The Guard (13 page)

When Harry and I talk to each other it's like we're putting on a play. Our words fall into their fixed patterns, the sentences are old friends, but the dialogue sounds stilted and rehearsed. The presence of an observer in the darkness behind the footlights changes us into a couple of hams. The guard himself doesn't say much and hardly a word in Harry's presence. He does display an occasional tendency to briefly repeat statements or phrases, including some that are totally trivial, for no apparent reason. Is he taking mental notes that inadvertently leak out of his mouth? Do they combine to form a report he leafs through once more just before falling asleep?

95

After a single five-hour night the linen is saturated with his body odor, which mine is powerless to resist. It is not as pungent as Harry's, not as sharp, but strong all the same. According to Harry there can be no doubt about it: the last resident is in acute danger.
That's why they've sent the guard after all. The danger is evidently so acute that the organization didn't have time to arrange things properly and is counting on us being able to share the linen peacefully in the meantime. He doesn't exclude the possibility of a logistic follow-up. Maybe within a couple of days. A week at most.

I hear their footsteps build up and then fade back into silence and each time I hope it's the last time I've heard it, that I'm about to fall asleep. I've got three hours left, I have to relax. The pistol is lying on my stomach with the barrel pointing at the door. I practice what I hope will be a controlled reflex.

After yet another pass, I slip out of bed. Barefoot, I look out through the opening into the basement proper, lit by three fading fluorescent tubes. Harry and the guard don't deviate from the set trajectory. I can hardly make them out. I don't think they're talking. Sometimes I see the movement of feet and legs, but rarely higher than the knees. They seem to be avoiding the light, circumnavigating it as if strolling on the banks of a deep pond. Still black water that makes you gasp for breath. If you go under, you'll never resurface.

96

The guard says he spoke to him twice. I jump and realize I was almost nodding off; I only got an hour's broken sleep. I can't remember asking any questions. Not Harry—his previous colleague, the one in the next box. He went to see him twice, even though it wasn't allowed. Speaking to colleagues was forbidden. He has no idea why, but it wasn't his favorite rule and in the end he broke it twice. He wants to know if that bothers me. I shrug. He asks me to be honest. I tell him it's nothing to do with me and water under the bridge anyway. It's in the past, he doesn't have to worry about it anymore. He shakes his head disparagingly, straightens
his shoulders and takes a deep breath: he shouldn't have done it. It's something he will never be able to undo. Rules are rules and a guard has to respect them. He understands my disapproval and also my reluctance to express it bluntly. He says he's deeply sorry about it. It was stronger than he was. One day he saw his colleague waving. The gesture was unmistakable. It was a greeting, directed at him. He waved back; as far as he knew greetings were not forbidden. It started very innocently, with a full sixty meters separating them. While the guard blathers on, I wonder what's got into him: he's talking as if we've already spent two days walking around chatting together. I don't think I've asked him anything. He says that they were best friends long before they exchanged a word with each other. He can't explain it, but it was something he just knew, he knew it for a fact. He had a sleeping schedule, presumably adjusted for a skeleton security staff, and he followed it precisely. After waking up he always prepared himself quickly and went to stand in front of his box with his heart in his throat. Almost always, his friend waved to him right away, asking with a thumbs-up sign if everything was okay. After his friend had gone to bed himself a little later, the guard kept his eye on his watch and made sure to look in the direction of that box about five hours later when it was time for him to reappear. It was like that every day. They were best friends, anyone could see that.

97

Harry grabs my sleeve. With gentle pressure, he pulls me into the narrow gap between Garages 34 and 35. It's pitch black, but Harry doesn't slow down. At the first crusher I feel his hands grasping my shoulders as he pushes me up against the iron wall. His face is close, his breath as warm as blood.

“Back to the start,” he says.

“How do you mean?”

“Where he asks you what you think about it.”

“He was talking about rules, the regulations, and him breaching them. He was very sorry about it.”

“And he wanted you to be honest? About what you thought of his offense?”

