We’re walking to the elevators. It is inconceivable that we’re doing this. Residents, visitors, staff: Harry and I walk toward them. The only entrance to the building, a solution that has been forced upon us. Forty luxurious floors, virtually forgotten, rise above us in full glory. We’ve never seen so much as a glimpse of them! It is inconceivable that we’re doing this. With the intention of leaving the basement, Harry and me! And yet we’re walking to the elevators. Our exit. The basement, where we live, will become a basement again, an empty car park. With each step, I’m dreaming. My pulse pounds in my temples; I can feel it shaking my head. The excitement. As if the resident has been hiding in one of the elevators since the exodus. Harry and I have finally discovered him, soon we’ll meet him. I see the distance growing smaller and know that it is inconceivable. I try to remember what Harry has said about the man, the man we have to save. I get no farther than a shaven head and black clothes. A few meters before the elevators we stop and stare silently at the smooth gray doors, impassive in their steel frames. Everything has been an exercise, preparation. Now it’s time for it to really start.
126
The service elevator, a little larger than the other two, is the only one with double doors that meet in the middle. Harry sends me to the staff storage cupboard for two barrels of liquid soap. When I come back, I see him working at the rubber. He’s used the paring knife to gouge out a notch. He digs at it and pulls pieces and long black strips out of the seal.
“Shall I get two more? There’s another two.” I nod at the fifteen-liter barrels.
Harry’s blank face bursts into a smile. He winks to show his appreciation. “Hurry.”
A little later we’re standing next to the double doors facing each other with our fingertips in the crack Harry has opened up. We both slide a foot past the halfway mark, crossing our legs. We puff up our cheeks. We form a strange but completely symmetrical figure, Harry and me, guards.
A long, hopeless period of strain and exertion follows. But once we’ve achieved an opening of about ten centimeters, the sliding doors suddenly capitulate and retract mechanically. Inside the elevator, the light flicks on, giving me the fright of my life. Momentarily blinded, I automatically let go. It’s as if we’ve tugged on a living creature and woken it, in God knows what kind of mood.
“Quick,” Harry says.
We slide the barrels into position. Thirty kilos on the left, thirty on the right. They do a good job of cushioning the blows of the sliding doors, which keep on wanting to close again. We stand there with our hands on our hips, like road workers looking at the new asphalt.
“Do you think the elevator still works?”
Harry nods, surprised by my question. “Of course, look.” He takes a couple of steps back and points at the small red light set into the top of the frame. “If the light’s gone back on here, it will be working on the other floors too. Try it, if you like. But not me. I’m not taking the elevator, Michel. I don’t know what’s waiting for us. Do you know what’s happened up there? Have you ever been there? I know I haven’t. If we use the elevator, we’ll have pretty little lights announcing our arrival. Don’t you think?”
I feel the heaviness in my exhausted shoulders. I have to think faster, I have to stay awake. There’s only one absolute certainty and that certainty is called a Flock 28 and it’s strapped to my hip. Everything else must at all times be appraised. Gauged. Sniffed out. Fortunately Harry is experienced. Together we can’t be outsmarted. I disappoint him, but he doesn’t hold it against me.
Harry steps tentatively into the elevator, saying that Arthur once told him about stairs that run down past the staff apartments to the ground floor.
I can hardly believe it. Not what he’s said about the stairs, but his unexpectedly mentioning Arthur’s name when I was thinking about him less than ten minutes ago. How strange it is after such a long time, even though it’s nothing special.
127
Harry doesn’t need to ask me for the chair. He only needs to glance up at the hatch in the ceiling of the elevator cabin. He moves over under the hatch to study it carefully, looking straight up with his head tipped so far back that his mouth hangs open.
“In and out,” he says, stepping up onto the chair. “We have to do it as fast as possible, not staying a minute longer than necessary. Upstairs is forbidden territory. But we’re both going, Michel, there’s no alternative. The alternative is very dicey. If something happened to one of us, preventing him from coming back, what would the other do then?”
I assume he means it as a rhetorical question, but either way, I try not to think about it. First things first, starting with the little things in my immediate vicinity that demand my attention.
Harry uses the paring knife to scratch away the dirt and paint. The hatch has almost certainly never been used. He keeps the base of his clenched fist close to it as if waiting for a signal. One firm blow makes the hatch pop up before falling back with a much louder clang. Above the cabin we hear the noise echo shrilly in the confined space, fading away and surging back, up and down the interminable shaft.
To climb up through the hatch we’ll need the table.
128
Harry shines the guard’s flashlight up the shaft. Its beam shows us the steel elevator cables and a black hole where they dissolve in the distance, creating an illusion of us holding long, fist-thick bars that stick up from the roof of the cabin. Harry shines the light back down at our feet to make sure we don’t stumble over anything. The shaft smells like a building site. It has never been subjected to any air but its own.
We assume the same positions as before. We’re halfway up to the ground floor, tugging on the doors at head height. I feel like I’m doing permanent damage to my back, muscles and joints. This time no mechanism comes to our aid, but the resistance does drop off noticeably after about ten centimeters. The light is dim, the polished stone floor gleams faintly. Finally there is no more resistance and the door stays open of its own accord; we gape with surprise for a moment and only then bend our knees to drop below the opening. My shirt is soaked, stretched over my skin like a chamois. Harry turns off the flashlight.
Minutes pass.
Together we peer over the edge. I feel a draft on my eyeballs. The slight gleam on the floor is the result of artificial lighting, tucked away somewhere to the right. We clamber up out of the shaft, making so much racket that I feel like they’re only holding their fire out of pity.
One behind the other, we creep along the wall, avoiding the open space like rodents. I don’t think Harry knows where we have to go. There were two possibilities. We’ve gone left. Into the darkness.
I hear Harry’s hand sliding over the stone skirting. If the entrance to the stairwell is on the right next to the elevator, we’ll only discover it after covering the entire perimeter of the ground floor on our knees and elbows, more or less the distance of our basement inspection round.
After what I imagine to be about thirty meters, we still haven’t found anything. After another five, I tap Harry on the calf. He stops immediately, lying there as if he’s dead.
I crawl up next to him and feel for his head and ear, which I move my mouth close to. I whisper that we should turn back, telling him that it looks like the door is located to the right of the elevators.
“Right,” Harry says into my ear in turn, “is toward the front of the building. The staff apartments are probably at the back. That sounds logical to me. Residents at the front, servants at the back. What do you think?”
Harry isn’t being cynical, he waits for my answer. And while I answer, I feel that I’m right. We can, after all, save ourselves an awful lot of misery by going back first to make sure. In my experience stairwells and elevator shafts are built close together.
I am now crawling in front and keeping up a good speed.
We creep past the yawning elevator doors. The indirect artificial light seems to increase a little in strength, shining along a wall. I see the bottom of an ornate frame, not much more than a shadow really, a jagged edge dissolving into darkness. As we get closer to the light, I am able to make out the veins in the light marble floor. The skirting stops. I feel a corner and, around it and set back a few meters, I see light under a door. Nothing on the sides, but at the bottom the gap is so big that I can see in past the door: the floor carries on and the reflection of another door is floating in the gleam.
I crawl into the niche. Harry follows me. Together we stand up. The handle is on Harry’s side. Slowly he pushes the door open. When he’s seen enough, he turns to me and whispers, “Toilets.”
The emergency lighting is on and nothing like the emergency lighting in the basement. It’s a series of recessed wall and ceiling lights that would be invisible when turned off. Toilets on the ground floor where nobody ever comes. On the dark washstand a pile of folded towels is waiting next to the washbasin; the wicker basket is empty. Our uniforms look good in the large, tinted mirror. Two doors with, behind each one, the same dark washstand, the washbasin, the towels and the empty wicker basket. Wooden coat hangers in a built-in cupboard. A real painting on the wall: flowers with thick daubs of paint, as thick as the flowers themselves. Under the painting, a tall, two-person sofa with old-rose upholstery, armrests and a white varnished back.
Harry stands still in a cubicle and looks into the toilet bowl for a long time with me watching his back. I am wondering what has caught his attention, what he has found there, when a powerful jet breaks the water surface. In the midst of the tumult, Harry stares straight ahead as if there’s something of interest on the wall in front of him.
130
We crawl farther to the right and find another two doors, both locked. Almost on the opposite side, more or less where the entrance is in the basement, we come upon a door with a bare corridor behind it, tiled in functional white. My elbows and knees are sore and, without agreeing anything between us, we stand up and shuffle through the corridor with our backs against the wall. Now and then Harry flicks on the flashlight. The corridor is narrow and has a low ceiling, more a tunnel really. Three corners later, behind a heavy door with a hydraulic closer, we find the stairs, no wider than an ordinary staircase in an ordinary house.
Harry sits down on the bottom step and shines the flashlight higher. It reveals little: after a narrow landing the stairs change direction. Strands of dust hang from the bottom of the next flight, swinging slowly and weightlessly like unknown sea creatures in the depths of the ocean, illuminated for the first time.
We let the images sink in until we are familiar with every detail. In Harry’s face, lit by the glow of the flashlight, I recognize my own horror at climbing the stairs and leaving the safety of the ground floor behind us. One well-chosen word, spoken in the right tone of voice, could change everything. I don’t know where to find them, but that word and tone of voice do exist. Harry’s sitting down betrayed their existence.
Maybe Harry will suddenly say the word, thirty or fifteen or five seconds from now, without suspecting my thoughts. The way he didn’t suspect I had been thinking about Arthur when he suddenly said his name. Nothing special.
Afterward Harry will stand up. Without making any fuss, we’ll simply turn back. Giving each other a comradely pat on the shoulder or symbolically shaking hands before walking side by side down the long corridor to the lobby, which we cross calmly. This time we’ll feast our eyes on it all. We’ll take the towels from the toilet, the coat hangers, the perfumed toilet paper. We’ll climb up one last time to fetch the wicker baskets and say goodbye, then pull the elevator doors back until they meet in the middle, let the hatch bang shut and slide the table and soap barrels out onto the basement floor.
