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wires as if he has done this all his life.
    At the end of the day I feel so tired that I don’t even count the coins that Chief gives me. I walk like a robot to our shed and go to sleep without eating, without even a cup of tea, my cheek on my lambskin blanket.
    I dream about Gloria Bohème’s five brothers. I see their faces, all dirty because of the war. I see Fotia’s and Oleg’s bleeding shoulders. Anatoly’s broken eyeglasses. Iefrem’s curly hair, stiffened by mud. And Dobromir, sitting astride a cannon, with his invincible, angelic smile.
    In the middle of the night Gloria’s coughing wakes me up. The dog is barking and scolding in her chest. I can’t bear to hear this awful noise, so I block my ears.

chapter eleven
    AFTER a few weeks on the glass mountain, I’m an expert in the recovery of nickel. My grapnel digs, my fingers grab the caps,
thwack!
I pull the wire. I make twice as much money now as I did the first days, and we can afford to buy more food at the small grocery store. I’m proud of myself, but I’m worried about Gloria. She’s coughing more and more; Mr. Betov says that it’s because of the dust.
    “This damn dust gets in your throat, deep down!” he says. “You have to be very careful!”
    “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Gloria says, panting. “It’s just bronchitis, it’ll pass. Don’t forget that I’m as sturdy as the trees, Koumaïl!”
    At work, when I squat near Stambek, I talk to him about all sorts of things. I tell him about Abdelmalik and Sergei, about Vassili and Zemzem. I explain that I promised Emil I’d bring him back some
loukoums
. I teach him the different cuts of beef and the mineral hardness scale, butStambek’s head is like a sieve. He repeats the things I say, but they don’t stick in his brain.
    “It’s OK,” I say. “This way I can tell you the same thing every day and you won’t get bored.”
    Stambek laughs, and we keep digging cheerfully in the sharp depths of the mountain. He’s a good friend. It’s too bad that I’m too tired at night to play with him. The pure and simple truth is that I miss running in the staircase with Baksa, Emil, and the others. But I guess life goes on and you have to grow up.
    One day I witness an accident caused by the drunk driver of a truck. It happens when everybody lines up, right where we unload our bags of nickel to be weighed. The truck starts suddenly with its load, but instead of moving forward, it backs up. People shout, jostling each other … too late. A little girl is crushed under the truck’s wheels.
    The girl’s mother throws herself on the ground and pulls at her daughter’s body. She lets out such a piercing wail that my hair stands on end. The driver gets out of the truck, totally unsteady. He puts his hands over his mouth when he understands what he has done. His eyes pop out. The mother screams, and the crowd looks at the driver. He takes off running like crazy, trying to get as far away as possible from the truck and the dead girl’s body.
    When Chief arrives, he sees the disaster. People help the mother carry her dead daughter to her shed. Silence falls over us, except for the engine of the truck, which keeps running stupidly. Then Chief gets behind the steeringwheel and drives the truck to the factory, on the other side of the glass mountain.
    All night I think about what happened, while Gloria coughs her lungs out.
    The next morning when I go see Chief to get my grapnel, I ask him whether the drunk driver came back.
    Chief shakes his head. “If he returns to Souma-Soula, people will kill him,” he says.
    “I know someone who can do his job,” I say. “Someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. Just tea, Chief!”
    “Someone who can drive trucks?” he asks distrustfully.
    “Yes, Chief! She can even repair engines and oil pistons, and isn’t afraid to get her arms deep in grease!”
    From that day on, Gloria abandons her job on the mountain. Behind the wheel of the truck, she jerks along the road full