A little farther up, the stairs come out on a small floor or spacious landing, the size of the garages in the basement. A lost space without any objects. No continuation of the stairs. We can’t possibly be near the roof yet.
Harry slides the light slowly over the walls.
The door doesn’t have a knob. On closer inspection we see the prints of dirty fingers where the knob would usually be. Hesitantly I press the spot with my index finger: the click of a magnetic lock. The fiberboard door swings a few centimeters toward us. Harry and I drop onto our left knees, out of the firing line, and aim, together with the flashlight, our Flocks at the crack.
Behind the fiberboard door, in a room not much larger than a shower cubicle, an ironing board is leaning against the wall, palm trees on its bleached and tattered cover.
A blue bucket is hanging from one of the legs.
It’s so unexpected that the whole strikes me as some kind of greeting or secret message, set up here for us long ago.
132
Daylight. It is dim, the light of a cloudy afternoon that has reached here after detouring through rooms and around corners and down meters of hallway. But there is no doubt that it is natural light which, as dim as it is, demotes the flashlight to the level of a toy, a battery-operated gadget for projecting circles. Daylight comes first. The moment Harry pushes the door on the opposite side of the tiny room away from its magnet, there is daylight on our black leather shoes, on the scratchy carpet, on the plaster decorations on the hallway walls, on our hands, on our gray faces, in our ears: daylight everywhere. Its wholesome effect kicks in immediately.
133
Like the plaster monkeys on the wall, we’re squatting. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The work of an amateur with no sense of proportion. We stick close to the ground.
The blue of our uniform looks different from downstairs, more frivolous.
In a small kitchen we sit on the floor with our backs to the cupboards and the barrels of our pistols up near our noses. At first sight, there’s nobody. The stench rising from the pedal bin effortlessly overpowers the metallic smell of the Flock. A sliding door can be pulled shut to separate the kitchen from the living room. Through the legs of the table and the chairs, I see a shabby lounge suite, caramel colored. The sofa bathes in the daylight pouring in through the window, which is uncurtained and covers almost the full length of the wall.
We stay sitting there for a long time. If someone has hidden themselves away, they must think we’ve gone again by now. But we don’t hear anyone. Harry turns his head, his beard scraping and rustling over his collar. He looks me deep in the eyes, then nods.
Halfway into the living room the vast firmament is a dazzling gray. Solemnly we walk over to the window, taking slow considered steps, awed and anxious about the view the city below us will provide. On the long windowsill, close to the middle, is a round fishbowl. The evaporated water has left a filthy green coating three-quarters of the way up the glass.
134
I hear Harry speaking. He’s saying something, not whispering. His words haven’t got through to me yet. There’s too much information to process in this hallucinatory chaos. The view is overwhelming and therefore meaningless: my eyes are no longer used to panoramas. It’s the outskirts of a city, I recognize that much, but essentially see it as one big patch below me on the earth’s crust, extending to the foot of this building. I close my eyes and give myself a mental pep talk, using my most soothing voice. I compose myself and open my eyes, trying not to see everything at once, concentrating my vision as if looking through a straw. Two, three buildings. I see their walls, their shape; they’re still standing. Buildings with windows and roofs. Roofs with cupolas, chimneys, tiles, strips of tar and zinc. I expand my field of vision, unable to confine it any longer, and again my eyes skip from one spot to the next. I can’t detect any destruction, just buildings with windows and roofs. Here and there, the first green of spring emerging in the gray stone mass. I look at the horizon, where there’s nothing special to see, where the countryside begins. The gray clouds covering the city contain rain, not soot or ash or dust. I look at a window closer by, as if I’ve only just remembered the people who must have inhabited this city, with the buildings as proof. I check all of the chimneys one after the other, searching for a wisp of smoke or steam. I search for movement. The pattern of the road network. I search for moving cars, intersections. We’re up high, but not high enough to see over the roofs and into the streets. The windows again. The back of a TV. A half-drawn curtain. The corner of a wardrobe. Toadstools with white dots on the glass of the window.
135
The remnants are lying on the bottom of the bowl, a shriveled sack of pale yellow scales. The goldfish died of suffocation or starvation or both, the only visible victim of the situation outside. Its dark eye has subsided and is staring inwards, as if desperate to turn away from what it saw from the windowsill.
Was the goldfish forgotten because it was everybody’s and nobody’s? Or did the difficulties prevent the owner from returning to the apartment, leaving them with a sickly sense of impotence every time they ate or drank?
This is just the first floor, Harry tells me. I might not believe it, but it’s true. None of our wealthy residents would have bought a first-floor apartment if the windows only provided a view of the windows of a neighboring building. That’s why the first floor is much higher than usual. He says we’re in the wrong place for a good view of the city.
In the kitchen he opens the cupboards. It’s a kitchen that was rarely, if ever, used for cooking. The apartment’s real kitchen, the large one where all of the meals were prepared, can’t be far away either. This one was for talking, sitting around, eating sandwiches or warming up leftovers. Two cupboards are filled with glasses, mugs and plates. Harry finds a canister of fish food and the instructions for a coffee machine that’s nowhere in sight. He picks out two sets of cutlery from the cutlery drawer and puts them in the inside pocket of his jacket, as if it’s not food that’s been in short supply, but knives, forks and spoons. In the fridge, a tin rolls around in the bottom of the vegetable drawer.
“Drink up,” Harry says. “You can use it.”
He hands me a garish fortifying drink.
Why can I use it more than him?
“We’ll share,” I say assertively.
“Of course we’ll share,” Harry says. “Hurry up.”
I sit down on the armrest of the sofa and guzzle frenzied fizz that tingles in my nose and eyes; I don’t taste a thing. While Harry’s drinking, I notice a magazine in a wooden rack between the sofa and the window. It dates from before the exodus. On the front page a celebrity turns her bloodshot eyes away from the camera. On her arm, a man who does look into the lens, angry and desperate. They are hurriedly leaving a building. The caption under the photo: “Why won’t they let us be happy?”
“Check out those boobs,” Harry says.
I open the magazine; the paper has turned stiff. In her preface, the editor reviews the contents. Not the slightest insinuation of a political or social issue. I leaf on, diagonally scanning the blocks of text: births, marriages, illness, deaths, the normal entertainment. I study the cartoon, which goes on about the couple on the cover and their impossible happiness. They’re featured in their underwear, the woman bare-breasted. Her nipples, indented around the edges as if they’re flowers, reach out to the warmth of the spotlights. I study the crossword, the ads. I leaf back, looking at all of the faces, captions, the questions in bold face. One catches my eye. A man in his fifties with an old-fashioned tapered mustache, a singer or a soap star, posing on a motorcycle in front of a villa, is asked if things are different now, given recent events, from how they were before. As far as that’s concerned, the man replies, a celebrity like him is no different from ordinary people and equal before the law. Plus he has to set an example.