Two
87
“Who sent you?”
The guard keeps the flashlight aimed at his feet, presumably overwhelmed by Harry’s bellow, which echoes off the walls, harassing him from all sides.
“Who’s your employer?”
“The organization,” we hear, deep and calm.
“We’ve got our guns on you. Put the flashlight on the floor, light down. Then take three steps back.”
I see the beam of light contract and concentrate as a blinding disk, which is swallowed by the concrete.
“Where are your colleagues?”
“My colleagues?”
“The other two guards. Your comrades.”
“I don’t know. I’m alone.”
“You’re alone?”
“Yes.”
“Without any colleagues?”
After a moment’s consideration, “You’re my colleagues.”
Harry falls silent. He doesn’t stand up. I hear a deep dragging sound as he sucks breath into his lungs. The disillusionment has hit him hard. I decide to take the lead, ordering the guard farther back. I count his steps. At five I tell him to stop. As I walk toward the flashlight, Harry moves off to one side to cover me and make sure he doesn’t shoot me in the back by accident.
Shining the light on the guard, I immediately see the familiar uniform, the crease in the pants, the emblem: he’s one of us. Remarkably, the uniform seems to be standing up by itself, enclosing a figure that’s gigantic but absent. Then I see the whites of eyes under his cap, flicking on and off like two small beacons. I have to use my imagination in combination with the matte gleam of his pitch-black skin to make out his head against the darkness of the basement.
Under his arm he is holding a large cardboard box, whose bottom is bulging from the weight of its contents. He’s carrying it effortlessly, casually, as if it’s a beach ball that would blow away if he let go of it.
88
The flashlight is standing the other way around on the ground and casting a glow on the ceiling, so that it feels like we’re sheltering from the darkness under a tarpaulin of light. I don’t know what I’m eating. I recognize the taste: it’s fruit, in syrup, I must have eaten it before. I can’t put a name to it and at the moment I couldn’t care less. My left hand squeezes the enormous tin, at least five times the size of a corned beef tin and all mine. I concentrate on eating, greedily gulping down pieces of soft slippery fruit, chewing just long enough to avoid choking. Peach. I’m dizzy with excitement and haste. Harry’s eating frankfurters, stuffing them into his cheeks and washing them down with the liquid they came in. We’re eating as if the cardboard box isn’t filled to the top with tins. Extraordinary colors and shapes we haven’t seen for years, but they leave the guard cold. He doesn’t say a word, watching us indifferently. He’s sitting on his backside on the ground on the other side of the box and the flashlight. Kneeling and full of mistrust, we keep our eyes on him as if he could take the food away from us again at any moment.
89
Harry grabs the flashlight and shines it in the guard’s face from close by. The whites of his eyes are yellowish, but not unhealthy. The irises are so dark they’re absent. The pupils, provocatively large as a result, seem to go against the laws of nature by dilating in the bright light.
In answer to Harry’s question as to what’s going on outside, the guard shrugs. He claims to have spent an hour or two sitting in the back of a vehicle before they dropped him off. He couldn’t see anything and he didn’t hear anything either. He asks sheepishly if we can tell him what our location is. No, he doesn’t know, he was picked up without any explanation and brought here. At his previous post he was prohibited from communicating with his colleague, who manned the next box a little farther down the road. He doesn’t know why: he was used to it, he was taught not to ask questions. It was a remote storage depot. He’s not able, or allowed, to tell us anymore. No, he has no idea, but whatever it was, the capacity must have been enormous. Besides his colleague, the guard never saw anyone in the complex. There could have been fifty guards stationed there, it might have been just the two of them. He speaks calmly, his words babble along; that’s just the way things go.
His stubble is extremely unusual, in my eyes at least, a white man’s eyes. The hairs are stuck together in little knobs that look stiff and hard. On his cheeks they’re spread out with lots of space between them, lonely, as if they don’t actually belong there. On his chin they’re closer together, but not close enough to cover the skin.
90
Harry stays aloof. For the first few hours he’s too unsteady from the blow to pay much attention to the guard. He answers my suggestion of temporarily turning three of the lights back on with silent assent. After all, the guard needs an opportunity to familiarize himself with the peculiarities of the location as quickly as possible.
While the guard and I set to work with the chair, the stool and the light covers — with Harry in position near the entrance gate — I think about the specific smell I noticed after eating the tinned fruit, when the tension had become a little more bearable. We’re reconnecting the lights along the longitudinal axis of the basement, which we have divided neatly into equal segments. That is still very far from lighting all of the corners. We give the guard a floor plan too and let him keep his flashlight, which is now swinging from a loop that is attached to the waistband of his pants, but missing from ours. I decide that the smell of his body tends toward the odor of scorched horse’s hooves, albeit strongly diluted.