17
Today it’s Harry’s turn: he wipes the inside of the tin of corned beef clean with a piece of bread, soaking up the last bit of taste. When the bread is saturated with his saliva, he swallows it. We stay sitting for a moment on opposite sides of the bunkroom door. Then Harry walks all the way to the crusher in the narrow space between Garages 34 and 35 and tosses in the tin. The impact is painful. Not so much the uppercut of piercing decibels, as the meaning of the sound. Harry comes back smiling. He rubs his stomach and opens his mouth to say, “They can’t take that away from us now.”
18
I think of Arthur.
Arthur extends his arm: a well-filled blue dustcoat sleeve with a clenched fist at the end. His other hand points to its length and gestures that the walls are at least twice as thick. He was in service with the Duprez family for years, three streets away. He saw the building rise. Now he works for the Poborskis. He suspects that the bottom layers have even thicker walls, but on the thirty-ninth floor he knows exactly. He’s quiet for a moment looking at the yardstick he’s holding out for us. He says that the apartment has window seats like they used to have in fortresses and castles.
He grabs the two trash bags by their knotted tops. Piss off, I think, piss off! But Arthur just stands there, knees bent, stinking garbage in each hand, as if he feels like he’s forgotten something and is dredging through his memory. Why does he come to chat with us first before putting the bags in the crusher? Doesn’t he notice the stench anymore? Has he always been at the bottom of the household ladder, where stench comes in many varieties, and has he gradually come to cherish those varieties as the peculiarities of his simple life?
Does he have a bad back?
I hope the bags don’t leak, not a drop. That concentrate of rot and decay could stink for days, nestling into our room, where it’s safe because of the lack of circulation. It will creep into our bedding and uniforms and when we start to think it’s gone, it will be because the stench has taken possession of us in our sleep.
Finally Arthur says that the building won’t collapse in a hurry. No, he’s certain of that. Not with walls like these… He lifts the bags up from the floor. There are no traces left on the concrete. It’s Arthur who told us that the building doesn’t have any garbage chutes: they’re too dangerous, they’d be throwing the door open to biochemical terror. According to Arthur, garbage chutes are a thing of the past. In older buildings they’re sealing them up. He lugs the bags to the crusher, disappearing around the corner. We hear them flop down one after the other. After a short pause the motor turns on, building up the hydraulic pressure. When the maximum has been achieved, the motor turns off and the press starts moving. Deep in the container, almost simultaneously, we hear the bags pop like two balloons.
Arthur tells us that they lie full-length on the window seats and stare out. He undoes his dustcoat to arrange the panels neatly one over the other, then pulls the belt tight. They look out over the city like Roman emperors, with delicacies from all over the world in arm’s reach. He’s seen it with his own eyes, at least once. The window seat in the second living area is without a doubt Mr. and Mrs. Poborski’s favorite spot. He says they made their fortune from insulating covers to use on ski slopes and glaciers in the summer. Without the Poborskis, Arthur claims, there would be no ski resorts left anywhere.
19
I wipe my plate clean with a piece of bread, clearly winning Claudia’s approval. I praise her deer-calf stew. Particularly tasty. She smiles. Mr. Olano enjoyed it too. He instructed the butler to call Claudia to the dining room so that he could compliment her personally. She says he’s charming; she loves his big, warm hands. How does she know those hands are warm? Do the Olanos shake hands with their staff? It sounds unlikely to me.
Mr. Olano is no stranger to the staff’s living quarters. The five-star service was included in the exorbitant purchase price of his luxury apartment and he interprets that service in the broadest sense. Without knocking, he opens her bedroom door. It is very quiet, but vague noises from the bowels of the building still reach these rooms. The night light in the hall reflects in Claudia’s eyes, she’s lying on her side. Mr. Olano calmly closes the door. He sits down on the side of the bed. Only after a while does he lay a hand on her hip, which rises up high under the sheet. A big, warm hand that gently explores her body, then moves her hand to his crotch. It doesn’t take long, especially when he feels her other hand, which has found its own way. This is all Mr. Olano requires. He touches her cheek for a moment and disappears.
But Claudia doesn’t look at all as if she’s let something slip or as if her words were meant to make me guess a secret. Perhaps she assumes that his hands are warm because he has a good character. In her world the two things go together. Maybe she dreams of one day feeling his hands on her hip in the darkness of her room, while he sits on the side of her bed and gently whispers her name. In her dream his hands are always warm.
20
The entrance gate starts to move. Harry and I move over to the residents’ elevator and assume the appropriate stance: feet apart, hands behind our backs. Although we serve the residents, we don’t take orders from them.
It’s Mr. Glorieux’s Aston Martin. He is accompanied by his daughter, her blond hair catching the light behind the flat windscreen. The gate has now closed again. Vehicles have to wait a full minute in the sally port between the street gate and the building before the entrance gate opens.
A servant, a friendly youth who rarely stops to talk, steps out of the service elevator. He assumes a pose that is scarcely different from our own. He is wearing a white shirt and a black waistcoat over black pants.
The deep growl of the eight-cylinder engine creeps closer, a predator that can surge forward with all its power in the blink of an eye. The car stops and the servant opens the door for Mr. Glorieux’s daughter. She doesn’t deign to look at him. The oversized sunglasses on the top of her head are keeping her curls under control. In his brown leather pilot’s jacket, Mr. Glorieux walks around the back of the car and says, “Thank you, Ben.” The servant nods and climbs in behind the wheel. With that same controlled growl, the Aston Martin creeps off to its cage, Garage 14. When the elevator doors slide open almost silently, Mr. Glorieux lays a gallant hand on his daughter’s lower back and says, “Gentlemen.”
21
Arthur leans against the wall with one outstretched arm. He says that Mr. Glorieux was one of the founders. That the plan to sell luxury apartments with the service of a five-star hotel was his. There was clearly a market for it, because all forty floors were sold before the derelict factory on the site had even been demolished. A spinning mill the city had been ignoring for years. Red brick, of all things. Trees growing up through the roof.
He thinks back on it with evident pleasure. He is a twelve-year-old boy whiling away countless afternoons on the factory grounds. His secret spot is under the roof on a weathered rafter that looks out over everything, where he rules like a king and smokes cigarettes like his father. He lures a girl here. She walks through the weeds on long, pale legs. Her name is Els. It takes hours before she lets him steal a kiss. In the very spot where the three of us are now standing.
Arthur tells the story of the body and the colony of cats. That the body of a toddler was once found here, or what was left of it, because at the end there were 163 cats living on the factory grounds. Not one adult cat was unscathed, they all bore the marks of furious battles: sockets where eyes had been clawed out, scars where ears had been ripped or bitten off, bald spots and suppurating wounds. Despite that, the neighborhood always stuck up for the colony, especially when Mr. Glorieux displayed interest in the land and began developing his plans. Petition followed petition, there were demonstrations, the factory gate was picketed, a brick went through a stained-glass window at the town hall. Not long afterward they found what the cats had left of the toddler’s body.