A Grain of Truth Read Free

by torchlight the pictures of signs of the zodiac that adorned the upper part of the room. He frowned at the crocodile. A crocodile? He glanced at its neighbour – Sagittarius, the archer – and realized the crocodile was meant to be a scorpion. Perhaps there was a reason for it being a scorpion. All he could remember was that in Judaism you weren’t allowed to represent people. He went up to Gemini, the twins. In spite of that fact, they were represented as human figures, but without heads. He shuddered.
    He reckoned he’d had enough of this expedition now, on top of which he had noticed a sea monster wrapped about a small round skylight. Here was Leviathan, the spirit of death and destruction, surrounding a patch of grey light as if it were the entrance to its underwater kingdom, and Roman became ill at ease. He felt a sudden need to get out of the archive, but just then, from the corner of his eye, he noticed something moving on the other side of the aperture. He shoved his head inside the monster, but he couldn’t see much through the dirty glass.
    On the far side of the room a floorboard creaked. Roman jumped, painfully banging his head against the wall. He cursed and crawled away from the skylight. There was another creak.
    “Hello, is there anyone there?”
    He shone the torch in all directions, but all he could see were registers, dust and signs of the zodiac.
    This time something creaked right next to him. Roman gasped aloud. It took him a while to calm his breathing. Fantastic, he thought, I should treat myself to even less sleep and even more coffee.
    At an energetic pace he followed the metal walkway towards the steep stairs; there was a thin railing separating him from the dark hole yawning between the staircase and the wall. As the top level of the scaffolding was also the level of the windows that admitted light into the hall, he passed some very strange contraptions used for opening and cleaning them. They looked like small drawbridges, now raised to the vertical position. To get to the windows, you had to release a thick rope and lower the bridge so that it reached across to the window alcove. Roman thought it rather a curious mechanism – after all, neither the scaffolding housing the records, nor indeed the thick walls of the synagogue were likely to be going anywhere, so they could have been kept permanently lowered. Now it made him think of a battleship with raised gangways, ready to set sail. He swept the entire structure with the beam of his torch and walked towards the stairs. He had only taken a single step when a mighty bang filled the room, a shock ran through the staircase, and he lost his balance, only failing to tumble down the stairs because he seized the railing with both hands. The torch fell from his grip, bounced off the floor twice and went out.
    As he straightened up, his heart was beating with dizzying speed. Quickly, feeling slightly hysterical, he inspected his surroundings. The drawbridge he had walked past had fallen. He gazed at it, breathing heavily. Finally he burst out laughing. He must have accidentally disturbed something. Physics – yes; metaphysics – no. All quite simple, really. Whatever, it was the last time he was going to work after dark among all these great-great-grand-corpses.
    He blindly groped his way up to the drawbridge and grabbed the rope to pull it vertical again. Of course it was jammed. Swearing like a trooper, he crawled up to the window alcove on his knees. The window looked out onto the same bushes as the aperture guarded by the sea monster.
    The world outside was now the only source of light, and it was extremely feeble light. Inside it was almost impossible to see a thing, and outside the break of day was changing into a springtime, still timid dawn; out of the darkness loomed trees, the bottom of the ravine surrounding the old town, the villas built on the opposite side of the escarpment and the wall of the old Franciscan monastery. The black