It started on Monday at two o'clock in the morning: a small, dry scratching inside the wall of the front room, behind the shelf with the cups.
My mother sat up in bed. "It might be a mouse."
"It may be water in a pipe," my father said, in the voice of a man who wants to sleep.
Tuesday, two o'clock. Scratch. Stop. Scratch.
"It could be the wind in the chimney," my father said.
"There is no wind," my mother said. "And a pipe may not scratch three nights at the same hour."
My little brother had his own idea, and he told it to us with the blanket up to his eyes. "It might be a hand."
My grandfather, who sleeps in the next room and hears everything, gave us the only calm sentence in the house. "It might be nothing. But something that comes at the same time every night could be alive."
On Wednesday my father came home with a hammer and a torch.
He knocked on the wall with one finger, from the floor to the ceiling. Above the shelf the sound changed: hollow. There was an old ventilation hole there, painted over years ago.
He opened a square the size of a book.
A grey swallow came out of the dark, hit the window twice, and sat on the top of the door with its wing half open. My brother did not move for a full minute.
Inside the hole, on a bed of dry grass and one blue thread, there were three eggs.
The bird had come in through a brick that had fallen out on the roof side.
My father did not close the wall. He put a small board under the hole, and we lived with an open wall for nineteen days, until three young swallows sat on the shelf with the cups and then went out through the window, one after another.
He closed it in October. My brother wrote the date on the new paint, and under the date, four words: it was not nothing.