Then there was sleep. In the
beginning, I slept badly at night and not at all during the day. Little by
little my nights got better and I could also sleep during the day, particularly
after I had completed a memory test with all its associated thoughts and
feelings and the life of people passing in and out and through me like dancers
waltzing across the dance floor or the way we danced in the clubs.
These acute reminders would be
tire me and would sleep but I would wake refreshed and start again. It was a case
of staging my time after meals and the night winds or the rain to send me
dozing off. In the finish I was sleeping between sixteen and eighteen hours a
day in preparation for the next bout of memory search for which I needed to be
fresh. Apart from visits to the prison yard, I had not time for exercise.
Sometimes even visits to the policeman interrogator or my lawyer checking up on
me came as a rude interruption. Six hours to spend with my meals, my basic
needs and the story of the man from France was more than enough to entertain
me.
Between my mattress and the
wooden bed I had found a worn scrap of
paper, yellow with age. It was almost completely stuck to the back of the
mattress and they must have thought it was a label or description of the make of the material. It was taken from
the Sarawak Times but the date was missing as was the beginning of the article.
It was a story that must have happened somewhere in France between the
mountains and the sea and no doubt taken place some years before because, as I
say, the paper was yellow and cross with brown markings at the creases.
A man left his village in the
country north of Marseilles to go down to the sea. He sailed away to make his
fortune. Twenty five years later when he returned from America, he was rich and
came back to the village with his wife and young child. His mother now ran a
Pension there, near to where he was born and brought up on their small farm. He
left his wife and son in another hotel and went to his mother’s place to
surprise them.
His mother didn’t recognise him
when he came in. As a joke he had the idea of asking for a room. He let them
see the money and cards he carried in his wallet. During the night, his mother
and sister entered the bedroom to rob him and murder him. They beat him to
death with a hammer and threw his body in the river which would carry it away
to the sea in the same way that he had set off to carry him on his journey and
brought him back home again like some maritime romance. When his wife arrived
in the morning, holding her little boy by the hand and not knowing what had
happened; she informed the mother and sister the real identity of the
traveller.
The mother hanged herself and the
sister threw herself down a well. I read this story a thousand times and tried
to make sense of it. On the one hand it seemed entirely improbable. Who would
play a trick on their family like that. And then I thought it was possible.
Duplication takes place every day. It all comes about by chance, the same chance
as with my actions that fateful Sunday. In any case I thought that the
traveller sort of got what he deserved. You should never mess around with
things like that. When Ma and Da told Dada out of spite that I had become aware
of his real identity and his shame, they said it was when he started getting
sick. That was another lie.
‘Sick’ the DaDa said and grunted,
‘Sick that I did not tell you more myself’ but he seemed worried.
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