131
We’ve climbed four times sixteen steps without any sign of the first floor.
We carry on cautiously, making sure not to let the soles of our shoes slide on the steps. As soon as Harry’s head reaches the level of the next landing, he stops and inspects it with the flashlight.
We keep climbing. There are neither doors nor windows on the landings. I’ve stopped counting. I am convinced that the stairs lead directly to the roof. Stairs for maintenance access. How else would they get to the machine room if the elevators broke down?
A little farther up, the stairs come out on a small floor or spacious landing, the size of the garages in the basement. A lost space without any objects. No continuation of the stairs. We can’t possibly be near the roof yet.
Harry slides the light slowly over the walls.
The door doesn’t have a knob. On closer inspection we see the prints of dirty fingers where the knob would usually be. Hesitantly I press the spot with my index finger: the click of a magnetic lock. The fiberboard door swings a few centimeters toward us. Harry and I drop onto our left knees, out of the firing line, and aim, together with the flashlight, our Flocks at the crack.
Behind the fiberboard door, in a room not much larger than a shower cubicle, an ironing board is leaning against the wall, palm trees on its bleached and tattered cover.
A blue bucket is hanging from one of the legs.
It’s so unexpected that the whole strikes me as some kind of greeting or secret message, set up here for us long ago.
132
Daylight. It is dim, the light of a cloudy afternoon that has reached here after detouring through rooms and around corners and down meters of hallway. But there is no doubt that it is natural light which, as dim as it is, demotes the flashlight to the level of a toy, a battery-operated gadget for projecting circles. Daylight comes first. The moment Harry pushes the door on the opposite side of the tiny room away from its magnet, there is daylight on our black leather shoes, on the scratchy carpet, on the plaster decorations on the hallway walls, on our hands, on our gray faces, in our ears: daylight everywhere. Its wholesome effect kicks in immediately.
133
Like the plaster monkeys on the wall, we’re squatting. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The work of an amateur with no sense of proportion. We stick close to the ground.
The blue of our uniform looks different from downstairs, more frivolous.
In a small kitchen we sit on the floor with our backs to the cupboards and the barrels of our pistols up near our noses. At first sight, there’s nobody. The stench rising from the pedal bin effortlessly overpowers the metallic smell of the Flock. A sliding door can be pulled shut to separate the kitchen from the living room. Through the legs of the table and the chairs, I see a shabby lounge suite, caramel colored. The sofa bathes in the daylight pouring in through the window, which is uncurtained and covers almost the full length of the wall.
We stay sitting there for a long time. If someone has hidden themselves away, they must think we’ve gone again by now. But we don’t hear anyone. Harry turns his head, his beard scraping and rustling over his collar. He looks me deep in the eyes, then nods.
Halfway into the living room the vast firmament is a dazzling gray. Solemnly we walk over to the window, taking slow considered steps, awed and anxious about the view the city below us will provide. On the long windowsill, close to the middle, is a round fishbowl. The evaporated water has left a filthy green coating three-quarters of the way up the glass.
134
I hear Harry speaking. He’s saying something, not whispering. His words haven’t got through to me yet. There’s too much information to process in this hallucinatory chaos. The view is overwhelming and therefore meaningless: my eyes are no longer used to panoramas. It’s the outskirts of a city, I recognize that much, but essentially see it as one big patch below me on the earth’s crust, extending to the foot of this building. I close my eyes and give myself a mental pep talk, using my most soothing voice. I compose myself and open my eyes, trying not to see everything at once, concentrating my vision as if looking through a straw. Two, three buildings. I see their walls, their shape; they’re still standing. Buildings with windows and roofs. Roofs with cupolas, chimneys, tiles, strips of tar and zinc. I expand my field of vision, unable to confine it any longer, and again my eyes skip from one spot to the next. I can’t detect any destruction, just buildings with windows and roofs. Here and there, the first green of spring emerging in the gray stone mass. I look at the horizon, where there’s nothing special to see, where the countryside begins. The gray clouds covering the city contain rain, not soot or ash or dust. I look at a window closer by, as if I’ve only just remembered the people who must have inhabited this city, with the buildings as proof. I check all of the chimneys one after the other, searching for a wisp of smoke or steam. I search for movement. The pattern of the road network. I search for moving cars, intersections. We’re up high, but not high enough to see over the roofs and into the streets. The windows again. The back of a TV. A half-drawn curtain. The corner of a wardrobe. Toadstools with white dots on the glass of the window.
135
The remnants are lying on the bottom of the bowl, a shriveled sack of pale yellow scales. The goldfish died of suffocation or starvation or both, the only visible victim of the situation outside. Its dark eye has subsided and is staring inwards, as if desperate to turn away from what it saw from the windowsill.
Was the goldfish forgotten because it was everybody’s and nobody’s? Or did the difficulties prevent the owner from returning to the apartment, leaving them with a sickly sense of impotence every time they ate or drank?
This is just the first floor, Harry tells me. I might not believe it, but it’s true. None of our wealthy residents would have bought a first-floor apartment if the windows only provided a view of the windows of a neighboring building. That’s why the first floor is much higher than usual. He says we’re in the wrong place for a good view of the city.
In the kitchen he opens the cupboards. It’s a kitchen that was rarely, if ever, used for cooking. The apartment’s real kitchen, the large one where all of the meals were prepared, can’t be far away either. This one was for talking, sitting around, eating sandwiches or warming up leftovers. Two cupboards are filled with glasses, mugs and plates. Harry finds a canister of fish food and the instructions for a coffee machine that’s nowhere in sight. He picks out two sets of cutlery from the cutlery drawer and puts them in the inside pocket of his jacket, as if it’s not food that’s been in short supply, but knives, forks and spoons. In the fridge, a tin rolls around in the bottom of the vegetable drawer.
“Drink up,” Harry says. “You can use it.”
He hands me a garish fortifying drink.
Why can I use it more than him?
“We’ll share,” I say assertively.
“Of course we’ll share,” Harry says. “Hurry up.”
I sit down on the armrest of the sofa and guzzle frenzied fizz that tingles in my nose and eyes; I don’t taste a thing. While Harry’s drinking, I notice a magazine in a wooden rack between the sofa and the window. It dates from before the exodus. On the front page a celebrity turns her bloodshot eyes away from the camera. On her arm, a man who does look into the lens, angry and desperate. They are hurriedly leaving a building. The caption under the photo: “Why won’t they let us be happy?”
“Check out those boobs,” Harry says.
I open the magazine; the paper has turned stiff. In her preface, the editor reviews the contents. Not the slightest insinuation of a political or social issue. I leaf on, diagonally scanning the blocks of text: births, marriages, illness, deaths, the normal entertainment. I study the cartoon, which goes on about the couple on the cover and their impossible happiness. They’re featured in their underwear, the woman bare-breasted. Her nipples, indented around the edges as if they’re flowers, reach out to the warmth of the spotlights. I study the crossword, the ads. I leaf back, looking at all of the faces, captions, the questions in bold face. One catches my eye. A man in his fifties with an old-fashioned tapered mustache, a singer or a soap star, posing on a motorcycle in front of a villa, is asked if things are different now, given recent events, from how they were before. As far as that’s concerned, the man replies, a celebrity like him is no different from ordinary people and equal before the law. Plus he has to set an example.
In the hall, behind another storeroom with two doors, this time with coats on hooks, we find more stairs. The height difference to the second floor is considerably less. We take the time to climb in silence, on our guard. On the fourth floor we come out on a landing that extends for a good fifty meters and leads to the continuation of the stairs. Harry says, with one foot on the new stairs, that it doesn’t make any damn sense. He asks if it makes sense to me. I get the strong impression, I say, that originally they didn’t plan for stairs. When they were forced to include them after all, this is what they came up with, squeezing them in left and right. I tell him I don’t know either. On the next floor up, the stairs go down again at the end of the landing. It’s unclear how many steps. Harry doesn’t trust it and hugs the wall, lowering his feet slowly as if the steps are made of rotten wood, high above a ravine.
137
We’ve counted properly and haven’t let the stairs’ antics get to us. Or is it just an unlikely coincidence? When we enter the apartment, separated from the stairwell by an elongated room tiled in the same white as the narrow hall on the ground floor, we’re standing almost next to the service elevator, another neutral environment in plain gray. Mounted on the wall opposite the elevator is an elegant brushed-aluminum plate in which a 2 and a 9 have been stamped; the indicator in the frame reads -1. I whisper that the stairs wind their way around the building and have brought us back to the elevators after all, but Harry isn’t listening to my explanations. He aims the flashlight at the wall between us and the residents’ and visitors’ elevators. He presses his ear against it; I wait, holding my breath.
No daylight in these halls. Night has fallen, we’ve been going almost four hours. These staff quarters clearly have a different layout from the ones on the first floor. There is no kitchen adjoining the living room. A table and chairs, no lounge suite. The chairs are arranged willy-nilly, as if the people left in a hurry. Harry and I sit on the floor and try to relax. The flashlight shines across the floor, casting long shadows behind crumbs and dirt and balls of fluff.
The square window with a view of the starless sky: suddenly I think of the city below us and creep over to the window with Harry lighting my way. He asks what I’m doing and follows me.
Big dark patches, businesses, department stores or housing blocks, demarcated by streetlights. I can’t see any cars driving in the streets close by. Lit windows are few; it could be five a.m. I search for TV sets, but don’t find any. I do spot a traffic light. Just the top of it, the red light, nothing of the intersection itself. When I fix my eyes on it, this is the only movement I detect in my entire field of vision: the red light flicking on and turning off again. And the varying intensity of the full moon behind the thin layer of cloud.
