The Guard (16 page)

115

A sledgehammer blow of his fist, which won't let itself be stopped by a bit of compacted sawdust between two sheets of gray veneer. I constantly expect that first, pounding smash on the door. Almost an hour has passed in nerve-wracking silence.

The cylinder of the lock prevents me from looking in. I can't see any light under the door.

A wild cat leaping up against the bars, spitting frothy saliva. I pass the pistol to my left hand to wipe the sweat off my palm. Long curving fangs clamped on the unyielding iron for hours. Forehead and face a bloody lump of raw meat. Caged beasts. Their nature.

An hour later I'm calmer. I lean back with my head against the wall so that I will pick up the least little vibration on the other side. I still have all the time in the world to get wound up. The guard is probably asleep.

It's just a coincidence he's not snoring tonight.

With my heart in my throat I slowly push the toilet door open. Empty. The seat is up. I return immediately.

I do two inspection rounds, each time hurrying back to the storeroom door. I seek out the gray rectangle from a great distance, my eyes homing in on it. I am attached by a line and slowly reeled in.

I cough, by chance, then deliberately. I cough and listen. It's a small room and it's quiet. If the guard is awake, he now knows I'm here. He'll understand I'm on guard here and not at the bunkroom. I can hear him easily, even if he whispers.

I scratch with my nails. As if lightly tickling the door.

He knows I don't want to wake anyone up.

Does he think, having just woken, that he's heard a mouse? A mouse?

I clear my throat. I recognize my voice in the sound.

Is he sleeping on the table?

Is he sitting in the corner between the rations and the ammunition, on the concrete ledge? He has wrapped his arms around his legs. Is he thinking of his old dad, bent over in a mineshaft? Is he trying to grasp how long forty years is?

He thinks, I have to keep quiet.

He sits in a corner and waits for his time to come.

The convenience of only having one possibility. The advantage.

He thinks, this is my chance.

He thinks, if I keep quiet, sooner or later he'll open the door and then I'll grab the little runt by the throat and squeeze it tight before he can let out a peep.

116

He hangs his cap over his jacket on the hook on the wall. The door is wide open. He lingers by the foot of the bed. After twenty-four hours almost everything is back to how it was before. We sleep either side of midnight, the best hours. I've scrubbed the smell of the guard's body out of the linen with my fists. I push my nose into the pillow and sniff. I want to keep smelling this all night: liquid soap, no matter how artificial or industrial the perfume. I'll be able to drift off into a deep sleep again without any trouble. I'll be able to dream calm dreams and wake up refreshed. It's like the old days. The guard isn't here. He has never been here. We're guarding the building alone again. It's the first time since he suddenly appeared. Harry spits on his hand. Twice. He's angry, I feel that at once. It hurts, but of course his anger isn't directed at me. “A few more days,” he growls in my ear. “When he's hungry enough, he'll start to talk. We can count on it.” He's angry. I hold tight, but he's angry about the guard and all the things he's keeping secret. Harry laughs with anger, saying they can't touch us. He is rough and presses down on me with all his weight, but that has nothing to do with me.

117

Harry slips in for the interrogation. He holds the Flock at the ready, close to his cheek, turns the key in the lock, opens the door no wider than necessary and shuffles in sideways, flicking the light on and immediately closing the door behind him.

After three days he no longer greets the guard.

No more, “You know what we want to hear.” Or, “Are you ready for some more?” Or, “Shall I undo the gag so you can get it off your chest?” Or, “Come on, man, don't be shy.”

After three days Harry goes back to eating his meals outside, next to me.

The time Harry spends in the storeroom now passes in almost constant silence. As if he's keeping vigil at a relative's deathbed: a question of hours.

Now and then I jump from the sound of a blow striking home and Harry screaming that the guard has to stop, that he has to stop his little games, that it's for his own good, begging him to once, just once, think of the resident, the client after all, who doesn't know what's hanging over his head, and what kind of gutless guard is he anyway? As long as he doesn't think someone's going to clean up after him. He can just lie there in his own filth. It's either talk or stay lying there like that, it's either stay lying there like that or eat and drink, and what's it going to be?

