The Guard (3 page)

He scoops up another spoonful. Mine again.

Almost as a ritual, united in a sacred silence, we eat it all. A spoonful for Harry, a spoonful for me. The enormous basement disappears in its own emptiness. We have no trouble fending off the question of how the driver got his hands on jam. The very last mouthfuls, scraped together, contain dust and dirt from the concrete floor, but the grit doesn't spoil it at all. It goes down easily with the sugary jelly and is completely tasteless.

12

As if sitting around a campfire, we slump on our backsides and stare at the spot on the concrete, which now really has become a spot. Daydreaming. Moved to reverie by the pleasant glow of the sugar. Feeling mild about our situation, although it hasn't changed. I am so sated that I keep my thoughts about the possibility of there being more jam in the cardboard box in Mrs. Privalova's garage to myself for a good five minutes before confiding in Harry.

“You think so?”

We scramble to our feet.

Wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to eat bread with jam every day for a couple of weeks? After what's just happened it doesn't even seem like an insane longing.

Harry folds back the lid of the box and starts pulling things out. I see the familiar tins of corned beef appear in the half-light, boxes of chicken stock cubes, flour, yeast. It's still possible. As long as he's bending over the box, it's still possible. It will happen without any transition. Harry will straighten his back while casually handing me a jar and saying, “Here. Cherry.”

Harry shakes his head.

He runs his hand around the four corners one last time. “No razor blades again either,” he says.

Rubbing and picking at our beards, which we trim fortnightly with a paring knife, we finally stroll back to the bottled water. We don't say it out loud. If we say it out loud the chance of a second miracle will disappear in a flash. Or do we keep silent because we don't want to admit to each other that we still have hope, completely irrational hope?

We circle the bottled water, acting as if it's about the water, as if we're inspecting the new provisions. In full harmony with this pretense, we don't let our disappointment show.

Suddenly Harry's face lights up. He asks whether I noticed. I'm staggered. Have I missed something? I'm about to inspect the water again, when Harry says, “The guard didn't come.”

13

I nudge the float in the cistern. The water level rises and a few seconds later the whistling stops. I click the cover back on and take a piss.

Hardly an hour after eating straight strawberry jam, my urine smells like liqueur. In the water, which has settled again, I detect a slow movement as if there really is a viscous fluid floating in it. I stand there breathing deeply for a moment, telling myself that I am drawing the volatile sugars into my lungs and introducing them into my bloodstream a second time.

The water gushes into the toilet bowl. Like always, I nudge the button back up with my finger. It's no great inconvenience, you can do it in a single movement. It stops the float from getting stuck, which causes the water to keep running and makes the whistling sound.

“It's very easy,” I tell Harry after returning to the door to our room. He's slouched on the chair, legs relaxed and spread slightly. There is an unavoidable sense that, after this nerve-wracking day, nothing else can befall us.

I explain it to him, the way the button springs back when the toilet starts to flush. But not entirely, probably because of the friction of the float against the inside wall of the cylinder. “A slight upward push of your finger,” I conclude, “easily helps the button to override that friction.”

Harry struggles to put astonishment and approval in his expression. He taps his forehead a couple of times. “I'll make sure of it, Michel.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

14

A long column of gleaming black limousines passes the building; I start counting as a reflex. They're driving cautiously, not in any hurry. A funeral procession. Or is it a parade? The weather is exceptionally radiant. Standing as I am at the basement entrance, below street level and looking up through the open gate at the street, I can only see the car windows. The pure, fresh air tingles in my lungs. I'm too greedy and succumb to a fit of coughing. I don't hear myself coughing; I experience the contractions in my gut and the rasping in my throat, the pressure in my skull. I don't see any other buildings or people on the street. I don't hear any other cars. I don't hear anything at all. If I concentrate hard, I perceive the silence that has been twisted into my ears like cotton wool.

