The tremor was accompanied by the ringing laughter of the masters and apprentices. The object hurled from high up with such a din was not even a homemade bomb. Rather, it had the weight and dimensions of the missing safe — exactly those, to a T. Yet it struck precisely at the solar plexus of the infrastructure, at the underground bunker hidden beneath the turf, in which the valve of a gas tank used for heating was right next to some electrical equipment and the compressor of an air-conditioning unit. As a result a hole was smashed in the ceiling, a transformer was crushed, and several pipes burst. The series of electrical discharges had catastrophic consequences, though, as had been planned, the far-reaching impact of the subterranean explosion did not affect the red-brick warehouses. The shocks traveled far, perhaps along the water lines. Whoever conceived the plan probably supervised the operation in person. Not alone but in the company of the overalled workmen, who made off-hand comments on the course of events, detecting from the color of the smoke and the sound of the explosions that the compressor alone must by some miracle have survived. In that case, they joked, instead of heating there’d be cooling. As they spoke, bandying strong words, they drew on filterless cigarettes and spat out shreds of tobacco. With a malicious pleasure they applauded the echoes of a disaster that demolished their own labors. Nothing captures hearts and minds quite like the monumental ebullience of destruction. Effortlessly multiplying the losses of the owner and employer, they gave him an appropriate seeing-off: let him regret not sitting quietly while everything except the safe was still in its place. As for me — because I was the one the safe belonged to — it was true that I began to regret things at once.
A discreet silence would at least have made it possible to spare the installations, the buildings, and the pavements. What can be better than silence when truth leads nowhere? The masters have common sense enough not to expect me to believe in their good intentions. But they don’t give a hoot; they’re not in the least afraid, since they’re satisfied that once again they’ve succeeded in not giving themselves away. After all, didn’t the safe appear again at once, though empty? Did they not offer the required show of goodwill, eloquent expressions of false earnestness that for the sake of balance they must have laughed at in private? In the cross fire of questions, one after another of them would have presented his explanations, hesitating and stammering like would-be polyglots who only out of necessity are speaking in a foreign tongue. They would have maintained with hand on heart that the safe had been left in one of the warehouses by a simple oversight; that they had suspended it on the arm of a crane for the sole purpose of installing it in its rightful place without delay; and that everything that happened subsequently was a regrettable accident which was no one’s fault. As they were prepared to testify, the reinforced door was opened by the impact of the fall, and its contents, in their view, were swept away by the wind. It all scattered, no one knows where to: title deeds to local apartment buildings in the names of various clients of the photographer or parents of one or another grammar school pupil; certificates of treasury loans left in safekeeping by the school custodian and the policeman; security deposits for the rentals of stores; wedding rings waiting in pairs for the big day; various IOUs, the top one bearing the extravagant signature of the student, though it’s easy to imagine that there are no funds to cover it; and finally, thick and thin bundles of government bonds. In a word, everything that was of value in the entire neighborhood, and to top it all, a satin-lined box containing a diamond necklace of unknown provenance. And now it’s all gone with the wind. Interrogated on this subject, the masters would even have turned their pockets inside out as proof they had not taken a thing.
The apprentice with his bag of tools, a half-smoked cigarette in the corner of his mouth, sent precisely where there is strictly no unauthorized admission, will say nothing because he knows nothing. He pressed all the buttons in the crane as he was told to, in the correct sequence; when the impact came, all he did was blink. And look around in surprise, because he’d done exactly what his boss asked him to, nothing more and nothing less. In the cloud of dust that had instantly risen into the air, he could not have seen anything anyway. He merely wiped his watering eyes. And in that cloud of dust he himself also vanished. Even if someone had managed to take a photograph at the time, it would have recorded nothing but an impenetrable gray haze. The shock moved in a wave from the epicenter to the peripheries. The alleged accident shifted the layers of loose sand beneath the distant foundations. This circumstance, from one perspective most unpropitious, from another had many advantages. The more dramatic the events that the men in overalls managed to unleash, the more unquestioned would be the mass writing-off of every possible item from the inventories of one or another story. Having achieved their end, because once again they have succeeded, the masters and apprentices lock themselves in the storeroom and break out the bottles of untaxed spirit. Harmonica music accompanies them, plaintive and out of tune. They drink and sing, sing and weep. In the depths of their isolation, each of them separately becomes helpless. It is then that the greatest pain strikes them. They ask in a slurred voice why they are condemned to a life without women — them alone? In their despair they smash the empty bottles till the sound echoes away in the void into which they have been cast. Up on the heights they would at least have been something in the nature of angels with a golden touch. Yet what have they actually become, what? — they repeat, their furious gaze passing across the ceiling. One can only imagine the pandemonium they would create if on top of everything else they were given women. They’d probably suffer less, coming to terms with the shortcomings of their existence. The matter of their life without women is to remain closed for good. When they have emptied all the bottles, the balance sheet of their profits will be back at its point of departure. But business will continue to flourish, filling the same storeroom with new cases of bottles.
How agonizing it is to know about it all — about the illicit flow of goods, the mocking laughter in the back rooms — yet never to possess irrefutable proof. Helpless suspicions drift over the deserted marshaling yards like trembling balloons filled with hot air. In the meantime, deceitfulness oozes from every calculation, invoice, and specification list, and also from the bills that arrive in advance for urgent repairs not yet even commenced and paid for at twice the normal rate, for express service. There was no way to economize on repairs to the backdrops, since the plywood boards bearing the necessary painted images had been knocked down and smashed — they looked as if they had been through an earthquake. Indolent apprentices in overalls, suffering from the hiccups and convinced that nothing in this world was of any significance, were already at the warehouses pulling out other backdrops, whatever came to hand first. They were in a hurry and were not picking and choosing, since they had been instructed to act as quickly as possible to cover up the holes gaping on every side. It is the backdrops that determine the look of the world; they give it a trustworthy face and bolster faith in its substantiality, in the belief that everything the eye sees actually exists. There will be no other perspective than the one drawn on plywood boards at a deceptive angle, depicting the continuation of the street from the point where the wall and the pavement come to an end. Closing the space, the boards open it up at the same time, offering an illusory distance that seems to stretch into the unseen suburbs.