A Story

I sat in my room, looking out through the window at the autumn trees and thinking about something. My small son was crying beside me. ‘Autumn has come…’ I thought. ‘Autumn…’

My son was crying. Outside the yellow poplars stood motionless in the still air. A family, who lived next door to us, passed by. They were carrying large leather suitcases which they left in the car and went back into their house for the bags. They were going abroad. They travel every autumn. They lock up their flat, load their suitcases onto their car and disappear. They stay away for two or three months. A plane passed quite low over the rooftops and shook its wings.

‘All right!’ I said to my son. ‘Why don’t you get hold of your mother?’

His mother was at work.

‘When she comes home, get hold of her,’ I advised him. ‘She’ll be coming back. In another couple of hours.’

‘It would be too late’, he said. And he wanted to be told a story now.

‘Well, you have got out of hand,’ I said, ‘You want it now. When we were children…’

My son continued to cry monotonously. I began to think about what we used to do once upon a time. The soft scent of leaves came through the open window, a tiny stream of smoke was borne on the breeze, scarcely perceptible in the autumn air. My son cried on.

‘You want a story,’ I said, reproachfully. ‘But once upon a time I was reared in a suitcase.’

He stopped crying.

‘How were you reared in a suitcase?’

‘Just like that,’ I told him, ‘in a suitcase.’

‘Was it a big one?’ he asked.

‘Middle-sized,’ I said.

My son grew thoughtful. He is still very small, like a crumb.

‘Was it a leather suitcase?’ he asked.

‘No, a cardboard one,’ I answered. ‘The suitcase was made of cardboard. Only one man in our neighbourhood had a leather suitcase. He was very rich; he had a lime pit. But people said even about his suitcase that it was made of artificial leather.’

‘But how did they rear you in a suitcase?’

‘There wasn’t any money for a cradle,’ I answered. ‘All the money went on the two white horses and the drink.’

‘What white horses?’ my son asked.

‘They brought me home from the maternity hospital with them. It was a carriage with two white horses. Because I was a boy.’

‘And how many white horses did you bring me home with?’ asked my son.

‘We brought you home in a taxi,’ I answered. ‘Those were different times. At that time, after drinking in my honour, my people got the cardboard suitcase, spread a couple of diapers in it, and put me inside.’

My son frowned. He had seen me do it. His whole forehead was wrinkled. He was thinking.

‘Did the suitcase lock?’ he asked a minute later.

‘It did,’ I said. ‘One of the locks worked.’

‘What about the other one?’ asked my son.

The other one, what was the other lock like? Autumn was outside the window, the leaves were brown, the sun shone softly and the two yellow quinces which were still on the little tree gleamed in the sunshine.

‘The other used to catch,’ I remembered. ‘It stuck when you tried to open it.’

It really did. I remember, the suitcase was kept in the garden, under the morello tree, which had long since lost all its leaves, and only a small sparrow twittered about its top. My sister was fussing around me, tied to the morello tree by a short rope, to keep an eye on me. Otherwise she would have run away and gone to play hop-scotch with the other girls. The rays of the soft autumn sun played over my face making me screw up my eyes from time to time. My sister sat beside me, gathering the fallen leaves and piling them up in a heap. After that she got tired of this, she peeped into the suitcase, began to press my nose and wink at me. I lay there meekly, smiling. When she got tired of this my sister said:

‘Shall we just shut the suitcase? Would you like that?’

And she dropped the lid. The suitcase was shut. It grew dark inside, and outside my sister was locking it.

‘D’you see?’ she cried. ‘I’ve shut it.’

She played for a time around the closed suitcase, then when she tried to open it, she found she couldn’t because one of the locks was jammed. She panted around the suitcase, even gnawed at the lock with her teeth and hammered it with her patten.

Then she said in a trembling voice:

‘Hey, can you see the sky?’

I held my tongue.

‘And the quinces? Can you see the quinces? Those over there, the yellow ones.’

I lay in the suitcase, and through the holes I could only see a quarter of the sparrow’s tail. Several holes had been made in the suitcase so that I could breath. ‘What about me?’ my sister asked, ‘Can’t you see me either?’

I held my tongue and didn’t answer. I couldn’t talk yet.

My sister sat down beside the suitcase and began to cry. I listened from inside, I listened to her, but it was dark inside the suitcase and I went to sleep. I thought it was already night.

I was awakened by my father’s voice. He had got back from his job and was untying her, while he scolded her for shutting the suitcase.

