John Berger - Lilac and Flag

In the car he found a bottle of beer and he came down the slope, loins first, like a man who still has his legs comes down a ladder.

Drink, he said, and listen to me, friend. I’ve thought it all out waiting for sleep in my Cadillac. With no money there’s little left on the surface of this earth. It’s ashes and cinders like the moon. The best thing is sleep, if you can manage sleep. In dreams money’s abolished. Everywhere. Maybe you dream of money. But you never dream of paying! Nobody in the world dreams of paying. This is what makes waking up so terrible. This is what makes waking up worse than hunger. Drink your beer and get some sleep.

THE DOORS to the Interrogation Unit were all locked in Cauchy Street Station. To do what they do on the ninth floor they require isolation from everything else in life and death; they need to believe that there were no stories before them and that there will be none after them. God in his loneliness created the world. They up there on the ninth floor try to destroy it, member by member. So all the doors were locked.

I heard grunts, footsteps and a voice. The voice belonged to Sergeant Pasqua although it was shriller than his everyday one. The grunts came from Sucus. The grief Sucus felt in his heart made him practically immune to the pain being inflicted on him by the sergeant. Each shock winded him, and smashed mercilessly against the inside of his skull. But between the shocks, the other pain was worse.

Who was with you? The sergeant screeched the question so many times that the four words lost their meaning. To begin with, they had referred to a gun battle on Rat Hill the previous night, during which Naisi and a police officer had been shot dead. Who-was with you! Who was with you! With repetition the words became like a circling vulture’s cry. And from far below, barely audible, came a squeak as from a mole or a field mouse. Whether its origin was the voice box or some other maltreated organ of the prisoner’s body, it was impossible to tell. Then came a silence. No cry, no squeaks, no footsteps, no hum. A door opened and the silence was broken by a second voice. Hector said: I want to see the prisoner alone, Sergeant, you may go.

Sergeant Pasqua marched off. In the sound of his boots, in the rhythm of his footsteps, there was an iron pride. Then there was heavy breathing and the noise of effort, as if two men were climbing up a steep ridge.

Long ago, during one of the long summers when I was in the alpage with the goats and the two cows, Desirée and Rouquine, a strange dog appeared. A medium-sized, black dog. Nobody had ever seen him before. He was lying in the grass not far from the chalet, where there was an outcrop of grey rocks on which I sometimes used to sit to watch the valley and the clouds a thousand metres below. The afternoon was hot, the grasshoppers were hissing, and the stonechats were perching on the yellow gentian plants, which swayed whenever one alighted or flew off. The dog was clearly very old. His hind legs were so stiff that when he walked he looked as if he wanted to crap. His awkwardness was comic. Yet after watching him take a few steps, you felt a kind of pity.

Towards the end of the afternoon I saw him again. And he was unrecognisable. At first I thought he was another dog. His hangdog tail was up and waving in furious circles. His walk was swift and brisk. He was with the brown bitch from La Fine’s chalet. She must have been in heat, for both of them were sniffing and licking under each other’s tails. I left them to it.

When night fell, and the stars were so bright above the pastures that they looked as if you could walk to them, he turned up again. I found him shivering in the grass when I went out to fetch some wood for the stove. He was lying in an odd position, his head was alongside his body, prodding it to see why it didn’t move. With considerable difficulty I brought him inside. He stretched out beside the stove, where the pinewood was crackling, and dozed. Sleep he couldn’t, for every few minutes his whole body was shaken by convulsions in his chest.

The stove quieted and the moon came up. We could see it through the windowpane that had a puddle in it. Somehow the dog got to his feet and went to the door. I opened it and he made for the rocks where I’d first seen him. There he lay down. And there he howled. Howled once. Ten minutes later he had disappeared. He had gone into the forest to die.

Men and women are not like this dog because they have words. With their words they change everything, and nothing. Whatever the circumstances, words add and take away. Either spoken words or ones heard in the head. They are always incongruous, because they never fit. This is why words cause pain and why they offer salvation.

Let’s begin with your name. Tell me your full name.

You have it written down.

How do your friends call you?

I don’t know.

Does the name Sucus mean anything to you?

Nothing.

Where were you yesterday around six o’clock in the evening?

I could hear the words of Sucus and the Superintendent through the locked door.

Nowhere.

Shall I remind you?

It makes no difference.

You were with a dealer named Naisi on Rat Hill and you had a Zig gun in your hands.

The sergeant told me Naisi’s dead.

My man fired in self-defence.

So he’s dead.

Naisi was resisting arrest and he wasn’t alone, there were two other guns with him. There were three of you. All of you were firing. Naisi, his sister, and yourself.

I wasn’t there.

One of my officers was killed.

He’s dead.

If you weren’t there, where were you?

Words were already taking Sucus and the Superintendent out of the locked room.

It was a lifetime ago.

How old are you?

You look it up.

I’m sixty-five. Your parents are alive?

My father’s dead.

A Trojan?

He came from the mountains.

Like I did.

My father wasn’t a bogey!

What did he do?

He was in commerce.

My father was a cattle dealer, said the Superintendent. What was your father’s line?

He opened oysters.

Anything else?

He opened oysters all his life.

Do you have a regular job?

What do you expect?

So you’re unemployed.

I worked on a building site.

In the city?

Across the road from here.

Where the cranes are.

Where the cranes were!

They’re still there.

Are they?

Come to the window, you can see them.

There was a silence. The two men must have been standing by the window that gave on to the Mond building site.

Look! said the Superintendent, something’s flying from the top of the tall crane there. It’s a flag.

Flag! repeated Sucus in a broken voice.

I can’t make out the insignia, said the Superintendent, my eyesight’s failing.

We’re on the ninth floor here, aren’t we?

Can you read the flag?

White stripes and a white cross on sky-blue. Most flags don’t change.

Then it’s Greek, the Greek national ensign.

The crane driver was a Greek.

You knew him?

A lifetime ago. His name was Yannis. He came from the island of Samos. He could draw a cork out of a wine bottle with his crane.

The flag wasn’t there yesterday, said Hector.

Yannis flew a flag on his crane each time his wife gave him a baby, explained Sucus, he had two daughters, one of them was named Chrysanthe. He was hoping to have a son whom he would call Alexander. What more do you want to know?

I want to know where you were last night. I want to know where your guns came from. I want to know who Naisi was working for. If you tell me, I’ll do my best to help you. Otherwise I must warn you, it looks bad for you. Killing a police officer isn’t something we let anybody do twice.