“Yes, you’ve singed my eyebrows.”
“What?”
“Could you keep the torch away — you’re burning my eyebrows.”
“You won’t be making jokes for much longer.”
The soldier grabbed Sim by his pajama collar and set off, dragging the professor behind him.
“I believe I’ve forgotten my glasses,” the professor managed to utter. “They’re under my pillow. . . .”
“Shut your mouth, you’ll see better like that.”
They disappeared in a deafening din.
Once the door had closed behind them, someone whispered, “I think they’ve found the tunnel.”
Their tunnel was practically finished, and their escape was planned for the following week.
Darkness and silence returned to the dormitory.
Maya put her head between her arms: she couldn’t bear it anymore. So much violence . . . So much stupidity . . . So much fear.
Maya Lolness no longer felt she had the strength to go on. Once again, her husband had been ripped away from her. With her face buried in the old mattress cover, she started crying. She did what she could to avoid being heard, but she was crying her eyes out.
It was so hard to keep fighting all the time. This had been going on for so long, and the hope on the horizon was so slim. . . . Who would she be able to count on if her husband disappeared for good one day? She was all alone at the bottom of the Crater.
Maya was very fond of the other prisoners, but how could she lean on them? And, anyway, had a single one of them said a word to her in her moment of suffering? Had a single one come over to comfort her in her moment of loneliness, even though they all knew what she had just been through? Men. At the end of the day, they were just a bunch of rusty, thoughtless men! Men who didn’t know what a difference small gestures made, who didn’t know about being sensitive and tender. . . .
Maya wept for a long time, with her eyes closed. And when she felt a little calmer, after an hour of tears, she turned onto her back with a sigh.
It took her a few seconds to see the crowd of men surrounding her.
The thirty dormitory inmates were all around her. Barely a moment after Sim’s hasty exit, they had gathered, one by one, to form a group around her bed. Lou Tann’s head was sticking over the mattress above her, Rolden’s was next to Lou Tann’s, and all the others had been watching over her for the last hour, shoulder to shoulder.
Yes, they were a bit stupid and clumsy, and they had no idea what to do or say, but they were there.
“If you need anything . . .” Zef Clarac offered.
Maya started laughing, very gently, and it was a laugh of genuine joy. They were all there, around her.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”
The thirty elderly rebels returned to their beds.
When he realized that they were taking him in the direction of the classroom, Sim Lolness had a sense of foreboding that they had found out about the tunnel. He had no idea how he was going to get himself out of this one.
Joe Mitch was sitting in the professor’s study with a napkin around his neck, eating. Sim had never witnessed one of Joe Mitch’s meals before, and it was an experience he could have done without.
There was more food on Joe Mitch’s napkin than there was on the plate, and even more on his knees and the ceiling. Razor and Torn were standing at some distance, to avoid the flying squirts of sauce. Even without his glasses, Sim was instantly relieved to see that the trapdoor over the tunnel wasn’t open.
The professor was flung into a chair.
“Piece of cake!” He smiled.
Razor became the spokesperson: “The Friendly Neighbor is tired of your stories.”
“I’m glad to see that they’re not putting him off his food,” said Sim.
“Be quiet!” shouted Torn.
He kicked the chair to drive the message home.
“You asked for time before revealing Balina’s Secret,” Razor went on. “You told us you still had some work to do on it, before . . .”
“The equinox,” said Sim Lolness.
“The what?”
“The spring equinox.”
“We don’t give a fig about your knoxes!”
“March 20 . . . That’s the spring equinox.”
“Be quiet!” Torn roared. “Nobody asked you!”
Razor got a splash of grease on his cheek and looked up at the ceiling to see if it was raining. But Mitch had just sunk his teeth into the meat on his plate.
Razor coughed and started explaining again. “The Friendly Neighbor is very patient. But the Friendly Neighbor isn’t stupid.”
Sim looked astonished, as if he had just heard some shocking news. “Really?” he said.
“Be quiet!” yelled Torn.
“Could you confirm for me that you are indeed working properly on the Balina project?”
“I can confirm that,” said Sim.
“And this? What is this?”
Razor picked up a box full of papers, which he proceeded to empty over the professor’s knees. Sim looked at a few pages, almost gluing his nose to them, as he could hardly see without his glasses. The pages all showed the same drawing: a tree.
“Mr. Lolness, we have emptied your laboratory. It is full of these pieces of paper. There is no sign of a single piece of work on Balina.”
Sim smiled amiably.
“I said that if I didn’t give you the secret on March 20, you could do what you like to us. But until then, I don’t think you’re qualified to judge my work. Kindly put all these drawings back in my laboratory.”
Mitch held out his dirty hand. He was given a bundle of drawings. He looked at them slowly as he sucked on a leftover bit of insect shell. Greenish juice dribbled from his fingers onto the paper.
Sim was seething. This handful of drawings, which they were getting filthy, was the fruit of research that had fired him up since his arrival in the Crater.
