Kika

All day Eva said barely enough to thank Hortensia when she offered her bread. There was no storming off or snapping at anyone. She walked with them, stopped when they stopped and ate what they gave her, staring at her sandwich.

Axel tried three times to get her talking. For his first attempt he chose a joke that hadn’t had much chance of success to begin with.

“What did the fish say when it swam into a wall?”

Eva kept walking.

“Dam,” said Axel. “That’s what it said. Dam.”

Hortensia had to stop on the verge, bent double.

“Oh, son, that’s terrible.”

Eva, nothing. Like the wall.

The second time, he tried a question about the route, something she’d have to answer.

“Do we hit a village before lunch?”

“I don’t know.”

The third attempt was where he went wrong.

“Here, if you want we can talk about this morning.”

“I don’t.”

“Yeah, but sometimes it helps…”

“Axel.”

Axel shut up. He was already trying to sort her morning out and she hadn’t even asked for a conversation.

Hortensia talked enough for all three of them: about a priest who fell asleep standing up during Mass, about mushrooms and why people didn’t sit in their doorways any more. In five hours she didn’t ask Eva a single question.

They stopped for lunch at a fairly dismal picnic area beside a petrol station, with two plastic tables and a cigarette machine. They were eating their sandwiches when the dog appeared.

She came from behind the bins with her head down and was so thin Axel took her for a wolf. A big grey-and-white dog, with pointed ears, a masked face and striking blue eyes that stood out even through the clumps of shedding fur. She had no collar.

She stopped five metres off, weighing things up.

“Ooh,” said Hortensia. “That’s a husky. The sledge-pulling sort. Who in their right mind buys a wolf to keep in a flat?”

Fay, up on the table, looked at her, decided it was none of his business and curled up.

“Don’t give her anything,” said Hortensia. “If you feed her she won’t go. And then what, you’re taking her with you?”

Axel froze with half a sandwich in the air. The dog didn’t take her eyes off him.

Eva got up with her untouched sandwich and crouched four paces away from the dog.

“Come here.”

It was the first thing she’d said since the hard shoulder without anyone asking her anything.

The dog didn’t move.

“Come here, I said, you daft thing.” She broke the sandwich in half and put one half on the ground. “Here.”

The dog came in sideways, ready to bolt. She grabbed the piece and moved two metres off to eat it.

Eva sat cross-legged on the gravel and started talking softly to her, telling her how skinny she was and wondering where she’d come from. Those eyes were just like Fay’s. Maybe they were cousins.

The dog lifted her muzzle, closed her eyes and answered with an endless “awooo-wo-wo-wo”. Judging by all that complaining, she was ready to tell Eva her entire life story.

“Excuse me?”

“Awooo-wo-wo!”

“Oh, so it’s like that, is it.”

They kept it up for ten minutes, a girl talking quietly and a dog who wouldn’t let her finish a sentence. Hortensia was crying with laughter into her sleeve.

As they packed up, the dog stayed three metres away, watching what they did. She followed them to the road at a careful distance, and half an hour later she was trotting ahead with Fay, quite at home.

“That one’s not going anywhere now,” said Hortensia. “We’ll have to call her something.”

“Kika,” said Eva.

“Kika? Why Kika?”

“Because she’s four kilos short. And because it suits her.”

That girl didn’t give her songs names, and she’d named a dog in two seconds.

The next day they came to a junction with two arrows. One said “Cantomar 480”. The other just said “Valdebruma” and headed uphill, towards some mountains that were blue in the distance.

Axel stopped in front of the Cantomar one. He’d had the cliffs stuck in his head for months.

Fay crossed without looking at anyone, took the top road, sat down twenty metres along and settled in to wait. Kika behind him, like a trailer.

“That way,” said Eva.

“But there’s no sea that way,” Axel told the cat.

The cat didn’t answer.

“Uh-huh,” said Eva.

“Right. Up we go, then.”

And it wasn’t as hard as he’d expected.

“Let me get this straight,” said Hortensia, setting the pace. “You pack everything in and go and you don’t know where.”

“North. To the sea, to the cliffs.”

“Do you surf?”

“No.”

“Oh. So why did you go, then?”

“Because of a slice of pizza,” said Eva.

Hortensia stopped dead in the middle of the road.

“You what?”

“Eva.”

“He choked on a slice of pizza and it changed his life.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“It was exactly like that.”

“It wasn’t exactly like that.” Axel walked faster, very dignified. “It was a big slice.”

“Of frozen pizza,” Eva went on, loving it. “Microwaved.”

“Pre-frozen.”

“What’s that when it’s at home?”

“Something else.”

“And he chucked himself belly first at the worktop like a wild boar and the pizza went flying.”

“Like an animal, I said! I never said boar!”

Hortensia was looking from one to the other with her mouth open.

“And you thought you were dying?”

“I thought I was dying. And I thought: fucking hell, what a stupid life.”

Hortensia went quiet for three steps. And then she let out a cackle that scared Kika.

“A pizza! Oh my Lord, a pizza!” She wiped an eye with her wrist. “For me it took a man dying. You got off lightly with a pizza.”

She kept walking two steps ahead of them.

Eva elbowed Axel, without looking at him. The first one in two days.

A couple of hours later the valley opened out and an enormous dark-green reservoir appeared, tucked between the hills. The cracked banks showed how high the water had once reached. What stopped all three of them was a stone tower rising from the middle, about two hundred metres away, with two windows at the top and an opening where a bell must once have hung.

“A bell tower,” said Hortensia. “There was a village down there. They flooded it to make the reservoir. People got a piece of paper and a deadline, and the deadline was short. The dead they took with them. For the living they built a new village up there, with straight streets.”

She put her hands in her cardigan pockets.

“And the houses down below were left standing. With their doors shut.”

They went down to the shore because Eva had got it into her head.

Down by the water they found the corner of a wall buried in mud and half a staircase that no longer led anywhere. Kika, busy with her own affairs, dug up a leather shoe as hard as a rock and brought it to Hortensia, bursting with pride.

“Drop that, you mucky thing,” said Hortensia.

Hortensia didn’t even bend down to take it. She was staring at the tower.

“These houses were like my mother’s,” she said.

“Where was that?” said Axel.

“Up there, in the mountains.” She pointed with her chin and looked away.

“Is it still standing?”

“And let’s see if you two know what this bit of iron is!” said Hortensia, bending down for a lump of scrap. “Because I haven’t a clue.”

She started talking about mushrooms, very loud and very fast, and didn’t change the subject all afternoon.

Axel looked at Eva. Eva raised her eyebrows half a millimetre.