The Fire-Cutter

by The Weight of Unbelief, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Aurèle Boillat did not believe in the words, and had not believed in them for seventy-four years, and the telephone on the kitchen wall did not care what he believed: it rang at ten past three on the first night of snow, as it had rung at every hour of every season since the hospitals had begun to keep his number, and he went down the stairs to it in his socks with the stair-rail cold as iron under his palm and the whole dark weight of the farmhouse leaning on him from above.

He did not turn on the light. He never did. The kitchen of the farm at Les Chaumilles was a thing he could cross blind: nine boards from the stair-foot to the table, the table's corner at the height of his hip, the iron of the potager to the left giving off the last ghost of the evening's fire, the smell of pine resin and ash and the sour wool of his work coat hung on the nail. Outside, beyond the double window, the pasture would be going white under a sky with no moon in it, and the two old mares would be standing with their rumps to the wind at the bottom of the field, too stupid or too wise to come in to the barn. He lifted the receiver. The plastic was colder than the rail.

"Boillat."

"Monsieur Boillat, good evening, forgive me—" A woman's voice, young, not from the Jura: the vowels were flatter, from the lake. Behind her he could hear the hospital, which always sounded the same, a hum and a far bell and somebody's rubber soles. "This is the burns centre at Lausanne. You're on our list. I have a patient. Will you—"

"Name," he said. "Given name. Age. Where."

He always said it so. He had found, in the first years, that if he allowed them to explain, to apologise, to say that the doctors did not really hold with it but the family had asked, then he had to listen to their embarrassment as well as their burns, and he could not carry both. Four words. The words that the night sister at Moutier had taught him to ask for in 1961, when the first hospital rang, and that he had asked ever since, for nurses and mothers and once for a gendarme who had spoken to him as if taking a statement.

"Theurillat," the nurse said. "Yanis. Nineteen. Both forearms, the left side of the neck. A barn fire, he's with the fire brigade at—" She heard herself explaining and stopped. "Second degree, some deep. His grandmother asked that it be you. She said you would know."

He knew.

---

He stood with the receiver against his ear and the snow ticking on the glass, and for a time that he could not afterwards measure he did nothing at all, because the thing that he had always done was no longer possible, and he could not at first understand why.

What he had always done was simple. He did not pray: he had stopped at the age of fourteen, on the morning his father's thresher took the two fingers from his father's hand and the priest from Saignelégier came up in his black car to say that God had spared the arm. He did not light a candle, or touch a crucifix, or close his eyes. He listened to the name and the age and the place of the hurt, and then, with the receiver against his ear and whatever stranger breathing on the other end, he said the words in his head, in the order his grandmother had given them, with the sign she had shown him made small against his chest with his thumb, as one would brush away a crumb. It took the time it takes to say the Our Father twice. Then he said, "C'est fait," and hung up, and went back to bed, and did not think of it again.

That was the whole of it. That was all that the hospitals at Delémont and Porrentruy and Lausanne and Fribourg had been getting from him since before the nurse on the other end of this line was born: an old man in a cold kitchen, reciting to himself, without belief, a sentence about fire. He had never taken a centime. He had never met one of them. He had never asked whether it worked, because to ask whether it worked would have been to admit the question was worth asking, and he would not give it that. He had been a case-polisher at the factory at Le Noirmont for forty-one years. He knew what made a thing work. Abrasive, pressure, the wheel turning at its speed, the steel coming up out of its own dullness into a shine that was nothing but the absence of scratches. The words were not like that. The words were nothing. He said them because his grandmother had put them into him like a splinter, and because it was easier to say them than to explain to a weeping mother at three in the morning why he would not.

He said them as he would have said his own telephone number. Indifferently. Without hope.

He tried. He opened his mouth in the dark, though the words had never needed his mouth, and he made the small sign against his chest, and he began—

—and he could not get past the first of them, because he was wanting.

He was wanting it to work. He felt the want in himself like a hand closing on his windpipe from inside. Yanis, who was Odile's daughter's boy, who had been at the farm every summer until he was fourteen and then had stopped coming, as boys stop; who had sat on the dungheap wall at seven with his heels drumming and asked whether it was true that Aurèle could stop fire with his mind, and Aurèle had said, I stop nothing, it's a tale for old women, and the boy had looked at him with a disappointment so complete that he had gone into the barn to be away from it. Yanis, nineteen, with the skin of his forearms gone to white leather and blister, lying in a bed in Lausanne with a nurse standing over him who had never in her life seen the hay barns of the Franches-Montagnes or smelled what they smell of when they go. Aurèle had seen three go. He knew the sound the roof-beams make. He knew exactly what the boy had been doing with his arms.

