NOT SO LONG AGO

1958 THE ESCAPE

Thursday, July 10, 1958

Adam’s bony shoulder slammed into the door jamb. The boy bounced and fell on the landing. He needed several seconds to recover his wits. On impact, star-shaped molasses danced in front of his eyes. Like in football the other day, when Nathan kicked me in the head, he thought later.

His stiff limbs refused to move, as if he had run over a long distance and burst his lungs, and his arms and legs were exhausted beyond his control. Impossible to take refuge in his room—impossible to take refuge anywhere. He remained motionless, dazed, arms dangling, eyes almost closed. A few drops of drool glided onto his lips and ran down his chin.

Finally, it was the sound of his father’s heavy footsteps that pulled him from this torpor. He swung to his left and the effort made him squint. When he was on his belly, on the filthy floor, he crawled awkwardly. A few days earlier, he had seen an animal documentary on a channel he didn’t know, one that never showed cartoons. He saw a salamander leave a pond and waddle awkwardly into a thicket; right now he felt as able as a salamander wading out of its natural environment.

With his big toe, he hooked the bottom of the door and tried to close it. He blinked and the back of his skull throbbed. On the ocher-tinted wall, where his headboard rested, an anonymous superhero on a trimmed poster showed a Duchenne smile, his torso stretched, his chest compressed by his tight suit. The boy had gotten it from a comic book found in a rubbish bin, in the park, thrown away by a kid of the same age.

Adam tried to kneel to reach the key. In vain.

His father was quicker.

The irregular groans passed shamefully through the thin mouldy plaster wall. Erma was waiting for the moment when the jolting hiccups of the van’s engine would be heard. She could then rush to her brother’s bedside without fear. If she intervened too early and Daddy caught her in the hallway, she would suffer the same fate as the boy. Under normal circumstances, she would do it anyway, but her plans meant that she didn’t draw attention to herself. Violence, once again...

As always, she held her breath and left it to fate. She thought: if Adam coughs three times, it’s because Daddy is leaving. Then: if I hear the wind blow through the open window, it means that someone will come to visit us and that I will be able to leave my room without him beating my brains out. And again: if the clouds lift and the sunshine breaks through, it’s because I’m safe again.

She turned her eyes fogged by the tears toward the dirty window and closed her eyelids. One, two, three, sun... Outside, the grey became so dark that a dull veil covered the tattered wallpaper, just in front of the girl. The once orange wallpaper had turned urine-yellow ages ago. At the corners, whole sections were frayed. The flower patterns had been out of fashion for decades—if they had ever been in.

At the other end of the world, only a few yards away, Adam continued to cry. He stifled his sobs in his pillow so as not to annoy his father more, but Erma could still hear his hoarse complaints.

She lay down. When a spring pricked her lower back, just above her buttocks, she winced and resumed that position she knew by heart: curled up like a fetus, to the side, her forehead resting against the chipped wood bed frame. But no matter how she curled up, she could never disappear completely.

Ten minutes passed and her father’s vehicle finally came to life. Erma stood up and pressed herself to the window, still not breathing. She saw the rectangular shape of the old car disappear at the end of the road, after the mound of manure that she was charged with building up daily, even if her father had gradually abandoned farming and refused to continue the toil of his forefathers. He would rather break his back on his fishing boat and occasionally play golf with the crime bosses in the area, those who controlled the traffic around the port.

She hurried into the room next to hers and opened the door without taking the trouble to knock. Every time she did so, Adam reproached her by shouting the coarsest insults. The week before, she had the joy of reaping a furious “f**k off” which she didn’t know the definition of. Besides, her younger brother certainly didn’t know any more about it than she did—he must have heard this expression in the playground and just repeated it foolishly, as the kids of his age did. Now, nothing. No admonishment today.

The boy was sitting in the corner of the room, his back wedged between his desk and the wastebasket, his heels pulled under his buttocks and his knees stuck between his arms. He was holding a pillow soiled with dubious stains. His chestnut hair, bushy, leaning towards ash blond at the nape of his neck, shone curiously. A spike stood on top of his head, and Erma realized that even under these circumstances she could not help but pick out trivial details. Like the time I almost fell from the second-floor window and instead of calling for help, I was thinking there were spiderwebs under the windowsill and it would be nice to take them off before those dirty bugs swarm. Only one of the boy’s eyes was visible, the second was buried under a bluish bump that would soon swell and turn to purple.

