The Bone Seekers: (Les chercheurs d’os) by Tahar Djaout

Author:Tahar Djaout [Djaout, Tahar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Djaout, Alergia, Marjolijn de Jager
Publisher: Diálogos
Published: 2018-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

3

The news that a school would be built made a dramatic entrance into the village. I was in the meadow, deep in the grass up to my waist, thinking about very straight chairs and book bags of brand new leather. The adults assured us the school would change a great many things, both in the behavior and the mental state of the villagers. So I began thinking about everything that was going to vanish—birds and the warm texture of their feathers, wandering clouds and their ephemeral, free-flowing forms, the knotty tree trunks, the familiarity of the herds we’d take to pasture at dawn. Beside it I saw the new life that was to be ours—supplies of crumbly chalk, the plant-like smell of sheets of paper full of pictures, a new language that contorts the lips and makes the voice grow huskier. Geometric mornings of faded sunshine or tamed rainfall; no more fearless cavorting after capricious goats. I imagined the change would take place suddenly one winter morning, moored in the luster of an impartial sun. Robins, larks, warblers, and woodpigeons wouldn’t fly off any more when we’d approach—they’d just be embedded like birds of ink in the implacable book of nature.

I was pondering all that with an uncertain feeling where the most contradictory urges collided. I’ve always been enticed by the unknown, but I sensed that this time around it was going to take the form of invisible bars that would prevent me from continuing my visits to the dump, setting my traps inside shrubbery where the rain didn’t penetrate, removing bits of branches to try and make impossible grafts, and going off to shoot the forest’s most exotic animals with a secret rifle in my brain.

They came with helmets on their heads and a lot of equipment. They were almost all foreigners. Still, some of them were exactly like us; they said their prayers five times a day and spoke a language that we partly understood.

They did it all, and very quickly, too. Gigantic metal panels were erected on the lot where the school was to be constructed. The sun brutally ricocheted off the metal and a stifling smell of paint hovered in the air.

We often went to watch the men as they worked. Some of the boys would go there just to inhale the wafts of paint, which they loved. One of the construction workers had only one hand, but he was highly skilled and carried on like a mud dauber. His name was Saï; he came not from our country but from a neighboring one. Since he spoke a language almost identical to ours, he’d have long conversations with us while he worked, bent over his crates with bolts, metal plates, and cans of paint.

“Your world is going to change,” he told us. “Oh no, not for the better. It’s just that the things inside your head will take on other configurations, your dreams will be shaped differently. The purple lymph of the inkwells will tamper with your blood.

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