TFOA Chapter 29

An eerie silence fell, and they grasped the thread of suspicion.

"It's certain that there was a hunter. And they were here secretly."

Right. This wasn't a case that would be buried pathetically with an old beagle.

These snares. This method. They were all made using the same handcraft method as those found throughout the village.

Benjamin looked at the biscuits abandoned on the floor.

The basement's humidity was on the low side. An environment where mold, once it appeared, would spread very slowly.

But microorganisms were more tenacious than they looked, and biscuits of this size could be made to rot within half a year.

"You. When did you move into this house?"

"Me? Early spring. So about three months ago?"

"I think this house was empty before then."

"Yeah. The landlord moved away three years ago, and it was empty until then. Gilbert and the villagers said so too."

But the mold on these biscuits didn't look like it had been growing for long. That meant...

"According to what you said... it means some weirdo was quietly living here."

He muttered.

"Ahhhhh! How can you say something like that so suddenly! I won't be able to sleep alone!"

Niksi turned pale and pointed accusingly at the painter. Regardless of whether she did or not, Benjamin rummaged through the drawer.

Suddenly she remembered what Gilbert had said. When talking about the hunter, what he'd muttered reluctantly.

'Gil. Is there a hunter in this village by any chance?'

'...Not now.'

"Wait. Gilbert spoke about the hunter as if it were past tense?"

"Then maybe a dead person came back to life."

"No, no..."

Niksi squeezed her eyes shut. It seemed like tears might have trickled out.

"I can't stay here anymore. I want to leave. Today I'll tell the village head and ask him to change my house or I'll sleep rough..."

Niksi staggered up the stairs.

Benjamin picked up the shotgun from which he'd removed the ammunition again.

"......"

What could it be? This strange suspicion. This sense of unease. Where was it coming from?

This uncomfortable feeling had started from the moment he saw this gun.

He stared at the black metal part of the gun for a long time, then brought the muzzle toward himself.

For a moment, something from the past flashed through his mind. The rainy season... a rainy day... and.

CRASH-CLANG-BANG!

At the sound like wooden stairs being smashed, Benjamin startled and turned around.

There stood Niksi with a pale complexion as if she'd really seen a ghost.

"Painter."

"What?"

"The door was locked."

"What...?"

Rattle-rattle.

As she said, the door was firmly fixed and wouldn't open.

It had felt tight from the time they opened it, but somehow it had become firmly locked.

"What, what should we do?"

"We have to open it."

"How?"

Benjamin showed her the gun he was holding. He meant to blow the door away.

Niksi was absolutely against it.

"Our house entrance will be destroyed! I've only lived here for three months!"

"Then starve to death."

Benjamin put down the gun.

Niksi looked at the shriveled biscuits rolling on the floor.

Would eating those kill her from food poisoning, or would they still extend her life by a day?

She involuntarily swallowed dry saliva.

"L-let's try to calm down."

"...Only you need to calm down."

They tried knocking on the door, pleading with it, and getting angry at it. But the door showed no signs of opening.

Niksi searched through the drawers and cabinets in the basement to find some way to get out.

But unfortunately, all she found were trivial things like nose hair trimming tweezers and candy wrappers.

Exhausted, Niksi plopped down on the basement stairs. Benjamin sat in a chair at the table, rolling bullets under his hand.

"Let's just endure for a day or two. When I don't show up, the village head and villagers will come to my house."

Benjamin was newly impressed by the influence of this neighbor who had only been here for one season.

If he had been trapped here alone, he would have starved to death without hope.

Someone with sharp edges like a jutting corner, yet blending into the village better than anyone—a strange woman.

"Ugh..."

Rattle.

Benjamin wrapped his other hand around his hand as the dulling sensation spread from his fingertips.

The familiar phantom pain was beginning.

Clatter, clatter.

Thanks to this, the bullets in his hand fell to the floor with a series of thuds.

"Are you okay?"

Niksi, who had moved beside him at some point, examined the condition of his hand.

His hand was stiff like a rigid log, as if he'd gotten a cramp in his leg while sleeping.

When she tried to place her hand on the prominently protruding blood vessels on the back of his hand, he quietly growled from beside her head, "Don't touch it."

"Okay, okay. People naturally become sensitive when they're in pain."

Niksi petted Benjamin's head like stroking a dog, then sat down.

Some time passed, and by the time Niksi had stacked the three fallen bullets like a tower, the pain had subsided.

"Phew..."

The painter, who had been crouching without making a single sound of pain, leaned against the wall and let out a long sigh.

