TFOA Chapter 13

<You will find 100 euros while walking down the street.>

<What you thought was a tumor turns out to be just weight gain, according to the doctor.>

<This year's harvest will be more abundant than last year's.>

<What you picked up thinking it was a bottle cap while walking will turn out to be a gold coin.>

Niksi got stuck on the 57th fortune slip. Last night she had come thinking she could easily write up to 80, but it was a miserable failure.

'So what should I write for the remaining 43?'

She had already written about finding money on the street three times, just changing the amounts.

This was also wounding Niksi's pride, who had swaggered in front of Gilbert saying 'Flower fortune telling? Easy as pie.'

"Wouldn't it be okay to write some slightly bad things instead of just good ones? Fortune telling is all superstition anyway. Your hair will fall out, but it will grow back. There are some mildly bad but trivial things like that, right?"

Witty words that wouldn't get her scolded by Gilbert. Niksi furrowed her brow.

Bang. Finally, she got up from her seat with her pen.

"Excuse me, Mr. Edgar. What is it that you want?"

Edgar from the Seeds & Seedlings shop, who had been smoking, hastily scattered his smoke.

"If you ask so suddenly..."

"Don't you have something like 'I'd feel good if I heard this kind of thing'?"

Edgar scratched his head while looking at Niksi's serious face. It was a face that absolutely wouldn't back down until he gave her an answer.

Edgar, who felt awkward making eye contact with anyone for long, let out a groan and turned his head away.

"Just hearing a pleasant morning greeting would be nice..."

"Not that kind of thing! Something more special and nice to hear!"

"Well... that the day's business will go well?"

"Great! Thank you, Mr. Edgar! I'll write it while praying that you'll draw that one!"

Niksi scribbled down what Edgar had said in her notebook and disappeared as suddenly as she had arrived.

She began wandering around the village, collecting the kinds of words people wanted to hear.

"I'd like to hear that what I'm worrying about will soon work out."

"That the cat I'm raising will grow up soon! I hope it'll cause fewer trouble. Oh, but what about people who don't have cats? Hmm... How about 'you will receive a cat's cute affection'?"

"You will eat delicious food. I haven't had any appetite for food lately because of the tongue blister that popped up yesterday."

"Huh? Obviously you'll fall in love."

Love? Niksi stopped writing 'love' in her notebook and put a question mark instead.

The person who said that was a woman her age named Victoria, who had once been introduced as a carpenter.

Her braided hair that was between carrot and sunset orange, and her freckles, were charming. And from their first meeting, she had the natural ease to ask to be called Betty.

Victoria had harsh pronunciation and seemed like a hard tree stump that was difficult to cut, or something like that.

"Yes. Love!"

Anyway, Betty, who liked making strange octopus-or-something sculptures, said that.

"Um... love will come. Got it. Thanks, Betty."

"But what are you doing right now? Are you collecting Santa Claus gifts from this early spring?"

"Something like that."

"I see. How interesting!"

Because Gilbert had repeatedly warned not to tell the villagers about the flower fortune telling, Niksi had no choice but to brush it off vaguely.

"By the way, I need a table. Can I commission you?"

"Then you've come to the right place. I just got some good walnut wood for making tables the day before yesterday! Do you have any specific patterns or shapes in mind?"

"It's a desk for eating and studying, so it should be sturdy. As for the shape... just make it however you want."

'As long as that octopus doesn't end up on it...'

Niksi said, looking at the sculpture Betty was leaning against.

Noticing this, Betty giggled and patted Niksi's shoulders.

"Haha, Niksi! Do you think I'm going to make your table in the shape of a hamster?"

It was a moment when her artistic sense became questionable. That twisted monster was supposed to be a hamster? No matter how you looked at it, it looked like Heracles fighting a hydra.

Moreover, among a hamster's small body parts, something that long... that long...

No way. She didn't even want to think about it.

"Don't worry. I'll make it in a shape that's easy to use and pretty."

Betty said proudly. Anyway, it was an answer that she would make it in the shape of a normal table. Niksi, secretly relieved, smiled bashfully and nodded.

"Please take good care of it..."

"But do you want the desk legs in the shape of horse legs, or snake legs?"

"Just regular wooden legs! Snakes don't have legs."

When Niksi muttered this, Betty grinned and said, "What are you talking about? In the beginning, snakes had legs too."

Of course, Niksi, who wasn't there at the beginning of time, couldn't have known that story.

Gilbert watched Niksi writing the 97th fortune slip. She had been scratching her cheek constantly.

"Did you get bitten by a bug?"

Gilbert, unable to watch anymore, gently moved Niksi's finger away. Her cheek was clean.