Harry says that the guard is lying on the table. He's sacrificed his sheet, tearing it up into strips. He says he tied the guard up right away and since then he hasn't made a single attempt to get loose. He asks me if I know why. He'll tell me: it's his guilty conscience eating away at him.

118

One morning Harry appears in his gray vest with his jacket, shirt and tie draped over his arm. Drenched in sweat and with his pale, freckled shoulders drooping, he locks the storeroom door and slips the key into his trouser pocket. He scratches the hair on his throat irritably, removes his cap, then puts it back on at the correct angle.

“It's hard,” Harry says after catching his breath on the chair. “It's a hard, merciless test and you and me, we just have to get through it. It's about determination, Michel. For the sake of that one human life above us. For the sake of his security.”

He fills his mouth with bottled water and shakes his head gently while swallowing it in two gulps. “If the guard's an agent, he's a kind of agent we could never have suspected. A completely new kind, for insane fucking missions they reserve for niggers.”

119

Although it's the middle of my sleep, I'm immediately awake, as if I've been lying here for three hours with my eyes closed waiting for this scream. Now that it's come, I'm hardly surprised. It is the first sound from the guard in six days.

He screams that he doesn't know a thing about a last resident.

I hear it word for word.

He doesn't scream aimlessly, this is no uncontrolled eruption. His scream has a purpose. His voice and the way it's raised tell us that this first time will also be the last time. His contribution is once only and definitive. He won't be adding anything else. It's over and out.

I am staring into the darkness when Harry comes into the bunkroom and switches on the light. He paces back and forth from the door to the washbasin, keeping it up for a couple of minutes. With the table gone, his steps ring in the small room.

“Did you hear what he said?” Harry asks. “One sentence. That's enough. He gave himself away from the word go. Did you hear it? The last resident? He claims he doesn't have a clue. Yeah, that makes it obvious, doesn't it? The last resident is the
reason
for his posting! Are we really supposed to believe the organization hasn't informed him about the
reason
for his posting? If he knows anything at all, then surely that there's only one left, one single resident who's in great danger, enough danger for three instead of two guards.”

Later—I've washed and dressed and am sitting on the stool next to the door even though I have almost an hour left in which to rest—Harry says he needs my help. From now on we have to keep the guard awake the whole time. If we also keep him awake in the hours that Harry's asleep, then we'll manage it. No doubt about it. He'll definitely snap.

I have to go into the storeroom with him, Harry says. There's something he needs to show me, a trick. The way he does it.

120

With the Flock up near my cheek I follow Harry into the darkness, creeping into the stench, a musty cocktail I can't break down into its constituent elements. Urine, in any case, stale urine. I feel my eyes watering and press back against the wall. I shut out the idea that this foul air is entering my lungs, settling in soft tissue, contaminating my body with horrific complaints that will only reveal themselves after an incubation period, starting with small, unmistakable signs: itching, subcutaneous blisters, blurred vision, blood-streaked stools, fungal infections. I am firmly convinced that it is not the absence of electric light, but the unutterable stench that is responsible for the darkness in the storeroom.

