A boy descends a staircase. The staircase is narrow and winding. He goes down step by step, carefully, close to the wall, and his boots hit each step with a thud. Just before the base of the stairs, he pauses for a moment, looking at the passage rising behind him. Then, with sudden determination, he jumps the last three steps, as he usually does. He lands stumbling, and collapses on his knees on the stone floor. It is a stifling day, windless, at the end of summer, and long strips of light tear through the ground floor room. The sun shines fiercely on him from outside, the windows resembling netted slices of yellow glow, fixed to the plaster.
He gets up, rubbing his feet. He glances back at the stairs; then looks the other way, unable to decide which direction to turn. The room is empty, the fire rumbles over the coals in the hearth – orange embers beneath a layer of thin, spiraling smoke. His wounded knees throb in time with his heartbeat. He stands with one hand on the latch of the door leading to the stairs, with the worn tip of his boot raised, ready to move, to flee. His hair, light-colored, almost golden, rises from his forehead in upright tufts. No one.
He sighs, inhaling the warm, dust-filled air, crosses the room, and steps out the front door onto the street. The commotion – carts, horses, vendors, people shouting to each other, a man dropping a sack from a high window – does not touch him. He wanders at the entrance of the house, and from there, to the neighboring front door. The smell in his grandparents’ house never changes; a mixture: wood smoke, varnish, leather, wool. It is similar, yet subtly different, from the smell in the little house next door with two rooms, which his grandfather had built on the narrow strip beside the bigger house, where he lives with his mother and sisters.