Chapter 8.

By dusk, there was not much to be seen, and the crowd dissipated. When the last of them had gone, the wall seemed to have returned to its usual appearance: implacably uniform, alien and imposing in the silence of the night.

Early the next morning, I returned to the hole with my fellow students. To our astonishment, we couldn’t find the opening. We made several trips up and down the wall, almost all the way back to the village and pushing on in the opposite direction to landscapes we had certainly never seen before. We walked along the wall, staring at its surface and probing it with our hands until our fingers blistered. By the time the endless pattern of dark stones had imprinted on our retinas, we faced up to the fact that the hole had indeed disappeared. It was at this point that some curious folks arrived who had not seen it. On hearing of the hole’s disappearance, they shrugged and walked away with an air of disdain, as if we had just hoaxed them. We also headed home, most of us dispirited, except for the SAWs who decided to continue lobbying for the destruction of the wall with the town hall.

A day too late, the local gazette published a front-page article devoted to the hole, detailing its location and all the observations that had been made about it. As a result, people were still flocking to the infamous spot, only to return disappointed. It took a few weeks for the publisher to recover from the scandal surrounding the publication of this false news. The hole became taboo. Authorities acted as if nothing had happened, and the extraordinary event was soon forgotten.

My incredible ascent as a pioneering explorer was followed by a vertiginous fall from grace in the eyes of the community once my discovery was consigned to oblivion. When I tried to evoke the hole in the wall, my interlocutors looked at me with a bewildered expression or laughed in my face. I began to doubt my sanity when the dialogue would take on a Kafkaesque tone: “Don’t you remember the hole in the wall? – What hole? There never was a hole.” Soon, I was regarded as a lunatic. Children were pointing fingers at me. My classmates stopped talking to me. People told jokes about me.

Overwhelmed by persecutions, I left the village. I walked far along the wall in the hope of finding a new opening and restoring my reputation. But the wall was hermetic, and I had no other wish than to move away from it. I walked towards a beautiful meadow, in the middle of which I found an abandoned but still perfectly habitable farmhouse. I settled there as a hermit for decades to come.

The wall was not visible from my new home. But its irresistible call would occasionally draw me back into its shadow, and I would be filled by memories of the three splendid parallels I had glimpsed on the other side. To preserve this image, I hung a small square mirror between the stones. From a distance, it reflected the color of the sky and looked like a hole in the wall.

The end.

What if history had taken a different turn? Go back to the previous chapters and choose the alternative option.