The Seventh Candidate (3 page)

“Lorz,” he muttered to the receiver.

“Yes, I know,” said the voice. “I
remembered. Edmond Lorz. We met a few hours ago, bumped into each
other, ha ha. I’m Henry. You can’t have forgotten. How are you,
Edmond? All that time.”

“I don’t know who you are and how you found
my name and number. Stop hounding me or I’ll take action.”

Lorz hung up and returned to the kitchen. He
sat before his plate for a minute and finally put the scraps of
food back in the refrigerator for tomorrow’s dinner.

He vacuum-cleaned the big apartment, except
for three of the rooms. There were the two rooms filled with broken
furniture, locked for thirty years. There was his mother’s bedroom
with the mottos and the effigies and the mirrors to raise the dead,
and the fragments of the Chinese vase she’d gone on trying to patch
up to no avail. The room was unlocked but he never went there.
Going past the closed door he tried to imagine the vase as it had
been, that miniature childhood haven. All he captured was a heron,
a misty mountain crag and a meditating sage. It was fragmented in
his mind too.

At ten o’clock he went into his study, tugged
free a giant poster from a big stack and tacked it to the wall. He
stepped back and stared at it for a few minutes. Then he selected
his instruments, media and chemicals and worked over the lovely
boyish girl until eleven.

He washed his hands and face and brushed his
teeth methodically. Before he went to bed he closed the iron
shutters against the booming of their celebrant rockets and chose
an encyclopedia volume at random. He read at random until church
bells irregularly rang one o’clock. He placed the book and his
glasses on the floor on the safe window side of the bed, within
easy reach in case of insomnia, and switched off the reading
lamp.

In the darkness the images came, bad ones of
course, but also, combating them, the images of the advertising
posters he protected: laughing children, tender-eyed dogs, lakes,
starry skies, seas, fondled cats, snow-capped mountains, summer
forests, vineyards, gardens, hand-in-hand couples, weddings,
close-knit smiling families, and, lingering longest on her, the
lovely boyish girl he’d worked over a few hours before. The last of
the poster images was a flock of sheep with a pure white cloud in
the blue sky.

He was looking for a new doctor. The young
secretary in blue and white smiled insipidly and asked him when he
wanted to consult Dr J. C. He protested that the name was wrong.
Either it was Dr J. and he’d consulted four of those powerless
quacks already, or it was Dr C., the potent one he wanted. It
couldn’t be both. She said, oh no, it was Dr J. C., she was in a
position to know. He could cure whatever was ailing him. She told
him the office number. He wandered in a maze of corridors with
blank doors which he tried. They were locked. He encountered a
woman standing in an open doorway. To one side of it there was a
dish with three silver fish. She was holding an open tin. She said
that she knew about his problem and could cure it. But he knew the
wafers simply relieved symptoms of minor ailments. He went past
her, still looking for the number and trying all of the blank
locked doors.

***

2

At 8:05am, ten days following the
February 26
accident, Dorothea Ruda was
standing on a makeshift podium in the
Ideal Poster
office. She was alarmed at the director’s
tardiness but tried not to show it to the thirteen sleepy
candidates slouched behind their tables before her. One of the
candidates, for want of anything better to do, started assessing
her from neck to ankles and quickly gave it up.

Flushing, she looked around the office
once again to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything for the test.
In her first years with
Ideal
she had recurrent nightmares in which she’d overlooked
something vital. In one it had turned out to be her clothing. She’d
found herself standing stark naked on the podium before the
candidates and her disapproving employer.

She checked the table next to the lectern.
The five bottles of chemicals and the six jars of paint stood
strictly aligned, each identified by a label. There were the
erasers, spatulas, sponges, cutters, scissors and paste-pots. And
of course the brushes, of various sizes. She’d placed them head-up
in a jam-jar in such a way that they looked like a stylized dried
bouquet in a modernistic etching, even though she knew the director
disliked modern art.