It had all started with a crack in his glasses. They had fallen, and the cracked section of glass created the shape of a tree. Sim had meticulously copied this design. The next day a storm had broken, and Sim had noticed the shape of the lightning. Trees! Always trees! Day after day, by observing a stream, cracked ice in a bucket, the veins in his arm, the veins in the leaves, Sim had found this pattern everywhere.
The shape of the Tree was following him. He didn’t know exactly where this discovery would lead him, but he was amassing the evidence. And this new heavy file was keeping him alive. It was like a secret garden at the bottom of a mine.
Joe Mitch tossed the bundle of papers across the room. Sim got up to collect them but was sent back to his chair.
Mitch pulled out his napkin and wiped his face. He was spreading the sauce right up into his hair. Charming!
“Professor, don’t forget that you have a wife,” said Razor. “It would be a shame if anything unfortunate happened to her. You need to apply yourself seriously to your work. We want results.”
Sim returned to the dormitory a little before dawn. He was clutching a bundle of greasy sheets of paper. Maya hugged him tight.
“Piece of cake . . .” said Sim, overcome with emotion.
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to know how I’d managed to charm you.”
“So what did you say?”
“I said I didn’t know.”
Maya smiled sadly. Sim decided it was the moment to talk to her about Toby.
“Maya, I don’t normally say anything I can’t prove. This time, I can’t be certain at all — in fact I have virtually no evidence — but I believe Toby is alive. I don’t think he’s far from here.”
Maya couldn’t manage to speak.
“I’m telling you,” Sim whispered, “because this hope is helping me.”
“I got the impression that Plok Tornett wanted to talk to me about Toby a few weeks ago,” Maya answered her husband. “He saw something. I didn’t dare believe in it. But i
f you think that . . .”
Through his gestures, Plok had indeed tried to tell Maya about his encounter with Toby during the great leech hunt.
Sim and Maya were lying next to each other now.
At the first glimmer of dawn, they heard the voice of old Rolden, who was two beds away from them. “Professor, I’ll be one hundred and three tomorrow.”
“I know, Albert.”
Councillor Rolden had been very tired for several weeks now. He kept reminding people that he wasn’t sure about holding out until his one hundred third birthday.
“We’ll have a party,” said Sim. “Maya will bake her white tart for you.”
Rolden knew all about Maya’s white tart. But he also knew that there was no more chance of a white tart being baked in Joe Mitch’s Crater than of poetry being created out of fly dung.
Maya wanted to set the record straight. “I’ll make you one soon, Albert.”
“Tomorrow,” Sim insisted. “It’s his birthday tomorrow.”
Maya poked her husband with her elbow, but Sim got up and went over to stand in the middle of the dormitory.
“Friends, tomorrow night we will be outside. Get ready. We’re leaving this evening.”
On the other side of the Crater, in the Grass people’s shelter, nobody had slept a wink all night. At one o’clock in the morning, two male captives had been brought to the edge of the prison area: two Grass people who had made it that far.
They had set out from the Grass in the middle of winter. They had overcome every obstacle but had been caught in the snow while snowboarding down a branch in the middle of the night. Every evening, Joe Mitch’s men set their nets to catch prowlers and gnats.
They had caught these two Grass people.
Room was made for the newcomers in the freezing shelter where the other prisoners were sleeping. They had no strength left at all.
“Why did you come this far?” Jalam inquired sternly. He didn’t like pointless heroes.
“We had no choice,” the man said.
Moon Boy stood between Mika and Liev, staring at the new arrivals; they didn’t know that the worst was still ahead of them, in the Crater. Back in the Grass, they referred to this as walking into the flea’s den.
For several months, Moon Boy had been persecuted by a soldier called Tiger. This Tiger wanted to get him to talk about Toby and interrogated him behind the other guards’ backs. Moon Boy was the only Grass person who knew Little Tree’s real name.
He was hopeless at lying, so Moon Boy had to find other ways of telling the truth, without betraying his friend: “I’ve never called anybody Toby” or “There’s nobody we address by that name in our country.” Time and again, Tiger had nearly skewered him on his harpoon, but he didn’t want to get rid of his only witness.
“Setting out in the middle of winter like that!” complained Jalam. “You didn’t stand a chance!”
“It wasn’t about chance,” said the second Grass person.
“We had no choice,” the other one repeated.
“What were you coming to do?” asked Moon Boy.
“Someone left the Grass with the first snows. We were looking for her.”
“Who?” asked Moon Boy.
“It’s unforgivable,” said Jalam. “You shouldn’t have left the Prairie.”
“Who were you looking for?” Moon Boy asked again.
The two new prisoners looked at each other before turning toward Moon Boy.
“Your sister, Ilaya.”
All the Grass prisoners fell quiet.
“Nobody understands why she left.”
The fields of snow, the bark mountains, the vertiginous Trunk, all this and more flashed before Moon Boy’s eyes. Could Ilaya have crossed all of that alone?
“We saw her very close to here three days ago,” the man explained. “She nearly killed me when I tried to speak with her. I don’t know what’s happened to her. I don’t know what she wants.”
“Your sister has been full of anger since you left,” said the other Grass person. “And since Little Tree left.”