138
We come upon swing doors with small porthole windows and know that we needn’t look any farther. Where else would they use swing doors except between the service section and the luxury apartment? The sides of the doors are lined with silky-soft brushes. The flashlight smears a bluish-black gleam over the velvet that covers the backs of the doors from top to bottom, with the exception of one gold-colored circle, split neatly into two halves down the middle: Plexiglas for pushing the doors open. It’s dark behind the portholes.
Harry and I ball ourselves up against the wall. How are we going to do this? Without posing the question, we both search anxiously for an answer. It goes without saying that the resident will have a gun at his disposal. Even a bullet from an elegant lady’s pistol can be fatal. He’s lying in bed, unable to sleep from worry, and hears thumping in the apartment. It’s not unexpected. He’s always known that the war would one day reach his floor. Then someone calls him, and someone else, over and over again, so reticent and suspicious that he decides not to deviate from his decision. They claim to be guards. Michel and Harry from the basement. The names of the poor buggers whose throats they just cut, their last words their own Christian names. He’ll stay still, he’ll stay lying in his bed in the darkness, something no intruder who announces himself would ever suspect. He’ll take his time to aim properly and, even if he’s noticed, with his arms on the duvet folded back in front of him and thick pillows behind his back and shoulders, their astonishment will give him a good two-shot advantage.
Harry’s right though when he whispers that we can’t just burst in on him. If we don’t say anything and try to take him by surprise, it could turn out very badly. We have to avoid getting into a scuffle. We have to identify ourselves and hope that the resident keeps a cool head.
139
The wainscoting in the high-ceilinged hall behind the swing doors makes us feel like we have entered a country manor. There are no lights on anywhere. After so many hours of watchfulness, it’s a real effort to raise our voices. Harry takes the lead, announcing our presence, giving the name of the organization. As long as he’s shouting, I’m deaf to anything else and someone could come up behind me and shoot Harry straight through my head. I call out now and then too. We’re two frightened children trying to chase away the woodland spirits by making lots of noise. Everything in the apartment looks big and heavy. Bigger than usual, no doubt of that, but so oversized that even the enormous living room doesn’t bring them back to normal proportions. Perhaps because of the shadows. A serrated bar to hang a kettle off extends out of the brick fireplace. It’s hard to believe we’re in a city, twenty-nine floors up and not in the English countryside. We walk from a living room to a salon, through a book-filled library to another study. In the sleeping quarters we lower the volume of our calls. The bedrooms have thick carpets and romantic wallpaper, four-poster beds with heavy, turned woodwork. All six of them are empty. No signs of life anywhere. Harry whispers that he’s hiding from us. He warns the resident that we’ll have to search for him and explains that we’ve come to get him because it’s all become much too dangerous for him to stay here alone. I add that we can’t possibly leave without him. I notice that my tone of voice is lower, less commanding. We stand there motionless, giving our words time to sink in.
140
Far from the sleeping quarters, in a billiard room with four doors, we stop for a moment. The balls are arranged neatly on the table. On the way here, Harry and I called out loudly once more, insisting that the resident show himself, to no avail.
“I know he’s in the apartment,” Harry whispers confidently. He means, I’m quite capable of counting to forty, but that wasn’t even necessary, because only thirty-nine residents left the building. He suggests we lie low for a while with the flashlight off. The man’s trembling in a wardrobe somewhere. If we keep quiet long enough, he’ll get curious and come out of his hole and then we’ll find him soon enough.
I don’t ask why there aren’t any lights on anywhere. Has the resident been living without electricity? Did he hear us coming? Did he see us, our caps, our uniforms? Did he catch a glimpse of our emaciated, bearded faces as we waved the flashlight around and take us for two murderers from the back streets of the city?
We leave the billiard room and keep watch in one of the halls. For about twenty silent minutes we stand in the dark with our Flocks in our hands. Then Harry comes closer and whispers slowly, “Maybe something’s happened. To the resident.”
I hear a cow moo. She’d already started while Harry was talking. I hear the last half of an angry outburst, although the sound hardly differs from the silence. Can I hear a cow here, behind eight centimeters of glass, behind walls that are thicker than the length of Arthur’s arms? Wouldn’t the cow have to be standing right in front of the building? There it is again: agitated, a quick succession of short, powerful, identical moos. More bellow than moo. I see the head and neck stretched out, eyes bulging, breath steaming out of her warm lungs. The sound in the night has a piercing loneliness. Is it because we’re up so high? Is there a direct line from the apartment to the field the animal is standing in, without anything in between? Has the sound been sucked in through a ventilation shaft and funneled into the apartment?
I’d like to ask Harry if he’s heard it, but I don’t want to erase the bellowing with my own voice. I feel that my silence draws his attention to the sound. A cow. A living animal not far from here, that hasn’t been eaten.
141
“Harry?” More than really whispering, I mouth his name. We were making our way up the hall when I heard something behind us and stopped: a vague murmur, suddenly drowned out by the rustling of Harry’s uniform, quite far away from me, short but remarkably loud, as if he’s done something like quickly rub his arm over his torso or raise a knee, just once. I turn in that direction and mouth his name again, panting it out a little louder. I feel in the pitch darkness with one long arm. He’s no longer there. “Harry?” More than five seconds pass. As if someone is holding me underwater and I’ve used up all of the air in my lungs. I can’t stay here. I grope my way back to where I think I last heard Harry. “Harry?” I press the button on my watch three times, pointing the light in different directions, because I’m standing in a doorway and a meter farther, the pale gleam of the dial shows another hall at right angles to the one I’m in. I wait, listen, stare. I think of Harry who could be standing still and waiting somewhere close at hand. I speak to him in my thoughts, beaming out my concentration like an antenna. I shuffle around the corner, to the right, searching for doorways, rooms. “Harry?” I squat; my mouth is dry, my tongue swollen. Why doesn’t he flick the flashlight on just once? Has something happened to him? Has he discovered something? I crawl on all fours back to the spot where I lost him twenty minutes ago. I curse myself. Perhaps we’ve lost each other because I didn’t stay put. Why didn’t I stay where I was? I try to summon up the sound of his uniform again, the movement that made it rustle. Has someone overpowered him? “Harry?”
142
The dawn comes as deliverance. When the black has changed to the deepest blue and the sky is unmistakably growing lighter, Harry disappears from my thoughts for a moment. I look up from the floor at the large window as if it’s a cinema screen. It’s a spectacle I haven’t seen for a long time and after a tense night it moves me to tears: the comforting proof that at least these certainties—the earth revolving on its axis, the existence of the sun—have remained unaffected.
143
I spend the whole day hiding behind a tall armchair. I have ripped open two cushions, with embroidered hunting dogs and flying ducks, and slowly saturated the pale balls of cotton wool with my dark-yellow pee. I haven’t been able to make out any other sounds. No bellowing, no rustling garments, no man climbing out of a wardrobe. Lying down, I’ve stared out over the floorboards.
Either Harry’s dead or Harry thinks I’m dead.
And where is the last resident? Is he the one who got Harry? Is Harry’s lifeless body now lying somewhere on oak floorboards just like these, stiffening in position?
The chance of Harry walking in, saying my name and then laughing as he asks what I’m doing hiding behind a chair, that chance only existed briefly at daybreak. Still, I try to banish all other thoughts. I wait for his footsteps, the tap of his trouser hem against the smooth shoe. I wait where I am.
144
Late in the afternoon my tummy rumbles. It must be audible in the adjoining room and the two halls that lead into this one, maybe even farther. I grab my ankles and curl my body up tight, tensing my abdominal muscles to drive out the growling.
Later cooling sweat sends shivers down my spine.
Toward dusk, the confined space behind the armchair is a prison and the urge to stand up grows too strong.
My perspective changes dramatically.
I fit the interior.
Otherwise nothing else happens. The air in the room stays still. I could just as well have spent the whole day standing like I am now, with my hands on the back of the armchair. I could have sat in the chair all day. Nobody would have noticed.
145
I can only see high-rise. It undoubtedly adds to the charm of the apartments, their looking out over the other tall buildings in the center of town. Especially now, at the start of the evening, the view is irresistible. The streets remain hidden, as if intentionally. Again there are electric lights, but again there is an absence of any movement that suggests the presence of humans. In the clear sky I can’t see any dissipating vapor trails from passenger jets. Only a purplish dot, far away, that soon disappears between invisible layers of air. The sky is empty and endless. The sunset casts a spell on me. For more than fifteen minutes, I don’t look over my shoulder; until the sun has gone down, I am immortal. Maybe Harry and I were profoundly mistaken and right now parents are popping out to the supermarket to buy some meat, a carton of milk, some butter. A beautiful blond in a black dress rearranges the wine glasses on Table 18, while the first customers enter the restaurant, waiting politely in the entrance hall for her to come over. In a vending machine in the train station concourse a chocolate bar with peanuts slides toward the edge of the abyss.
I creep around in the dark. The resident can’t possibly still be hiding in a wardrobe. Harry has gone looking for him, just like me. The resident comes first. If I find the resident, I’ll probably find Harry too. We just lost each other in the dark. I should have stayed where I was, but I didn’t. Harry had his Flock in his hand, his finger on the trigger. Even taken by complete surprise, even if a piano wire had been tossed over his head and pulled tight around his throat by a burly man, he would have still got off a shot. That didn’t happen either. Since he, just like me, doesn’t know what’s going on with the resident, he’s keeping a low profile. On the other side of the manor, he’s sweeping the dust and dirt away from the edges of the rooms, just as I’m doing in this wing. One thousand square meters. I turn onto my back, carefully pull my shirtsleeves away from my bleeding elbows and make a small calculation. It seems ridiculous to me: one thousand square meters, that’s forty meters by twenty-five! The apartments are definitely larger. Whoever claimed they were a thousand square meters? I can’t remember. Was it Arthur? Was he using “a thousand” as a figure of speech to show how big they are? As a symbol of the residents’ extraordinary wealth? Their insatiable extravagance?