Niksi let out a groan and told him about her conversation with Betty from a few hours ago. When Niksi asked what kind of words she'd like to hear, Betty answered that she wanted to hear that love would come.

Niksi, who had become curious about what love was anyway, finally couldn't contain her curiosity and spoke up. 'What do you think love is, Betty?'

Betty answered without a moment's hesitation that it was 'something adorable.'

The reason being that seeing cute things made her feel good and made her want to kiss them. And then she had kissed Niksi's cheek, saying she was cute.

"Gil. Betty loves me, right?"

Was she serious? Gilbert made a rare expression of bewilderment.

"Uh, um. I don't think that's it?"

"Then am I just a momentary entertainment?"

"That's probably not it either... Wait. Why are you turning Betty into a scoundrel?"

"Then why did she say love is something you want to kiss and then kiss my cheek?"

"Well, at least you can be sure she doesn't hate you."

Niksi shyly scratched her cheek.

"I was so surprised I couldn't return the kiss. It was the first time anyone had ever kissed my cheek."

"Uh... wow. That's a surprising fact."

"I must return the gesture next time I see her. I don't have much, but if I just ask my friends around, I could probably arrange for a house in Paris. It's humble, but that would become Betty's and my new dwelling."

"Don't you think that's quite excessive for the price of one kiss?"

The flower fortunes were all complete. Having kept going on about love, love, the last slip had only the single word 'love' written large as a door panel.

Even Gilbert, who couldn't read, could guess that those letters probably said 'love.'

"I'm going to be serious, Niksi."

"Yeah."

"That's probably not love. Betty is Latin-French mixed, you see."

A look that said 'what does that have to do with anything?'

Gilbert said that in Latin America and Southern Europe, cheek kissing was a gesture to show friendliness as a greeting.

Niksi protested that she was French but had never received anything like that, and Gilbert asked if that meant she didn't have any friendly people worth cheek-kissing.

To what was half a joke, Niksi seriously answered, "You're right. I didn't know because I had no friends."

What she had thought was a connection that would last forever was just her own misunderstanding.

Niksi wilted like seaweed and muttered.

"I don't want to believe that."

"Please believe it."

"When I asked Betty to make me a table, she gave me tons of sawdust to use as kindling, so I thought it was true love."

Niksi showed him a bulging bag. There was clearly enough sawdust to keep a fire burning all day.

'Betty's quite the businesswoman.'

Gilbert collected the neatly folded fortune slips into a basket. Among them, there was still the unfolded 'love' fortune slip left.

"Well, if you put it that way, I've received it too."

Gilbert wondered what to do with the unusable, meaningless slip and folded it neatly in half.

"What? You weren't affected at all? I felt queasy."

"I wasn't affected at all. It's just like an ordinary greeting."

Was feeling queasy the sensation of falling in love?

The neatly folded slip went into Gilbert's shirt pocket. There was no special feeling or sudden sense of the slip becoming like a charm or anything.

He just... felt nothing in particular.

"Then it wouldn't affect you if I did it too?"

Niksi said. He didn't understand why the conversation was going in that direction.

Gilbert was just bothered by the sawdust stuck in Niksi's hair.

"Of course. Want to try?"

Cheek kissing is a gesture where you alternate touching right and left cheeks while making kissing sounds to show friendliness.

Originally you're only supposed to make the gesture without actually putting your lips to the cheek, but Betty was Latin American mixed blood and liberal with skinship. And though she'd learned it wrong, she hadn't been caught and thrown in jail for harassment or anything yet, so Gilbert thought it would be fine not to correct her.

Unaware of this, Niksi seriously pondered whether she should touch her cheek to Gilbert's left side or right side.

Her seriously furrowed brow represented her earnestness.

Gilbert quietly watched her as she reached out to grab his face.

Surprisingly, her hands were rough with many calluses. Like those of a farmer who had been hoeing for about five years. Though probably not as rough as his own.

Gilbert turned his head to the right.

His smooth brown hair, like lacquered wood grain, moved softly.

Niksi pressed her lips to his right cheek.

'Oh dear, I knew this would happen.'

Gilbert couldn't help but chuckle at her ticklish action.

"That's not it, Niksi. Cheek kissing is like this."

He lightly brushed his cheek against hers in response to her greeting and made a short kissing sound.

"See? Doesn't affect you at all, right?"

"You're right."

"See, it's not love."

I see. That's not love.

Niksi's learned definition of 'love' was like fireworks.

She didn't know because she disliked fireworks, but it was something that seemed to explode right in front of your eyes, made your heart tremble while watching, and caused a churning emotion.

That's why at first she thought she loved war. There too, fireworks exploded before your eyes, your heart trembled, and you felt nauseous.

She scratched her cheek.

Even if she couldn't empathize, she thought she had learned about most human emotions. But there was still one thing she hadn't learned.