A wet roar filled the room. Two of the
candidates jerked awake. The toilet of a minor sub-ministry was
situated just behind the flimsy rear wall of the
Ideal
office. It flushed like an
asthmatic waterfall. As it gurgled into silence Dorothea Ruda
critically examined the giant poster she’d tacked up (maybe a
little crookedly?) on the wall facing the candidates.

The boyish long-necked girl in a sailor
suit was on the point of deriving intense pleasure from an
Eskimo’s
Delight
pistachio
ice-cream cone. Her loveliness survived what the director had done
to her: the lacerations, the political stickers, the swarm of
graffiti and slogans, all perfectly proper of course, nothing at
all like the real ones that covered her on the underground walls.
Next to her was tacked a very large sheet of blank paper, maybe a
little crooked too. Too late to straighten it. The wheeled aluminum
stepladder, whose braking system she’d carefully inspected, stood
to the right of the girl.

The director’s assistant checked the
candidates’ big folding tables again. No oversight there either.
She’d laid out the same bottles and tools as on the director’s
table, also a much smaller format of the girl with the cone,
covered with exactly the same graffiti as the big one on the wall.
It had taken the director, she knew, whole evenings to copy them
twenty-one times. Lots of work for nothing, as all those unoccupied
tables proved. Eight of the applicants, informed by return mail
that employment was contingent on passing an early morning test,
hadn’t shown up.

But then the director hadn’t either.
Normally he was punctual to the second. She wouldn’t be able to
handle the test all by herself, she thought as the big subterranean
office slowly filled with the muted roar of Line 8. If you closed
your eyes (as she did now) you could try to imagine it was strong
wind in the pines of the Central Mountains. Dorothea Ruda lived by
herself in a two-room flat in an industrial suburb of the capital.
Some days she was very homesick.

When the office-door opened at 8:16am she
thought it was a tardy candidate. She didn’t recognize her employer
at first because of his limp and his strangely naked face. Then her
body stiffened into a posture of respectful welcome that
tentatively formulated breasts against her loose blouse. She
thought anxiously: what’s the matter with his leg? What’s happened
to his glasses? And why is he smiling? Things must be bad if he’s
smiling.

As her employer approached the podium she
saw his eyes for the first time in the ten thousand hours of their
association. His dark lenses had always intercepted her glances in
that direction, throwing her own image back at her distorted and
belittled. She’d frequently imagined her employer’s eyes powerfully
dark or luminous gray. They proved to be red-rimmed blue and full
of inconceivable tears.

“Sir, is something wrong?” She held out her
arm to help him onto the podium. The director ignored her question
and also her arm. It was possible he didn’t even see it. His gaze,
only partially outward in the best of cases, was totally inward
now. What did I do? she thought anxiously, what didn’t I do? She
repossessed her arm.

Her employer limped painfully onto the podium
and up to the lectern, dabbing at his eyes with a silk
handkerchief. Without his strongly tinted glasses his eyes wept at
light. He peered at the thirteen applicants, squinting the myopic
blur into semi-focus. He couldn’t help finding them a particularly
unsightly lot. Twelve of the thirteen at any rate, the ones seated
at their folding tables in the front rows. The thirteenth (soon to
be the seventh) candidate, seated in the rear of the big office,
was no more than a blob to his sabotaged vision. The director felt
like ordering him to join the others up front, but finally
didn’t.

It would have been better for both of them
if he had.

A week and a half after the
February 26
accident, the director’s
condition (unlike Operator Seven’s) hadn’t improved. On the
contrary. The world was a blur, his right sole badly lacerated and
the fire in his bowels, he felt, imminent. Limp and blur – and
maybe the fire to come too – had a common cause. He’d got up on the
wrong side of the bed. The wrong side was the window-side, where,
for decades now, he placed encyclopedia and glasses on the floor
before switching off his reading-lamp.

