Sweet Nothing by RICHARD LANGE Page B

the gutter, and the only reason they didn’t leave me there is that they needed something to blame.
    “My first memory is of my mother sucking off a customer in whatever flophouse we were living in then. My second memory is of my father skinning a rabbit alive and chasing me with its still-kicking, still-screaming carcass, laughing at my pleas that he stop. They kept me in a closet. They used me as a footstool, a garbage pail, a chamber pot. They beat me ceaselessly and with much glee.
    “Did your parents beat you?” he asked me.
    “Not enough to boast about,” I replied.
    “I grew to enjoy the brutality,” he continued. “At least there was the relief that came afterward, when the blows stopped.”
    I left the prison that evening thinking I had some insight into the stresses that twist some men’s minds. Imagine my chagrin when, the very next day, the whole story was changed.
    “Every Sunday the family sat down to an enormous lunch,” the prisoner said then. “Maman, Papa, my brother and sister. The cook labored all morning to prepare the meal, and the serving girl brought in dish after dish after dish. We ate until we couldn’t eat anymore, leaving just a bit of room for dessert, of course.
    “Then we all went out to the garden, where Papa read his newspapers and Maman dozed over her embroidery while we children played escargot and b ilboquet . At night Maman would tuck me in with three kisses, one on each cheek and the last on my forehead, to sweeten my sleep.”
    “What’s your family name?” I asked, thinking that even though he was lying, he might still slip and reveal some fact that would help the authorities identify him.
    “What’s yours?” he replied.
    “That’s not important,” I said.
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “And what will it be tomorrow?” I said. “Descended from kings? A gypsy foundling?”
    “I’ve lived many lives,” he said. “And I’ll live many more.”
    “I know what you’re talking about, and it’s blasphemy,” I said.
    “Really?” he said. “What did you do to get sentenced here?”
    “I’m under no sentence,” I said. “This is my work.”
    The prisoner laughed and said, “Nobody would choose this for work. You’re being punished for something.”
    “Something I did in a previous life?”
    “Thief,” he whispered through the slot in the door of his cell. “Adulterer. Murderer. You dream of your crimes and wake with a stiff prick.”
    At times like these I had to step away, to retreat down the corridor until I could no longer hear his rants. I didn’t want such depravity echoing in my head. I didn’t want to take it home with me.
      
    JEAN PISSARDY, AGE seven; Irène Dizaute-Lacoste, age eight; Charles Vignes, age eight.
    I memorized the list, and the names of the dead and missing came to my lips when they shouldn’t have: When I spoke to my daughters, when I kissed my wife, during my prayers. Between that and the vile insinuations the prisoner sometimes spewed, I began to feel that perhaps I was being punished for something. Why else would I be more at ease locked in a dungeon with a killer than sharing the boulevards and parks with my fellow citizens?
    I turned my face from policemen for fear they’d see in my eyes the disquietude in my soul. I avoided touching the children lest my hands obey some phantom command and do them harm. “Keep your distance,” I told my wife and spent my hours away from the prison confined in a cell of my own making, shutting myself up in our darkened bedchamber, where God and the devil fought over me like two dogs after the same bloody bone.
      
    “WHY DO THEY make you stay down here with me?” the prisoner asked. “Don’t they trust their own locks?”
    “I’m here to see to it that you don’t hurt yourself,” I said.
    “So that they can hurt me later?” he said.
    “Why waste your breath on questions you already know the answers to?” I said.
    The prisoner was silent for a second, then said, “Well,