“Yes, he honestly wanted my opinion.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“Not really. I just said it was water under the bridge. Then he said he understood it, my disapproval. He understood my not wanting to express it in so many words.”

“What was your answer to that?”

“Nothing. He was in the wrong of course.”

“I know that. But you didn't add anything else?”

“No.”

“Was that the first time he's made a confession or admitted something?”

“It was a complete surprise, Harry. He just launched into the story. I was dumbstruck.”

I hear him scratching his throat, his fingernails rasping through the curling hairs. “So they give each other the thumbs-up now and then and wave hello . . .”

“He said they were best friends. He just knew it.”

“Best friends?”

“Yes, he was convinced of it. He thought so, anyway.”

“He was wrong?”

“I don't know. I don't know what to make of his story. One day he sees the guard make a gesture he doesn't understand. Not giving him the thumbs-up or waving, but something less obvious, surreptitious, from the hip. After fretting for a couple of hours, he decides that something might be going on; it must have been some kind of signal. He said that a friend in need is a friend indeed. He asked me if he was right. If a friend in need was a friend indeed.”

“He asked you that?”

“Yes. He made a point of it. I said I hoped so.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He nodded. He hoped so too. And what happens? That friend of his is rather upset by his visit. He tells the guard to piss off. He knows it's against the rules, doesn't he? But we're friends, says the guard. He says that a friend in need is a friend indeed. His colleague puts a finger to his lips and keeps his mouth shut. Meanwhile the guard has cast a glance into the sentry box: it's identical to his. Different colors, that's all. He sees a simple figurine on a shelf, a porcelain cat. There are others too, five or six, but not on the shelf. Back in his box he can't get that figurine out of his head. When he sees his own bare shelf, he thinks of that white pussycat. It has a blissful smile on its face and its long-lashed eyes are closed, and it's made so you can put it against the wall or next to some object and it will look like it's rubbing up against it.”

“Are you taking the piss?”

“That's how he told me about it, in one big gush. There's more. The next day the guard goes back. After having brooded about the incident all night, he throws caution to the wind and goes over to his friend's sentry box a second time. And again, wordlessly, the friend shows him the door. The guard says that although he appreciates his colleague's desire to stick to the rules, he still finds his behavior extremely unfriendly. As a token of his good character he could lend him the figurine on the shelf. After all, he has figurines to spare, whereas he doesn't have a single one. He'll take good care of it and bring it back at the end of his service. He says that since their last meeting he's had to think about that pussycat constantly, he found it so beautiful. But his colleague snatches the figurine from the shelf and threatens to throw it down on the ground and smash it to smithereens if the guard doesn't get the hell out of there . . .”

Harry doesn't react.

“That's his story,” I say.

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“How's it end?”

“I don't know. He clammed up. He didn't say another word. I guess he just slinked off.”

98

I get Harry to smell too; reluctantly he puts his nose in the crack. The wind is blowing straight at the gate again and carrying silence, the silence of the country, I think. Maybe the countryside starts just a couple of kilometers away. The smell of rotting leaves is almost gone. Instead I think I can detect manure. At least, it's the smell I associate with manure. A steaming mixture of hay and dung, shoveled out of a shed and spread on a field. Has agriculture recovered? Will the crops grow normally? Will the harvest be any good, will it be edible? Or is the farmer ignoring my questions and doing what he's done his whole life: farming. Hoisting himself up onto the seat of his old tractor and chugging over his fields with his last few liters of fuel. Preparing the soil for sowing regardless of any prohibitions or restrictions that have been put in place, despite the warnings of a poison he can neither see nor smell. Acting instinctively by following his nature, true to the calendar and the seasons. Wearing the threadbare blue overalls that are more familiar to him than his own wife. Carrying on the way a cow produces milk, a chicken lays eggs and a pig just grows. Is that possible, two kilometers from here? A bent-over farmer, chickens scratching in the dirt, a nervous mutt? Cows shoulder to shoulder in a muggy shed? Sparrows chirping in the farmyard. Harry turns away from the gate. As if he can read my thoughts, he purses his lips and shakes his head. He can't smell any manure. Plus, he says, it would be
unusual anyway. The tree is bare, not a leaf in sight, not even any buds. It's too early for plowing and farming. Unless they're piling the dung from the sheds on the fields in preparation. But him, he can't smell a thing.

