The manager was a man with a greyish complexion who tried hard to be jovial. He was a smoker and must have been miserable in a place like this. When they got into his car, he changed the subject to the reason he assumed they had come. They were being asked to elect a new executive director at the meeting, but everyone here felt that the old management team should be kept on despite the reforms. A large and important enterprise such as this one should be run by experts, after all. Of course there was a lot that needed changing. The equipment was antiquated, but that was not the management's fault. The enterprise had to pour money that might have been used to build a modern production line into the state coffers, and once the state got hold of the money, it simply evaporated, or rather got swallowed up by palaces of culture and power dams that did more harm than good… He stopped as though he had suddenly realized he didn't know who he was talking to, or rather, as though he knew exactly who he was talking to.
There were still two hours before the meeting began. On television, meetings were as boring as heads of state receiving ambassadors or saying goodbye to each other at airports. Unfortunately, this was precisely the kind of thing news producers wanted. They didn't care if viewers were bored or not. They knew that most people had no choice of programme and that they would look at the screen even if all they showed was smoke pouring out of smokestacks. Sometimes there were interesting faces at these meetings, but they were the exception, and they almost never belonged to the person who was speaking. The speakers usually had oddly shaped heads and spoke in slippery sentences. In the cutting-room Pavel's colleagues would often try in vain to find a single sentence that actually meant something.
The car bounced along the uneven road. The plant was laid out like a small town. It had streets, junctions, railway tracks and yard engines, hospitals, canteens, timberyards and its own signs with rules and regulations printed on coloured panels.
Pavel remarked that the windows in several buildings were smashed although the buildings were obviously still in use.
'Yes,' said the manager, 'even with the greatest precautions we occasionally have explosions, it's not worth replacing the glass.'
'Many dead?' asked Sokol.
'Oh no, not when you consider we're living under a volcano. Isn't it odd how people go on building their villages under volcanoes? We don't have a volcano of our own, so we had to make one.' The manager laughed stiffly. It was clearly not the first time he had delivered this witticism.
'Living under a volcano takes courage,' remarked Sokol. 'Building a volcano is just perverse.' A pity he would never say that on camera.
They stopped in front of a building that was newer and more modern than the others. The manager got out of the car to take them inside. Sokol was prepared to follow him, but Pavel was more interested in the place than in speeches, so he asked if he could look around the volcano.
The manager hesitated, and then moved to get into the car again.
'I can walk,' he suggested. 'In fact, I'd rather walk. You can't see much from a car.'
'But I can't let you wander around on your own. There are dangerous operations going on. I'm sure you'd like to take some shots around here, and I could probably arrange it, but not just now.'
'That's all right. I'll leave my camera here.'
'Good. Are you carrying matches?'
'I use a lighter.'
The crew followed the manager's interrogation with interest.
'You should have left it at the gate.'
'I won't light up.'
Looking slightly annoyed, the manager promised to send his secretary down to look after him, then went into the building. The rest of the crew followed. While Pavel was looking around the plant, they would set up the lights and position the cameras, which on his return he would order to be moved, just so they wouldn't begin to think him redundant.
He was alone. He noticed that most of the trees near the buildings had their tops lopped off. The buildings had roofs but they looked old and in need of repair.
A lorry carrying sacks and bearing a dangerous load warning drove by him. He could hear short, sharp detonations coming from somewhere in the distance. With every breath, he felt the air scraping his throat and making it hard for him to inhale. It would take more than sound and images to capture the stench of the poisonous fog that permeated everything.
Another lorry displaying a warning- sign drove past, loaded with metal barrels. This plant was where one of the most effective plastic explosives in the world was made. It was odourless and almost impossible to detect, and every terrorist on earth was eager to get his hands on it. He wanted to see how they made it, but they would never let him, and if he so much as asked, they would report him for being too curious. How were they to know who he was working for?
The secretary finally came. They introduced themselves to each other, but her name was as ordinary as her appearance, and he instantly forgot it. She said she would show him what she could, even though there wasn't much: whatever was interesting was off limits. And there was nothing nice to look at.
'Do you make aniline?'
She nodded. She reminded him superficially of Eva. She wore thick make-up that bluned any individual features she might have had. She apparently liked purple, and she swayed her hips when she walked. 'But the plant is being rebuilt now. They had no choice. A lot of women ended up dead.'
'How many women work in the aniline dye plant?'
She gave him a look that suggested he'd asked her
something outrageous. 'Quite a few, a couple of hundred certainly. But they have to be at least forty years old. And they have to sign a waiver saying they understand what the consequences might be. To their health, that is.'
She took him into a warehouse and introduced him to a bearded foreman. The building was old. The walls had not been painted in a long time and were cracked in some places. Warning signs were displayed everywhere. An enormous ventilator roared up near the ceiling. Metal barrels were stacked neatly on spacious shelves. The foreman explained how they handled the explosives to avoid accidents. In the rear two women in coloured dresses were lifting barrels on to the highest shelves with a forklift truck. 'What would happen if one of those barrels fell off?' he asked.
The foreman grimaced. Well, they could spend a week trying to put you back together again but they wouldn't succeed.'
'It happens sometimes,' the secretary added. 'They find a watch on an arm but they can't find the body to go with it.'
They went outside again, and the secretary led him past some low wooden buildings. In the distance he saw a double wire fence and could hear the sharp crack of explosions coming from the same direction.
Suddenly he remembered the prison camp. Escape had been impossible, he couldn't leave for a day or even for an hour, he had nothing and no one, neither his camera nor his dog, nothing but his prison uniform, his defiance and his hope that one day all this would come to an end. He'd been certain at the time that as soon as he got out he would try to escape again, that he'd do it better next time and be done with this barbed-wire country forever. Instead, here he was, still around, waiting to film a meeting, a colourless, odourless, antiseptic meeting in rooms that reeked of death.
He looked around to see if there were guard towers and prisoners in striped prison uniforms, but he could only see two workers in blue overalls moving slowly in the distance, one of them carrying an iron rod on his shoulder. In prison camp they had cut iron rods, old, rusty iron rods, and sheets of metal. They put him into a gang with a man called Gabo, who was inside because he'd slept with his thirteen-