The Guard (9 page)

“No embassies for me,” Harry says. “We're going to a villa. A white villa surrounded by gardens. You and me, Michel.”

It's detectable, albeit with difficulty, the slight hesitation in his voice. The euphoria after the absence of the guard and the arrival of food seems to have ebbed a little. We are both being drawn back to the driver's last words, spoken as if he was exhaling them while moving toward his seat. As if, rather than being formulated, they were being forced up out of his chest by his rising diaphragm. They have put down roots, deep in our subconscious, and are now pushing up quickly toward the light.

62

We're doing a round when I break first and raise the subject of the resupply.

“That's right,” Harry says. “The cardboard box was in the furthest corner . . .”

“Do you think he could have been keeping the rations hidden there? Out of sight of someone who happened to glance in through the windows?”

“Hidden? Then he would have thrown a blanket over it. The ration was right there in the back of the van. Why would he want to hide it?”

I shrug. “There weren't any other boxes in the load compartment.”

“I noticed that.”

We shuffle on for a few meters until Harry gradually picks up the pace and we're back at our normal tempo.

“We were the last address on his route,” he says. “That's why the box and the water were right up the back.”

Were we the last address? It was the dead of night.

“If we were the last post on his route,” I say, “then it's strange that there weren't any empty trays in the back of the van. Trays he gets back when he makes a new delivery.”

“Maybe they put everything straight into storage at other posts?”

I see four or five beaming guards in a storeroom. One stands at the trays, the others at the shelves. The first says the name of the provisions out loud, then tosses them to the right man. In a few minutes everything is in its place.

“Then the load compartment would be filled with the trays they've just emptied, surely?”

“True.”

“He was eight days late,” I say after a silence. “That's a long time.”

“There could be numerous causes for that, Michel. Causes we can only guess at.”

“We almost starved to death.”

“We might not have been the only ones. Maybe we got off lightly. Maybe other places have suffered casualties.”

“You think?”

“I don't know. The main thing is we're not dead. Understand? You and me, we're still alive.”

63

I'm washing our socks, kneading the wet, black lump against the sloping sidewall of the washbasin. Harry comes up behind me. When I neither stop nor turn around, he sits down on my bed.

“The driver said, ‘Be glad I still bring you anything.' What he meant was:
We
should be glad
he
still brings us anything. We should appreciate it. He meant: I've been racing around all day. I'm exhausted. But I've still made it here with your provisions at this hour. And then you treat me like this. He must have been pissed off about me kicking him in the butt after such a long day. That's what I think. That explains his reaction.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but I didn't get the impression he was reacting out of anger. Plus, he didn't look tired. He didn't look like he'd been working all day.”

“Those guys are all front, Michel. Even when they're tired. What were we like ourselves? Always ready with a smart answer. Never backing down.”

I wring the water out of the lump cautiously, trying not to rip the old material. I hang the socks up on the side of Harry's bed. It will take hours for them to dry.

“His day's almost over,” Harry says. “His second-to-last address is close to the depot and we're more or less on the way back to base. So he thinks, I'll unload the van first, then I won't have to drive all the way back later. That's why the van was already empty, except for our ration.”

64

It's night. In these unchanging surroundings lit by emergency lighting, the days don't differ from the nights. But still my wristwatch and biology have the capacity to color the hours, dividing the days into sections. It's night and I walk past the garages alone.

I keep my eyes peeled, but let my mind wander. I feel like Harry and I have overlooked something. If only the driver had stressed the most important part of his sentence. That's the problem. What, for instance, does it mean if he'd meant to say, “Be glad
I
still bring you anything?”

Should we be happy that he in particular has brought us these things? And what does that suggest? Does he mean that we already have another driver? That he's not the only driver on this route, and we should be glad that
he
is still bringing us something, because he knows the other driver isn't?

But maybe he wanted to say, “Be glad I
still
bring you anything.”

