Kennedy's Brain Page 0,13

always looked like that. Dark, medium-length hair, centre parting. Blue eyes, narrow lips. Even if everything inside her had changed, her face was the same.

She gazed into her own eyes.

Inside her, time had started to pass once more.

CHAPTER 4

As dawn broke, Artur took her out into the woods with him. The air was filled with the smell of moss and damp bark, the sky hidden by mist. The first frost had arrived, the ground creaked under their feet.

During the night Louise had woken up and gone to the toilet. As she passed a half-open door she saw Artur in his old armchair, its springs almost touching the floor. He had an unlit pipe in his hand – he had stopped smoking some years previously, abruptly, as if it had struck him that he had used up his lifetime ration of tobacco. She paused and observed him, and it seemed to her that this was how she had always experienced him. No matter what her age, she had always stood outside a half-open door and observed him, assuring herself that he was there, standing guard over her.

He had woken her up early, gave her no chance to protest but insisted that she should dress for a walk in the forest. They drove over the bridge in silence and turned northwards, following the river towards the mountains. The tyres produced a crackling noise, the forest was motionless. He stopped on a logging road and put his arm round her shoulders. Barely visible paths meandered in all directions into the trees. He chose one of them, and they entered the vast silence. They came to an area where the ground was uneven, covered in pine trees. This was his gallery. They were surrounded by his sculptures. Carved out of the trunks were faces, bodies, trying to release themselves from the hard timber. Some trees had many bodies and faces intertwined, others had only one small face, often several metres above the ground. He created his works of art both on his knees and perched on primitive stepladders he had cobbled together. Some of the sculptures were very old. He had made those over forty years ago, when he was young. As the trees grew, they had distorted the images, changed bodies and faces, just as people change as they grow older. Some sculptures had burst, heads were shattered, as if they had been crushed or decapitated. He told her that sometimes people would come here during the night, saw out his sculptures and take them away with them. Once, a whole tree had vanished. But he did not worry, he owned twenty hectares of pine forest and that would be enough for his life and quite a lot more besides. Nobody would be able to steal everything he carved for his own pleasure, and for those who wanted to see them.

He eyed her surreptitiously, looking for any signs that she was disintegrating. But she was still drowsy from the strong tablets, he was not even sure that she noticed the faces peering at her from the tree trunks.

He took her to his holy of holies, three big pine trees growing close together. Brothers, he had thought; brothers or sisters who could not be separated. He had spent a long time contemplating these trees, hesitating for many years. Every sculpture existed inside the trunk, but he had to wait for the moment when he saw the invisible. Then he could sharpen his knives and chisels and start work, exposing what already existed. But those three mighty pines had remained silent. Sometimes he thought he might have caught a glimpse of what was hidden under the bark. But then he hesitated, it wasn't quite right, he needed to look deeper. One night he had dreamed about solitary dogs, and when he came back to the forest he had realised that it was animals inside those pine trunks – not really dogs, but something between a dog and a wolf, or perhaps a lynx. He had started carving, he no longer had any doubts, and now there were three animals there, each of them both dog and cat, seeming to climb up the massive trunks, as if they were climbing out of themselves.

She had never seen the animals before. He watched her, saw her searching for the story. His sculptures were not images but stories, voices whispering and shouting and urging her to listen. His gallery and her archaeological digs had the same roots. They were