such a trance and still hadn’t done anything, hadn’t prepared anything . . . Meanwhile, that clock was probably striking six . . . His sleepiness and torpor suddenly gave way to an unusually feverish and confused burst of activity. There wasn’t much to prepare, though. He was doing his utmost to think of everything and forget nothing, but his heart thumped so hard that it became difficult to breathe. First, he had to make a loop and sew it to his coat – a moment’s work. He rummaged beneath the pillow, where he’d stuffed his linen, and retrieved an old unwashed shirt that had all but fallen to pieces. From it he tore a strip about two inches wide and a good foot long. He folded this strip in two, took off his broad, sturdy, coarse-cotton summer coat (his only outer garment) and started sewing both ends of the strip to the inside, just below the left armpit. His hands shook, but he still managed to do it well enough that nothing was visible from the outside when he put his coat back on. He’d had needle and thread to hand for a while, inside a scrap of paper in the little table. As for the loop, that was a crafty invention of his own: it was intended for the axe. After all, he could hardly walk along the street brandishing an axe. Hiding it under his coat wouldn’t do either – he’d have to hold it in place, which would be conspicuous. But now that he had the loop, all he needed to do was place the blade in it and the axe would hang nicely, under his armpit inside the coat, all the way there. What was more, by thrusting a hand into the side pocket of his coat he was able to hold the end of the axe handle and stop it moving about; and since the coat was very broad – a real sack – there was no way of noticing from the outside that he was holding it through the pocket. The loop was another thing he’d thought up a couple of weeks before.
Having done this, he slid his fingers through the small gap between his ‘Turkish’ couch and the floor, fumbled around near the left-hand corner and extracted something he’d prepared and hidden there long before – a pledge. Pledge was hardly the word for it, though: it was a smoothly planed bit of wood, no bigger in size or thickness than a silver cigarette case. He’d found it by chance on one of his strolls, in a yard containing some kind of workshop housed in an outbuilding. Then he’d added to it a thin, smooth iron strip – a fragment of something, presumably – which he’d found in the street at the same time. Putting together the two pieces, of which the iron strip was the smaller, he tied them tightly with thread, making a cross; then he wrapped them neatly and daintily in clean white paper, tied a thin ribbon around it, also in a cross, and fixed the knot in such a way as to make it hard to untie. The point of it all was to distract the old woman as she fussed with the knot, and thus, to seize his chance. As for the iron strip, it had been added for weight, to keep the old woman from guessing right away that the ‘item’ was made of wood. He’d kept it all under the couch until the time came. No sooner had he retrieved the pledge than there was a sudden yell from somewhere outside:
‘It’s well past six!’
‘Well past! Good God!’
He rushed to the door, listened, grabbed his hat and set off down his thirteen steps, warily, noiselessly, like a cat. Ahead lay the crucial business of stealing the axe from the kitchen. That the deed was to be done with an axe had been decided by him long before. He also had a small folding gardener’s knife; but he had little faith in it, still less in his own strength, so he settled definitively on the axe. Let us note, by the way, one peculiarity of all the definitive decisions already taken by him in this venture. They shared one strange quality: the more definitive they were, the more hideous and absurd they immediately became in his own eyes. Despite all his inner torment and