Standing on the edge of outside and inside, I feel the prohibition, the commanding presence of the mental borderline. In the same instant I realize that I am able to interpret my dream even
while dreaming it, which explains my lack of fear. It seems I can even intervene in my dream at will. For instance, long before the end of the procession I know that there are thirty-nine cars, forty minus one. Whether I am the cause of this or am simply anticipating the total because I understand my dream, it doesn't really matter. Fully conscious now of the nature of the event, I see no good reason for remaining in the gateway.

The moment I take a step, extending a foot beyond the limits of the building, I feel a heaviness in my toes, my foot, my leg. As if I am entering another atmosphere with different air pressure, different natural laws and a different specific gravity for the human body. But that doesn't cut off any of my possibilities because everything in this atmosphere is subject to the same forces. We are on an equal footing.

I adjust to the conditions quickly. If I take my time, I can even run. The cars are proceeding as slowly as ever, more slowly in fact, because I am now nearing the rear bumper of the last vehicle. The weather really is radiant and I can see virtually nothing through the side window. There is no doubt about it; someone is sitting on the back seat. I know from my reflection that I am screaming. I think I am screaming with joy.

15

We eat around midday, when virtually all guards take their dinner break, but also because, with corned beef on hand, we find it impossible to wait until evening.

The air of the storage room is tinged by the new provisions. Despite the strong metallic smell that coats the inside of my mouth and reminds me of when I was a boy and accepted a dare to put my tongue on the two poles of a battery, the association with salted meat is overpowering and stimulates my appetite.

Under Harry's watchful eye, I use the key to roll back the thin metal lid, then cut the corned beef and arrange it sparingly on the bread. There is a festive gleam to the meat.

We eat calmly. We eat politely. Although Harry casts the odd exploratory glance into the darkness around the sides of the basement now and then, we are, for the duration of this meal, first and foremost people who are eating. Just as the whole city, as I imagine it, is populated in this moment by people who, in one way or another, are focusing their attention on their midday meal.

16

I think back on Claudia.

Claudia is in the service of the Olano family. Head of the kitchen. It's around 2:00 p.m. when the signal sounds and Harry and I turn our heads toward the elevator.

The service elevator signal is easy to recognize. All of the elevators give a signal upon reaching the desired floor. For starters, the service elevator is louder; that seems directly related to its intensive use. What's more, the signals of the residents' and visitors' elevators are subtler, styled as it were to the taste and presumed intellect of the users. Modest, too. Compared to the rather matter-of-fact sound of the service elevator.

Claudia has a gigantic body, curvaceous and relatively firm. She walks toward us holding a plate covered with an upside-down soup bowl. Some people might claim she waddles, but that's an optical illusion. What they see is the inertia of the mass her hips push up with each step. According to Claudia her parents named her after a film star from the distant past, when they still showed films in cinemas. She says we have to share the meal equally. We eat a kind of poultry we don't know and can't picture at all; it is unbelievably
flavorsome. Ever since Chanel, the Olanos' lapdog, choked to death on a sugar cube, Claudia has arranged the leftovers on a staff plate. She wouldn't give the hot dinners the organization delivers to us daily to the pigs. Her parents have a farm in the north of her home country with a smokehouse for the hams.

We let Claudia sit on the chair. She asks our opinion. That hint of tarragon, it's not too strong, is it? Her eyes are the center of any place in which Claudia is located. She has eyes that show pent-up jubilation and speak of a desire no one can quench, which shouldn't be unleashed for that very reason. Claudia is beautiful to look at, even when she's depressed. She says that Mrs. Olano has had a hard life and sometimes that impedes her contact with the staff. I eat poultry prepared by Claudia. Harry has already finished his share. I chew slowly and at length, out of politeness. At times Claudia watches my mouth as I chew, as if that mouth will reveal what I really think about the food. I look at her eyes, which are looking at my mouth.

We don't ask about her parents: whether they're still alive, for instance, or if she ever hears from them. Harry says that her father must be as proud as punch. A daughter—that's every father's dream. In service with the Olanos, in this building. A father could do worse. I ask Harry if he has kids. He shakes his head. He doesn't want kids, not in this world. By that he means the world in which he's a guard. He says that real guards shouldn't have daughters. You can't put yourself through something like that.

