121
This is what I see in a couple of seconds. With these hundreds of colorful bulges, his body looks like it’s engaged in a horrific struggle, molecular warfare, blossoming flesh erupting through his old skin. He’s undergoing a metamorphosis.
Harry goes over to the table and bends over the guard’s head. He says that for two days now he’s been too feeble-minded to open his eyes so that he can never be sure if the guard’s awake or not and has to keep at it the whole time.
From close by, Harry stares at the shining eyelids. Their noses are almost touching when he bursts out screaming, “Yes, Michel, Mr. Sensitive is taunting us!” Harry yells each word separately, as hard as his lungs and vocal chords can manage and all in the same tone.
Suddenly, without drawing my attention to it, Harry is holding a tool in his hand. I recognize the transparent, light-blue plastic of our water bottles. It surrounds his fist. It’s the bottom of a bottle. A short blade is protruding from this protective covering. The paring knife.
He says, “This is how I do it.”
Harry emphasizes the “I.” He does it like this. He’s giving me a tip, not an order. If I can find a better way, he’d be glad to hear it.
At first, Harry explains, he thought he had to nick him in a new spot every time. He did it more or less every ten minutes, it made sure the black bastard paid attention. Eventually, however, he discovered by chance that cutting open old wounds is more effective. Generally he observes a reaction over his whole body. A bit like a cow that’s bumped an electric fence. He asks if I understand him. He still needs to keep nicking him in new places as well because it takes a while before the wound is infected enough to give his lordship a good shake. As strange as it sounds, Harry says, I’ll need to lay in a supply. The simplest, he’s found, is to alternate every ten minutes: new, old. But I’ll find out myself. The situation is constantly changing.
Harry studies the guard’s body. On the side above a knee he finds what he was looking for. He indicates a position on the other side of the table that will give me a good view of the procedure. When he pulls the blunt paring knife forcefully over the swelling, green fluid splats out against the light-blue plastic. The intense contraction in the guard’s arms and legs keeps up for quite a while. “No two ways about it,” Harry says. “He’s awake now.”
Outside, at the bunkroom door, before going to sleep, Harry urges me not to forget one thing. The guard is silent because he knows something. If he didn’t know anything, or if he wasn’t an agent, he would have made something up long ago.
122
A half-hour passes. The guard’s breathing is regular; he’s probably sleeping deeply. I’m sitting on the concrete ledge in the corner between the rations and the ammunition and staring at the stains on the ground. The resident is our priority. He is my priority. I repeat that to myself.
I hear mumbling. The guard has opened his eyes and turned his head toward me. He is looking for me and as soon as I stand up and come into his field of vision, his deep voice sounds again, incomprehensible because of the gag.
Is it because I’ve given him a respite of half an hour that he is now willing to talk?
The material is damp. The hard double knot is difficult to loosen. The dark eyes are fixed on me constantly. When I carefully remove the strip, from one corner of his mouth and then the other, he tries immediately to say something, but this time it’s his cramped tongue that’s getting in the way. A few seconds later I understand the word he is struggling to pronounce.
“Friend.”
A strange smile appears on his face. It’s a smile that doesn’t go with the state he’s in.
What makes him think I’m his friend? How could I be his friend? What kind of conceit is that, laying claim to someone’s friendship just because they were polite to you?
“I’m not your friend.”
I ask if he can hear me.
I am surprised by the sound of my voice in the storeroom.
The guard’s smile gets bigger, he whispers, “My friend.”
He thinks, this is my last chance. He thinks, I’ll wind this gutless good-for-nothing around my little finger. I’ll flash him my most beautiful smile. I’ll call him my friend. He’s got no backbone. Piece of cake. He fell for those porcelain figurines too, of course. I’ll grin in his face and throw him off balance. If I just lie on my back like a dog and look at him faithfully with big eyes, he’ll pat me on the stomach.
“Have you got something to say?”
The guard lies on the table, relaxed and shameless, smiling his stupid smile.
He doesn’t think, when it comes down to it, Michel is a guard too. I mustn’t be blinded by his good manners. If I don’t immediately stop grinning, and if I’m stupid enough to insult him again by making another wild claim of friendship, I’ll set him off. He might hesitate, but once the faltering knife has been lubricated by the rising blood, he’ll carve to the bone.
123
Two days later, five o’clock in the afternoon, Harry opens the storeroom door and asks if I would like to come in. He walks around the table and says I should feel the guard’s pulse. With the tip of my middle finger on a small, untouched patch of skin, I look at the turned head, the closed eyes, the crack between the dry, fleshy lips. There is a silence without any perceptible movement: three men under a bulb in a storeroom. Like a canvas by a seventeenth-century master, captured in the light.
124
Harry and I take small, jolting, sideways steps. We’re not synchronizing and that makes carrying him even more difficult. Sometimes the guard’s ankles are almost ripped out of my hands. We should count — one-two, one-two — but now we’re in the middle of it and making progress, we muddle along through the basement. Occasionally his buttocks drag over the concrete.
“The resident,” Harry pants, “has paid for his security… If we want to prove our dedication… We have to go to any lengths… If we want to have a chance… We have to get him… Thanks to this bastard we’re in the dark… It’s up to us now… We have to save him.”
“Save him?”
Harry nods confidently. “We’ll bring him down to the basement… In the storeroom… One of us on the door at all times… He has to be spared… One human life, Michel… By saving one human life, we save humanity.”
We drag the guard over the ground on the curve of his hipbone. We don’t have any strength left. In the middle of the basement, we let his trunk and legs flop to the ground and slump down next to him. The very thought of leaving this basement! The concept is too enormous, it pushes out against the inside of my burning head, pressure on the back of my eyes.