Small beads of sweat had formed on his face, suggesting it had been quite painful.

"How have you been painting with hands like that all this time?"

"...Who knows."

"Are you okay now?"

"For a few minutes, I'll be fine."

"Why only a few minutes?"

"Because I haven't taken painkillers."

His voice cracked at the end, and he cleared his throat softly.

He pressed his relatively fine left hand firmly against his right hand, which was trembling slightly.

Niksi crouched in front of him.

His hand was definitely still stiff, as if the pain hadn't completely gone away yet.

He'd been painting with hands like this. Indeed, he was as stubborn as she was.

"When did you start painting?"

"...Fifteen."

"Did you start because you liked it? For reference, I started researching chemistry because I was a genius! The world needed me."

'Because I liked it...'

Everything that's a "first" tends to have meaning.

He too had his own beginning with painting.

That was probably long ago. When he was just starting to come of age. When he and his younger brother were living together earnestly.

"To show my younger brother the scenery outside."

"Outside scenery?"

"He said he wanted to see the sunset in front of Hope Cathedral."

"Really? Then your brother..."

Ah, he said he died. Niksi muttered. He seemed unfazed.

"Was it because of the war?"

"What?"

"Your brother's death."

He didn't answer. Instead, his hand movements stopped as if he was thinking about something.

In the end, she didn't get an answer to that question.

In the silence that had awkwardly fallen. He opened his mouth.

"Didn't you have family?"

"No, I didn't. My parents died during the Great Depression."

"I see."

"What about you?"

She also moved closer to the wall to find something to lean against.

Benjamin leaning against the cold stone wall and Niksi sitting on the floor ended up next to each other.

"...Similar."

If you weren't wealthy, everyone's situation back then was probably similar.

"Then you don't have anything to protect either?"

"Something to protect?"

"Yeah. Well, let's call them precious people?"

Niksi laughed awkwardly as if embarrassed by her own words.

"I left Paris because there was nothing left there that I wanted to protect."

Well, strictly speaking, friends like Jackie and Philip were still there.

But what would be the point of continuing to stay with them when the war was already over? In the end, they'd only be able to talk about old stories—what happened back then, what was like this or that.

Nothing good would come from people stuck in the past hanging around together.

"So I came here to find other meaning in my life. Something other than life as a soldier. A different, interesting life."

A joyful life where she could finally feel alive.

When she came to Auvers, everything was new for the first time, so it was quite interesting.

Every day picking chicory from the back mountain, watering the fields, chatting with the villagers, then sharing lunch.

Turning over the yard, tilling the fields. Wrestling with crops that were like children who wouldn't grow according to her expectations. After making fences, she even named the potato and sweet potato fields. Popo.

Yesterday she'd planted all the sunflowers she'd brought by the cartload. Though she groaned and complained while doing it, it was quite an enjoyable experience.

"How about you, painter? Do you have a particular reason for coming here?"

She asked with a tickling tone at the end.

For some reason, he felt his earlobe tingle where her question had reached it.

"...I..."

For some reason, his lips felt dry.

An unfamiliarly warm early summer temperature.

Even though they were sitting side by side where warmth might have gathered, the subtle chill from the basement walls cooled the embarrassing heat that came with awkwardness.

"I was just looking for a place to die."

A place for my end. He replied as if talking to himself.

A defeated soldier who fled from war.

In the Battle of Gergonne that took place in midsummer, the German army was defeated, and Benjamin dragged his injured body as he fled, then collapsed on some mountain.

That place just happened to be Auvers.

Meanwhile, Niksi was working hard to understand his ambiguous words with the beginning and end cut off.

'This is the timing where I should comfort or advise him, right? A test to see how much our friendship is worth?'

Though weak at grasping emotional language, she was skilled at systematic language organization and quickly completed her situational analysis.

In short, the painter's words would mean this:

'I crawled into this place to die. I was absolutely crazy about dying. But these stupid French people still haven't killed me.'

Situational analysis complete.

Then what should she say as a 'friend' at this time?

"If you want to die that badly, why don't you just die?"

Handle your own business yourself.

Whoosh. Niksi made a gun shape with her finger and pretended to shoot her own head.

"Oh wait. Could this be proof that we've become very close friends who can discuss each other's deaths?"

Niksi covered her cheeks with both hands as if imitating an embarrassed girl.

At her annoying fuss, Benjamin's eyes turned cold.

"Pretend you didn't hear what I just said."

"I already heard it, so how can I pretend I didn't?"

"Consider it a joke."

"You joke about dying? Is that German humor? It's not funny."

