The cow started mooing as it lay on the ground. I was frightened the soldier might hear it mooing and come and arrest me. Fortunately the mooing was faint because her body was so weak. I had to find some way to torment the cow without the soldier detecting it if he found her.
Among the rubble I found four footballs. They were all punctured. I gathered them together and went over to the cow. When she saw me approaching with the balls she tried to get up. She was frightened – very frightened. She took a few steps but she soon collapsed on the ground panting. I seized the opportunity and slipped a piece of rubber football into her mouth. The cow rejected it at first, but she was so hungry she started to chew the piece of rubber. Then she swallowed it.
In the end the cow ate all four footballs. But instead of the cow suffering and having diarrhoea, for example, or stomach cramps, her body fattened up and her health improved. I tried other things: pieces of broken china, old fruit, mouldy bread, a shoe lace, the buckle of a school satchel, a key ring – everything except photographs and cassettes. The cow ate them without complaining. She had put on weight and had recovered her vigour. But her eyes were sad. I avoided looking at her so that I wouldn’t cry. She was now strangely swollen and her coat was standing on end. She looked rather like a giant white hedgehog with black spots. She began looking for anything to eat. The next day I saw her eating some halva, some cake and some pastries full of cream.
On the final day the cow came as usual in the morning. She walked through the projection room, but slowly. She was bigger than ever before, and she weighed more than her legs could bear. She was also dirty and bruised. Maybe she had stumbled on the way or somebody had fallen on her from the ruined buildings around the cinema, the ones where I had filled the cracks with cheese. Recently flies had started eating the cheese and maybe that had affected the strength of those buildings. I was sitting on the same seat in the cinema, and everything was still around me. There was no one there but me. Neither my mother nor my sister nor the others. The cow’s eyes looked at me through the opening in the projection room, but this time she didn’t go anywhere. She couldn’t leave the projection room. Instead of taking a step forward, she sat down where she was. I got up from my seat in the cinema and went into the projection room. I wanted the cow to leave, to go walking as she did every day. But she just sat there. I aimed a few kicks at her, but she didn’t groan or moo. I tried to push her with both hands but my pushes were very feeble and ineffective. I stepped back a little and looked at her. Then I went back to the auditorium and sat in my seat watching the cow. I knew she wouldn’t leave. Now the cow was blocking the sunlight that usually came into the auditorium in the morning through the hole in the wall of the projection room. Now the auditorium was completely dark, just like it was when all the lights went out. Just like it was when the film was about to begin.
Biscuits
MY MOTHER WAS SITTING QUIETLY IN THE BACK seat. I was telling my wife a joke and driving the car. We were on our way to the care home, taking my mother back after her day out with us. My mother stays at the care home six days a week. Alzheimer’s. The car was travelling at fifty miles an hour. This is not just a detail. I never found out whether my wife got the joke or not, since she didn’t have a chance to laugh. Just as I finished telling the joke, we saw an old man crossing the motorway on the other side. When you’re travelling at high speed, sudden death looks like it’s happening in slow motion.
I stopped the car, of course, like a number of other people, and with my wife’s help I got my mother out of the car and left her to watch the scene from behind the concrete barrier. The old man was truly amazing. He was hopping nimbly between the vehicles, avoiding one car, dodging and weaving, whirling around, spinning like a wheel, doing the splits and throwing feeble punches. I kept my mother and my wife at a safe distance so that the old man wouldn’t touch us with his boxing gloves and turn us into biscuits. The old man’s gloves grew bigger and bigger whenever he touched the side of a car and turned it into a biscuit. My wife tried to say something to the old man, but I nudged her with my elbow and she realized she should keep silent. As for my mother, her eyes drank in the whole scene, especially when I started describing it to her in precise detail, with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator: ‘He’s touching the side of a car and turning it into a biscuit.’
The old man didn’t look anxious. He stepped out into the motorway between the speeding cars, then took off his white hat and wrapped it around his fist like a boxing glove. He didn’t want to punch the cars, just to touch them. The speeding cars tried to avoid him, but they didn’t succeed. Every car he touched turned into a giant biscuit. Since they were going so fast, they overturned and crumbled into pieces by the side of the road. The scene was riveting to watch as the first three groups of cars passed. Soon there was a giant pile of biscuit crumbs on the side of the road.
Later, on the way to the care home, my wife said with a smile that she would have liked to ask the old man just one question. I didn’t comment. We reached the door of the care home. I got my mother out of the car and, as I handed her over to a beautiful nurse, I whispered in her ear, ‘Mum, tell the nice lady the story about the old man.’ And Mother did then launch into a monologue about the biscuits as she went off with the nurse. I heard the latter saying, ‘And what else happened?’ My mother fell silent because she could no longer remember, and the nurse then suggested, ‘How about giving you an injection to help you remember the rest of the story?’
This is what I usually do with my mother: I present her with a story once a week. Last week we were alone – my wife wasn’t with us. I stopped the car in front of a biscuit seller. He’s a boy who carries on his back an enormous canvas bag full of giant biscuits that he sells by the kilo. They’re the kind of biscuits used for making desserts at home. He targets cars with elderly women, confident they are mothers.
He came up to the car window, saying to my mother, ‘Madam, would you like some biscuits? Take one and give me whatever you like for it.’ But my mother didn’t answer. She didn’t know for a moment what the boy was talking about. ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Biscuits – you know what biscuits are, don’t you?’ But she didn’t answer. I asked the boy to get a biscuit out of his bag and show it to her. ‘It’s a massive biscuit, isn’t it, Mum?’ I said. My mother smiled at the sight of the giant biscuit. ‘That one’s half the size of the bonnet of the Renault 5 that I’m driving,’ I said. Then I added that the boy had other biscuits, some of them the size of tiles and some as big as a classroom blackboard.
Mother could no longer make the delicious desserts she had been so good at making during the war. Baking a cake requires intense concentration and in some cases determination as well. My mother would carry on in the midst of bombing raids and when the neighbours and their children were shouting. She’d tell us to go down to the shelter with Father while she stayed in the kitchen. She’d join us only when her cake was ready, and her cakes always had biscuits as the main ingredient, because it was cheaper than filling them with chocolate, cream or fruit. My father loved cake with biscuits.
In the care home my mother would sometimes throw a tantrum and tell her doctor that it was me who made up all these stories. The doctor summoned me several times to ask me whether what she said was true. I denied it of course. I’d say that my mother had Alzheimer’s and that’s all there was to it. It was Alzheimer’s that made her confused and led to these accusations. She said, ‘The old man was dead and covered in blood. He’d made a desperate attempt to block the motorway, but a car ran him over. I didn’t see any biscuits.’ But she’d add that she wasn’t certain about this, and then she’d collapse, so they would give her an injection to tranquillize her.