The Shape of a Pocket

gully, and then very close behind the second walls, on both left and right, there is a sense of stacked sleep, and, confronting that sleep, almost touching it, the total indifference of the hewn stones, iron bars, and laid bricks. A strange congruity, even harsher than that of the earth around corpses.
    What kind of building would you say, sir, houses the most dreams? School? Theatre? Cinema? Library? Intercontinental Hotel? Discothèque? Mightn’t it be a prison?
    First, the modern prison was founded on a set of dreams. The dream of Civic Justice. The dream of Correction. The dream of a City of Civic Virtue.
    And then there are the dreams dreamt now, each night. Dreams include, of course, nightmares and insomniac terrors. Under certain circumstances the insomniac may lose, like a dreamer, his sense of physical time and place.
    Inside the walls, on the other side of the narrow gullies, there is the great perennial dream of Escape. Amongst the screws there is the perennial nightmare of a Prisoners’ Revolt.
    Further, there are the endless small dreams. The dream of the sea – the Rhone is the length of a garden away and the pigeons, who shit on the wire netting, fly over the river. The dream of taking the TGV to Paris. It leaves every hour and its tracks are even nearer than the Rhone. Dreams of privacy. These are as much about time as space. The dream of private time. Choosing a date – say Saturday May 6th – to do something one has chosen for oneself! On Saturday, I’ll go and see the brother-in-law in Bapaume. Or, on Saturday, I’ll go to the cemetery in Clamart and there I’ll find the vodka bottle under the flowers on my friend’s grave and I’ll drink to him. (He too was in another kind of prison for twenty-seven years.)
    The dream of women. The dream of open doors. The dream of Saturday nights. The furious dream of putting an end to everything. The dream of no more mistakes.
    And, finally, there is a dream which may be the most persistent and ubiquitous of all. In St Joseph’s isolation block, in the
prétoire
where punishments for insubordination are handed out twice a week, in the showers, in the exercise yard under the wire netting with garbage where the stars might be, walking on all fours, sitting before the television, on the stairs, in the
mitard
, alternating between insults and silence, day and night, year after year, men dream in flashes of their thousand mothers, many of whom are lost or dead and, who being so, find their own way instantaneously through the prison walls.
    Once inside the Maison d’Arrêt, some of these mothers tell stories to their children. Many many stories. Here, sir, is one.
    Once there was a man who, every morning, picked up a bread-knife and cut off ten centimetres from the loaf of bread he was holding, and threw this chunk away, before cutting another slice for his own breakfast.
    The man did this because every night mice had nibbled a hole from the centre of the loaf. Each morning the hole was about the size of a mouse. The house cats, although they hunted moles, were strangely indifferent to the grey mice who ate the bread, or perhaps they had been bought off.
    This had been the state of affairs for months. Many times the man had written down
mousetrap
on a shopping list. And many times he had forgotten, perhaps because the shop where the villagers once bought mousetraps no longer existed.
    One afternoon this man is searching in a shed beside the house for a metal file. He doesn’t find a file, but he comes upon a strong, obviously handmade, mousetrap. It consists of a plank of wood, 18cm. × 9cm., with a cage around it made of stout wire. The space between any two parallel wires is never more than half a centimetre. Enough for a mouse to poke its nose through but never enough to get its two ears through. The height of the cage is 8.5cm., so that, inside, a mouse can stand up on its strong hind legs, clutch the bars at the top with its four-fingered hands, and poke its snout between the wires of the ceiling, but it can never get out.
    One end of the cage is a door which hinges upwards. A spiral spring is attached to this door. When the door is held open, the spring goes taut, ready to pull it back shut.
    On top of the cage is a trip wire which fastens the door when open. The trip wire, however, extends beyond the doorframe by less than a millimetre. In wire-terms by a hair’s breadth! At the other end of the wire, inside the cage, is a hook on to which a piece