TFOA Chapter 11

"Let's go pick flowers, Niksi."

Helen came by early in the morning.

The people in this village don't distinguish between morning and dawn.

Niksi rubbed her sleepy eyes and followed her, wearing only pajamas with a cardigan thrown over top.

There was a small lake in the western forest of Auvers village.

The path there was treacherous and seldom walked by people. Despite its jungle-like appearance, water-loving flowers bloomed in wild abundance, making it quite a worthwhile place to visit.

"Spring flowers have the most beautiful colors. Soaps with flowers or flower pieces are popular with city folk."

"Ah. So what flowers are we going to pick now?"

"Camellias and daffodils."

They pushed through the underbrush and arrived at the flowers' wild kingdom.

The soft flower fragrance that had been floating gently suddenly hit their noses with a sharp tickle.

"Daffodils are poisonous, is that okay?"

"Huh? What kind of poison?"

"Diarrhea and stomach pain."

"Well, it's not like anyone's going to eat the soap, right? And it wouldn't end with just diarrhea and stomach pain anyway."

"That's true."

Snip snip. Helen crouched by the water's edge and snipped off only the petal parts of the daffodils with scissors.

In contrast, Niksi roughly tore them off by hand and tossed the mangled yellow flowers into her basket, earning herself a scolding from Helen.

They picked up camellia flowers that had fallen to the ground, selecting only those whose petals weren't damaged.

They hadn't even picked and gathered that many, but her fingers were already stained and blotchy.

"If you dry the flowers nicely and add them to bath salts, it's really nice. When the dried flowers soak up water and come back to life, it looks like flowers blooming."

After filling their basket with an armful of flowers, they left the lake.

When they were picking flowers, she worried whether it was okay to pick so many, wondering if they might be contributing to the extinction of daffodils, but it was needless worry.

"You don't need to worry about the flowers. There seemed to be tourists about ten years ago, but now it's a place where no one comes at all, so the flowers are overflowing. Of course, there are no violets. If you don't pick the flowers properly, wasps swarm around and it becomes a frightening place. Of course, wasps don't really swarm around violets!"

"Helen, are you making fun of me for the violets?"

As thanks for helping pick flowers, Helen invited her to stop by her house.

She said the stew she made yesterday turned out incredible and she absolutely had to try it.

Since all Niksi had at home were weeds anyway, there was no reason to refuse, so she strolled through the village in her pajamas, following Helen.

"I was dating that guy back then. What were you doing around this time?"

"Around this time?"

'Shooting guns, stabbing, throwing bombs, running.'

"Before the war, I mean."

"Ah."

Niksi blinked.

When Helen said "around this time," she had been thinking about what she did last year around this time.

Before the war.

Since war had taken up more than a quarter of her life, the days before war seemed impossibly distant.

Struggling to dig up her memories, she could barely recall the time when she had just become an adult.

She was a chemist who dreamed of becoming the second Marie Curie.

'Reading chemical formulas, writing papers, injecting drugs into mice, stabbing with syringes, cutting.'

Come to think of it, both lives were corpse-like—not much different after all.

"Pretty similar. Oh Helen, this camellia is similar to Helen's hair color."

"Really? I've never been told I look like a camellia before. I've been told I look like coral though."

They arrived at Helen's general store.

She immediately lit the fireplace.

Soon the sound of salmon stew bubbling came along with the warmth.

Helen, who claimed that eating salmon stew dipped with baguette was heavenly, sliced a baguette saying she'd send Niksi to heaven.

"Oh, go check out the ocean. This stew is made with salt from there."

"I hate the ocean."

"Why?"

"I feel like I'll be swallowed up."

The stew came out. The taste was truly heavenly. Too salty.

Fortunately, the stew being salty wasn't Helen's fault with seasoning.

She had forgotten to add cream when she should have.

In the end, the lunch appointment became a dinner appointment.

After hearing that her life before the war wasn't much different from now, Helen said things like 'That won't do' and 'You need to find little pleasures in life' while giving her bean seedlings as a gift.

She couldn't understand any connection between life's little pleasures and beans, but there was no reason to refuse a gift.

'Should I restart the genetic modification experiments I gave up on?'

About six years ago, before she enlisted in the army.

She was quite a famous genius chemist back then.

The research she was doing at the time was some stem cell something-or-other experiment.

'What was I trying to do with that? Oh, I remember. I was trying to make giant crops. I wanted to create plants that could feed several people with just one bean.'

Though it was hazy, it wasn't completely forgotten.

Besides, an experiment that simply enlarged crop size through genetic manipulation was basic stuff.

'Why didn't I finish even such a basic experiment before enlisting?'

Niksi flicked the green bean sprout.