Once Harry has locked the door and turned on the light, I am able, after an intense bout of blinking, to see again. I don't know what reaches my retina first. The boxes. Sideways. Without casting a conscious glance in that direction, I see that the ammunition on the shelves hasn't been touched. The boxes stand in rank, exactly as during my last inspection. There's no time for this vague consolation, because my brain is faced with the task of deciphering what the table, in the middle of the room, is presenting me with. Limbs, spread slightly, and bound to the planks by the white cotton
tentacles of a powerful creature that is concealed under the table and reaching up through the cracks. The limbs are defenseless and naked and the planks are no longer gray, but black, saturated as if after a cloudburst. The guard isn't wearing his uniform: I don't see any blue anywhere, I don't see any underwear. His large feet are angled outward. One of his hands is turned up, his right. In the pale palm I see dead insects, worms, grubs. His mouth is fixed in a grin by the grimy gag. His eyes are closed; he's already sound asleep. Exhausted from his scream. No, not grubs. Gradations of the rosy color have spread all over his immense black body. It's on his face, his penis, his calves, the soles of his feet. I screw my eyes up out of instinctive revulsion. He is covered with it; the guard is no longer entirely black. The new color has soaked into the tentacles close to the wet wood. The marks on the white stripes merge into pale brown. His penis, as thick as a smoked sausage, is resting on a swollen, pitch-black pouch and nestling against the inside of his thigh. Under a wreath of knobs of hair. He is circumcised, no, the foreskin has been pulled back, bunched up and wrinkled against the edge of the glans as if he has just had an erection. There is plenty of pink on the glans, on the pouch, on the shaft. This is what I see in a few seconds. It's not grubs, it's cuts. It is bulging flesh: pink, whitish pink, gray and purplish red. A lot of yellow too. I see greenish yellow. I smell stale urine and suppurating flesh. I concentrate on the flat underside of his big toe, close by, to suppress the rising nausea. The pale, flat underside of his big toe. Miraculously spared. Or used as a lever to stretch the sole of his foot.

121

This is what I see in a couple of seconds. With these hundreds of colorful bulges, his body looks like it's engaged in a horrific struggle,
molecular warfare, blossoming flesh erupting through his old skin. He's undergoing a metamorphosis.

Harry goes over to the table and bends over the guard's head. He says that for two days now he's been too feeble-minded to open his eyes so that he can never be sure if the guard's awake or not and has to keep at it the whole time.

From close by, Harry stares at the shining eyelids. Their noses are almost touching when he bursts out screaming, “Yes, Michel, Mr. Sensitive is taunting us!” Harry yells each word separately, as hard as his lungs and vocal chords can manage and all in the same tone.

Suddenly, without drawing my attention to it, Harry is holding a tool in his hand. I recognize the transparent, light-blue plastic of our water bottles. It surrounds his fist. It's the bottom of a bottle. A short blade is protruding from this protective covering. The paring knife.

He says, “This is how I do it.”

Harry emphasizes the “I.” He does it like this. He's giving me a tip, not an order. If I can find a better way, he'd be glad to hear it.

At first, Harry explains, he thought he had to nick him in a new spot every time. He did it more or less every ten minutes, it made sure the black bastard paid attention. Eventually, however, he discovered by chance that cutting open old wounds is more effective. Generally he observes a reaction over his whole body. A bit like a cow that's bumped an electric fence. He asks if I understand him. He still needs to keep nicking him in new places as well because it takes a while before the wound is infected enough to give his lordship a good shake. As strange as it sounds, Harry says, I'll need to lay in a supply. The simplest, he's found, is to alternate every ten minutes: new, old. But I'll find out myself. The situation is constantly changing.

Harry studies the guard's body. On the side above a knee he finds what he was looking for. He indicates a position on the other side of the table that will give me a good view of the procedure. When he pulls the blunt paring knife forcefully over the swelling, green fluid splats out against the light-blue plastic. The intense contraction in the guard's arms and legs keeps up for quite a while. “No two ways about it,” Harry says. “He's awake now.”

Outside, at the bunkroom door, before going to sleep, Harry urges me not to forget one thing. The guard is silent because he knows something. If he didn't know anything, or if he wasn't an agent, he would have made something up long ago.

122

A half-hour passes. The guard's breathing is regular; he's probably sleeping deeply. I'm sitting on the concrete ledge in the corner between the rations and the ammunition and staring at the stains on the ground. The resident is our priority. He is my priority. I repeat that to myself.

I hear mumbling. The guard has opened his eyes and turned his head toward me. He is looking for me and as soon as I stand up and come into his field of vision, his deep voice sounds again, incomprehensible because of the gag.

Is it because I've given him a respite of half an hour that he is now willing to talk?