Moon Boy thought about his sister, only a few years older than him, who had taught him about the world, who had been his mother, his father, his whole family. He thought about Ilaya singing in wintertime, in their ear of wheat. Where had all that gentleness gone? What was Ilaya coming to do in the Tree?
“They’ll catch her,” said Moon Boy.
There was a hush.
“It’s already happened, little one. They caught her at the same time they got us. But she put up such a fight that they imprisoned her a little higher up. We heard her cries as we went past.”
“My sister’s here?” whispered Moon Boy.
That evening, in the classroom perched above the Crater, the thirty elderly students were awaiting the hour of their escape. A great silence hovered above them. Wearing warm undershirts under their pajamas and carrying food in their satchels, they were all ready to leave. Rolden’s hands were trembling a little.
Seeing as nobody else felt up to teaching the class, Zef Clarac had offered his services. Everybody had looked at him in astonishment: Zef had no area of expertise whatsoever and had always been a bad student. He had succeeded in his career as a lawyer only because of chance circumstances.
One of the prisoners had advised him to give a cooking or embroidery lesson or to recite the times tables, but Zef had apologized for his lack of knowledge in those disciplines.
It was Maya who had eventually whispered a helpful suggestion.
And so Zef Clarac — the ugliest man in the Tree, the scarecrow of the Treetop — had just started giving a talk on “Inner Beauty.”
Nobody, apart from Maya, knows what he said on the subject, because nobody was listening. Everybody’s ears were strained toward the sound of footsteps coming and going in front of the classroom window.
Zef was talking into a void. He wasn’t even thinking about their imminent escape anymore; quite simply he was telling the story of his childhood. He had regressed to the tiny misshapen Zef who had made the midwives faint the day he was born, the repugnant-looking little boy who had learned day by day to shine from the inside.
Maya thought it was an excellent lecture.
Sim finally gave the signal for them to leave. He got down on all fours and made his way over to the trapdoor.
At precisely the same moment, the main door to the room opened softly. Zef stopped talking. Sim quickly lay down on the floor. He heard footsteps coming toward him and then Zef’s voice mumbling, “The professor is having a little snooze.”
“I’ll wait for him,” came a loud voice overhead.
It was Pussykinska.
She stood there for a while in silence, very close to Sim. Zef picked up his lecture again, as a fascinated Pussykinska listened. She had never heard of inner beauty before.
When Sim realized that Pussykinska wasn’t going to leave, he stretched, yawned, and sat up a bit.
“Another Grass person has arrived,” said the female guard. “You’re needed.”
“Again?” answered Sim. “There were already two newcomers this morning.”
“You have to come and see.”
There was no way for Sim to escape these confrontations. Every Grass person that entered the camp was presented to him. He shrugged. He would get it over with quickly and be back in no time. Desperate to hear more of what Zef Clarac had to say, Pussykinska followed him with some reluctance.
“I’ll be right back,” said Sim before walking out of the door. “Wait for me. There’s no change of plan.”
The elderly students let out a long sigh. Rolden was trembling more and more. In two hours, he would be one hundred and three years old.
Sim entered a small room, where Pussykinska left him alone. He waited for the Grass person, but he was surprised by a second catch in one day. It was rare for a Grass person to be taken alone: usually they were caught in groups.
Sim waited impatiently for several minutes as he ran ove
r the escape plan in his mind. Sunrise was at seven o’clock. Even if they escaped at midnight, they would still have several hours of walking under the cover of darkness. That was enough time to reach a safe place and embark on the second phase of Operation Liberty. Thirty old people escaping from a prison as well guarded as this was an insane idea, but Sim knew that he could pull it off.
Nothing would stop them now.
The Grass person was shown in. The room wasn’t lit, and all that could be seen was the blue mark on the soles of his feet.
“Do you know this old man?” asked the guard.
Sim’s glasses shone in the gloom. There was a long silence as the two prisoners stared at each other. They grew accustomed to the dark, and Sim’s eyelid started twitching. The shadowy face of the Grass person was motionless. Finally he said, “No, I don’t know him.”
Sim was very pale when he returned to the classroom. He sat down on a small chair and whispered something in his wife’s ear. Maya’s face was equally pale as she smiled and lay her head on Sim’s shoulder. Her husband enjoyed the moment, the weight of her forehead pressing against his neck. He could feel hope, on velvet paws, finally returning to this low point of his life.
Zef was trying to carry on with his lecture, in spite of his distracted public.
Sim leaned forward and whispered a few words, which spread around the classroom from table to table.
These words finally reached Zef Clarac.
“Sim and Maya aren’t leaving anymore. It’s because of the boy who’s just been captured among the Grass people. Sim recognized his voice: he says it’s Toby Lolness.”
A little flame had rekindled in Maya’s eyes.
Sim kept staring at old Rolden. He was trying to make him understand how sorry he was.
But deep down, Sim was sobbing with joy.
Albert Rolden ran his hand through his beard and wrote a few words on a sheet of paper. This new message was passed along the rows. Eventually it reached the hands of Sim and Maya.
Some departures can wait. All of us here know that we won’t leave without you.
Albert Rolden
Toby and the Secrets of the Tree Page 17