The Wall(63)

He went through the same sequence again: leaving the central piece in place, he filled the floor of the box, then emptied it. He looked through the cardboard box at the central piece in the middle of the table – in the centre of the stage, occupying the whole of the screen, in his mind. Then, slowly and deliberately, he looked up at me and Hifa.

‘He’s lonely,’ I said. And then to the man: ‘There used to be people here, but they all went away, and now you’re on your own, and you got tired of it.’

I saw something flare in his eyes: the first moment I’d really felt contact with what was in the mind of our hermit.

‘That must have been hard,’ said Hifa. He looked at her: yes. His expression did not change. He brought some more pieces of paper to the box and moved them around and watched them. Now that I knew he was trying to tell a story his actions made much more sense. I felt as if I understood: the pieces of paper were other people, other sea-going vessels, coming to the platform. He moved them in circles around the central piece, one by one, and then put them to one side. The central piece, the one representing our hermit himself, stayed where it was. Other boats had come to the platform but he had not lowered the ladder. He repeated this sequence six or seven times. I could tell they were separate actions because he didn’t reuse the pieces but put them to one side once he had finished with them. At one stage three different pieces of paper were brought to the platform and he moved them round it in circles, then put them down, then moved them around again.

Three ships had come to the platform and had stayed there for several days, looking for a way onto it. That must have been terrifying. If they had got onto the installation and found him and realised that he had been refusing to let them on, they would have killed him. I wondered if they had guessed that he was there, observing them? Like when you hide from a knock on the door, hoping that the person outside will go away, but then they ring the bell, and knock louder and louder, again and again, knocking and ringing together, and you know that they know that you’re there hiding, and they’re getting angrier and angrier, but you’re committed to hiding now so there’s nothing you can do except duck down, low and quiet, and wait and flinch and hide and long for them to stop and go away, except a secret part of you fears that they never ever will, that they can wait longer than you, outlast you, that it’s a contest to the death … and then they go away and you find you’ve been holding your breath and it’s all fine and you’re safe. For now.

He stopped moving the pieces around and took the three ships away. The single piece – the hermit himself – was still in the middle of the box. Then he brought another piece of paper to the edge of the box and left it there for a few seconds. He moved it very slightly and left it again. And again. He kept doing this. I got it: a vessel approaching the installation, but slowly, very slowly. It took at least a couple of minutes for the boat to get to the platform. The boat was moving so slowly that it had to be under sail or oar – and that’s when it came to me: this must be the story of how he had seen us coming and what he had decided to do. This was us rowing towards the platform.

Our boat got to the middle of the box, right next to the hermit. He left it there and folded his arms. He had seen us coming, he had seen us arrive, and then he had thought about what to do next. He looked at the pieces on the board, then picked them up and put them down beside the box, and then he looked at us, as if to say: and now here we are.

‘Why us?’ Hifa asked, her voice soft.

He seemed not to be listening, but after a few seconds, he held up two fingers. The answer appeared to be, because there were only two of us.

‘Thank you,’ said Hifa. The man gave a circular movement of his head which I took to mean something along the lines of ‘Don’t mention it’.

‘Thank you,’ I said. It was nowhere near a large enough statement for what I felt, but what else was there to say?

‘We’re going to go upstairs,’ I said. ‘I hope that’s OK.’ Again he showed no reaction, but there was something about his non-reaction which was a form of ‘yes’. Yes-stillness was different from no-stillness. This was going to take some getting used to as a form of communication, learning a new non-language.

I went up the ladder first this time. There was just enough light. I went first to ‘our’ room to check that it was all as we had left it. Hifa came in behind me and sat on one of the mattresses. I knew that I should eat but I felt too tired. I knew what I wanted instead: light. I went to see if there was another one of those oil lanterns. There didn’t seem to be one in any of the other rooms on this floor, except the hermit’s, and I couldn’t take that. By now the sun had gone down. The ladder was the darkest point of the building, in the centre away from the windows, and I went down very carefully. The hermit was still in the same corner, but looking out the windows in the direction where the sun had set. Past him I could see the first stars.

‘I’m on the hunt for one of those lanterns,’ I said, ‘with your permission. It’s been such a long time.’

There was a pause of a few seconds. I think it was still so strange to him hearing human speech again that it was taking him a while to process what he heard. He pointed at a far corner of the room. That was a huge moment, the first gesture he had made that didn’t involve his cardboard stage set. I picked my way through the stacked and teetering supplies and found, sitting on top of a crate, an oil lantern, identical to the one I had seen upstairs in his room. Next to it, just as miraculous, was a box of matches. It occurred to me that the matches were as valuable as the oil. I turned to look at him and, with the starlight behind him and the moonlight pouring across the windows in front, he made a double-handed gesture which clearly meant: go, take it.