147
I lay the Flock on my stomach, then open and close my hand to avoid cramp. I am lying motionless on the floor, my arms alongside my body as if I’m waiting for the doctor and have already lain down on the bed. Has Harry started adding it up now as well? Does the apartment seem larger to me because I’ve never been here before and have no overview? Familiarity makes everything smaller. What’s more, I’m looking at it all in moonlight from floor level. The walls are two stories high.
On display in the middle of the room is a large design object with steel cables and several chromed tubes. A piece of fitness equipment. I can’t think of any other purpose. Two serious men look down on the device disapprovingly from their dark portraits on the wainscoting.
I mustn’t fall asleep. Despite everything, I feel as if I could fall asleep effortlessly, with a brief, blissful awareness of it happening, me disappearing into myself. I scratch my beard, stick a finger in one ear and jiggle it as quickly as I can. The pleasure spreads over my skull, opening my mouth and refreshing me. After the noise has left my head and I can hear the silence again, I press in the safety catch and strip the Flock: slide, barrel with chamber, recoil spring guide. I keep my eyes on the dark-swathed ceiling. Twice I overcome the resistance of the trigger: two clear clicks of the hammer and firing pin. For a few seconds, the parts are spread out on my stomach. Nobody notices it. Nobody seizes the opportunity. Then I click and slide everything back into place and it is as if the pistol, which I haven’t really cleaned, is brand new again and extremely reliable.
148
Perhaps I’m leaving a trail. When it gets light, my trail will be as visible as the slime of a snail that has been dragging itself around all night. Although I am certain it’s the same apartment, I don’t encounter anything that fits in with last night’s journey with Harry. The swing doors are unfindable, but the kitchen isn’t necessarily close to the swing doors; nothing here can be taken for granted. Everything looks the same, but I don’t recognize anything. I might as well be equipped with a faulty compass and surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes in the barren landscape of the far North. I wouldn’t feel any more lost than here between the tapestries, candelabras and carved chests, faint with hunger.
149
A step. I feel another one higher up. I light the way with my watch. I’m far from any windows, in the heart of the apartment, somewhere in a small room. Narrow, wooden steps like the kind that lead up to a mezzanine or an attic. It’s close to morning, maybe the other rooms are already getting lighter. I haven’t heard a thing all night. The resident isn’t on this floor. He’s either dead or alive. If he’s alive, he must have fled out of fear, upward perhaps, to a higher floor. He expected the danger to come from below, merciless, like water rising in a flood. I creep up. The staircase is short, two or three meters, that’s all. I expect an intermediate level, a workroom, studio or loft, but my hand doesn’t feel the oak floorboards I’m used to. I feel the chill of stone. I enter a room that amplifies every noise I make. It reminds me of the landings Harry and I crossed earlier. Some distance farther along a new staircase begins, made of stone like the stairs between floors. Have I found my way back into the stairwell near the swing doors? Or is there more than one set of stairs? Are the apartments not only larger than a thousand square meters, but with layouts and dimensions that vary completely from one to the next?
150
Slinking is ridiculous and pointless. Except for the white marble columns, a double row of three, the imposing hall is virtually bare: every corner is exposed. I am alone. I stand up. I stand on two feet like a man. Is this a mosque? I see a vision of gray prayer rooms hidden behind faded warehouse gates, with cables and pipes visible on the walls, with low, false ceilings. But this makes me think of Mohammedan temples on the banks of the Euphrates. Every square centimeter is covered with tiles, together representing garlands of flowers, olive branches and symmetrical vines, blue, yellow, reddish brown, green, in numbers and patterns that make my head spin. I can hardly bear it. So much profusion is overwhelming. I concentrate on the low benches against the walls: they’re continuous, they pass under the keyhole-shaped windows and trace the perimeter of the hall like overgrown skirting boards. On the very far side there is a small interior balcony. But no carpets, not even a doormat. In the middle, the floor is a kaleidoscopic compass rose, a mosaic of the most colorful kinds of stone beneath a gold-leaf-covered chandelier as big as a treetop.
There, in the center, I also see myself. I see my uniform, stained and sagging. My cheap black shoes, my ruffian’s face. I feel like a desecrator. I’m still wearing my cap on my head.
151
I sweep the aluminum plate with the dim light of my watch. Two threes. I’m on the thirty-third floor. I repeat the sentence in my head, as if putting a seal on a certificate. With my back against the wall, I slide down onto the floor.
The stairs connecting the floors to each other are meant for domestic staff only. They share a single employer, after all. The residents have purchased the service, but that doesn’t make them their bosses. That’s why the staff can disappear into trompe l’oeils like Regency period servants and slip down secret corridors on their way to another floor, climbing wooden attic stairs to get there if necessary.
I stare at the red light in the frame for so long that the −1 becomes meaningless and it takes me a while to realize that it’s suddenly gone off. I keep looking at exactly the same spot. When I blink, I see it appear again as a vague glow. The after-image is displaced by a new light. It’s the same red, at most a little brighter, and now shaped like a zero.
For a short period I am convinced that I am controlling the light with my brain, through my gaze. I think of 1, I think of 2, and, look, the numbers light up before my eyes. It’s only at 4 that I hear something, a weak, subterranean rumbling, and only at 5, a handful of seconds after the disappearance of −1, that it hits me like a bucket of ice water: the service elevator is moving.
Breathlessly I follow the numbers, trying to avert them. 20 is a turning point. The moment I see that I haven’t succeeded in stopping it at 20, I realize in the darkness preceding 21 that the elevator is headed for this floor, 33, and me.
152
I’m sitting in front of the elevator with both hands clamped around the grip of the Flock. My relaxed arms are resting on my raised knees. I’d hit the bull’s-eye at fifty meters.
I concentrate on the sliding doors, no longer looking at the red numbers.
A sucking sound as it brakes, starting high and getting lower.
The familiar signal.
After a moment’s hesitation, the doors slide swiftly open.
I see the table in a sea of light.
It is as if the elevator is presenting me with the table.
The hatch through which Harry and I climbed up onto the roof of the cabin is still open.
The door stays open longer than usual.
I start to get a nasty feeling that something is expected of me. The elevator has come to visit me of its own accord to present me with the table. It’s my turn.
Again I check the corners of the cabin. The table can’t hide anyone, therefore there is no one in the elevator. Just the table.
Then I catch sight of the control panel. Because I’m sitting on the ground, I notice a slightly larger button at the bottom, separate from the long row like the dot of an exclamation mark. There is a picture of a red telephone on it. Next to it, thin vertical stripes indicate a built-in speaker.
What would happen if I pressed that button? Would I get someone on the line: a call center, a young woman asking how she can help me?
But when I inquire about the situation outside, she skillfully avoids answering. She repeats her question, asking how she can help me, if there’s a problem with the elevator. She quotes the address. She looks at the dot in the area shaded red on the map on her wall. She has been selected for her high tolerance. They’ve taught her techniques; it’s impossible to throw her off balance. I can curse, rant and rave, the woman’s voice coming out of the speaker will sound just as cheerful and she will give away just as little. They have impressed upon her that someone can be listening in. Sometimes. She doesn’t know when. She has to placate the client; that’s her number one priority. She has to give the client the impression that help will be arriving shortly. That is the only service she is able to provide: lying. She has bunched her hair together in a ponytail on the top of her head. The ends curl in. In the toilet she dabs the corners of her eyes with a tissue, controlled and systematically, until the tears stop coming. She introduces herself as Julie, but her name is Isabelle.
I get up and walk slowly to the light-filled cabin. Just to hear Isabelle’s voice! I am willing to play the game. I won’t make her lies any more difficult and I’ll ask her if she can send someone soon to fix the elevator.
Close to the cabin I hear a double click and all at once the two doors slide toward the middle. I pull my arm back and stiffen. For a couple of seconds I have a clear view of the planks that make up the tabletop, with a lengthwise strip of unstained gray wood, a rough silhouette of a body.
The elevator stays where it is.
Has Harry sent the elevator because he’s back in the basement with the last resident safe in the storeroom? But how would he know I’m on 33? It must have been me, groping around in the dark. I must have pushed the button to call the elevator myself. In the basement the doors resumed their struggle with the barrels of liquid soap and finally won.
I make myself scarce. My position is known.
153
I open my eyes. The sunlight is as sharp as broken glass, slashing my brains. Within seconds, pain has filled my head. I have slept. I’m lying on my back on a parquet floor and feel very precisely the points where my skeleton has been resting on the wood for hours. If I want to get up I’ll have to move, but what should I try to move first?
I raise my arm uncertainly, as if I’m pushing my limits with an overly ambitious weight. The cumbersome thing waves over my chest and stops ten centimeters in front of my face. I read 11:17 on my watch. With a thud, the arm falls on my hip and rolls to the floor. Sleeping has exhausted me.
The radiator near my shoulder has thick, decorative elements. Descending from the high ceiling are several angular chalices, orange glass in black frames, finished with fringed trim; they hang down as low as the standard lamps are high. In a single, exhausting movement, I hoist myself up onto all fours. I let my head hang for a moment, until the dizziness from my low blood pressure passes. Then I move to a squat, laying the Flock aside, picking up my cap and arranging it on my head at the prescribed angle. Dark blocks of wood are set into the parquet, forming dotted lines across the breadth of the room.
I lean heavily on a low, narrow table against the back of a long sofa. I see my hand lying next to a dish, an even dark blue with a gold rim, containing brooches, rings, bracelets and pearl necklaces, as if they were candy or pieces of fruit to pop in your mouth casually in the course of the day.
