You can’t repair it?
I tapped at the keys at random, but the levers still refused to move.
“Your voice is trapped inside this machine. It’s not broken, it’s just been sealed off now that it no longer has a purpose.”
Sealed… sealed… sealed… The word spun meaninglessly in my head.
“It’s an extraordinary sight, don’t you think?” he said. “Every one of these is a voice. A mountain of voices wasting away here, never again able to make the air tremble. And today, yours joins them.” He picked up my typewriter with one hand and tossed it back where it had been resting. It sounded like a heavy door slamming shut—closing off my voice.
Why? Why are you doing this?
My lips moved but no sound emerged.
“You don’t seem to understand. There’s no point in trying to talk anymore.”
He put his hand over my mouth. His palm was cool and smelled vaguely of metal, no doubt from the stopwatch.
“You’ll forget you ever had a voice,” he continued. “You may find it annoying at first, until you get used to it. You’ll move your lips as you just did, go looking for a typewriter, a notepad. But soon enough you’ll see how pointless it is. You have no need to talk, no need to utter a single word. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. Then, at last, you’ll be all mine.”
The hand that had been resting over my mouth slid down to my chin and then to my throat, where he took his time caressing every hollow, as though making sure that the voice that had once been there was, in fact, gone for good.
I wanted to cry out as loudly as I could, to push him away and run from the room. But I simply stood still, tensing my body. The sensation of his fingers on my throat was like a strand of wire being wrapped around me again and again.
“Do you know why I became a typing teacher?” he asked, his hand still at my neck.
I don’t know. I don’t understand anything.
I shook my head back and forth, but his hand stayed in place.
“And you don’t need a voice to type,” he said, closing his hand more tightly around my throat. The tips of his fingers sank into my skin. Perhaps he was trying to wring out any last bit of my voice that remained.
“In the classroom, you were all silent. Not one word while you were typing, while every nerve was concentrated in your fingers. There are rules to govern the fingers, but not the voice. That was the one thing that bothered me. But the fingers! They moved with nothing but the sound of tapping to accompany them, according to my instruction, rapidly and precisely. Glorious, wasn’t it? The end of the hour always came too soon. The fingers were lifted from the keys. And then you would begin to talk about anything you wanted to. Someone wants to eat cake on the way home. Someone else knows a good bakery. By the way, are you free on Saturday? What about a movie? It’s been ages. How utterly boring. And the fingers that had been obedient a moment before have lost their coherence, are reduced now to fastening a purse or fixing a hairdo or clinging to my arm.”
But what could be more natural? I say what I want to say, move my fingers as I want to move them. You only give orders in the class.
“I was glad that I was able to erase your voice. Did you know that an insect will fall silent if you cut off its antennae? It will just sit there, as if frozen, and even refuse to eat. The same as you, really. When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself. But don’t worry. You’ll be staying right here. You’ll live among the fading voices trapped in these typewriters, and I’ll be here with you, giving you instructions. Nothing too difficult. In fact, it will be a bit like learning to type.”
He released me at last. I sat down, rested my head on the table, and drew in a deep breath. My throat throbbed.
“The intermediate class is about to begin. I’d better be going down.” He slipped the stopwatch into his inner pocket. “The test today involves typing a medical article. Quite difficult, in fact, which should make it fun. But you wait here and keep quiet.”
He closed the door behind him. I could hear the sound of a heavy lock turning and his footsteps receding. Then I was alone…
I realized that the woman in my novel had also become trapped in a tight place. At this point, I gathered up the pages I’d written that day, secured them under a paperweight, and turned off my desk light. I had imagined that the two of them, bound by a warmer and more ordinary affection, would wander off to search for her voice at a typewriter factory or in a lighthouse at the end of a cape or in a morgue or in the storage room of a stationer’s, but somehow things had ended up like this. It happened quite often that my writing went far astray from what I’d imagined before I started, so I went to sleep without worrying any more about it.
The next morning, when I woke up, the calendars had disappeared.
There were only three or four of them in the house, and they were all advertisements, so I was hardly attached to them. Nor was R as upset over calendars as he had been about photographs. Of course, the loss would cause some inconvenience to begin with, but one could always find other ways to count the days.
I burned them in the little incinerator in the garden. They caught fire easily, and they left behind just the wire spirals that had bound the pages.
The bottom of the incinerator was filled with ashes. They formed a soft mass, which, when nudged with the poker, rose up in a cloud. As I watched the ashes, it occurred to me that the disappearances were perhaps not as important as the Memory Police wanted us to believe. Most things would disappear like this when set on fire, and they could be blown away on the wind with very little regard for what they might once have been.
Smoke rose from the gardens of the houses nearby and was soon absorbed into the low-hanging clouds. The snow had stopped, but the morning was cold as usual. The children wore their school backpacks over heavy winter coats. The neighbor’s dog studied the scene from his doghouse with sleepy eyes, only his muzzle protruding out into the snow. People had gathered in the street and were talking in small groups.
“I haven’t seen your old friend recently.” The man who had once made hats spoke to me over the fence. “Is he all right?”
“He was ill for a while, but he’s feeling much better,” I told him. For a moment I worried that he knew the old man had been picked up by the Memory Police, but I quickly realized that did not seem to be the case.
“Who wouldn’t be under the weather with the cold going on and on like this?”
“Not to mention the fact that there’s almost nothing in the market to buy, and you have to wait in long lines for the little they do have.” The woman from a house across the street had joined us. “A half hour out shopping in the snow chills you to the bone.”
“A few days ago my grandson said he wanted some custard to soothe his swollen tonsils, but I couldn’t find any no matter how hard I looked.” This was the man who worked at the town hall and lived in the house next to mine.
“Custard is a luxury nowadays. You need eggs, and the chickens won’t lay because of the cold. I waited an hour the other day and they would sell me only four eggs.”
“I went to five different grocers before I could find a head of cauliflower, but the only one they had left was brown and shriveled.”
“And the butcher shops get a little emptier every time you go in. In the old days, you could barely see the ceiling for all the sausages they had hanging there, but now it’s just one or two scrawny things and they sell those by half past ten.”
Each one in turn told of his or her trials finding enough to eat.