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  The Book of Lies

  Agota Kristof

  An omnibus of novels: The Notebook – The Proof – The Third Lie

  These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided "brothers" in much of Europe since World War II. Kristof's postmodern saga begins with The Notebook, in which the brothers are children, lost in a country torn apart by conflict, who must learn every trick of evil and cruelty merely to survive. In The Proof, Lucas is challenging to prove his own identity and the existence of his missing brother, a defector to the "other side." The Third Lie, which closes the trilogy, is a biting parable of Eastern and Western Europe today and a deep exploration into the nature of identity, storytelling, and the truths and untruths that lie at the heart of them all. "Stark and haunting." – The San Francisco Chronicle; "A vision of considerable depth and complexity, a powerful portrait of the nobility and perversity of the human heart." – The Christian Science Monitor.

  Agota Kristof

  The Book of Lies

  © 1997

  The Notebook

  The first book in the Book of Lies series, © 1988

  Translated by Alan Sheridan

  Arrival at Grandmother's

  We arrive from the Big Town. We've been traveling all night. Mother's eyes are red. She's carrying a big cardboard box, and the two of us are each carrying a small suitcase containing our clothes, plus Father's big dictionary, which we pass back and forth when our arms get tired.

  We walk for a long time. Grandmother's house is far from the station, at the other end of the Little Town. There are no trams, buses, or cars here. Just a few army trucks driving around.

  There aren't many people in the streets. The town is very quiet. Our footsteps echo on the pavement; we walk without speaking, Mother in the middle, between the two of us.

  When we get to Grandmother's garden gate, Mother says:

  "Wait for me here."

  We wait for a while, then we go into the garden, walk around the house, and crouch down under a window where we can hear voices. Mother's voice says:

  "There's nothing more to eat at home, no bread, no meat, no vegetables, no milk. Nothing. I can't feed them anymore."

  Another voice says:

  "So you've remembered me. For ten years you didn't give me a thought. You never came. You never wrote."

  Mother says:

  "You know why. I loved my father."

  The other voice says:

  "Yes, and now you remember that you also have a mother. You come here and ask me to help you."

  Mother says:

  "I'm not asking anything for myself. I just want my children to survive this war. The Big Town is being bombed night and day, and there's no food left. All the children are being evacuated to the country, with relatives or with strangers, anywhere."

  The other voice says:

  "Then send them to strangers, anywhere."

  Mother says:

  "They're your grandsons."

  "My grandsons? I don't even know them. How many are there?"

  "Two. Two boys. Twins."

  The other voice asks:

  "What have you done with the others?"

  Mother asks:

  "What others?"

  "Bitches have four or five puppies at a time. You keep one or two and drown the others."

  The other voice laughs loudly. Mother says nothing, and the other voice asks:

  "They have a father, at least? You aren't married, as far as I know. I wasn't invited to any wedding."

  "I am married. Their father is at the front. I haven't had any news of him for six months."

  "Then you can put a cross over him."

  The other voice laughs again. Mother starts crying. We go back to the garden gate.

  Mother comes out of the house with an old woman.

  Mother says to us:

  "This is your Grandmother. You'll be staying with her for a while, till the end of the war."

  Grandmother says:

  "It could last a long time. But I'll put them to work, don't you fret. Food isn't free here either."

  Mother says:

  "I'll send you money. Their clothes are in the suitcases. And there are sheets and blankets in the box. Be good, you two. I'll write you."

  She kisses us and goes away crying.

  Grandmother laughs very loudly and says to us:

  "Sheets and blankets! White shirts and patent leather shoes! I'll teach you what life is about!"

  We stick our tongues out at Grandmother. She laughs even louder and slaps her thighs.

  Grandmother's House

  Grandmother's house is five minutes' walk from the last houses in the Little Town. After that, there is nothing but the dusty road, soon blocked off by a barrier. It is forbidden to go any further, a soldier is on guard there. He has a machine gun and binoculars, and when it rains, he takes shelter in a sentry box. We know that beyond the barrier, hidden by the trees, there's a secret military base, and beyond the base, the frontier and another country.

  Grandmother's house is surrounded by a garden at the bottom of which is a stream, then the forest.

  The garden is planted with all sorts of vegetables and fruit trees. In a corner, there's a hutch, a henhouse, a pigsty, and a shed for the goats. We have tried to ride the biggest of the pigs, but it's impossible to stay on.

  The vegetables, the fruit, the rabbits, the ducks, and the chickens are sold at market by Grandmother, as well as the hens' and ducks' eggs and the goat cheese. The pigs are sold to the butcher, who pays for them with money, and with hams and smoked sausage too.

  There is also a dog to keep away thieves, and a cat to keep away mice and rats. We mustn't give the cat anything to eat so that he's always hungry.

  Grandmother also owns a vineyard on the other side of the road.

  You enter the house through the kitchen, which is large and warm. A fire burns all day long in the woodstove. Near the window there's a huge table and a corner seat. We sleep on the seat.

