Excerpts from
Safran
By Bodil Bredsdorff
I dried my
mouth on the back of my hand and looked at him. He was thinner and taller than
the first time I had seen him, but his eyes were the same. He was sitting there
biting his knuckles, glancing at me and looking out across the landscape. All
the merriment in his eyes had gone.
“They all ran off.” He
scratched his knee.
“Except Dom,” I
countered.
He nodded. “Yes, he
was the one who died.” He scratched his other leg. “They fetched him later.”
Poor old Dom. If it
hadn’t been for that brat and his pals...
“I thought you
couldn’t speak.” There was a hint of a smile in his eyes.
“Couldn’t speak?”
He nodded. “Yes,
that time in the ravine. You never said a word.”
That was right. I
had used signs to speak to the boy and the old man.
“I couldn’t understand
that man who tried to speak to me.”
“We hardly could,
either, but then they were afraid of the robbers as well.”
He said it without
batting an eyelid. He was a robber himself now. I looked around along the hill
crests to see whether there were any more after all.
“The others don’t
know,” he assured me. “They’d be furious.”
“Why are you helping
me?”
“You gave us water -
and the staff for Granddad.”
He kept on looking
at me.
“Are you a boy or a
girl?”
“I’m Saffi,” I
replied. “Who are you?”
He finally looked
down and fiddled for a while with a stone in the ground. “I’m called Snoop.”
I tied the black
scarf around my hair, filled the can, pulled the strap over my shoulder and got
up.
“Just follow the
path.”
“I’m not going
home.”
He looked up at me
in amazement. “Where are you going then?”
“To the town,” I
replied and started to walk.
He ran after me and
blocked my path. “You’re crazy.”
I dodged past him. “Why
shouldn’t I? I haven’t got anything worth stealing.”
“You’ve got that
pouch round your neck.”
I stopped. If he
could see it, so could everyone else.
“Come here.” He
grabbed my arm and drew me back towards the cave, and we sat down again in
front of the entrance,
“Tomorrow,” he
looked imploringly at me, “I‘m leaving. Going in to Granddad’s. He lives there.
You can come with me. But first ... Can you stand a bit of pain?”
I nodded hesitantly.
He took his knife out of his sheath.
“It’s a sign so that
the robbers won’t hurt you. Undo your shirt.”
I undid the top
buttons. He pulled the material down off my shoulder and cut a triangle in my
bare skin.
The knife was so
sharp that I hardly noticed it as he did it. It was only when I was alone again
that, sitting there and watching the blood trickling from the cut, I realised
how much it hurt.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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