He wanted it so much that the wanting was a weight, a stone in the throat, and the words would not come round it.

And he knew—with the hard clarity of the hours after three, which the night shifts at the factory had taught him to distrust and could not teach him to refuse—that it had always been this. That whatever the thing was, it had lived in him for seventy-four years because he had never once wanted anything of it. That it had used his indifference the way the polishing wheel used the paste: as the gritty medium through which the work was done. He had despised it, and so it had been safe in him, the way a coin is safe in a pocket that has never been opened. And now he wanted, and the wanting was a hand going into the pocket, and the coin was not there, or was there and was hot, too hot to hold.

He knew that he was thinking this. He knew that it was the thinking of a man who believed, after all, and the knowledge sickened him, because he had built his life with care on not being that man. He had watched his grandmother's neighbours come up the hill in their Sunday shoes with their burned children, and seen the way they looked at her, and he had sworn, at nine years old, with her dry hand still on his head, that nobody would ever look at him like that. Nobody had. He had kept them on the end of a telephone line for sixty-five years precisely so that nobody would. And here he was, alone, with nobody looking at him at all, and he was looking at himself in exactly that way, and he hated it, and the hatred did not help him, and the boy's arms went on burning in Lausanne.

"Monsieur?" said the nurse. "Monsieur Boillat? Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"Is it— are you doing it now? I'm sorry. I don't know how long it takes. Usually they say c'est fait and—"

"I can't," he said.

---

His grandmother, Mélanie Boillat, had given it to him in the winter of 1952, in this kitchen, at this table, on the night she knew she would die, because the rules of her line said that it went once, and to the other sex, and by mouth only, and never to be written down, and never sold; and because the other rule, the one she whispered last, was that when it was given it was gone from the giver. It goes out of me into you, she had said, the way heat goes out of the stove into the room. And afterwards I'll be cold. Hold still. And he had held still, nine years old, frightened of her breath, while she put her mouth to his ear and said the words, three times, and made him say them back, three times, and then she had sat back in her chair and looked at him with eyes from which, he would have sworn it, something had in that moment gone out, as the colour goes out of a coal, and she had said, There. Now I'm only an old woman. Go to bed.

She had died in the night. He had not wept. He had lain awake hearing the house tick as it cooled and thinking, with the cruelty of children, that she had been only an old woman all along.

He had never given it to anyone. Odile's girl had asked once, when she was training as a nurse herself, and he had laughed at her, and she had not asked again. He had told himself that it was because the thing was nothing, and one does not hand nothing down the generations like a clock. That was a lie, and he had known it was a lie in the same moment he told it. He had kept it because to give it away would be to say that there was something to give. He had kept it out of unbelief. He had kept it the way some men keep a grudge: tended, unspoken, because without it they would not know what shape they were.

"Monsieur Boillat," said the nurse. "I'll have to go. He's— I need to go back in."

"What's your name?"

A pause. The far bell. "Carvalho. Inês."

"Inês. How old are you?"

"I don't— thirty-one. Why?"

"Do you believe in it?"

He heard her breathe. He could hear, too, that she was a woman who did not lie quickly, who was turning the question over to see whether there was an honest answer under it. "I do the dressings," she said at last. "I do the morphine. I clean the dead skin off them in the bath while they scream, and I'm good at it, and I don't believe in anything that I can't put on with a glove. I ring the numbers on the list because the families ask, and because it costs nothing, and because I've seen—" She stopped. "No. I don't believe in it."

"Good," said Aurèle Boillat. "Are you alone? Can anyone hear?"

"I'm in the office. The door's shut."

"Then listen to me. Don't write anything down. If you have a pen in your hand, put it away."

"Monsieur, I can't—"

"Put it away."

He heard the small click of a pen being laid on a desk in Lausanne, a hundred kilometres and more away, beyond the long hills and the lakes, and the sound was so slight and so absolute that he felt it in the bones of his face.

"I'm going to tell you some words," he said. "I'll say them three times. You'll say them back to me three times. Then you'll go in to the boy, and you'll say them in your head, not aloud, with your hand— no. Not with your hand. Just near him. And you'll make this sign." He told her the sign: the thumb, small, against the chest, as one would brush away a crumb. "You don't have to believe them. It's better if you don't. Don't want anything from them. Say them the way you'd say the dose of a drug. Do you understand?"

"No," said Inês Carvalho.

"Good," he said again, and leaned his forehead against the cold wall beside the telephone, and closed his eyes, though there was nothing to see, and began.