154
I see the newspaper from a distance. It’s lying next to an antique crystal bowl on a gleaming cherry sideboard. It is folded neatly, but yellowed and wrinkled, as if it has been removed sopping wet from a letterbox and never read. That last bit is highly likely: the dateline is the day before the great exodus.
Like a dog snatching a piece of sausage, I grab the newspaper and throw myself on the floor. My heart is pounding, my hands trembling. I expect a headline that will explain everything in one glance, five or six words that will reveal all the things Harry and I could only guess at in the basement. On the upper left, in a typeface from the top of the case, I immediately strike gold: “Army ignores bills.” While running my eyes over the lead, “Defense launches internal investigation,” I try to reconcile this news with the events that followed it, but that proves difficult. I read the sentence in the middle of the article that has been printed in slightly larger, red letters to attract the readers’ attention. “The water in the barracks was almost cut off because of the unpaid 10,000 euro bill.” I read the words again, perplexed. Then the start of the article, which repeats everything I’ve read so far. Negligence in a few barracks, after which the ministry of defense launched an internal investigation.
Unpaid bills? Could unpaid bills have been the germ of a conflict that, for reasons unknown to me, led to the city emptying shortly afterward?
At the bottom of the page is another article about the army: the three large cities in the south of the province have called in the army to assist with garbage collection until an agreement has been reached with the unions. On page three, again: “Army helicopter hits power line.” The emergency landing turns out to have been successful, the crew unharmed: seven soldiers thank and praise the pilot.
I race through every headline in the paper. Not one sounds like something big is about to happen. But . . . if the catastrophe had emerged a few days beforehand, would the newspaper have been left unread on a sideboard?
In the culture section I discover a photo of the celebrity I saw red-eyed and with a man on her arm in the magazine on the first floor. She’s beaming happily. Her dazzling evening dress only just covers the secret of her success. The man is not in the picture. A mourning band has been superimposed on the upper left-hand corner of the photo because the woman jumped out of a window of the Hilton Hotel the day before. The awning over the entrance did a good job of breaking her fall but the solid radiator grill of the parked limousine, a Hummer, still crushed her skull. Her death is considered in detail over four pages. Some people point the finger of accusation at the popular media. Others are sure she was pushed.
155
I reread the newspaper from front to back, concentrating on every sentence. Somewhere among the events that took place two days before the exodus and were reported on its eve, there must be some indication of the spark, the flicker that seemed innocent at first but soon caused an inferno. I have the solution in my hands. But the longer I read and search, the more it seems as if the words and sentences are willfully barricading the path to an explanation. It’s as if my view of the news is being blocked by a smokescreen of banality raised by a select group of writers acting on the orders of the security services. A practice that virtually everyone knew about, but no one rebelled against. Perhaps out of fear of reprisals or social isolation. Perhaps from naked indifference. Maybe everyone knew what was going on, but no one wanted to be reminded of it. That could explain the disproportionate attention for this celebrity and the account of her suicide. A story, what’s more, that fell into the writers’ laps ready-made.
I close the paper and look across the parquet and between the furniture at the doors. Then I try to forget all the thoughts I’ve had so far. In my hands I am holding a completely ordinary newspaper, which contains facts about things that really happened, covered by an independent editorial staff because of their newsworthiness. These facts may cast a light on the events of the following day. I take a deep breath and begin reading at the top of the page on the left, about unpaid army bills.
156
The fridge looks as massive as a monolith. The corners and edges are rounded off, even the door is slightly convex. The brand is shining in small signature letters on a stripe on the door. Everything in the kitchen interior is matching and wearisome because of the excess of bright colors.
With one hand on the handle, I feel like I am breaking an unwritten law. As if it is only after opening the fridge and revealing what they eat that I will have fundamentally trespassed in the residents’ intimate sphere; me, a guard who is meant to protect the residents from such infringements.
I look at my hand, at the determined white of my knuckles, the precursor to a release of the energy building up in my shoulder.
What am I doing here?
This fridge, this kitchen, these colors: they were never meant for me.
What, after all, did the guard tell us that gave us the right to leave the basement and enter the clients’ apartments?
The organization hasn’t given us a mandate. It’s true that Harry and I are searching for the last resident to move him to safety, but no one ordered us to do so. We are still only authorized for the basement of this building.
157
I smell her perfume, the herbs and spices, thyme, rosemary, nutmeg, I smell the simmering, the sizzling beef, fresh soup vegetables chopped up on the board, onion and bay leaves, boiled marrowbones and steaming meat stock, chicken pastries in the oven, a joint of venison braising in port, spoonful by spoonful, the lid in the air while the steam is sucked up by the extractor fan, billowing up around the sides of the hood, condensed steam dripping from the lid and dancing on a glowing hotplate. She wipes her red hands on her apron, which pinches her waist like a string tied around a joint of rolled meat and covers the skirts that surround her thighs like layers of puff pastry. Her fingertips scored with dozens of nicks that always contain the taste of food.
She doesn’t tug on the handle, but opens the door with a twist of her wrist. She is shorter than me, about ten centimeters, and it’s a big fridge; she doesn’t need to bend to get a good view of its contents. If she wants something from the back of the top shelf, she has to stretch and go up on her toes, just slightly, as if giving her weight a nudge, momentarily bouncing it up into the air, just long enough for her plump hand to grab what she needs.
I’m sitting at the table with my hands on my thighs to avoid seeming pushy. I’ll let Claudia give me whatever she likes. She slides sideways along the worktop with her stomach resting on the front edge, as if she’s attached to it. This is her kitchen. At least, the kitchen she works in daily. Her kitchen would look different, more rural, chunkier, with a water pump and a big sink.
I see the way her lower legs taper down to ankle folds. There’s something glittering on the left, a gold chain, as thin as if it’s for the wrist of a newborn; resting on the top of her bare foot. Surprisingly, she is also wearing heels. They are low, wide at the top but descending almost to a point: timeless women’s shoes, bordering on seductive.
Soon she will turn around. I’ll look her in the face, which, as always, will be beautifully made up. Her eyes hardly need any color. The edges of her eyelids, her eyebrows and lashes are naturally coal-black. Bending over the table, she will lay spotless cutlery to the left and right of an absent plate.
159
In the salon, she fluffs up the cushions. She unties my laces and cautiously removes my shoes, as if suspecting pain. I’m ashamed of the stench, but Claudia is discreet, she doesn’t let it show. She lifts my legs up onto the sofa and sits down across from me, beneath a collection of handbags with solid, upright handles, ascending toward the ceiling on five columns of glass shelves. When she crosses her legs, her shoe slips off her heel and dangles from her toes. Dreamily, she looks out of the window at the clouds, humming. My gaze wanders to a black patent-leather handbag in the middle of the top row; it is shaped like a shell. Without looking at me, Claudia says it would be better if I shut my eyes for a moment.
160
We’ve secluded ourselves. We’ve locked doors to make a small home inside the enormous apartment. Claudia knows the ropes. She’s worked here from the beginning. No one except Claudia has ever operated the cooker, apart from Mrs. Olano putting on the kettle at the crack of dawn to make some tea, or Mr. Olano during a sleepless night, when his sick wife or someone or something has prevented a visit to Claudia and he’s venting his anger with food. He has a right to much more than her hands, though he’s never claimed it. Instead of Mrs. Olano’s stubble he wants to imagine pitch-black hair curling up exuberantly into her butt crack, and the beat of his pelvis sending waves up toward her waist, the tanned Mediterranean skin over her sploshing flesh; he wants to sink his teeth into it, really biting, tearing away a mouthful of this taunting abundance. It’s his right; that is his deepest conviction. What would Claudia be without him, back in that impoverished country of hers with its pigs and peasants and suffocating traditions? He leans back on the cushions beneath the handbags, appraising his cigar while the smoke leaks out of the corner of his mouth. He wants me to tell him that. He says he’s a reasonable man, that he’s never demanded too much of life, always meant well by other people. I can ask anyone I like, no one will speak badly of him. Someone who tries to please everyone must be self-centered: this insight comes to him at night when Mrs. Olano’s mouth has dropped open and she’s blowing her sour breath at the moon. He delights in the realization and, for its duration, he, Carlos Olano, comes first and wants to bite, really bite, but not bones. He could devour Claudia’s flesh, did I know that? But the long, dark passage to the staff quarters weakens his resolve. Standing at her bed, when she rolls over toward him, he only lays a warm hand on her high hip. He doesn’t stroke her, he doesn’t bite her, he doesn’t push a finger in anywhere. None of that. Once the fire has been quenched by her hands, he might run the back of a little finger over her cheek, but then he’s gone, because sooner rather than later contempt will flare up out of those smoldering ashes. He doesn’t speak and in the daytime he never touches her. He keeps an amiable distance. It’s only after her very best dishes that he sends the butler to fetch her so that he can compliment her while resting one hand on Mrs. Olano’s knee to reassure her, his beautiful, captivating wife, who grows melancholy from the desire in Claudia’s eyes and realizes that she is attractive despite her size, not least of all to her Carlos, for whom she has borne two successors, two clever sons, two sweet boys, who are moved to tears by Mahler’s Fifth, nestling their heads against her empty breasts; they will never leave her.
161
We listen and hear nothing. We’re probably the only ones on the entire floor. It has grown dark. I’ve spent more than a full day here. Claudia says that everything is locked, that we’ll definitely hear any intruders. Before sitting down, while bending her knees, she runs both hands over her bottom and the backs of her legs to smooth out her skirts. The room is moonlit: long, unrecognizable shadows hang from the handbags. Claudia tells me I have to think. First and foremost, a guard must think. Unlike most people, he can’t just go at things. She says that always thinking is a guard’s best way of protecting himself. That’s where it starts. This is, above all else, his first task. If he only half protects himself, how can he protect a client? A guard who’s let himself be eliminated is no guard, he’s just a dead body, incapable of doing anything more than making his murderer stumble. He’s worthless. Her upper body sags toward the armrest; pensively she rests her chin on her hand. She asks if I wouldn’t mind washing just this once, the room reeks of my stench. Mrs. Olano would show me the door, she loathes things that smell. No shortage of bathrooms. Even if the water’s cut off, there will still be some left in the pipes, enough to run at least one bath.