“Adam!”

Erma’s cry of panic pulled him from his lethargy. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him gently.

Adam stared at his older sister with sadness. He cried. A bold tear fell on his cheek and traced a hollow path in the dust clinging to the boy’s skin, then it ran down his neck and faded away on the collar of his T-shirt, spattered with crimson.

“Adam, are you okay?”

He raised his head and sought his breath.

“Oh! Will you answer me?”

“Yes.”

Hollow voice, sluggish, almost extinct.

“He hurt you?”

“No more than usual. It hurts here.”

Adam pointed to his left temple with trembling fingers.

“Do you want me to call Mom?”

“It’s useless…”

Erma left the room and Adam heard her rummage through the bathroom medicine cabinet. She came back with compresses and a bottle containing an antiseptic solution.

“Did he only hit you there?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“On the arse. And in the belly. And here, on my side.”

The child grimaced when he touched his floating ribs.

“The black eye and the bruise on your forehead, it doesn’t matter, they’ll heal,” said Erma. “The ribs, though, are a problem.”

“Why? Why is it more of a problem than the rest?”

“Because if you have a broken rib, you can’t come with me.”

Adam jumped. He wanted to get up, but as soon as he moved he let out a small cry of pain and fell back on his bed, frustrated.

“I will come with you!” he yelled. “Erma, you’re not going to leave without me?”

“I told you, no. We’ll see how you’re doing tomorrow. If things don’t get better, we’ll have to postpone it. But either the three of us will leave or we’re not leaving, I promise.”

“Truth?”

“Truth.”

“Swear and spit?”

“It’s okay, Adam, you don’t have to make a big fuss. We’ll see tomorrow if you can walk without a problem, okay?”

A simple nod of the boy’s head, who spat in his palm despite everything. Adam reached out his hand, fingers apart. His sister paused for a moment, and then she squeezed it, a little disgusted.

She then helped him to his bed.

“I’ll get you some aspirin. Then you’ll have to sleep.”

“He’ll be back.”

“But not right now. Well, I think, we’re in the clear until late in the evening.”

“Don’t tell Mom when she gets back. I don’t want her to come and lecture me.”

“I won’t tell her anything. Anyway, she doesn’t care.”

Adam raised the pillow so that his chest was straight.

“I have less pain like this,” he explained. “Say, Erma, do you think it’s going to work?”

“Yes.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“Because we are determined and smart.”

“We are determined and smart, us?”

“Let’s say you’re determined and I’m smart. And Roland will be with us. He knows a lot of things, you’ll see. Don’t worry, Bambino, we’ll get away with it.”

“Are you sure we’ll have everything we need? We’ll have food, drink...”

“Yes.”

“And comics, and games, and TV?”

“We’ll have food and drink for sure.”

Erma left him alone for five minutes, enough time to steal two pills from her mother’s bedside table. She dissolved them in a little warm water and forced her brother to swallow it all at once.

She stayed by his side until he dozed off and then went down to the kitchen. In the next two hours, her mother would come back and put her huge arse in the living room armchair to rot her brains until dusk in front of the stupid soap operas she devoured every night after work—the gigantic chair, host to her mother’s gigantic arse.

In the closet under the stairs, Erma grabbed the two backpacks she had hidden behind a pile of crates. She opened Adam’s and swore. What a fool. I tell him to take only what is important, and he fills his bag with comics...

She emptied the backpack of the comics that were cluttering it, and as she had been doing every day for three weeks, she went around the hanging cabinets in the kitchen. So that nobody would notice the thefts, she had chosen to steal only a handful of food here and there. Pilfering an entire packet of pasta would never have gone unnoticed; it was better to take a few ounces of it at a time. Same thing for canned foods. Generally, she put two whole cans of tuna in the salads she prepared for her supervisors, for their lunch in the break room of the factory. By saving over several days, she had managed to steal the equivalent of two full cans in just ten days.

For the rest, everything was ready. She would grab the main things just before she left: matches, flashlight, blanket, sharp knife… She couldn’t help but think of the tanning she would suffer when her father discovered the theft. Then she realized that it wouldn’t matter; she didn’t plan on being here to take the blows.

They wouldn’t come back.