Has something caused a cutback in resupplying? Has there been a significant reduction in the number of drivers available and should we be glad he still comes? Is he virtually alone because no one else is willing to do the job? Because it's too dangerous? Is there a strike going on or has a mutiny broken out?

Or was his rash outburst that we should be glad that he still brings us
anything
? And should we conclude that daily necessities are in short supply, that there is an even more pressing shortage than the shortage which has been in force for so long now? And is that why he came at night, to avoid attracting attention? With a ration that was considerably smaller than the previous one? Is that why he came with just one ration, so that if he was robbed, he would only lose the one, and was that why it took him so long to resupply everyone?

I lean back on the entrance gate, close to the crack, the whirlpool in my head making me dizzy.

I hear a cyclist.

I hear a cyclist, no doubt about it! Every cell in my body stirs. The cyclist is coming from far away and headed in this direction. I recognize the sound as if he or she cycles past here every day, although I've pressed my ear against the crack countless times since the exodus of the residents and never heard anyone or anything. And now this, in this city, a cyclist, unmistakable. With each turn of the pedals, the chain scrapes over the chain guard, making an almost ringing sound, and when he or she is at the level of the entrance gate, I hear the groaning springs of what sounds like an old-fashioned bike seat, maybe a large one, a lady's seat. I press my face against the crack. Vaguely I make out the wall tapering up to the street with the shadow of the tree above it: nothing else. But still I am certain that he or she is not cycling on this side, but on the other side, against the normal direction of the traffic, or at least in the middle of the deserted street. I listen for perhaps a full minute, until the rattling dies away and only the hum of the lighting is left.

I have heard it so clearly, my perception of it has been so acute that when I turn back to face the basement, the image of the cyclist is branded on my retina.

65

He feels the tension in his thighs. His muscles are as hard as steel, not just when he's pushing down, but moving up now too. Tension that imperceptibly crosses the line to pain, at least where the bundles of muscle are attached to the knee joint, the spot that is taking the most stress because the bike is too small for someone his size and he never gets a chance to straighten his bent legs. The bike is the cause of his pain and this ride. They found it in an alley, a rusty lady's bike, an alley here in the neighborhood, where they
had no business being but still turned a profit, abandoned as if the thief had jumped off years ago and left it leaning against the wall, suddenly disinterested in his escape vehicle, dumping the evidence of his snatch and grab, a drug addict investigating his spoils next to the tilted bike, stashing money, credit cards, tablets and a cell phone in his coat and tossing the rest up onto a roof where no one will notice it and a suspicious stray cat will sniff it many months later before spraying it, day after day, so that years afterward the new inhabitant of the building will pick it up between two fingers with even greater aversion, this stinking, weather-beaten object, after having pulled on rubber gloves first and, to spread his weight, crawling out over the old tarred roof on all fours, studying it carefully and, without turning, calling back to his wife at the window that he thinks it's not an animal after all but a handbag, he's as good as certain, and then he holds it over the side of the roof and lets it drop into the alley next to an old lady's bike. The alley on the edge of the neighborhood that is now restricted access, on whose borders they linger at night, bored out of their skulls. Until one of them slips on something disgusting in the dark, maybe a dead cat, and knocks over a bike as he falls.

A bike. None of them have ridden a bike in years, bikes are for kids and boring adults. But tonight this bike is a stroke of luck, a gift from the gods. After a bit of fooling around, he's the one who suggests a suicide ride straight through the neighborhood that is the subject of the wildest rumors, with the real reason for it having been declared off limits lost in everyone's memory. He should have kept his big mouth shut, he drew the short straw. The rattling chain drives him on, he swings his shoulders to push harder on the pedals. He has to go faster, faster. He feels naked to his bones. He's an easy target. What's he got himself into? Can the hair in his nostrils filter air? And what kind of microscopic germs will grip onto those hairs, his eyebrows, the inside of his ears? What will dissolve in the water on his eyes? Will the wind on the round surface drain it off toward his cheeks or push it back in the other direction? Entering his body through the tear ducts?

