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the upper rooms, where, of course, it is strictly forbidden to disturb him.

CHAPTER TWELVE
     

Réol, 1
     
    FOR A VERY long time the small two-roomed flat on the fifth floor left was occupied by a single lady, Madame Hourcade. Before the war she worked in a cardboard factory making casings for art books in strong card covered in silk, leather, or suedette and with cold-hammered lettering, storage folders, advertising display folders, office sundries – file boxes in red or Empire-green cloth bindings with thin gold edging – and novelty boxes with stencilled decorations, for gloves, cigarettes, chocolates, and fruit jellies. It was of course from her that Bartlebooth, a few months before his departure in nineteen thirty-four, ordered the boxes in which Winckler would pack his puzzles after he had made each one: five hundred absolutely identical boxes, twenty centimetres long, twelve centimetres wide, and eight deep, in black cardboard, with a black ribbon for tying them closed and which Winckler would seal with wax, and with no labelling other than an oval sticker bearing the initials P.B. followed by a number.
    During the war the factory could no longer manage to obtain raw materials of adequate quality and had to close. Madame Hourcade survived with difficulty until she had the luck to find a position in a large hardware store on Avenue des Ternes. It seems she enjoyed the work, for she stayed on after the Liberation, even when the factory reopened and offered to take her back.
    She retired in the early seventies and settled in the little house she owned near Montargis. There she leads a quiet and peaceful life and, once a year, returns the good wishes sent her by Mademoiselle Crespi.
    The people who have succeeded her in the flat are called Réol. At the time they were a young couple with a little boy of three. A few months after moving they posted on the glass pane of the concierge’s door an announcement of their marriage. Madame Nochère made a collection around the building to buy them a present, but gathered no more than 41 francs!
    The Réols will be in the dining room and just finishing dinner. On the table there will be a bottle of pasteurised beer, the remains of a sponge cake with the knife still in it, a cut-glass fruit bowl containing what are called “the four beggarmen”, that is to say an assortment of dried fruits, prunes, almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, figs, and dates.
    The young woman stands on tiptoe beside a Louis XIII-style dresser, her arms outstretched to reach from the top shelf an earthenware plate decorated with a romantic landscape: wide fields surrounded by wooden fences and broken by dark spinneys of pine and little streams spilling over into lakes, and, in the distance, a tall narrow barnhouse with a balcony and a flattened roof on which a stork has landed.
    The man is wearing a polka-dot pullover. He holds a fob watch in his left hand which he looks at whilst with his right hand he resets the hands of a large Early American carriage clock on which a group of Negro Minstrels is carved: a dozen musicians wearing top hats, cutaway jackets, and big bow ties, playing various wind instruments, banjos, and a shuffleboard.
    The walls are hung with hessian. There aren’t any pictures, or reproductions, not even a standard post-office calendar. The child – now aged eight – is on all fours on a very thin straw mat. He wears a kind of red leather cap. He’s playing with a small whistling top bearing a bird design drawn in such a way that as the top slows down it looks as though the birds are flapping their wings. Beside him, in a strip comic, you can see a tall mop-haired young man with a blue-and-white-striped sweater jumping onto a donkey. In the bubble coming from the donkey’s mouth – for it’s a talking donkey – are the words: “If you want to play donkey you must be an ass”.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     

Rorschach, 1
     
    THE ENTRANCE HALL of the Rorschachs’