162
She walks ahead of me, it’s not far; it’s already morning. A sarcophagus, that’s what the block of granite most recalls. It’s set into a deck of tropical hardwood in the middle of a room. A tub has been carved from the block, as rectangular as the stone itself. No taps anywhere. After Claudia presses the matte silver button, the water wells up quickly, then abruptly falls still, except for some quiet murmuring. She closes the glass door, which has no lock; the glass is only transparent at the top and bottom. She tells me I have to take off my uniform and removes my cap. My Flock moves from one hand to the other, back and forth, until I’m standing on the deck undressed. My stench is more pungent. Claudia looks me over from head to toe. After a while of not saying or doing anything, she touches my abdomen. She comes closer and joins me in looking down at her hand on my white belly, which is almost completely motionless. I feel her other hand on my backside. She whispers that it’s a test. She means Harry. He wants to see how far I’ll go. Whether I’ll freeze up with fear or be resolute and carry on. If I can find the resident by myself and bring him back to the basement. She says that Harry took off deliberately. As a test.
163
My clothes are lying in a heap at my feet. I see the dirt between my toes and under my long nails. I have to pick up my clothes. My jacket needs hanging up, my pants need folding. Claudia soothes me. She’ll do it in a minute. Now I just have to lie back in the bath. It will refresh me. I’ll feel reborn, a new man. She’s fetched clothes out of Mr. Olano’s wardrobe, we’re the same size. Spotless clothes made of the finest fabrics. Smelling of dried flowers, they lie here next to a pile of towels waiting for me. But slowly my aversion to submerging myself in the dark water in the cold room grows insurmountable. Claudia says I have to relax. Look at the way I’m squeezing my pistol. Look at my eyes, there, in the mirror. Her hand descends over the curve of my buttocks, slipping between my legs, carefully enclosing what it meets on its way.
164
She says Harry didn’t come back. Normally he would have returned to where we lost each other, just as I returned. He would have waited there for a sign of life. But he didn’t. He didn’t send any signals either, not with his watch and not with the flashlight, even though he couldn’t have been very far away. Claudia is sitting on the edge of the bath, leaning straight-armed on the granite, her heavy breasts raised miraculously by her high shoulders. She is, for a woman of her size, small and tight. She keeps looking down. She whispers that she wants to see it. On her tummy. When she sees it, she’ll come too.
165
The bath drains without a sound. To me, it seems as if the mass of water is a solid object slowly sliding into the base of the sarcophagus. Maybe the pipes contain enough water for another bath; it doesn’t matter. I pull my uniform back on. My stinking doesn’t matter, it is my own stench. I don’t want to be reborn. My name is Michel, I’m a guard. Mr. Olano’s clothes don’t suit me. Claudia does up my tie, she speaks hesitantly. She says that of course Harry doesn’t want to go to the elite with someone he can’t count on, someone who can’t take care of himself. A partner he has to constantly watch over. You can’t do that in the elite. He wants to be sure of things, which is understandable. Because the elite does its guarding much closer to the client. There is no room for mistakes or losing time or inattentiveness. A single incident can seriously compromise people’s trust in the organization. And, as I know, everything depends on that trust. Without that trust, the organization has no authority, no power. Everything that has been built up by thousands of dedicated guards, over the whole world, could be undone by a single blunder. Claudia asks me if I understand. She brushes off the shoulders of my jacket, takes a step back and looks at me.
I don’t really believe that, do I? She repeats her question. She’s lying stretched out on the sofa under the handbags, her right leg raised indolently, she’s touching herself. Her breasts have sunk into her armpits; nipples as dark as chocolate, as big as the palm of a hand. She is only wearing her shoes. Sometimes she gives little taps. One hand encloses, the other taps. Do I hear her? The twenty-ninth floor, she doesn’t think so. No, she doesn’t believe a word of it. Harry deliberately gave the wrong floor so that he could shake me off in the confusion and leave me in uncertainty. He thought it out far in advance, even before the decision to move the resident to the basement. He knows full well which floor the resident lives on. He had me barking up the wrong tree. He wants to know if I listened to him properly, if I learned anything in those hundreds and hundreds of days, if I’m primed, ready when necessary, and that’s usually when it’s completely unexpected. Claudia squints up at my member just above her forehead. She presses the top of her head back in the cushions, raises her chin in the air and opens her mouth a little. The deep folds in her neck open up as smooth white lines. Little by little the taps turn to blows.
167
I ask her to stay in the kitchen. She’s distracting me. I’d rather not hear her. She doesn’t even need to raise her voice: she talks as if I’m sitting at the table with her in the kitchen and that’s enough. I roll my forehead over the cold window like a stamp and look down on the fossilized city. She tells me I have every reason to be disillusioned. After all, what did I do to deserve this? Haven’t I always done as he asked? Haven’t I always shown my loyalty? How exactly does Harry expect me to fall short? Not once, Claudia says, has there been a serious incident. He and I were always one step ahead of trouble. What’s more, I’ve spent hours and hours on guard duty alone, while Harry was asleep, when he, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t there and the building was an undiminished forty luxury stories high with defenseless rich people asleep on every one. She says he could have foreseen me asking myself these questions. He should have foreseen that I would look beyond first impressions and, sooner or later, guess his motives. Doesn’t he realize that this maneuver undermines everything we’ve achieved together? A test! What’s he scared of?
168
I’m lying on the floor, rolled up in a ball, protecting myself. I have been reduced to eyes, nose and ears. I have become my face, a small animal living in the center of a dark muggy cave. Through a crack I see shiny leather shoes pointing in my direction. I move my head, my eyes rise up Mr. Olano’s evening dress and skip over his bow tie to his face, spotlighted by the bright sun. The gleam on his rigorously parted black hair. He blinks as he tries to look into the cave. He pulls his left and right cuffs out from under the sleeves of his dinner jacket and steps toward me, kneeling, moving his mouth to the crack, breathing. I smell peat, whisky, single-malt. Quietly he says that the competition is murderous. He says that positions hardly ever come up. Who wouldn’t want to guard a roomy villa in body armor with modern firearms? Patrolling magnificent gardens? Estates that are guarded so well and in such numbers that the chance of an attack is zero. A job for life. The twenty-ninth floor? No, he says. The last resident doesn’t live on 29 and Harry knew that all along. No, he wasn’t mistaken. Harry will escort the resident to the basement and he’ll do it alone. His achievement, his promotion.
169
Harry’s dead. He’s in a state of decomposition. It’s as if I can’t find anywhere in this immense building to put him down. I keep searching with his body slung over my shoulder; the reek of rotten potatoes. I try the stairs to a higher floor: head down, pulling his feet up and angling him across the steps, arms dramatically spread-eagled. A fatal fall. I leave him where he is for a moment. Yes, he’s good there. When I come back, I don’t like the look of those spread arms. I dislocate his shoulder and hide one arm under his torso. His shirt is bloodstained. He was dead before he hit the ground, he didn’t feel any pain. I break his neck too, so that he’s looking almost backward. I take off a shoe and lay his cap a few meters away, blue satin up. I take him in from different perspectives. He doesn’t look bad, but the location is slightly contrived. Maybe I should keep searching.
170
I can’t worry about Harry anymore. I have to keep going. Until he shows up, I have to act like he doesn’t exist. Claudia begs me to stay, hanging off my arm as I try to reach one of the locked doors. I drag her over the parquet. I feel compelled to intervene but even after a firm slap in the face—once the moment’s astonishment has passed—she persists in holding on tightly to my trouser leg with both hands. I kick her. First lightly, as an announcement of intent, then harder, with the toe. I tell her I’ll kick her full in the face, but that doesn’t scare her. Suddenly I swing my leg away from her, as if kicking for goal; I hear her fingernails breaking.
I slam the door behind me, turning the key in the lock.
After a few seconds in the hall, I am struck by something familiar. At first I don’t know what it is. Claudia leans against the other side of the door. She says it’s walnut, a hint of fresh walnut, just fallen from the tree, with a hard green hull. She says he’s looking for me. He fell behind. He had trouble finding all of the stairs and has only just reached this floor. She says he wants to play it safe, he doesn’t want to squander the opportunity. He’s planned it all. We lost each other and then a terrible accident happened. In the confusion I, Michel, died, fatally wounded by friendly fire. Harry is inconsolable, but he keeps his back straight, his chin up. You can’t turn back the clock. This is what his trusty partner would have wanted: him dedicating himself completely to his new task.
171
Claudia and Mr. Olano don’t know Harry.
172
At the end of the hall I lie flat on my stomach. Am I imagining the smell I know so well? Am I imagining the smell because I hope it’s a way to track down Harry without his noticing? And if I really can smell it, am I tracking him or is he lying in wait for me?
173
I creep along on my elbows, the scabs break open, the familiar pain flares in my bones. The day is coming to an end, twilight has laid claim to the halls and rooms. I combat my thirst with memories of drinking the bathwater, scooping it up out of the sarcophagus with my hands before it disappeared completely down the drain. I no longer think about how hungry I am. Hunger has become a part of me. Just as I have two arms, two legs and one head, I am hungry. I crawl through a portal and enter an atrium. White Roman busts in niches around me, radiating light. A draft drifts over the smooth floor and as I, breathing half through my mouth, pick up the smell I would recognize from thousands, I see a leg moving beside the central ornament, a foot, a black shoe slipping out of sight.
I don’t even flinch, but still feel everything within me move. His name is on my lips, I’m about to softly blow life into it.
