Flutterings

I remember their warmth and charm but nothing else about the day except for a heavy, exotic-looking dagger with a curvy double edge that lay on top of a sideboard, its elaborately chased blade catching gleams of sunlight. When I approached for a closer look, Cartier-Bresson and his wife said, in one voice, "Be careful!"

Seeing my surprise, he explained that the knife was a Malayan kris, and that the dark sheen along its blade was probably poison. "I don't want it to cut you," he said.

"I wasn't going to touch it," I said. I felt like a reprimanded child.

"He means it will cut you if it wants to," Eli said. She herself was Balinese, strikingly so, and again I stopped in my tracks. She spread her hands in distress and said to her husband, "Can we tell Roger why it's out on the table like this?"

"Yes," Cartier-Bresson said gravely. "Normally, in the everyday, the kris rests in this drawer, here below, but now and then it asks to get out."

"It asks?" I asked.

"It knocks," he said, rapping a double rap with his knuckles on the sideboard. "And when it asks again we take it out and put it just here for a few days."