He spent a brief moment looking up at the ceiling and feeling skeptical about life.

After the squabble, the two barely managed to agree on compromising that it was a joke.

"...I decided not to take my own life."

"Why?"

"Because I promised to meet my brother again."

Niksi tilted her head. Subtly disconnected words.

But that could be possible. There are various types of people in the world. She decided to just accept it.

"Then anyway, until your wish comes true, you'll end up living aimlessly."

Niksi stretched fully and leaned against the wall.

"Since that's how you'll be living anyway, how about finding what might be meaningful in your life? Something other than dying."

"....."

"While you're at it, help me with my planting! Working up a sweat is incredibly rewarding. If you do about 50, you can see heaven."

Her laughter, giggling foolishly, was so absurd.

So he too had no choice but to loosen the tension in his body like her and lean against the wall.

But pain always came when he relaxed like that.

Benjamin made a small groaning sound at the phantom pain that started again.

"Oh my, are you okay?"

Actually, he didn't look okay at all.

He bit his lips while sweating coldly.

Whether the pain was so intense that he couldn't even hear her voice, he pulled his hand toward his body and panted with his upper body.

She had never experienced it, but she'd heard it was terrible pain. The agony of healthy body parts being torn apart.

Holding onto that memory intact, then slowly revisiting it—a horrific process.

'How has he endured all this time?'

He was someone who used to take sleeping pills that were strong chemical compounds. The painkillers such a person took couldn't possibly be normal.

'Then he's been enduring this constantly?'

But right now, in this place, there wasn't even such abnormal painkillers—a hopeless situation.

A situation where they'd have to be trapped here for at least a day.

Could he endure this without medicine? Pain that seemed to visit several times a day? Really?

Niksi looked at the firmly closed door.

The conclusion was 'no.'

Niksi picked up the gun from the floor.

"What are you doing..."

The painter groaned thinly while clutching his hand.

Regardless, Niksi walked with determined steps to stand in front of the basement door. She picked up a bullet.

Click.

The familiar sound wrapped around her hand. The muzzle was aimed at the basement door.

BANG!

With the gun's death cry, the basement door completely flew away as if hit by a bomb.

The first thing she did after coming out was to bring various medicines she no longer took and concoct something from them.

She offered the suspicious medicine she'd made to him.

Normally, he would have refused to take it even under threat. But distracted by the unrelenting pain, he immediately swallowed the medicine.

He collapsed against the wall just like that. The pain that had been dragging on finally disappeared.

Only then did he let out a long sigh.

One storm had passed. All that remained was the blown-away wooden floor and her ruined terrace.

"This... will need to be fixed before the rainy season comes. But we survived. Right? This must be what it feels like to be reborn. Painter. Honestly, you were really scared too. Suddenly talking about dying and everything."

The mood killer Niksi watched as his expression turned sourly cold in real time.

"Why, why are you making such a serious face? Did I say something wrong?"

She poked his side repeatedly.

It wasn't wrong. Looking back, why had he said such things? It was just embarrassing words.

Benjamin looked at the round hole punched in the entrance floor.

"I'll... fix that."

Even if getting trapped wasn't his intention, he had played the biggest role in Niksi blowing away the basement door.

"Really? Then I'm grateful. I'm not good at sawing!"

A floor made by an artist. She chuckled.

"If you repair it well, I'll throw in some freebies like painkillers and other things when I make your medicine next time!"

Niksi resolved that she would definitely brag about this mysterious and gloomy basement to Gilbert tomorrow.

The painter brushed off his body and prepared to return home.

"You're leaving?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, take the cabbage!"

The sun had already set completely, and the village lights were on. The scent of wind sweeping across the fields, characteristic of houses on hills.

Niksi inhaled the welcome evening air deeply and let out her breath in a satisfied sigh, then raised the corners of her mouth.

"Should I walk you home? An old beagle might come out in the village and bite a feeble painter."

Niksi came forward to see him off at her yard fence.

Auvers' unpaved dirt roads didn't have proper street lamps.

It was perfect for viewing the moon and stars, but might be somewhat difficult to walk relying only on that light.

"How do you know others would be feeble?"

"You can tell just by looking!"

"...You have no eye for it."

Indeed. Her discernment was completely messed up.

"Then be careful going home!"

Niksi waved her hand as she would to a friend.

Benjamin walked into the darkness, firmly holding the half-crushed cabbage in one hand.

▶ Today's harvest

Cabbage — 1

▶ Overall assessment

If I can gain friendship with cabbage, it's not a bad trade.