'Good. This time I'll really make Jack's beanstalk.'

Deciding to make it tasty too while she was at it, Niksi began looking for books about crop cultivation somewhere in the village.

However, after circling the village twice, she realized:

There's not a single piece of paper to be seen here!

But there was one thing she'd learned since coming to Auvers.

When you don't know something, just find Gilbert first.

Eventually, her purpose of finding crop cultivation books changed to finding Gilbert.

Niksi headed to the village hall.

Creak. She opened the poorly oiled, stiff door.

Around 3 PM when farming kept everyone busy. The hall inside was completely empty.

An administrative space for the village head.

It sounds nice to call it "administrative," but a hall in a small rural village was nothing more than a clean warehouse.

But there was a paper smell she'd never encountered anywhere else in the village.

Looking around the hall, Niksi discovered wooden stairs leading to the second floor.

There was a large corridor and several rooms that looked like guest rooms. The paper smell came from a small wooden staircase at the end of the second-floor corridor. She headed there.

She peeked her face up.

A cozy-sized attic that caught the sun well, the kind of place perfect for drying oranges and strawberries.

It was the library she'd been searching for until her eyes nearly fell out.

Books about crops and farming were packed tightly on the shelves.

Having found an unexpected treasure trove, Niksi's eyes sparkled as she clattered up to the attic.

There was something Niksi had overlooked while absorbed in the books.

There was already a visitor in that attic room.

That visitor looked at Niksi, who had suddenly barged in, with an expression like encountering a bear in the wild.

"Wh-who are you...?!"

Niksi noticed the visitor's presence when she aimed a thick encyclopedia at her like a blunt weapon.

It was so heavy that she held it with both hands, trembling.

Seeing the visitor's expression like a rabbit before a predator, Niksi suddenly wanted to smile mischievously.

"Ow...Your friendly neighbor Niksi."

"Ah, the one who said she was moving into that empty house..."

Niksi rubbed her forehead, swollen from the encyclopedia blow.

She's stronger than she looks, this girl.

The woman who seemed to be around her age mumbled while looking back and forth between her forehead and the floor.

She seemed sorry for having split open an innocent person's forehead with an encyclopedia.

Of course, the misunderstanding was Niksi's fault first.

She had smiled meaningfully while hugging the bean pot in her hands like stolen gold bars.

"I'm Greta."

The woman with black bob hair that reached her neck spoke softly.

The more you looked at her, the more elegant and beautiful she was.

Feeling good when seeing pretty things is human instinct. Niksi stared directly at Greta's olive-colored eyes.

The very shy Greta didn't know what to do with herself.

"What were you doing here?"

"Yes? Well... I was reading a Latin dictionary."

"Wow, there's even that kind of thing in this library? I thought there were only things like 'Growing Potatoes, Harvesting Potatoes.'"

"Of course those are here too."

Greta told her there were quite a lot of books in this library.

Since this place was remote and far from surrounding cities, it was created for children who had difficulty attending school.

Thanks to that, there were books across all fields - dictionaries, magazines, sheet music, and more.

"But isn't 'The Psycho's Killing Methods' a bit much to show children...? Who buys the books?"

"Gilbert. Probably because the cover looks fine."

What a strange selection criteria. Does it mean that as long as the outside looks decent, it doesn't matter if the contents are bloody or explicit?

'Ha ha, so Gilbert with his laughing, good-natured appearance has this scary side.'

Among the books were many that were close to academic texts with letters as small as sesame seeds.

Normally, books that students read would be picture books, or at most short story collections with lots of words, but had the students' level become ridiculously high during her brief time in the army?

Niksi couldn't hide her amazement as she opened a book.

This academic text was even written in English.

Gradually Niksi became confused.

Was this Gilbert having no prejudices, or had Auvers students mastered not only French but English as well?

'Wait, Greta right here, who's my age, is reading a Latin dictionary. That means... is this kind of knowledge basic knowledge in Auvers? Do you have to be highly educated to cultivate crops?'

Niksi tried to maintain her composure as she picked up two books on bean cultivation and an English botany book.

It was an embarrassing moment for someone who had just been calling herself a genius chemist.

Indeed, the world is wide and there are many geniuses.

'You think you're smart, don't you? No, you're nothing but a whining child.'

As someone once said.

Greta said she had to start preparing dinner and went outside with Niksi.

It didn't seem like they'd been there long, but it was already evening when the sun sets.

Greta and Niksi awkwardly said goodbye in front of the hall, saying they should meet again next time.

What to do. It was an awkward time to stop by home.

Helen's dinner invitation time was approaching.

Though the bean sprouts had wilted from moving around all day without rest, Niksi had no choice but to head to Helen's house.