What Cannot Be Bought

Awa put on her good wrapper.

"You are coming?" said the watchman, astonished.

"One does not leave a guest to burn."

She climbed into the merchant's 4x4, and the whole village set out behind it on foot, in the warm night, the way people follow a wedding or a coffin — no one yet knew which.

In the big sitting room the merchant was waiting, surrounded by lamps left unlit out of an economy of shame.

"Repair it," he ordered. "Make it burn for me."

"It burns for no one," said Awa. "It burns for what is true."

"Then watch."

He planted himself before the lamp.

"I paid for it." The wick stayed black.

"I am an honest merchant." The dark thickened.

"The whole city respects me!" Outside, someone coughed.

The merchant clenched his fists. The gold of his rings clicked. He had bought plots, papers, consciences — and this small copper thing refused him a flame.

"What must I say?" he cried at last.

"What is true," said Awa gently. "You must have one somewhere. A truth."

The silence stretched. The crowd held its breath against the windows.

Then the merchant, without deciding to, said very low:

"I am afraid of the dark."

The flame leapt up.

Tall, calm, unhurried, it lit his face the way one lights a child's bedroom: the damp forehead, the eyes open too wide, and that old fear, older than the fortune, which had held him all his life.

The crowd did not laugh.

Perhaps that is the most astonishing thing in this story: nobody laughed.

The merchant looked at the flame, then at the crowd, then at his hands.

And he closed his fingers around the burning lamp.