An extension of the feeling of liking something. Love.

"Hey, painter. What is love? You're an artist, so you must know well, right?"

All artists are emotional. Love is something emotional people understand well. Therefore, all artists understand love well. With this somewhat narrow-minded thinking, Niksi hung from Benjamin's window sill and spoke.

Benjamin, who had just been mixing paint, closed the window while rubbing orange into yellow.

Niksi firmly blocked the window sill, which seemed like a guillotine about to chop her neck, with her palm.

"Is it okay to treat a client with such rudeness?"

"I only accepted a painting commission, not a counseling request."

"Still! I'm a valuable customer, isn't the service terribly poor?!"

"I told you not to talk to me."

"Ah, fine, fine. I won't acknowledge you outside. Is that good enough?"

Niksi crashed into Benjamin's house through the window with a clatter. Benjamin frowned.

The painter was working on a landscape painting that looked like a forest at midnight. It was still a gloomy painting without a single bright color.

"Wait a minute. When are you going to paint my picture?"

"I'm working on the base colors."

"You're still doing that? Can't you start applying these oil paints like you're doing now?"

Of course, Niksi, who had no deep knowledge of art, thought painting was just something you swish swish with a brush and it was finished.

Thanks to this, whenever a low-level client said weird things, it was the artist whose insides burst with frustration.

"Didn't you ask me to paint a daytime landscape?"

"I did."

"Is it day or night right now?"

"You see the world too dichotomously. It's 7:21 right now, and since it's spring, the sun is ambiguously tilted..."

"Just choose one of the two."

"It's night."

Benjamin shook his phthalo blue paint and permanent yellow paint.

"If I paint the landscape now, what color should I use for the sky?"

Of course, with her shallow knowledge of colors, to her it just looked like faded jeans color and rotten lemon pulp color. In short, both were choices she didn't like.

She grumbled to herself at Benjamin's stuffy dichotomous logic and picked the blue paint.

"So what do you think love is, painter?"

"...Love?"

The painter repeated like a murmur.

Niksi nodded and randomly flipped through the unfinished canvases lying around.

She really felt like she had come to the wrong person.

The love that people talked about, if you put it in terms of color, was like ripe grapefruit color. It might also be like the lipstick color of a sultry dance singer, and in terms of bright and dark colors, it belonged to the bright side.

"I don't know."

But look at the painter. In terms of color, he was blue-moldy cheese color. Withered color like a starving beggar's fingernails, and whether dark or gloomy, he was both.

"I thought so."

Niksi muttered while staring at the painter's milk tea-colored hair. He picked up his brush and began spreading dark green on the canvas.

The inside of the house was cool even though the weather had gotten warmer. The painter's cabin where you'd get a headache if you kept sniffing the paint fumes for too long. The small room that was kitchen and living room and studio all together had canvases leaning in every corner.

Even with so many painted pictures piled up like this, it was strange that not a single painting was hung on the walls. And him continuing to paint was even weirder.

Having painted so many pictures and yet still painting.

"Don't you love painting?"

His stiff brush strokes stopped.

"No?"

"......"

"Never mind then."

Scratch scratch. The brush stroke sounds continued again.

If he didn't love painting, why did he bother painting?

Niksi stared intently at the back of the painter's head.

'Well, I didn't love war either, but I enlisted in the army.'

Since the world didn't run on love, she figured there must be some story behind it.

'Come to think of it, why did I enlist in the army?'

For a while after that, all that could be heard was the sound of thick liquid being applied to dry canvas and the clatter of changing brushes. Eventually, no sound could be heard at all.

Niksi turned her head to look at him. Like someone with frostbite, he was staring down at his pale, trembling hands.

It was time to finish the painting. He methodically put away the canvas. He sprayed strong alcohol on the oil painting, moved the chair, and organized his art supplies.

Where the painting had been, only the cool wooden floor remained. Just a thin floor mat and a single blanket were left. It was his infinitely shabby sleeping place.

The lamps lit throughout the living room hadn't been turned off yet, so the room was brightly lit, but he lay down covered with the blanket. Whether Niksi was there or not.

"You're protesting for me to go home quickly because you're going to sleep."

"If you understand, then go home quickly."

"Honestly, our painter is so fussy."

Niksi got up from her seat. Unlike Auvers' kind neighbors, the painter didn't even come out to see her off.

The warm, loving heart that comes from the warm climate typical of southern villages was a basic trait of Auvers. She puffed out her lips.

Looking here and there, he was a man who didn't match this village. A soldier from a defeated country. A painter whose hands were full of scars.

"...You're making a choice you'll regret."

Creak. It was when she opened the door. That's when he spoke.

"What?"

Niksi asked back, but he didn't answer.