‘Come along now, we’ll go and see someone,’ he said after that. ‘We’ll go to the godparents.’

They lived at the other end of town. Going there was always very interesting. It would begin in the tram. ‘A ticket for your luggage, please!’ the conductor would say. And without waiting for an answer he would tear off a luggage ticket.

‘Doesn’t need one,’ my father would say. ‘Still too small.’

‘What d’you mean? Too small?’ the conductor would say, surprised. ‘Just look at the size.’

‘You can’t see like that,’ my father would answer politely. ‘You’ve got to open the suitcase.’

‘Why should I open it?’ the conductor would say. ‘I can see its size without opening it. It’s just big enough for a luggage ticket.’

‘There are rules,’ my father would say then. ‘Still small and has the right to travel without a ticket.’ ‘What are you thinking of?’ the conductor would say, losing his temper. ‘Perhaps you want to wait for it to grow?’

My father would answer that all his efforts were concentrated on that and nothing else.

The conductor would grow thoughtful, then look carefully at my father, convince himself that he looked quite normal and then would stick the ticket under his nose again. Seeing that the man was beginning to be really angry, my father would open the suitcase, point at me and say?

‘Just look. Does he look to you as if he were six years old?’

Sometimes the conductors would be so startled that they would drop their punches on the floor. And sometimes they would give me the ticket stubs, which I would chew at once. Sometimes there would be indignant citizens in the tram who asked my father how he could carry a baby about in a suitcase. It wasn’t hygienic, and so on.

‘Well, that’s how he was born,’ my father would answer. ‘In a suitcase. Some are born in cauls, but mine was born in a suitcase.’

We would leave the tram at the last stop; my father would buy popcorn for my sister, and we would set out through the park which was crowded with children. They crawled about like insects everywhere. My father would open the suitcase, untie the straps which held me in place and let me out to play with the children. I would crawl towards the yellow sand at once, sit there and wait for my sister to make a castle for me so that I could spoil it. As soon as we had played enough, we would go back to my father, he would put me back in the suitcase, shut the lid, lock it and we would set off for our godparents’ house.

There was a notice on the inside of the lid: ‘Persons picking up this suitcase by mistake are politely requested to return it together with contents to the following address: Then came our address. Dad put in that notice after the suitcase with me inside had been stolen once. He left me beside a stall where he had stopped to buy cigarettes. And while he was explaining to the stall-holder where he had bought his shirt, the suitcase vanished.

There was a terrible fuss. My father dashed off to look for me, going around the streets, and swearing he would give up smoking and never put another cigarette in his mouth. He went into shops, peered under the counters and looked so wild that the shop assistants cowered up against the walls and waited for him to clear out. It was a good thing he thought of going back to the same stall from which he had bought his cigarettes. The stall-holder was delighted to see him, and took him into the stall. There was the suitcase, in which I was sleeping without a care in the world.

‘Two chaps brought it,’ the stall-holder said. ‘It was just a joke. They said they were your friends, and that you would be sure to call for it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ my father said, absent-mindedly. ‘Give them my regards.’

He seized the suitcase and carried me off home. On the way he lit another cigarette.

‘To my mind, they were more the stall-holders’ friends than mine,’ he told my mother. ‘I wondered why the fellow asked about my shirt, when he was wearing exactly the same one.’

And he wrote on the lid the appeal to absent-minded gentlemen who are in the habit of picking up other people’s suitcase by mistake. And who were surely bitterly disappointed when they saw me.

When we arrived at the godparents’, their children – they had seven of them – poured out of the house to welcome us in the courtyard. They would kick up fearful noise, seize the suitcase and carry it carefully into the house, where they opened it slowly. I would sit up in it and examine them one by one. They would give shrieks of delight and pinch my cheeks. They had seen the grown-ups do that. I was a great favourtie with them, and they all wanted to pinch me. By the time the seventh had had his turn, my cheeks would be quite black and blue.

My father and the godparents would sit out in the yard under the pergola, talking about the next day and making all sorts of plans of which we were the centre.

When it began to grow dark, my father would shut the suitcase, take his leave of the godparents and set off for home.

That’s how I lived in the suitcase. In summer, it was left out in the garden and all day long I would watch the branches of the cherry tree above me, the sparrows flitting from branch to branch and the clouds passing across the sky slowly and changing their shape.

I lived in the sky. I almost never saw the earth and did not know it. Sparrows flitted about the sky, the red tiles of the neighbouring house, and the clouds were all in the sky. Later, in the autumn, the leaves of the trees would begin to come down to me in the suitcase. They were brown, warm and made a slight rustling noise. The leaves fell, whirling in the air and gently falling into the suitcase.

