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By Root 582 0

or scruples. With great satisfaction he spoke to mortally sick people about the death that awaited them. Visits of condolence provided him with an opportunity for sharply criticizing the life of the deceased, still being mourned by his family. About the unpleasant or intimate incidents in people's private lives that they wanted to conceal, he spoke to them loudly and with sarcasm. Then one night he returned from a business trip completely transformed and, shaking with fear, tried to hide under his bed. A few days later news was spread in the family that Uncle Jerome had given up all the complicated, dubious, and risky business affairs that had threatened to submerge him, had abdicated, and had begun a new life, regulated by strict, although to us somewhat obscure, principles.

On Sunday afternoons when we were usually invited by Aunt Retitia to a small family tea party, Uncle Jerome did not recognize us. Sitting in the alcove, he looked through the glass door at the company with wild and frightened eyes. Sometimes, however, he unexpectedly left his hermitage, still in his long housecoat, his beard waving round his face, and, spreading his hands as if he wanted to separate us, he would say:

"And now, I beg you, all you that are here, disperse, run along, but quietly, stealthily, on tiptoe . . ."

Then, waving his finger mysteriously at us, he would add in a low voice:

"Everybody is talking about it: Dee-da ..."

My aunt would push him gently back to the alcove, but he would turn at the door and grimly, with raised finger, repeat: "Dee-da. "

Dodo's understanding was a little slow, and he needed a few moments of silence and concentration before a situation became clear to him. When it did, his eyes wandered from one person to another, as if to make sure that something very funny had really happened. He then burst into noisy laughter, and, with great satisfaction, shaking his head in derision, he repeated amid the bursts of laughter: "He's off his head!"

Night fell on Aunt Retitia's house. The servant girl went to bed in the kitchen; bubbles of night air floated from the garden and burst against the window. Aunt Retitia slept in the depths of her large bed; on the other, Uncle Jerome sat upright among the bedclothes, like a tawny owl, his eyes shining in the darkness, his beard flowing over his knees, which were drawn up to his chin.

He slowly climbed down from his bed and walked on tiptoe to my aunt's bed. He stood over the sleeping woman, like a cat ready to leap, eyebrows and beard abristle. The lion on the wall tapestry gave a short yawn and turned his head away. My aunt, awakened, was alarmed by that head with its shining eyes and spitting mouth.

"Go back to bed at once," she said, shooing him away as one would shoo a hen.

Jerome retreated spitting and looking back with nervous movements of his head.

In the next room Dodo lay on his bed. Dodo never slept. The center of sleep in his diseased brain did not function correctly, so he wriggled and tossed and turned from side to side all night long.

The mattress groaned. Dodo sighed heavily, wheezed, sat up, lay down again.

His unlived life worried him, tortured him, turning round and round inside him like an animal in a cage. In Dodo's body, the body of a half-wit, somebody was growing old, although he had not lived; somebody was maturing to a death that had no meaning at all.

Then suddenly, he sobbed loudly in the darkness. Aunt Retitia leapt from her bed. "What is it, Dodo, are you in pain?" Dodo turned to her amazed. "Who?" he asked.

"Why are you sobbing?" asked my aunt. "It is not I, it's he . . ." "Which he?" "The one inside ..." "Who is he?"

Dodo waved his hand resignedly. "Eh . . ."he said and turned on his other side. Aunt Retitia returned to bed on tiptoe. As she passed Uncle Jerome's bed, he waved a threatening finger at her. "Everybody is talking about it: Dee-da ..."

EDDIE

I

ON THE SAME FLOOR as our family, in a long and narrow wing of the house overlooking the courtyard, Eddie lives with his. Eddie has long ago stopped being a small boy.