Only on one other occasion did our job bring us into the proximity of women. While we were surveying a narrow strip of meadow beside a stream, there were several young women just across the water, picking flowers from a field of asters that stretched as far as we could see. As we worked, the sound of their voices was constantly in our ears.
I was holding the tape and looking into the shallow brook. I noticed how tranquil the place and the moment
were. Even the distant tower blocks, which usually made me feel crowded, seemed, in the haze of autumn mists and behind a screen of feminine laughter, more like a constructivist painting or a theatrical backdrop.
'When we finish the survey,' Kos suggested, let's go over and pick some flowers.'
Though I knew that the flowers would have wilted by tomorrow I didn't object: the slide from our monotonous routine into a field of flowers inhabited by young women meant more than just a short walk across a bridge.
So that we wouldn't forget which world we belong to and the god we serve, a roll of thunder sounded behind us. The noise grew quickly to a crescendo and became recognizable as the roar of a jet engine at full throttle.
Then we saw them. Not far from us, midway between where we were standing and the mist-shrouded apartment towers, contemptuous of all living things, jet fighters speeding towards an invisible but precisely surveyed concrete runway. I looked regretfully across the stream at the field of flowers, which seemed to tremble in alarm and then flee, fading from our sight like a dream vision.
At regular intervals, this same ceremony was repeated. And each time the languages of birds, animals, people, silence and even our inmost thoughts were sacrificed on enormous funeral pyres.
We finished the survey, got into the car and, adding some noise of our own to the ceremony, drove off to another place to continue our work, preparing fresh data for new and better runways.
The Factory
WE SET OUT in a sticky autumn fog when it was still dark.
There were several triangulation points inside the grounds of a factory, and in the area around it, but the surveyor had put off checking them. We needed several letters of reference and permits from the department of special projects and, anyway, we assumed that the benchmarks inside the factory would be the least likely to be damaged.
The factory lay just off the main road in the most fertile part of the country's Golden Belt of arable land. A high wall surrounded the factory and only the foul odour of the fog warned us that we had arrived. We parked the car and walked over to the main entrance where a fat female guard asked us if we were carrying matches. When we assured her we were not, she let us into the waiting-room where we were to remain until the company surveyor came to get us.
The waiting-room was painted from floor to ceiling in a greyish-brown oil-based paint. The floor was covered with worn and dirty ochre-coloured linoleum. The only décor was a poster warning against the danger of naked flame, and a clumsy-looking metal telephone. Anyone finding himself here could have no illusions about what to expect inside.
All I could see of the interior of the factory was a concrete yard and a few grey buildings. Occasionally the door would open and someone would hurry through importantly. A young woman in a black dress with a sickly pale face ran in. Paying no attention to us, she lifted the receiver on the phone and dialled a three-digit number. She was having trouble getting a line and while she pleaded, nearly in tears, to be connected, to communicate what I had no doubt was some bad news, I could hear the shrieking laughter of women behind me. Turning round, I saw four women in the unattractive dark grey uniforms of the factory guards bent over a magazine which, I surmised from the tone of their laughter, was 'objectionable,' or even 'diversionist,' as our police terminology has it. But perhaps the magazine was not objectionable; perhaps they were only delighted that they had got the better of life, with their pistols on their hips.
Finally, the factory surveyor showed up. He was short, wearing a leather jacket, jeans, and high-heeled shoes to increase his stature. He carried a roll of paper under his arm. He and Kos stared at each other for a while, then realized they'd gone to school together, and at once began trading accounts of their recent lives and comparing incomes.
We returned to our car, where the factory surveyor looked at our letters of recommendation and our permits, cursed the local bureaucracy, then pulled a top-secret map out of his roll. Two of the triangulation points, it seemed, were easily accessible; the third and fourth lay in a highly restricted area. The factory surveyor would inform the guard of our presence to prevent our being shot as spies. He smiled and left us.
'I wish this thing were over with,' my boss said. 'You never know here what you'll get mixed up in. The last time this place blew up, it took about four hundred people with it. Some of them completely vanished, except for maybe a watch that they found two kilometres away.'
When the diminutive factory surveyor returned we asked him about this catastrophe.
"That's bullshit,' he said. 'The gunpowder section blew up two years ago; it happened during the lunch break. Five dead and a couple of wounded. Mostly cuts and bruises. There was glass flying around all over the place,' he said, warming to the memory. 'But no one lost an eye. That's the thing, my friends, when you see a flash of light around here — even if it's only a thunderstorm — cover your eyes.'
While we were waiting for a yard engine to shunt some cisterns out of the way that, as far as we know, might have been filled with dynamite, trinitrotoluene or even nitroglycerine, he explained to us how in the aniline department they only took women over the age of forty and, even then, they had to sign a statement saying they're aware of the dangers.
'What are the dangers?'
'A hundred and eighteen per cent increased chance of cancer of the bladder.'
'And they sign?'
'Of course they do. They get risk money every month — at least four hundred crowns.'
Although they were not marked with stakes, we found the first two points easily. I gave them a fresh coat of paint, and painted red arrows on the surrounding trees.
The third point was on a wooded knoll just inside a high barbed-wire fence. It was a double fence of the kind they
put around prison camps. There was even a watch-tower. The oak and birch trees in the woods had already turned yellow and brown and seemed to be exhaling a chemical stench. The surveyors were poring over the map again, arguing. Eventually they came to the conclusion that one of the stones lay outside the fence.
We set the tripod up over the accessible stone and returned to the car. We turned on to the road, passed a high cooling tower and an assembly of boilers and pipes in which something liquid I didn't want to know about was being created, drove through a side gate and came to a halt at the edge of the woods. We took another tripod out and very carefully, as though it were sacred, the surveyor brought out the case containing the spirit level. Even outside the factory, enormous pipes supported on low trestles snaked through the trees. In several places, a vapour of some sort was escaping from them.
We positioned the level over the stone with great effort and the surveyor tried to get a clear view of the tripod we'd left on the knoll inside the fence. All we could see was a thicket of tree trunks, large and small. Using the machete and the axe, we chopped a trail right to the fence where, with our combined strength, we felled a spruce tree. We returned to the stone pillar and even I could now see the yellow leg of the tripod on the small knoll across the way.