I lived in the sky for a whole year.

‘Dad,’ said my small son.

‘I lived in the sky for a whole year,’ I told him. Outside the window it was real autumn. Brown leaves whirled in the air and fell slowly to earth, I sat in my room thinking. The neighbours came out again carrying bags. They put them on the back seat, the car started off and was lost among the yellow poplars.

A wasp buzzed at the window, wanting to come into the room, then it gave up the idea and flew off somewhere. The late autumn sun shone on the window panes. Beside me sat my small son, crying.

I looked at him and said:

‘Very well. The suitcase was neither big, nor small, made of cardboard…’

On the following day his mother came to me, horrified.

‘Look,’ she said, showing me our green suitcase. ‘He has pierced it. In five places.’

‘Tell him to come here,’ I said.

‘But don’t beat him,’ his mother begged. ‘Don’t beat him hard.’

‘Tell him to come.’

A little later they all came; my son, his mother and the suitcase.

‘So,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘You pierce holes in suitcases, do you?’

‘Well, how can I breathe otherwise?’ he asked, and everything was clear to me.

‘Can you fit into it at least?’ I asked.

‘It’s just a little too narrow, but never mind,’ said my son. ‘Shall we go?’

‘Where?’ asked his horrified mother. ‘What are you thinking of?’

‘We’re going to the park,’ I said. ‘For a walk.’

The gardens of our neighbourhood, which we call a park, were full of children. They were running around the walks, digging in the sand, and were being pushed around in bright, deluxe prams made of duraluminium.

When I opened the suitcase and my small son got out of it, the whole gardens gathered around us. He paid no attention to anyone, crawled up to the sand and began to play with a little pail. He played for a while, then came, got into the suitcase and said that he wanted to go to the other end of the gardens to the slides. I shut the suitcase and set off. After us came a crocodile of children, watching curiously and waiting to see what would happen.

But nothing special happened. My son slid down the wooden slides, the children gave him a push at the top, and I caught him down below at the bottom of the slide. After that he climbed up the iron sticks of the turtle, rode on it for a time and then got back into the suitcase.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

And we triumphantly left the gardens, accompanied right to its other end by children and also by their parents.

On the following day, three persons arrived in the gardens with suitcases. They opened them, and out of them crawled children, who at once scattered over the rock garden. The fathers opened their papers and began to read, in exemplary fashion.

The plaid sports prams and graceful high baby prams with springs, nets, brakes and what have you gathered haughtily and began to make comments. We men with suitcases began to greet one another with nods when we met at the fountain or the swings, exchanged papers and passed the cigarettes round. The prams passed us by contemptuously and majestically, without paying any attention to us, behaving as if we didn’t exist.

About eleven o’clock, a graceful pram swam up to us, from which loud wails were coming.

‘Do excuse me,’ the woman said. ‘But could he sit in the suitcase for a little while?’

‘Of course,’ I said, pointing to it. ‘Let him sit there as long as he likes.’

‘He wants to sit in the suitcase,’ the offended woman explained. ‘He’s been howling all morning. What he likes about that suitcase I really can’t make out.’ As soon as he sat down in the suitcase, the baby stopped howling. He stared at us with his blue eyes, obviously expecting something more of us.

I gave up my paper and made a hat for him out of it. To his mother’s horror I put it on his head. She was ready to faint, torn by terrible visions of microbes and bacilli jumping out of the suitcase and the paper onto her unfortunate child.

The unfortunate child smiled, waved its hands and pulled the hat down right over its nose. This was too much for the mother, she seized him and thrust him back into his pram. The child set up a wail and we could hear him howling for a long time, as he was wheeled away down the green avenue.

A few days later the gardens looked like a railway station. Along all the walks, at the lake with the goldfish, at the slides and the iron tortoise, men carrying suitcases were walking about. The children played, lay in them, toasted themselves in the sun, or tried to lock themselves out, dragging the suitcases over the sand and rolling them on the grass. Among them, like lonely islets, the brilliant prams could be seen carefully making their way amid the suitcases.

‘D’you see what you’ve done?’ I said to my small son.‘You deserve to be well spanked. You really do.’

‘Well, it was just a story, wasn’t it?’ he answered. ‘And stories always end happily.’

‘You know it all, don’t you?’ I said.

After that I stuck him into the suitcase and took him home.

The short autumn day was coming to an end, the sun was already growing weaker.