No further explanation appeared to be forthcoming, because Gigi hopped down off his chair, dropped the bone in the garbage, and disappeared into the pantry. When he came out a moment later, he had his hand in a box of cookies up to the elbow. He pulled a cookie out and offered it to me. I shook my head, and Gigi shrugged and bit into it himself, chewing thoughtfully. His hair was tangled and knotty in the back, as if someone had neglected to comb it for weeks. Tu as soif? he asked. What? I said. He pretended to gulp from an imaginary glass. Oh, I said, No. And then, absurdly: Does Mr. Leclercq know that you’re here? His brow furrowed. Eh? he said. Mr. Leclercq? He knows you are here? Tonton Claude? he asked. I tried to understand. Mon oncle? he said. He’s your uncle? It hardly seemed possible. Gigi took another bite from his cookie and pushed a strand of pale hair out of his eyes.
Gigi led the way up the stairs, still nibbling at his cookie, such a weightless, nimble child, or maybe he just seemed so against the dark, oppressive architecture of Cloudenberg. When we reached the landing, I glanced at the Brueghel to see if the boy was gone, the man with the hat drowned. But the figures were too small to make out from where I stood, and Gigi was already hurrying ahead, turning the corner. Finishing the last bite of cookie, he brushed the crumbs onto his nubby pajama pants, took a small Matchbox car out of his pocket, and ran it along the wall. Then he slipped the car back into his pocket and took my hand in his. We walked down one long corridor after another, ducked through doors and up stairs, and as we walked, Gigi sometimes leaping, ambling, and scurrying ahead, sometimes doubling back to take up my hand again, I felt myself losing my bearings, a feeling that was not at all unpleasant. The surroundings became more and more stripped of ornament, until at last we were climbing a narrow set of wooden stairs that wound higher and higher, and I realized that we were inside one of the castle’s turrets. At the top was a small room with four narrow windows, one facing each direction. The glass of one was cracked and the wind came through. Gigi switched on a lamp whose shade was covered in stickers of animals and rainbows, some of which someone had, in a moment of boredom perhaps, attempted to scratch off. On the floor were blankets, a pillow with a faded floral case, and some shabby stuffed animals piled together to form a kind of disheveled nest. There was also half a loaf of stale bread and an uncapped jar of jam. I had the feeling we’d arrived at one of those animal burrows one finds in children’s books, filled with homey furniture, with all of the trappings of human life on a miniature scale, only instead of descending down under the earth we had ascended into the sky, and, instead of warmth and comfort, the boy’s feral hideaway reeked of isolation and loneliness. Gigi went to one of the windows, looked out, and shivered, and as he did I had a vision of our turret from the outside, a shining glass cabin containing two experiments in human life floating in a dark sea. There were three or four metal soldiers with chipped paint frozen in battle on the sill. I wanted to put my arm around the boy, to tell him that everything would be all right in the end, not perfect, not even happy perhaps, but enough. But I didn’t move to touch or console him, and didn’t speak for fear that I might startle him, and because I lacked the proper words in French. Taped to one wall was a photograph of a woman with wild hair and a scarf thrown around her neck. Gigi turned and saw me looking at it. He came over, took the photo down off the wall, and placed it under the pillow. Then he slipped under the pile of blankets, curled into a ball, and fell asleep.
I slept, too. When I woke for the second time during that long night Gigi was snuggled against me like a cat and the sky was turning pale. Not wanting to leave him alone, I lifted him into my arms as gently as I could. Having never