The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

with furniture, and set up a drawing board in one corner, where I worked on plans for rebuilding the house. Looking up from my work, I would see the sunlight on the olive leaves and be lured outdoors. Walking over the grass by the house, I watched, with the tired, expectant eyes of a man who has lived all his life in the city, magpies running through the thyme and lizards vanishing into the wall. In stormy weather, the cypresses by my window bent before the wind.
    Then the autumn chill came down and hunters stalked near my house. The explosion of their rifles filled me with dread. Pipes from a sewage-treatment yard in the next field cracked and let a terrible smell into the air. I built fires in my fireplace and was never warm.
    One day my window was darkened by the form of a young hunter. The man was wearing leather and carrying a rifle. After looking at me for a moment, he came to my door and opened it without knocking. He stood in the shadow of the door and stared at me. His eyes were milky blue and his reddish beard hardly concealed his skin. I immediately took him for a half-wit and was terrified. He did nothing: after gazing at what was in the room, he shut the door behind him and went away.
    I was filled with rage. As though he were strolling around a zoo, this man had come up to my stony little pen and rudely examined me. I fumed and paced around the room. But I was lonely there, out in the country, and he had awakened my curiosity. By the time a few days had gone by, I was anxious to see him.
    He came again, and this time he did not hesitate at the door, but walked in, sat down on a chair, and spoke to me. I did not understand his country accent. He repeated one phrase twice and then a third time and still I could only guess at his meaning. When I tried to answer him he had the same trouble understanding my city accent. I gave up and offered him a glass of wine. He refused it. In a diffident sort of way he got up from his chair and ventured to inspect my belongings at closer range. Proceeding from my bookcase around the walls, which were covered with framed prints of houses I particularly liked, some in the Place des Vosges and some in the poor quarters behind Montparnasse, he finally arrived at my drawing board, where he stopped short and stood with his finger in the air, waiting for enlightenment. The fact that I was planning a house, line by line, took him a long while to understand and when he did, he began tracing the walls of each room with his finger, a few inches above the blueprint. When at last he had examined and traced every line, he smiled at me without parting his lips, looking sideways in a rather sly way that I did not understand, and abruptly left me.
    Again I was angry, feeling that he had invaded my room and stolen my secrets. Yet when my anger subsided I wanted him to return. He returned the following day, and a few days later he came yet again, though the wind was high. I began to expect him and look forward to his visits. He hunted every morning very early, and several times in the week, after he was finished, he would walk in from the field, where the sun was beginning to color the white clay. His face would gleam and he would be so full of energy that he could hardly contain it: leaping up every few minutes from his chair, he would pace to the door and look out, return to the middle of the room, whistling tunelessly, and sit down again. Slowly this energy would die away, and when it was gone, he would go too. He never accepted anything to eat or drink, and seemed surprised that I would offer it, as though sharing food and drink were an act of great intimacy.
    It did not become any easier for us to communicate, but we found more and more things to do together. He helped me prepare for winter by filling the chinks in my walls and stacking wood for the fireplace. After we had worked, we would go out into the fields and the forest. My friend showed me the places he liked to visit—a grove of