17

Today it's Harry's turn: he wipes the inside of the tin of corned beef clean with a piece of bread, soaking up the last bit of taste. When the bread is saturated with his saliva, he swallows it. We stay
sitting for a moment on opposite sides of the bunkroom door. Then Harry walks all the way to the crusher in the narrow space between Garages 34 and 35 and tosses in the tin. The impact is painful. Not so much the uppercut of piercing decibels, as the meaning of the sound. Harry comes back smiling. He rubs his stomach and opens his mouth to say, “They can't take that away from us now.”

18

I think of Arthur.

Arthur extends his arm: a well-filled blue dustcoat sleeve with a clenched fist at the end. His other hand points to its length and gestures that the walls are at least twice as thick. He was in service with the Duprez family for years, three streets away. He saw the building rise. Now he works for the Poborskis. He suspects that the bottom layers have even thicker walls, but on the thirty-ninth floor he knows exactly. He's quiet for a moment looking at the yardstick he's holding out for us. He says that the apartment has window seats like they used to have in fortresses and castles.

He grabs the two trash bags by their knotted tops. Piss off, I think, piss off! But Arthur just stands there, knees bent, stinking garbage in each hand, as if he feels like he's forgotten something and is dredging through his memory. Why does he come to chat with us first before putting the bags in the crusher? Doesn't he notice the stench anymore? Has he always been at the bottom of the household ladder, where stench comes in many varieties, and has he gradually come to cherish those varieties as the peculiarities of his simple life?

Does he have a bad back?

I hope the bags don't leak, not a drop. That concentrate of rot and decay could stink for days, nestling into our room, where it's safe because of the lack of circulation. It will creep into our
bedding and uniforms and when we start to think it's gone, it will be because the stench has taken possession of us in our sleep.

Finally Arthur says that the building won't collapse in a hurry. No, he's certain of that. Not with walls like these . . . He lifts the bags up from the floor. There are no traces left on the concrete. It's Arthur who told us that the building doesn't have any garbage chutes: they're too dangerous, they'd be throwing the door open to biochemical terror. According to Arthur, garbage chutes are a thing of the past. In older buildings they're sealing them up. He lugs the bags to the crusher, disappearing around the corner. We hear them flop down one after the other. After a short pause the motor turns on, building up the hydraulic pressure. When the maximum has been achieved, the motor turns off and the press starts moving. Deep in the container, almost simultaneously, we hear the bags pop like two balloons.

Arthur tells us that they lie full-length on the window seats and stare out. He undoes his dustcoat to arrange the panels neatly one over the other, then pulls the belt tight. They look out over the city like Roman emperors, with delicacies from all over the world in arm's reach. He's seen it with his own eyes, at least once. The window seat in the second living area is without a doubt Mr. and Mrs. Poborski's favorite spot. He says they made their fortune from insulating covers to use on ski slopes and glaciers in the summer. Without the Poborskis, Arthur claims, there would be no ski resorts left anywhere.

19

I wipe my plate clean with a piece of bread, clearly winning Claudia's approval. I praise her deer-calf stew. Particularly tasty. She smiles. Mr. Olano enjoyed it too. He instructed the butler to call
Claudia to the dining room so that he could compliment her personally. She says he's charming; she loves his big, warm hands. How does she know those hands are warm? Do the Olanos shake hands with their staff? It sounds unlikely to me.

Mr. Olano is no stranger to the staff's living quarters. The five-star service was included in the exorbitant purchase price of his luxury apartment and he interprets that service in the broadest sense. Without knocking, he opens her bedroom door. It is very quiet, but vague noises from the bowels of the building still reach these rooms. The night light in the hall reflects in Claudia's eyes, she's lying on her side. Mr. Olano calmly closes the door. He sits down on the side of the bed. Only after a while does he lay a hand on her hip, which rises up high under the sheet. A big, warm hand that gently explores her body, then moves her hand to his crotch. It doesn't take long, especially when he feels her other hand, which has found its own way. This is all Mr. Olano requires. He touches her cheek for a moment and disappears.