Chapter 10

After her head was broken, Leila went out proudly with her head wrapped in a bandage. If someone asked her, she would untie the bandage and show them the black scar, which was a little red around the edges and stuck out from her hairline. Eventually, she forgot about it, and if someone stared at her, at the white scar left on her skin, she would make a vicious gesture, meaning: What are you looking at! None of your business! She said nothing to me and never thanked me for handing her stones and using the edge of my apron to wipe the blood that came out of her. From that time on, we began to compare our guts, which had nothing to do with school anymore.

We often met in the yard. We took out our respective dolls and pretended to play with them on our own, pretending to ignore each other's presence. Later we let the two dolls play together as if to see if they were friendly. That day we were sitting in the basement next to a vent with a hole in it and we swapped dolls, me holding hers and her holding mine. At that moment, Leila did not move and threw my doll through the broken hole in the vent.

I felt unbearable pain, and I felt that the celluloid doll was the most precious thing I owned. I knew Leela was bad, but never thought she would do something so evil. For me, my doll was alive, and down in the basement, inhabited by thousands of vicious animals, and now the doll was down there, which made me desperate beyond belief. But at that moment, although my eyes were full of tears, I learned one thing - a skill that I later became very good at - to suppress my despair. Leila asked me in tongues.

"Don't you care?"

I experienced extreme pain, but I felt that arguing with her would only make me suffer more. These two kinds of pain took my breath away, one that had already happened, which was my loss of the doll, and another possible pain, which was the loss of Leila. I didn't say anything, I just calmly did something as if it was natural, even though my actions were not natural, I knew I was taking a risk, I just threw her doll, the Noe she had just handed me, into the basement too.

Leila looked at me with a very surprised look.

"What you do, I will do!" I immediately said aloud, outwardly calm, but in reality extremely fearful inside.

"Now, you go down and pick it up for me."

"If you pick up my doll too."

We went down together. There was a small door to the left of the front door of that building leading to the basement, and we knew that small door. That door was so dilapidated that one of it was supported only by a fold, and there was a chain on the door that locked the two doors together. The doorway was so wide that a random kid could squeeze through. That's what we did, and with fear in our hearts, we pushed the door open as wide as we could get in, and our skinny, nimble bodies slipped through the gap into the basement.

Leila went in first, then me. We went in, down five stone steps, into a damp place. There was a very small hole at the height of the road, and light came through, but the basement was still very dark.

I was scared and tried to stay close to Leila, but she seemed angry and bent on finding her doll as we stumbled forward. I heard a creaking sound under my shoes, the sound of glass, rocks, and bugs. There were things around, I don't know what: black, round, square, and some were pointy. The light coming through the window sometimes fell on top of some objects, and I saw broken chairs, lamp stands, fruit crates, shelves from the closet, and scrap iron. One thing that scared me looked like a floppy face with two huge glass eyes and a box-like thing there under the chin. I saw this face hanging on a wooden drying rack with a frustrated expression and I screamed and pointed it out to Leila. She turned around, turned her back to me, slowly approached the object, carefully reached out, took the object off the drying rack, and turned around. She put the thing on her face and couldn't see her eyes, just two big glass eyes and a huge face with no eyes in their sockets and no mouth, just a long black chin that swung across her chest.

The scene is engraved in my memory, I'm not quite sure, but at that moment I must have let out a scream of fear. She immediately told me that it was a mask, just a gas mask - that's what her dad called it, and they had an identical one in the family storage room. Her voice echoed a bit, and I was still shaking and screaming in fear, which made her quickly remove that mask and throw it into a corner with a crackle. In the light coming through the window, you could see the mask raised a big cloud of dust.

I calmed down. Leila looked around and positioned the window where we had thrown Tina and Noe. We walked forward along the rough, lumpy walls from the dampness, looking in the darkness, but our dolls weren't there. Leila kept saying in tongues: They're not here, they're not here, they're not here! She rummaged around on the floor with her hands, something I didn't dare to do.

After a few long minutes. There was a moment when I seemed to suddenly see Tina, my heart racing, reaching out for it, but it was just crumpled up newspaper. They weren't here - Lila said again, and she headed for the door. I felt so confused that I couldn't stay in the basement alone and keep looking, but I also didn't want to walk away with her because I didn't find the dolls.

She stood on the steps and said.

"The doll was taken by Don Achille, and he put it in a black bag."

It was then that I thought I heard Don Achille's voice, rustling like a snake as he crawled among the things he couldn't name. Leila had gotten through the broken door so nimbly that I had to give up on Tina to follow her.