66

His muscles are on the point of snapping. All at once they will break free of his knees and whip back, curling up toward his abdomen. He's too big for this bike, but he had no choice. The only taxis in sight were already taken. He ran down the pavement in a panic, crossed the street several times and frenetically searched the memory of his telephone for numbers. The shortest waiting time a taxi company could offer him was fifteen minutes. In reality that meant at least half an hour, assuming it was an experienced driver who knew the shortcuts in this permanently clogged city, where a car could get up to twenty kilometers an hour at most. He studied the drivers in the traffic jam through their side windows, trying to make out a friendly face behind the reflections of the neon-lit night, someone who might listen to his pleas. Then he saw a bicycle leaning on the fence of a small park, a remarkable sight. The days of casually chaining bikes to rails, posts or trees are long gone. The old lady's bike was leaning against the wrought-iron fence at quite an angle, like someone who's suddenly been taken sick. He couldn't see a chain or lock. There was nobody in the vicinity paying any attention to the bike; people walked past it as if it was a beggar or a street kid. When he focused on it, it seemed to be located in a parallel world that had nothing to do with the bored drivers and indifferent pedestrians. A world in which they were predestined to come together. He ran across the street, grabbed the handlebars without stopping and jumped onto the wide seat. Within the first five meters he felt the bike's abnormal resistance, something wrong with the crankshaft. It wasn't that bad, but he had a long way to go. The fear of getting totally exhausted halfway and having to dump the bike against a fence somewhere was not unfounded. Except he had no choice. Halfway would at least be halfway. Mapping out the route in his mind's eye, he saw the angular patch he'd have to cycle around. He only hesitated a few seconds. Sweating and panting, he turned down the
first side street. He ignored the warnings, relatively bland symbols on a prohibited entry sign. Fifty meters farther along a bright light flashed intermittently over similar signs, to which a blue rectangle with flashing electric letters had been added. He read, Attention! Or, Warning! Or, Reminder! He jolted over street markings and speed bumps. He passed immense signs with the universal phrases in various languages, beacons in the night, unpleasant gusts of hot air on his overheated face. No barriers. A weathered plywood sentry box in the middle of the pavement betrayed how temporary people had first estimated this problem to be. No longer manned. According to article such and such one enters the zone at one's own risk. Emergency services won't come this far for anyone. Without thinking, he keeps pedaling, turning into a long dark street flanked by tower blocks, the street that cuts straight through the zone and will get him to his wife in a third of the time. She's in the delivery room, scared, it's all happened very quickly. He has to be quick too, faster. He too has to push his body to its limits. If he becomes one with his effort, clenched from head to foot, an immense fist, his body will be impenetrable. The virus has dozed off, weakened, it can't keep up with him. He feels the wind in his hair, he sees the meters passing under his wheels. He won't tell his wife. He'll get there in time to witness the birth of his son.

67

Harry and I have had a miraculous escape. In some fortuitous way, this space has saved us from a painful death. Either that or we have the dumb luck of simply being immune. The organization was prepared to sacrifice us to save the building from mass looting, but the looters were terrified and never materialized. People outside of the protective ring don't know we're living in this basement. The
remaining resident is sprawled on a carpet somewhere in his apartment, on a handmade Oriental carpet. Lying there untidily like a dropped handkerchief. The carpet has been completely ruined. The juices that have leaked out of his decomposing body have eaten away at the fibers. He is still dressed in black. Shoes, watch, glasses. We were mistaken about his staff: they, of course, left with the other domestics. He misjudged the situation. He stayed a day too long. He thought it would all blow over. He wanted to show how fearless he was. He wanted to stay with the precious heirlooms inhabited by the soul of his late lamented mother. He was penniless. He had nothing left, everything had been sold: land, thoroughbreds, shares, yacht. The apartment had been stripped. He had nowhere to go. He didn't know where to hide. He took a gamble. He preferred the risk of the virus to the certainty of shame.