In the middle of that night he’d been
awakened by chanted slogans from the street below, the tail end of
another one of their demonstrations. They also kicked over stinking
garbage cans, unattended for a week. The sanitary workers were on
strike too. Like the bus-drivers, the miners, the railroad workers
and the teachers, to mention just a few.

The underground employees were sure to
rally the movement and then
Ideal Poster
would go bankrupt, and where would he be then, failing in
health and over forty? Practically everybody in the land was on
strike except for the vandals outside, tirelessly screaming and
smashing cars at all hours, day and night, three shifts.

Lorz’s horoscope had announced the day as
“perilous” for himself and his possessions. Worried about his car
parked below, he thoughtlessly got up on the window-side of the
bed, bare-foot naturally, and was instantly lacerated by fine
optical glass. One of fate’s typical ruses.

He removed the lens slivers from his right
sole and daubed the wounds, as best he could see them, with
tincture of iodine. This elementary surgery took him a good hour,
for at irregular intervals the lights stuttered and went out,
leaving him crouched blind over his foot. The power-workers too had
joined in. He’d hopped into the bathroom on his good foot for the
iodine, risking splinters, but it was out of the question hopping
in the dark all the way to the kitchen for a candle. Lorz got no
sleep the rest of the night.

In the morning, the radio spoke of fifty-odd
cars smashed or burned in the capital. Naturally no mention was
made of his glasses, for the destruction of which, however, the
young rowdies were in a sense equally guilty. And it might well be
that one of them was now seated before him, expecting to be hired
by the very man he’d victimized.

Vaguely making them out, slumped in
the
Ideal
chairs,
unkempt, unshaven, tieless, with stained corrugated trousers, the
director welcomed the candidates to
Ideal Poster
. He briefly defined the firm’s activity: the
restoration of vandalized advertising posters. They would shortly
be receiving instructions on poster cosmetic techniques. They would
be judged on their success in restoring the defaced poster on their
tables to its original state. On the basis of the test the most
successful candidate would be taken on.

At this point the director had to raise
his voice to dominate their surly murmurs. Had they really expected
that all thirteen of them would be hired? He assured them that the
runners-up would be placed on a waiting list and would be taken on
at the first opening. He added that
Ideal Poster
was an expanding concern and that there were many
openings.

This wasn’t a total untruth. The concern,
though unexpanding, was plagued by a high turnover. Even when you
screened out the obvious defectives among the applicants – the
needlers, the sniffers, the alcoholics, the witless – the hired
operators remained an unstable lot. There was a high proportion
among them of border-liners and drifters. It was months before the
new men mastered even the fundamentals and started earning their
keep. And then without warning they threw the job over or had
accidents and you found yourself having to cajole new candidates
such as these.

The director went on to the salary,
excellent for eight hours as he was sure they would agree. He named
the sum. It was received in dead silence. In his own days as a job
seeker, such an announcement would have elicited, if only out of
politeness, an appreciative murmur.

“
But please note that this generous salary
is being paid not for eight but for six hours of work per
day.
Six
.” More dead
silence. They suspected a catch. Now came the difficult
part.

“The work, which you will find both
challenging and rewarding, is divided into two three-hour shifts.”
He paused. “The first shift is from five to eight.” He paused
again, then added, as if an after-thought: “A.M.” Raising his voice
to dominate their reaction, the director went on quickly. “The
second shift is from nine to twelve. P.M.”

Three of the candidates gathered up their
things and left. Another candidate, who looked like a sniffer,
wanted to know if they could do just the second shift at half the
pay. When the director replied that such an arrangement was
impossible, the sniffer got up and, followed by two other young
men, departed.

This left seven candidates, including the
blur in the rear. The mathematical chances of one of them being
hired, which at 8:28am had stood at seven percent, had now, at
8:34am, increased to fifteen percent. One could hope that this
improved prospect would stimulate them to maximum effort. It was
only much later that the director reflected on the possible
significance of the fateful numbers the blurred candidate in the
rear bore, counting left to right, front to back: first thirteen
then seven.