I manage to swallow it just in time.
174
Sometimes I hear Harry. While creeping along, he sometimes slides his shoes over the ground. It’s not so much the sliding I hear, as the slight drag when the sole catches on a groove or a join in the floor.
He grew up on a farm in the north of the province with two brothers, Jim and Bob, guards like Harry. A pioneer family. With a war veteran dad to boot. I wrack my brains, but can’t remember anything else. After all that time in the basement, this is what I actually know about Harry. After all that time washing his underwear with my bare hands.
176
Why bother reacting? What kind of answer should he have given to the announcement that it was, for instance, Wednesday? He could hardly object. I was the one who studied the calendar. Every morning he relied on my calculation. Maybe he listened, maybe he didn’t. Maybe it didn’t make any difference to him whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. And he was right; it didn’t make any difference. But maybe, for a few minutes after my announcement, he did let the day of the week sink in. It’s even possible that he kept a record of the days too. That his silence was a sign of assent. And that he would have corrected me, immediately, if I had made a mistake.
177
“You and me.” He never said anything else, not once. He always said, “You and me.” He always dreamt about the elite for both of us. Us, Harry and me, sitting in a garden a hundred times the size of the basement, out of harm’s way in the countryside, enjoying a blue sky and eating juicy fruit. But nudging up the flush button in the toilet, the simplest of gestures, was too much for him, remembering to do that was beyond him, despite my repeated requests. Even though it was audible everywhere, enough to drive you crazy, Harry stayed deaf to the whistling in the pipes. It was too much trouble for him, even for his Michel, with whom he, in the near future, would be promoted and by whose side he would spend many more years as a guard. Harry with his gruff, handsome, square face, always one step ahead, ordering me time and time again to think, to just think, mostly when what I thought was different from what he thought. Harry, who was tempted to waste ammunition on a fly.
178
How can he possibly not smell me? I’ve been following him for two hours now. I don’t stink any less than him.
Does the pungency of walnut keep all other smells at bay?
I find it hard to believe he hasn’t noticed anything. Sometimes I come very close to him, but not once does Harry stop for more than a few seconds to smell or listen.
Is he leading me somewhere?
Is he laughing to himself as his Flock comes down on the ground with yet another click?
179
It happens in a room filled with moonlight. In one continuous movement he goes from creeping to raising his pelvis, kneeling on his left knee, bringing his other leg forward under his body, putting his foot flat on the ground and pushing himself up with his hands on his thigh. I expect him to speak to me and half raise my body, as if I’m ashamed at having followed him in silence, my partner, him and me at the same post together for so long. I kneel behind him and off to one side in the doorway of the study Harry is ignoring: he looks out of the window at the city deep below us. I see the moon shining through his beard, casting a glow around his head, and him staying motionless as if he’s not really looking, not really seeing anything, just staring into the night in a dream. His Flock hangs in his hand beside his upper leg, index finger curled around the trigger. Now that we’re no longer hugging the ground, the distance between us is ridiculous, just four or five steps. I see him blink. Once. A man who is calm and has himself under control, the master of the situation, certain of what will come next. I look a fool here on my knees. Is that why he keeps looking out, to give me time to stand up? Is he allowing me time to compose myself after this shameless pursuit over several long hours, letting me assume a pose worthy of a guard? Or is he giving me time to think about how he has got me into this position: on my knees high in the building, trapped? Is he glowing on the inside, glorying in his advantage? Is he telling me through his silence, by making a show of not turning around: Look at yourself. Here I am, Harry, in the uniform that’s made for me, cap perched on my head the way it’s supposed to be, headed for the elite, where I belong, and there you are, Michel, been to university and all, down on your knees like a mangy, desperate beggar. I should finish you off like this, without turning around.
A flick of his eyelashes ripples the hush, after which I feel like I detect a different expression around his eye, as if he’s on the point of breaking into a regretful smile or shaking his head disbelievingly. Is he thinking back on the past few days? Is he thinking back on them as if none of it happened to him, but to a different Harry, a Harry he doesn’t know as well as he’d always thought? Is he surprised by that Harry? Is he thinking, how could I have been so completely wrong about someone? Or is Harry surprised at having stood on his feet for two full seconds without firing? Why wait any longer? Is there a word? Is there a word in the air in this study, ready to be spoken in the one correct tone, just a moment from now, a word that will defuse the situation, making space for a safe continuation, a second word that will introduce a third, a sentence that will end in a laugh? It must exist, if we both think hard enough. But maybe Harry’s not thinking about anything in particular. Maybe he’s looking out of the window and thinking I’m dead, and letting his thoughts wander wistfully through the past and the basement, set off by the moonlight, turning over distant memories and thinking: Back onto the ground in a minute, creeping along in search of the last resident, wherever he might live. But not just yet, not now. Harry doesn’t move, it’s like he’s not there. In my position he wouldn’t have a single doubt. How long did it take him to see through the guard? Could he have unmasked him any faster? All he needed was a porcelain cat, that one detail was enough. A porcelain cat! And I, Michel, actually saw the figurine before me, a white pussycat sitting on the shelf in his colleague’s box. I saw the guard’s empty shelf and his colleague’s porcelain figurines, and Harry, he thought about it and smelt a rat. What would Harry make of it if I just disappeared, without so much as a signal, and didn’t return to the spot where we lost sight of each other? Would I be allowed to flout an agreement? In the middle of an unauthorized operation? What would Harry do if I then allowed myself to be followed for hours and suddenly, without deigning to look at him, got up to stand there, unmoving, for three full seconds?
Harry doesn’t move because he’s waiting. He’s waiting for me in the full light of the moon. He doesn’t turn, knowing that the most innocent of movements will evoke other movements that will set off his instincts, instincts he has no control over, causing a chain reaction with an uncertain outcome. He’s giving me time to think, briefly. He wants me to make the right decision, just as he would. I mustn’t hesitate any longer. I must do what he has shown and taught me. I mustn’t disappoint him. I want him to be proud of me. The old Harry. He’s waiting for me. He’s waiting out of love.
The study, which grew completely dark in the course of the night, regains its shape in the first timid daylight, its color too. I’m sitting under the window holding Harry’s hand on my thigh. He’s looking in the other direction. He’s listened to me, although I’ve told him little. I explained to him that he was wrong, that Mr. Toussaint’s car is white too. A big white car. And that Mr. Colet has nothing to do with the Olanos. I said, “Just believe me.” And, “I heard it from Claudia. She’s the one who baked the frangipane.” At the word “frangipane” my mouth started to water. I repeated it a few times and drank my saliva. After a few times it stopped. Then I thought about the canister of fish food we found in a kitchen on the first floor, five or so meters from the goldfish. Just lying there in the kitchen cupboard. Printed cardboard with a shaker lid. I wondered what fish food could possibly be made of to make it inedible for humans. I considered the question seriously, but couldn’t come up with anything and so decided, with a sense of victory, that the ingredients must all have organic origins. Nice and salty, to keep it from going off. I flicked the lid off with my fingernail and tipped the entire contents into my mouth, chewing on the dry flakes. Later, in the absolute silence, the sole of my foot started itching and I had to take my shoe off to scratch it. When I moved and let go of his hand, Harry seemed to softly squeeze my leg.
181
In my memory it was different: every time it seemed as if the Flock 28 was trying to take off, with the force of the recoil and the resistance of my arm making the pistol kick up. This felt more like a neurological short circuit, an electric charge suddenly cramping my whole arm, all the way up to my shoulder. It didn’t sound like a shot. It was a dry, penetrating thump. I can still hear it, or better, feel it: an indentation on the eardrum like a wound on the roof of your mouth you can’t stop running your tongue over. On exiting his head, the bullet tore away a piece of his cheekbone. In the daylight I see that the injury is clean, a hole I could stick my little finger into with white, broken bone around the edges. Below that hole, untouched skin and the start of his beard. Above it, his lifeless eye, an encapsulated eyeball. In the window the deformed point of the bullet, which has dug into the thick glass like a worm, catches the sun.
Not so far away, on the roof of another tall building, I notice two white dots. They catch my eye because the white stands out against the dark background in a part of the view that is still shaded and as cold as night and does not include any other distinct white. After concentrating on them for a while, I make out two deckchairs in a place that is clearly not intended for sunbathing. They are arranged neatly parallel to each other.
182
It takes more than three hours for the spring sun to reach the deckchairs.
I push in the Flock 28’s safety catch. Slide, recoil spring guide. Barrel with chamber, firing pin, sear. I mumble the names of the parts, as calming as a prayer. For lack of a brass rod, I try to clean the pistol by compressing air in my mouth and blasting it out in a well-directed jet.
I remove the cartridge clip from Harry’s pistol.
After approximately four hours the shadow slides back over the white dots. I don’t know how warm it was outside on the roof.
Perhaps it was still too cold.
183
I didn’t find the last resident.
I put Harry’s Flock in his hip holster, then closed it with the press stud. I laid his cap on his chest and put his hands together on his stomach. I cleaned his shoes with the sleeve of my uniform jacket. I took the flashlight from his trouser pocket. I closed his eyes and left him behind in the study; I didn’t say a word. One instant I saw Harry, the next I saw something else and would never see Harry again. Like a piece of wreckage floating in the sea, I drifted through the building. Time swallowed me and spat me out, then picked me up again. I heard myself laugh, so loudly I thought it was funny. I went in search of a window that opened, convinced I was about to suffocate because the air had been used up. All the furniture I could lift was too light to break the glass. I must have slept. I remember looking at my watch and not understanding what I saw, dredging my memory as if searching for the name of an old acquaintance. In a bedroom, over the head of the bed, beneath a gilded frame, engraved on a minuscule copperplate: “Paul Cézanne. Nature morte. Les pommes.” I ran my finger over the apples, tracing their outline, imagining Cézanne’s concentration. The banality of art above a bed. The sheets no longer smelt of anything, neither did the pillows. One afternoon my mind was so clear I saw everything at once. The feeling that all objects were converging, glittering, on my retina. I didn’t need to focus, one meter away or ten, the sharpness and brightness of the world was overwhelming; I was its focal point. I stuffed a dark-green leaf from a shriveled pot plant in my mouth, chewed on it briefly then quickly swallowed. I repeated my name in the dark. It appeared before my eyes, dangling there like a carrot on a string.
