Meaning what?

Always give her a second chance.

Naisi got up, opened his mother’s wardrobe, and placed the gun carefully on the top shelf behind the shoes.

What applies to them doesn’t apply to us, Brother-in-Law. Never forget it, otherwise you’ll get hurt.