The Shape of a Pocket

asked me to tell you if you came. He’s been transferred to the hospital. He didn’t want to go. They took Harry to the hospital, chained his legs and took him.
    The mouse in the cage holds his head on one side as if he was wearing a cap. His two front paws, with their four fingers, are planted firmly on the ground either side of his muzzle, like the hands of a pianist on a keyboard. His hind legs are tucked in close and extend along the ground so that they are almost under his ears. His ears are perked up, and his tail, stretched out far behind him, is pressed firmly on the floor of the cage. His heart’s beating very fast and he is frightened when the man lifts up the cage. Yet he doesn’t hide behind the spring; he doesn’t cringe. He holds his head acock, and he stares back. For the first time, a name for the mouse comes into the man’s head. Alfredo, he calls him. He puts the cage on the kitchen table beside his coffee cup.
    Later the man goes to the field, kneels down, places the cage on the grass and holds the door, which is the fourth wall of the cell, open. The mouse approaches the open wall, raises his head, and leaps. He does not scuttle, he does not dart, he flies. Relative to his size, he leaps higher and further than a kangaroo. He leaps like a mouse who has been freed. With three leaps he has covered more than five metres. And the man, still on his knees, watches the mouse he called Alfredo leap again and again into the sky.
    We’re going to begin again, honey, begin from scratch.
    The following morning the bread has not been touched. And the man believes the mouse in the cage may be the last one. Kneeling in the field outside the village, holding the door open, the man waits. It takes the mouse a long while to realise he can leave. When he finally does, he scuttles into the thickest and nearest tuft of grass, and the man feels a slight yet sharp pang of disappointment. He had been hoping to see, one more time in his life, a prisoner fly, a prisoner realise his dream of freedom. He had hoped that there would be another Alfredo.
    * * *

    Monsieur le Maire, you are, I trust, still dreaming. The first step, if I understand it well, in your extensive plan for the rebuilding of the centre of Lyon (the plan to which you gave the magical name of Confluence), is the demolition of the prisons of St Joseph and St Paul.
    What will take their place? I would like to make a suggestion. The area the two prisons cover is small. Less than two hectares. Imagine this site turned into an apple orchard, being used and enjoyed as a public park. It would be the first apple orchard in the heart of a city in the entire world! And the blossoms in the spring, and the fruit in late October, would be a memorial to all the dreams dreamt here. Here, if I may emphasise that word, sir,
Here.
    Recently I went, sir, to see my friend Zima Lewandowski near Zamosc, not far from the Ukrainian border. He is one of the great forestry experts in Poland; he discovered a new way of dating trees. Forests form a script and their experts can sometimes be a little like etymologists. Zima when he speaks has that kind of precision. I told him about our project – the project you are dreaming, sir – concerning an apple orchard in the centre of Lyon, and I asked his advice about what species of fruit would be best. He thought for a while, asked me questions about the climate and atmospheric conditions in the city, and then said: Spartans! Spartans would be the best apples there. They are a late apple, you pick them in October, and, if kept properly, they last the whole winter.
    The Park, sir, could be called Delandine’s Orchard, no? As for the Spartan apples, when they are ripe, they are a smoky red, almost like the colour of a mineral dug out of the earth. The trees should be planted, according to Zima, 6 or 8m. apart. The present cells measure 3m. × 3.6m.

21
Brushes Standing Up in Jars

    One of his recent paintings is called
The Eel.
It shows a painter’s studio, brushes standing up in jars, a long slender woman reclining naked, and an eel in a bowl surrounded by drawings on a table. When eels on dry land want to escape from the sun or to hide, they use their tails like corkscrews, make a hole in the earth and disappear tail-first. Some of his other paintings are of holes, rather like those made by eels.
    Another one of his tides is
La Deluge
, and in
L’Amour Fou
the sea invades a library. He’s an aquatic painter. Even when he