I didn’t find the last resident.
The last resident found me.
184
I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is astonishing how much a hand on a shoulder can say. This one is as self-assured as the guard’s bearlike paw, but lacks—despite the complete, breath-taking surprise—all semblance of hostility. It is as if the hand, through its purposeful touch, is conveying its apologies for the intrusion circumstances have compelled it to make. It pushes me down on the spot, not wrenching the joint but forcing me to think for a second without moving, so that I judge the gesture correctly and relax again immediately, at the very start of this imposed reflection, because I am not being overpowered at all—I mustn’t think that—on the contrary, I am being invited to turn around calmly, without fear or aggression, to face someone who has emphasized their lack of malice.
Even before I’ve finished turning my head, I encounter the wave of air the resident has set off by moving in my direction and which now, with a delay, washes over me. The air is tinged with his cologne, a multi-layered scent, which is elegant and discreet, but as strong as an opiate: after a single breath it has reached my toes, intoxicating me, forcing me to surrender. Ginger first, followed closely by citrus, with pepper and, finally, wood adding an unfathomable depth.
I look into grayish-blue eyes without any particular expression. They are framed by heavy, angular glasses. Judging by the modern lines of the interior on the edges of my field of vision, the glasses are deliberately old-fashioned, maybe even genuinely old, vintage, dating all the way back to the fifties or sixties of the previous century. That impression is strengthened by his gleaming bald head and pitch-black, tight-fitting turtleneck sweater.
“I’m Michel.”
The words tumble out of my mouth, bouncing like marbles on the concrete floor, and it’s only when it’s completely quiet again that the resident lays his hand on my shoulder for the second time. What this hand is saying, I don’t know. I have no idea. I notice that the resident is slim but nowhere near skinny. His face is sharp, without protruding cheekbones or sunken cheeks. He hasn’t been going hungry.
He looks remarkably healthy.
“Are you alright, Michel?”
He lowers his head a little to look deep into my eyes. He’s about ten years older than me. Concern, that is what the hand on my shoulder is now conveying, clearly. He is concerned. He is taking pity on me.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
If I let myself go for a moment I would, finally, burst into tears. I would be inconsolable and unable to speak. Nothing would help. He would hug me and not know what to do. I would embarrass him as no one has embarrassed him before.
“Would you like a glass of water? Are you thirsty?” Without waiting for an answer he turns and disappears around the corner. “Come in,” I hear him say.
He is inviting me to enter his apartment. But I am already inside. I am standing in a kind of lobby, which I suspect also contains the elevator doors, a bit farther along. At the narrower hallway through to his apartment, there is an invisible line; beyond that line are his living quarters. It’s a line I won’t cross. I know my place. I’m on duty. Without my duties I would never have met the last resident. I pull the knot of my tie tighter and pat my shoulders, arms and chest. I straighten my jacket. Not wanting to be rude, I shuffle up a few steps until I’m at the start of the hallway.
A large bright space extends before me, enclosed on all sides by glass walls: blue sky and white clouds. The full-color print to the basement’s negative. It seems to me as if this space no longer belongs to the apartment building, but is a part of nature. The ceiling is tightly strung sailcloth to protect against the rain and sun, although the bare interior seems designed to easily withstand the elements. The kitchen section in the far corner is gleaming stainless steel and looks more like a laboratory. There, in that same corner, I see green plants swaying on a large terrace. I see a crop and a long row of sticks, and on the ground I see plants coming up.
He is growing his own food!
Unlike Harry and me, he hasn’t been living off supplies.
He brings me a glass of water which is undoubtedly purified rainwater. It tastes better than the best wine I have ever drunk. I feel it flowing deep into my belly. Glancing at the embroidered insignia on my chest, he asks, “Are you still here?”
I nod, foolishly. “We came to make sure you were alright.”
“I thought everyone left long ago.”
I would like to check the time on my watch. I know that later I will want to recall this moment as precisely as possible. I look into the last resident’s grayish-blue eyes. I smell his cologne. He talks to me, he exists.
“Harry and I stayed. In the basement.”
“You must be the last ones then. As far as I know, everyone else is gone.”
The idea that we should take this man downstairs to lock him up in the storeroom and guard him is too insane for words, a delusion of the highest order.
“Harry kept count,” I say. “He was certain that thirty-nine residents had left. He knew you were still here. That’s why we were looking for you.”
“Well, that wasn’t necessary,” the resident smiles. “I never go anywhere. I’ve been here the whole time.” He gestures at his home. In that instant, as if the two things are related, there is the sound of someone flicking a wine glass with a fingernail, once only. On a long white sideboard, three stylized monitors flick on. Graphs appear: a mountain range, a young mountain range with sharp peaks and deep valleys. Above the mountains, outside behind the glass, a cloud hangs in the sky. This is the highest point of the city. He lives up above everyone and everything, as if in a watchtower.
“Your colleague, Harry, is he coming too? I can offer you some soup. Would you like some soup?” the resident asks with half an eye on the screens. “Pea soup. I made it yesterday so it should be at its best.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to delay you.”
“The computer can wait. Fifteen minutes here or there won’t matter.”
Pea soup. The words don’t set off any reaction in my mouth. I think I no longer know what pea soup tastes like.
Another ting on the wine glass. A window opens above one of the graphs. On the other screens the mountain ranges make way for scatter plots and three-dimensional histograms. They are moving.
“Excuse me,” the resident says, turning on his heel.
I stay standing there uncomfortably at the doorway, taking cover under my cap, in my uniform, feeling a warm gratitude to my uniform, thankful for the pretext of official validity it lends my visit.
“There were days,” the resident says, “I forgot I even had a computer. I’m not exaggerating.” He peers tensely at the screens, pulls a hand out of his trouser pocket and rubs the curve of his skull as if applying a lotion. “Long ago, Michel. Long ago.” Then he pulls a chair on wheels over and sits down.
“I won’t disturb you any longer,” I say. “I now know that everything’s fine. Thank you for the glass of water.” I raise the glass, but he doesn’t turn around. While I ponder what to do with it, I see him move a hand to the middle monitor, a relaxed, open hand, and tap something with the tip of his slightly bent index finger. Immediately there are beeps, one after the other in quick succession, like falling dominoes, a sweet cheerful digital cascade, which stops abruptly when the screen turns black. A brilliant pinprick of light is imprisoned in the monitor: it flaps long, colorful tentacles to float and sway elegantly through the black, like a ghost delighting in its intangibility.
The resident turns his attention to the right-hand screen.
I put the glass down on the floor.
“Wait,” I hear as I’m disappearing into the lobby. His heels click on the concrete and for the third time he lays his hand on my shoulder. This time the hand asks for understanding, but that’s not necessary.
“At least take my elevator then,” the resident says. “It will get you back down in a good forty seconds.”
He leads me to the door.
“If anything comes up, let me know. Okay?”
I step into the cabin and the resident reaches past my chest to the buttons. “You too, sir,” I say dutifully in his pointy ear.
My reply amuses him. “I’ll do that, Michel.”
The last I see of the resident is a gold eye tooth that looks out of place in his mouth and almost turns his broad smile into a sneer.
185
The walls and ceiling are white, padded leather, all sound is absent. There is a very fleeting awareness of motion, the acceleration is probably staged to spare the residents the sensation, however brief, of falling into nothingness. I neither hear nor feel a thing. The panel has two buttons, 0 and −1, and a dark window no larger than a postage stamp. There is no indication of the passing floors. I could just as easily be hanging motionless in the shaft. Nonetheless I am heading for the basement at full speed. After having spent a long time high up in the building, it’s as if I’m traveling to the center of the earth. The basement. The thought of seeing the familiar basement again in just a few seconds! Big warm tears roll into my beard. An enormous sense of relief makes me as light as a feather, floating in the falling cabin. I hear Harry’s voice. I feel his mustache against my ear. I feel the strength in the arm he’s wrapped around my shoulder. He whispers that I’ll be back soon. Do I understand what he’s saying? Soon I’ll finally be back where I belong. He asks what on earth I’d accomplish by joining the elite. What would I do in a fenced garden where the guards bump into each other and don’t even know each other’s names? What? He wants me to tell him that. What would that teach me? He says my challenge is here in the basement, in the emptiness, more than a thousand square meters of it. How big had I wanted my challenge to be? Maybe I was born to be a guard. It’s a possibility I can’t exclude. Yes, this is my last chance, Harry says, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t ended up in the right place after all. Some people find their place quickly, others at the very end. Mine is here at the entrance to this building and I mustn’t forget it. I have 29 cartridges, Winchester, 9mm, and a Flock 28 in excellent condition. It was wrong of us to turn away from the entrance, Harry says, a gross error, but no matter what’s happened in the city and the basement in the meantime, my precision and 29 cartridges will get me to the storeroom. Waiting for me there are 2,250 cartridges, corned beef and drinking water. That’s all I need. I have to prepare myself for a big adventure; what’s gone before will pale by comparison. Every second, a test. The door is about to slide open. Like the acceleration, the deceleration will be gradual. I won’t feel it in my bowels. I have to be ready because forty seconds don’t last much longer than this. Harry hugs me, squeezing the air out of my lungs. After a kiss on my forehead, he arranges my cap at the prescribed angle. I’ve been away, he says solemnly. But now I’m back again.