116
He hangs his cap over his jacket on the hook on the wall. The door is wide open. He lingers by the foot of the bed. After twenty-four hours almost everything is back to how it was before. We sleep either side of midnight, the best hours. I’ve scrubbed the smell of the guard’s body out of the linen with my fists. I push my nose into the pillow and sniff. I want to keep smelling this all night: liquid soap, no matter how artificial or industrial the perfume. I’ll be able to drift off into a deep sleep again without any trouble. I’ll be able to dream calm dreams and wake up refreshed. It’s like the old days. The guard isn’t here. He has never been here. We’re guarding the building alone again. It’s the first time since he suddenly appeared. Harry spits on his hand. Twice. He’s angry, I feel that at once. It hurts, but of course his anger isn’t directed at me. “A few more days,” he growls in my ear. “When he’s hungry enough, he’ll start to talk. We can count on it.” He’s angry. I hold tight, but he’s angry about the guard and all the things he’s keeping secret. Harry laughs with anger, saying they can’t touch us. He is rough and presses down on me with all his weight, but that has nothing to do with me.
117
Harry slips in for the interrogation. He holds the Flock at the ready, close to his cheek, turns the key in the lock, opens the door no wider than necessary and shuffles in sideways, flicking the light on and immediately closing the door behind him.
After three days he no longer greets the guard.
No more, “You know what we want to hear.” Or, “Are you ready for some more?” Or, “Shall I undo the gag so you can get it off your chest?” Or, “Come on, man, don’t be shy.”
After three days Harry goes back to eating his meals outside, next to me.
The time Harry spends in the storeroom now passes in almost constant silence. As if he’s keeping vigil at a relative’s deathbed: a question of hours.
Now and then I jump from the sound of a blow striking home and Harry screaming that the guard has to stop, that he has to stop his little games, that it’s for his own good, begging him to once, just once, think of the resident, the client after all, who doesn’t know what’s hanging over his head, and what kind of gutless guard is he anyway? As long as he doesn’t think someone’s going to clean up after him. He can just lie there in his own filth. It’s either talk or stay lying there like that, it’s either stay lying there like that or eat and drink, and what’s it going to be?
Harry says that the guard is lying on the table. He’s sacrificed his sheet, tearing it up into strips. He says he tied the guard up right away and since then he hasn’t made a single attempt to get loose. He asks me if I know why. He’ll tell me: it’s his guilty conscience eating away at him.
118
One morning Harry appears in his gray vest with his jacket, shirt and tie draped over his arm. Drenched in sweat and with his pale, freckled shoulders drooping, he locks the storeroom door and slips the key into his trouser pocket. He scratches the hair on his throat irritably, removes his cap, then puts it back on at the correct angle.
“It’s hard,” Harry says after catching his breath on the chair. “It’s a hard, merciless test and you and me, we just have to get through it. It’s about determination, Michel. For the sake of that one human life above us. For the sake of his security.”
He fills his mouth with bottled water and shakes his head gently while swallowing it in two gulps. “If the guard’s an agent, he’s a kind of agent we could never have suspected. A completely new kind, for insane fucking missions they reserve for niggers.”
119
Although it’s the middle of my sleep, I’m immediately awake, as if I’ve been lying here for three hours with my eyes closed waiting for this scream. Now that it’s come, I’m hardly surprised. It is the first sound from the guard in six days.
He screams that he doesn’t know a thing about a last resident.
I hear it word for word.
He doesn’t scream aimlessly, this is no uncontrolled eruption. His scream has a purpose. His voice and the way it’s raised tell us that this first time will also be the last time. His contribution is once only and definitive. He won’t be adding anything else. It’s over and out.
I am staring into the darkness when Harry comes into the bunkroom and switches on the light. He paces back and forth from the door to the washbasin, keeping it up for a couple of minutes. With the table gone, his steps ring in the small room.
“Did you hear what he said?” Harry asks. “One sentence. That’s enough. He gave himself away from the word go. Did you hear it? The last resident? He claims he doesn’t have a clue. Yeah, that makes it obvious, doesn’t it? The last resident is the reason for his posting! Are we really supposed to believe the organization hasn’t informed him about the reason for his posting? If he knows anything at all, then surely that there’s only one left, one single resident who’s in great danger, enough danger for three instead of two guards.”
Later — I’ve washed and dressed and am sitting on the stool next to the door even though I have almost an hour left in which to rest — Harry says he needs my help. From now on we have to keep the guard awake the whole time. If we also keep him awake in the hours that Harry’s asleep, then we’ll manage it. No doubt about it. He’ll definitely snap.
I have to go into the storeroom with him, Harry says. There’s something he needs to show me, a trick. The way he does it.
120
With the Flock up near my cheek I follow Harry into the darkness, creeping into the stench, a musty cocktail I can’t break down into its constituent elements. Urine, in any case, stale urine. I feel my eyes watering and press back against the wall. I shut out the idea that this foul air is entering my lungs, settling in soft tissue, contaminating my body with horrific complaints that will only reveal themselves after an incubation period, starting with small, unmistakable signs: itching, subcutaneous blisters, blurred vision, blood-streaked stools, fungal infections. I am firmly convinced that it is not the absence of electric light, but the unutterable stench that is responsible for the darkness in the storeroom.
Once Harry has locked the door and turned on the light, I am able, after an intense bout of blinking, to see again. I don’t know what reaches my retina first. The boxes. Sideways. Without casting a conscious glance in that direction, I see that the ammunition on the shelves hasn’t been touched. The boxes stand in rank, exactly as during my last inspection. There’s no time for this vague consolation, because my brain is faced with the task of deciphering what the table, in the middle of the room, is presenting me with. Limbs, spread slightly, and bound to the planks by the white cotton tentacles of a powerful creature that is concealed under the table and reaching up through the cracks. The limbs are defenseless and naked and the planks are no longer gray, but black, saturated as if after a cloudburst. The guard isn’t wearing his uniform: I don’t see any blue anywhere, I don’t see any underwear. His large feet are angled outward. One of his hands is turned up, his right. In the pale palm I see dead insects, worms, grubs. His mouth is fixed in a grin by the grimy gag. His eyes are closed; he’s already sound asleep. Exhausted from his scream. No, not grubs. Gradations of the rosy color have spread all over his immense black body. It’s on his face, his penis, his calves, the soles of his feet. I screw my eyes up out of instinctive revulsion. He is covered with it; the guard is no longer entirely black. The new color has soaked into the tentacles close to the wet wood. The marks on the white stripes merge into pale brown. His penis, as thick as a smoked sausage, is resting on a swollen, pitch-black pouch and nestling against the inside of his thigh. Under a wreath of knobs of hair. He is circumcised, no, the foreskin has been pulled back, bunched up and wrinkled against the edge of the glans as if he has just had an erection. There is plenty of pink on the glans, on the pouch, on the shaft. This is what I see in a few seconds. It’s not grubs, it’s cuts. It is bulging flesh: pink, whitish pink, gray and purplish red. A lot of yellow too. I see greenish yellow. I smell stale urine and suppurating flesh. I concentrate on the flat underside of his big toe, close by, to suppress the rising nausea. The pale, flat underside of his big toe. Miraculously spared. Or used as a lever to stretch the sole of his foot.