26

•      He got up, pushing against the boards. The chains groaned. He went to the hole for pissing and expelled the few drops he had in his bladder, then he got dressed. Horrid smells came from his body and his clothes at the slightest movement he made. They swirled around him and upset him.

So, Kronauer, he said. The next time you decide to stay in jail, make sure to take a bath first, otherwise I won’t come with you!

He walked away from the hole and, as the cell was narrow, after four steps he touched the door. From the grille he could make out the thick shadow of a hallway. He brought his nose to the small mesh. In that spot the air was a little less nauseating than in the cell.

His headache came and went. Behind his forehead, in his eyes, the pain thrummed, sometimes slackened, sometimes swelled in forceful waves.

Well, he thought. It’s still better than lying outside, pecked by crows and vultures.

The smell of the metal grille mixed with that of his sniffing and breathing. Others before him had been there, hoping to see in the hallway a slight change in the atmosphere, an indication of the time, the day, the nearness or farness of death.

Other smells.

The smell of muddy snow carried on the detainees’ boots.

The smell of muddy snow, penal blood, muscle fatigue, penal cold, and filth.

The smell of holes in other cells, and the smell that he himself left against the grille, of a hairy, famished, muddy, and dead animal.

He walked away from the opening and went back to the boards.

Now he was sitting on the wood, head hung, his forehead in his hands. He was slowly trying to figure out what had happened before. He could barely reconstruct the passage of days and nights that had preceded his incarceration. The fragments appeared amid chaos and didn’t coalesce into a story or a life.

At some point he took off his coat and set it in a pile next to him, feeling as if he had accomplished something difficult.

His mind was full of massive holes.

He stayed that way and for two or three hours didn’t move. Without his coat he was just in rags. Occasionally he saw an image of himself in his mind, and he felt that he looked just like an ordinary detainee, chiefly male, in a torn uniform like a convict’s, a beggar’s, a soldier’s, or that of someone buried in a shallow grave.

•      Around eleven in the morning, a watchman came to open the door. The lock let out several lazy hiccups, then the iron plate squeaked on its hinges and Kronauer stood by the partition, standing mechanically at attention as if he had learned in the night of time the disciplined behavior of basic egalitarianism in concentration milieus.

The watchman was named Hadzoböl Münzberg. Kronauer recognized him easily. The day of feeding the core, they’d both taken a box with several puppets and video games out of the container. Hadzoböl Münzberg had a glassy stare then, a slow and weary pace, and Kronauer had figured out that he was one of Solovyei’s zombies. He had also thought of the children who had once played with these things and who must not have survived the radiation. When he and Hadzoböl Münzberg had tipped the box over the void, the dolls had slipped nonchalantly toward the abyss. Disarticulated puppets, damsels in plastic. “Dust to dust,” Hadzoböl Münzberg had remarked with a sigh.

And now Hadzoböl Münzberg was gesturing for Kronauer to leave his cell.

Kronauer showed him his coat and asked if he’d have to put it on.

—I’m taking you to the showers, Münzberg said.

—Good, said Kronauer as he followed his footsteps.

—You don’t have a headache, do you, sometimes? Münzberg suddenly asked.

—I do, Kronauer said. Horrible ones.

They went down the corridor. There were several doors with grilles, but, behind them, Kronauer couldn’t make out any breaths or signs of life.

—I’m the one who knocked you out, Münzberg clarified as they came to the shower room.

—Why? Kronauer asked.

—Had to, Münzberg explained.

—But, Kronauer protested.

—I did.

—So you knocked me out, just like that?

—Yes, said Hadzoböl Münzberg. With a shovel. I had to. You had become uncontrollable.