99

We've just started moving again, in step, when Harry suddenly stops. Half a step ahead of him I prick up my ears, hand on my Flock. The buzzing of the middle tube keeps getting deeper, the end is near. I am trying to concentrate on sounds from the sally port between the street and the entrance gate when Harry says that the guard deliberately left his story unfinished. Because he wants us to keep thinking about it. That's exactly what he wants. He very consciously left it open, without a conclusion. Whereas the outcome of the story and what we think about it are actually irrelevant and meant to distract us from the heart of the matter. That's obvious! It's not about that stupid porcelain figurine. Am I crazy? A pussycat to put on his shelf? What a load of bull. Come on. What kind of guard has porcelain figurines in his sentry box? He wants me to tell him that. He asks me if I've ever heard anything so ridiculous, porcelain figurines in a sentry box? When I shake my head, he hisses emphatically, See! He tells me the guard is a sly one. And to think that someone like me, who's been to university—now pointing a finger at my chest—didn't see through his trick at once! The guard deliberately wove an absurd detail into his story—porcelain figurines—to make Harry and me think, This is so extraordinary, it can't be made up. Damn sneaky.

When I ask why it's so important for the guard to have us believe his story, Harry says, Confession. Because that was what it was after
all, a confession. It was a confession of a breach of regulations he's fabricated to the best of his abilities. What can that mean?

Harry is going to tell me what it means and as he whispers the words into existence, I realize that his understanding has only just preceded them. Didn't the guard ask me to be honest? Hadn't he understood my disapproval, which I didn't even need to express? Hadn't he been immensely sorry for a violation that was essentially rather trivial? For Harry it's as plain as the nose on my face: the guard's half-baked confession was designed to lure me into his net. He wanted to arouse my sympathies, pretending to open up his heart to me to draw me out, trying to tempt me into confessing violations that were possibly worse than his, committed here in this very basement. That was his goal. That was what he was after. Come on, Harry says. First absolutely nothing, two days with his lips sealed and then suddenly a whole spiel? Do I think that's normal? He wants me to tell him that. He thought all along that the explanation was bizarre: why wouldn't two guards be allowed to speak to each other? Why doesn't he know where he was stationed or what he was guarding? And then out of the blue, up and at it, off he goes, sixty meters to visit his friend for a chat? Get out of here.

100

I stand on tiptoe and press down on the gray mass with my full weight, arms straight. Puddles of gray suds appear around my fists, only to be absorbed again by the sheets the moment I stop pushing. Harry is keeping watch at the entrance gate, the guard is at the bunkroom door, which is wide open; his figure fills the doorway. He looks over his shoulder and asks if it's okay, if he shouldn't help. He likes getting his hands wet, he doesn't mind it at all. He wants
to thank me. For letting him sleep in my bed and being willing to share my sheets with him. That is, he says, a friendly gesture. The least he can do is wash the sheets himself. I'm wary. At the same time I do my best to sound casual when I say that I prefer to do it myself, that I'm used to it. It's no picnic in a small washbasin, there's a knack to it. Before you know it, I hear myself joking, the whole room's flooded. Yes, the guard replies earnestly, he understands. The whole room flooded. He turns back to the basement proper and crosses his arms, his arched shoulders pulling his blue jacket tight.

He is a remarkable figure. As remarkable as the porcelain figurines in his supposed friend's sentry box. Maybe that's a tried and tested tactic the organization uses for its special agents, the guards who, besides guarding something, inspect other guards while they're at it. Maybe the organization always deploys striking characters for that purpose, characters who are so striking it doesn't occur to the guards under surveillance to suspect them of anything, least of all a secret and highly delicate evaluation. It's just too implausible.