The Black House had always been a silent place, as if the walls could foresee and remember the death that would shortly befall them. That's why the neighbor women failed to hear Zorka whimpering at the table, and they wondered more than once what that poor woman was doing shut up like that, and crossed themselves thinking how she could take the blows of life like a stone, feeding on the bitterness of her tears. And Zorka spent hours motionless at the table until the day when exactly three months had gone by since they took her son, and she wanted to cry very hard, to give vent to the rage that had built up in her for ninety days. And so her neighbors couldn't hear, she put her head in the oven and howled half the night until she collapsed.
When people started to say that the gunfire was getting closer and started to see rotting bodies floating down the Rzav, Zorka tried to draw strength from her desolation, and right at noon she would go to the Ice Bridge and sit on a stone by the bank to watch the hours and the dead go by in the river that, when she was little, had produced carp and pleasure. At first she watched anxiously, in case she might recognize her son, but what she did was imagine the dark death in the eyes of the drowned and she waved goodbye to them and said, Goodbye, my children, why have you killed one another when just moments ago you were playing hide-and-seek, and they didn't answer her, though some of them looked at her with fear still on their faces. And now, standing at their doors, people said, Look, Zorka's going to the river, poor woman, it's already time for dinner. And they said, May Almighty God have mercy on her, and they went inside, because since the Rzav had started to carry bodies there was a curfew in the village after noon.
One day, Zorka ran into a gang of soldiers who were heavily armed but dirty and ragged, unshaven from days in the forest, and looking for trouble. They told her rudely that she couldn't be out at that hour, or any hour, that they were in charge. And because she looked at them vacantly and said nothing, the corporal warned her that nobody messed with him, and he had orders to shoot anything that moved, including cats and dogs. She paid them no mind and went on towards the river, because it was noon and she had to go see her dead pass by. The corporal called to her again and his shouts echoed off the walls of the houses and pierced the ears of the terrified neighbors. Zorka, as if listening to the wind blow, kept on, dragging her feet and raising dust. The corporal swore and barked out the order to fire; the godless and soulless soldiers hesitated as they watched her walk away, and one of them thought, This isn't right, it isn't right, she's just a crazy old lady. The corporal repeated the order, his voice hoarse with rage. Then one of the soldiers put his rifle to his shoulder, a magnificent FR5o that before the war some lucky man had used to hunt boar, fixed the woman's back in the telescopic sight, and fired. Zorka of the Black House fell like an abandoned sack of clothes. The soldier went up to her, pleased with his marksmanship, looked at her amazed, raised his head and shouted.
"Look. I hit her and she's still moving."
Zorka, badly wounded, turned her face to the sky, to let her soul escape more easily, and breathed wearily. She felt no pain because she'd cried all her tears long ago. Then she looked at the soldier's face, widened her eyes and extended her hand. The words she said were understood only by the stones because they were accompanied by a bubble of blood made thick and dark by suffering. And she thought, Poor child, he's lost another tooth, they're not taking care of him. The soldier was amused by the dark bubble, and, still laughing, he put the barrel of the rifle to Zorka's forehead. She was shuddering desperately, not from fear but from the desire to make herself understood in spite of the bubble of blood. The shot burst her skull and the soldier howled, triumphant, happy,
"She finally stopped moving! Finally!"
And with his sleeve he wiped the drool that trailed from his mouth and went, fatherless, soulless and stupidly smiling, to where the gang was.
Poc!
1(2)
here were ten people on the elevator and he wasn't the only one carrying flowers. On the second floor some kind of security guard got on after winking at a very pretty nurse. The three people with bouquets got off on the fourth floor. As if he knew the clinic by heart, he headed down the corridor towards room 439. A woman wearing a coif and carrying a tray full of things he couldn't identify came out of the room next door. When he got to the door he was looking for, he paused for a few seconds, wiped away the sweat that beaded his upper lip whenever he was nervous, breathed out hard, and knocked discreetly three times. The voice saying "Come in" was muffled, with a note of curiosity. It seemed to him there was also a little hopefulness in that "Come in." He went in, a little formal, holding out the roses as if they were a calling card. All of a sudden he saw her there, sitting on a sofa in the ancient posture of delighted exhaustion typical of new mothers. She had obviously just nursed the baby, who was now lying in the crib. He closed the door without making a sound and turned to the woman, who hadn't moved from the sofa and was looking right at him, noticing the sweat that shone on his upper lip. Now her voice sounded cracked: "Who are you?"
The man, with a polite smile, leaned over the woman to offer her the flowers. And instinctively she took them and moved as if to smell them. That's why she didn't see the black eye of the silencer on the pistol that appeared among the roses. The bullet went in through her open mouth; there was nothing to hear but a gentle, almost sweet poc! The woman leaned back softly on the sofa, as if her exhaustion were infinite, as well as ancient. Not a whimper. Two delicately dropped the flowers onto the woman's lap. Then he looked towards the crib, shook his head, wiped the sweat off his lip with the hand holding the pistol and looked at the newborn, who was trying out his thumb. Delicately, almost lovingly, he brought the barrel up against the base of its skull. The pistol went poc!.
It wasn't until he got to the airport in Le Bourget and had smoked half a pack of Gitanes that he managed to get his heart to start working normally. And that was just the beginning.
11(1)
One had spent the flight from Paris looking straight ahead, as if genuinely interested in the folding tray on the back of the seat ahead of him. And he didn't look even once at the scenery out the window. He refused the dinner and the drink without looking the stewardess in the eye, as if he didn't want to lose his focus for even a moment. As if he wanted to do everything in his power to be in the right place at the right time with the cigarette and the whisky after work. He looked only twice at the reddish head of the man he'd been told to eliminate. Okay to kill. He was called Zero and he was very easy to follow because of the bright color of his hair. Now that he was looking at him for the second time, on the other side of the aisle, a few seats ahead, he realized that Zero wasn't hiding the briefcase attached to his wrist by a kind of sturdy-looking handcuff. He was reading France Soir and didn't feel One's glance pass over the back of his neck.
Five seats back, Two was watching One look at something ahead of him. He'd found it odd that Three had ordered him to follow One and wait; he could have finished him off in the bathroom in the airport, once his heart had started to beat normally. He leaned back; he followed orders and he'd do One in Barcelona just like they'd told him to. It was easier to obey, not ask questions, and bide his time. Natalie would be happy; as soon as he finished work he'd go back to Paris and invite her out for a great dinner. The most irritating thing was having to spend hours on planes that didn't allow smoking. He considered it insulting but was going to have to get used to it. In fact, he was already used to working like this, always being a Two in pursuit of a One. He was One once; he'd felt bad about it, really. Well, the way he felt about what happened at the clinic. But, work is work. Anyway, the thing that he… What?