  From the kitchen a door leads to Grandmother's bedroom, but it's always locked. Only Grandmother goes there, only at night, to sleep.

  There's another room, which can be reached without going through the kitchen, directly from the garden. This room is occupied by a foreign officer. Its door is also locked.

  Under the house there's a cellar full of things to eat, and under the roof, an attic where Grandmother doesn't go anymore since we sawed away one of the rungs of the ladder and she fell and hurt herself. The entrance to the attic is just above the officer's door, and we get up there by means of a rope. That's where we hide the notebook, Father's dictionary, and the other things we're obliged to conceal.

  In short order we make a key that opens all the doors in the house, and we bore holes in the attic floor. With the key we can move freely about the house when nobody's in, and through the holes we can observe Grandmother and the officer in their rooms, without their suspecting.

  Grandmother

  Grandmother is Mother's mother. Before coming to live in her house, we didn't even know that Mother still had a mother.

  We call her Grandmother.

  People call her the Witch. She calls us "sons of a bitch."

  Grandmother is small and thin. She has a black shawl on her head. Her clothes are dark gray. She wears old army shoes. When the weather's nice, she goes barefoot. Her face is covered with wrinkles, brown spots, and warts that sprout hairs. She has no teeth left, at least none that can be seen. />
  Grandmother never washes. She wipes her mouth with the corner of her shawl when she's finished eating or drinking. She doesn't wear underpants. When she wants to urinate, she just stops wherever she happens to be, spreads her legs, and pisses on the ground under her skirt. Of course, she doesn't do it in the house.

  Grandmother never undresses. We have watched her in her room at night. She takes off her skirt and there's another skirt underneath. She takes off her blouse and there's another blouse underneath. She goes to bed like that. She doesn't take off her shawl.

  Grandmother doesn't say much. Except in the evening. In the evening, she takes a bottle down from a shelf and drinks straight out of it. Soon she starts to talk in a language we don't know. It's not the language the foreign soldiers speak, it's a quite different language.

  In that unknown language, Grandmother asks herself questions and answers them. Sometimes she laughs, sometimes she gets angry and shouts. In the end, almost always, she starts crying, she staggers into her room, she drops onto her bed, and we hear her sobbing far into the night.

  Our Chores

  We have to do certain chores for Grandmother, otherwise she doesn't give us anything to eat and leaves us to spend the night outdoors.

  At first we refuse to obey her. We sleep in the garden, we eat fruit and raw vegetables.

  In the morning, before daybreak, we see Grandmother leave the house. She says nothing to us. She goes and feeds the animals, milks the goats, then takes them to the bank of the stream, where she ties them to a tree. Then she waters the garden and picks the vegetables and fruit, which she loads into her wheelbarrow. She also puts in a basket full of eggs, a small cage with a rabbit, and a chicken or duck with its legs tied together.

  She goes off to market pushing her wheelbarrow, with the strap around her scrawny neck, which forces her head down. She staggers under the weight. The bumps and stones in the road make her lose her balance, but she goes on walking, her feet turned inwards, like a duck. She walks to the town, to the market, without stopping, without putting her wheelbarrow down once.

  When she gets back from the market, she makes a soup with the vegetables she hasn't sold, and jams with the fruit. She eats, she goes and has a nap in her vineyard, she sleeps for an hour, then she works in the vineyard, or if there is nothing to do there, she returns to the house, she cuts wood, she feeds the animals again, she brings back the goats, she milks them, she goes out into the forest, comes back with mushrooms and kindling, she makes cheeses, she dries mushrooms and beans, she bottles other vegetables, waters the garden again, puts things away in the cellar, and so on until nightfall.

  On the sixth morning, when she leaves the house, we have already watered the garden. We take heavy buckets full of pigfeed from her, we take the goats to the bank of the stream, we help her load the wheelbarrow. When she comes back from the market, we are cutting wood.

  At the meal, Grandmother says:

  "Now you understand. You have to earn food and shelter."

  We say:

  "It's not that. The work is hard, but to watch someone working and not do anything is even harder, especially if it's someone old."

  Grandmother sniggers:

  "Sons of a bitch! You mean you felt sorry for me?"

  "No, Grandmother. We just felt ashamed."

  In the afternoon, we go and gather wood in the forest.

  From now on we do all the chores we can.

  The Forest and the Stream

  The forest is very big, the stream is very small. To get to the forest, we have to cross the stream. When there isn't much water, we can cross it by jumping from one stone to another. But sometimes, when it has rained a lot, the water comes up to our waists, and this water is cold and muddy. We decide to build a bridge with bricks and planks that we find around bombed houses.

  Our bridge is strong. We show it to Grandmother. She tries it and says:

  "Very good. But don't go too far into the forest. The frontier is nearby, the soldiers will shoot at you. And above all, don't get lost. I won't come looking for you."