---

He had thought that it would be difficult, that the words would stick in him as they had stuck a minute before. They did not. They came out of him easily, almost eagerly, the way water comes out of a pipe when the ice in it finally gives, in a rush and then a steady pour. He heard them in his own mouth for the first time in his life, spoken, not thought, in the hoarse whisper of an old man who has not talked to anyone since the post van on Tuesday; and they sounded foolish, as he had always known they would, a scrap of bad Latin and worse French and the names of saints that nobody has prayed to since the war, a thing a child might make up in a hayloft to frighten a smaller child. He said them once. He heard her breathe. He said them a second time, and somewhere in the second saying he felt it begin.

It was not a warmth. It was not a light. He had always half expected, in the contemptuous part of his mind that had imagined this moment so as to despise it, some swelling of feeling, some confirmation; and there was none. What there was, was subtraction. As he spoke, something that he had not known was there began to be not there, the way one does not hear the hum of a refrigerator until it stops; a pressure under the breastbone, so old and so constant that he had taken it for the shape of his own chest, easing, thinning, going out of him along the line of his whisper and down the wire and under the snow and away, south over the Jura, toward Lausanne.

He said the words a third time, and the last of it went.

"Now you," he said.

She said them back to him. She said them badly, the first time, stumbling on the saints, and he corrected her, and she said them again, and the second time they were right, and the third time she said them without hesitation, in her flat lake vowels, quickly and coolly, as if reading back a dose. He listened to them come out of a stranger's mouth and felt nothing at all. They were only words now. They were exactly what he had always said they were.

"Is that it?" she said.

"That's it."

"And— the sign. Before, or after?"

"After. And when you've done, you say c'est fait. That's all."

"Monsieur Boillat." She hesitated. He heard her decide to say it. "What happens to you?"

"Nothing," he said. "I'm an old man in a kitchen. Go in to the boy."

She did not hang up at once. For two or three seconds he heard the hospital breathing on the line, the hum and the soles and the far bell, and he thought she would say something else, thank him, ask him again whether he was sure; and he found that he was afraid she would, because he did not think he could bear to be thanked for this. Then the line clicked and went to the long flat tone, and he stood holding the receiver against his ear and listening to it, and could not make his arm put it back.

---

When he could, he did not go back up the stairs.

He sat at the table in the dark, in his socks, with his coat off the nail around his shoulders, and listened to the farmhouse. The snow had thickened; he could hear it now not as ticking but as a kind of hush against the window, a sound that was the absence of sound. In the potager the last of the evening's embers had gone to grey. The cold came up through the boards into the soles of his feet and he let it.

He did not know whether it had worked. He would never know. He could not even tell himself that the giving had been noble, because he knew how much of it had been cowardice: he, Aurèle Boillat, could not have borne to say the words himself and then lie awake waiting to discover whether they were nothing. He had handed his unbelief and his belief together to a stranger in Lausanne, so that he would not have to hold either. He knew this. He knew that he knew it. The knowledge sat on him like a second coat, heavier than the first.

And under all of it, under the knowledge and the self-contempt and the cold, there was the other thing, the thing he could not think his way round: the space under his breastbone where the pressure had been. It was not pain. It was not grief. It was only an emptiness of a very particular shape, as precise as the setting from which a watch-jewel has been lifted, and he understood, sitting there, that he would carry it now for whatever was left of his life, and that it would never ache, and that he would never stop feeling it.

Now I'm only an old woman. She had known. She had sat in this chair and given the thing to a frightened, contemptuous boy who would not weep for her, and she had known exactly what it would cost, and she had paid it anyway, without asking him to believe. He had spent seventy-four years refusing to forgive her for that. He found, now, that he had no more refusal in him. It had gone out of him with the words.

At half past five the sky over the pasture went from black to the colour of slate, and the shapes of the two mares came out of it at the bottom of the field, white along their backs, standing exactly where he had known they would be. He got up. His knees cracked like kindling. He went to the potager and opened the firebox and raked the grey ash through the grate until he found, deep in, three coals still with a red eye in them, and he laid on them a twist of newspaper and a handful of pine shavings from the box and blew, steadily, the way his grandmother had taught him before she taught him anything else, until the shavings caught.

The flame came up yellow and quick and greedy, licking the paper into black lace, climbing the shavings, reaching for the split log he set on top. In seventy-four years he had never once looked at a fire without, somewhere in the back of his mind, the first of the words beginning to form against it, as a hand rises without thought to ward off a blow. He looked now, and nothing rose. There was only the fire, and the log beginning to spit resin, and the heat coming out through the open door of the firebox onto his face and his chest and the empty place under his breastbone, and he did not close the door, and he did not step back, and he let it come.

---

THE END

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The Weight of Unbelief, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Kalendās Novembrēs (27 October 2026), ā Pondere Incrēdulitātis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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