The ministry of war
On the morning of April 6, 1915, Oskar Serti received a letter from the War Office, asking him if he would be so good as to go back to the front. That same night, he woke up in a sweat, tormented by the fear that the world was crumbling beneath him. He leapt out of bed with a single bound and began pacing round and round the room in an effort to pull himself together.
Little by little he managed to calm himself: he even reached a state of felicity which he had not felt since his early childhood. He felt the soft warmth which used to surround him when he had heard the comforting step of his father coming to give him his goodnight kiss.
Lost in his thoughts, Serti suddenly realised that he was no longer circling the room, but following a precise route. The route lead him to avoid treading on certain strips of the parquet, and to move more slowly over others.
Serti instinctively realised, that he had managed to find, with perfect accuracy, the creaking of the floorboards which accompanied the footsteps of his father when he entered his childhood bedroom.
After having comforted himself with the noise of the floorboards over a dozen times, Serti began to feel calm enough to go back to sleep. But he chose to go on pacing his route until daybreak, haunted by the fear that if he went back to bed he would make the floorboards creak as they had when his father, after having kissed him on the forehead, left him alone in the darkness of the night.