  When we were building the bridge, we saw fish. They hide under big stones or in the shadow of bushes and trees whose branches meet in places over the stream. We choose the biggest fish, we catch them, and we put them in a sprinkling can filled with water. In the evening, when we take them back to the house, Grandmother says:

  "Sons of a bitch! How did you catch them?"

  "With our hands. It's easy. You just have to stay still and wait."

  "Then catch a lot. As many as you can."

  Next day, Grandmother puts the sprinkling can on her wheelbarrow and sells our fish at market.

  We often go into the forest, we never get lost, we know where the frontier is. Soon the guards get to know us. They never shoot at us. Grandmother teaches us to tell the difference between edible mushrooms and poisonous ones.

  From the forest we bring firewood on our backs, and mushrooms and chestnuts in baskets. We stack the wood neatly against the walls of the house under the porch roof, and we roast chestnuts on the stove if Grandmother isn't there.

  Once, deep in the forest, beside a big hole made by a bomb, we find a dead soldier. He is still in one piece, only his eyes missing because of the crows. We take his rifle, his cartridges, and his grenades: we hide the rifle inside a bundle of firewood, the cartridges and grenades in our baskets, under the mushrooms.

  When we get back to Grandmother's, we carefully wrap these objects in straw and potato sacks, and bury them under the bench in front of the officer's window.

  Dirt

  At home, in the Big Town, Mother used to wash us often. In the shower or in the bath. She put clean clothes on us and cut our nails. She went with us to the barber to have our hair cut. We used to brush our teeth after every meal.

  At Grandmother's it is impossible to wash. There's no bathroom, there isn't even any running water. We have to go pump water from the well in the yard and carry it back in a bucket. There's no soap in the house, no toothpaste, no washing powder.

  Everything in the kitchen is dirty. The red, irregular tiles stick to our feet, the big table sticks to our hands and elbows. The stove is completely black with grease, and the walls all around are black with soot. Although Grandmother washes the dishes, the plates, spoons, and knives are never quite clean and the saucepans are covered with a thick layer of grime. The dishcloths are grayish and have a nasty smell.

  At first we didn't even want to eat, especially when we saw how Grandmother cooked the meals, wiping her nose on her sleeve and never washing her hands. Now we take no notice.

  When it's warm, we go and bathe in the stream, we wash our faces and clean our teeth in the well. When it's cold, it's impossible to wash properly. There is no receptacle big enough in the house. Our sheets, our blankets, and our towels have disappeared. We have never seen the big cardboard box Mother brought them in again.

  Grandmother has sold everything.

  We're getting dirtier and dirtier, our clothes too. We take clean clothes out of our suitcases under the seat, but soon there are no clean clothes left. The ones we wear keep getting torn, and our shoes have holes in them. When possible, we go barefoot and wear only underpants or trousers. The soles of our feet are getting hard, we no longer feel thorns or stones. Our skin is getting brown, our legs and arms are covered with scratches, cuts, scabs, and insect bites. Our nails, which are never cut, break, and our hair, which is almost white from the sun, reaches down to our shoulders.

  The privy is at the bottom of the garden. There's never any paper. We wipe ourselves with the biggest leaves from certain plants.

  We smell of a mixture of manure, fish, grass, mushrooms, smoke, milk, cheese, mud, clay, earth, sweat, urine, and mold.

  We smell bad, like Grandmother.

  Exercise to Toughen the Body

  Grandmother often hits us with her bony hands, a broom, or a damp cloth. She pulls our ears and grabs us by the hair.

  Other people also slap and
kick us, we don't even know why.

  The blows hurt and make us cry.

  Falls, scratches, cuts, work, cold, and heat cause pain as well.

  We decide to toughen our bodies so we can bear pain without crying.

  We start by slapping and then punching one another. Seeing our swollen faces, Grandmother asks:

  "Who did that to you?"

  "We did, Grandmother."

  "You had a fight? Why?"

  "For nothing, Grandmother. Don't worry, it's only an exercise."

  "An exercise? You're crazy! Oh, well, if that's your idea of fun…"

  We are naked. We hit one another with a belt. At each blow we say:

  "It doesn't hurt."

  We hit harder, harder and harder.

  We put our hands over a flame. We cut our thighs, our arms, our chests with a knife and pour alcohol on our wounds. Each time we say:

  "It doesn't hurt."

  After a while, we really don't feel anything anymore. It's someone else who gets hurt, someone else who gets burned, who gets cut, who feels pain.

  We don't cry anymore.

  When Grandmother is angry and shouts at us, we say:

  "Stop shouting, Grandmother, hit us instead."

  When she hits us, we say:

  "More, Grandmother! Look, we are turning the other cheek, as it is written in the Bible. Strike the other cheek too, Grandmother."

  She answers:

  "May the devil take you with your Bible and your cheeks!"

  The Orderly

  We are lying on the corner seat in the kitchen. Our heads are touching. We aren't asleep yet, but our eyes are shut. Someone pushes at the door. We open our eyes. We are blinded by the beam of a flashlight. We ask: