Peter Terrin - The Guard

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?

The material is damp. The hard double knot is difficult to loosen. The dark eyes are fixed on me constantly. When I carefully remove the strip, from one corner of his mouth and then the other, he tries immediately to say something, but this time it’s his cramped tongue that’s getting in the way. A few seconds later I understand the word he is struggling to pronounce.

“Friend.”

A strange smile appears on his face. It’s a smile that doesn’t go with the state he’s in.

What makes him think I’m his friend? How could I be his friend? What kind of conceit is that, laying claim to someone’s friendship just because they were polite to you?

“I’m not your friend.”

I ask if he can hear me.

I am surprised by the sound of my voice in the storeroom.

The guard’s smile gets bigger, he whispers, “My friend.”

He thinks, this is my last chance. He thinks, I’ll wind this gutless good-for-nothing around my little finger. I’ll flash him my most beautiful smile. I’ll call him my friend. He’s got no backbone. Piece of cake. He fell for those porcelain figurines too, of course. I’ll grin in his face and throw him off balance. If I just lie on my back like a dog and look at him faithfully with big eyes, he’ll pat me on the stomach.

“Have you got something to say?”

The guard lies on the table, relaxed and shameless, smiling his stupid smile.

He doesn’t think, when it comes down to it, Michel is a guard too. I mustn’t be blinded by his good manners. If I don’t immediately stop grinning, and if I’m stupid enough to insult him again by making another wild claim of friendship, I’ll set him off. He might hesitate, but once the faltering knife has been lubricated by the rising blood, he’ll carve to the bone.

123

Two days later, five o’clock in the afternoon, Harry opens the storeroom door and asks if I would like to come in. He walks around the table and says I should feel the guard’s pulse. With the tip of my middle finger on a small, untouched patch of skin, I look at the turned head, the closed eyes, the crack between the dry, fleshy lips. There is a silence without any perceptible movement: three men under a bulb in a storeroom. Like a canvas by a seventeenth-century master, captured in the light.

124

Harry and I take small, jolting, sideways steps. We’re not synchronizing and that makes carrying him even more difficult. Sometimes the guard’s ankles are almost ripped out of my hands. We should count — one-two, one-two — but now we’re in the middle of it and making progress, we muddle along through the basement. Occasionally his buttocks drag over the concrete.

“The resident,” Harry pants, “has paid for his security… If we want to prove our dedication… We have to go to any lengths… If we want to have a chance… We have to get him… Thanks to this bastard we’re in the dark… It’s up to us now… We have to save him.”

“Save him?”

Harry nods confidently. “We’ll bring him down to the basement… In the storeroom… One of us on the door at all times… He has to be spared… One human life, Michel… By saving one human life, we save humanity.”

We drag the guard over the ground on the curve of his hipbone. We don’t have any strength left. In the middle of the basement, we let his trunk and legs flop to the ground and slump down next to him. The very thought of leaving this basement! The concept is too enormous, it pushes out against the inside of my burning head, pressure on the back of my eyes.

“You and me,” Harry says a little later. “No one can match us.” He grins over his shoulder, waiting for me to smile back. “But this job first. Come on, we have to hurry.”

Again I wrap the guard’s torn vest around my hands. I tell Harry that we have to count, moving in time to make it less of a load.

“I’ve got a better idea.” Harry removes the big, soiled shirt he has been wearing like a bib with the sleeves tied around his neck. He passes one of the guard’s hands to me and grips the other wrist tightly. We set our feet firmly on the ground and throw our weight into the struggle. Stretching the arms changes the pressures in his organs and bubbles of gas escape from the lower body, one after the other, as if our quick backward steps are pulling a string of marbles out of his intestines.

We cover a good fifty meters without stopping. At the entrance to the narrow space between Garages 34 and 35 we let go. The back of the guard’s head cracks down on the concrete.

“Somehow we’ll have to get him up onto my shoulders,” Harry says. “Otherwise we’ll never get him over the edge.”

I’m glad of the darkness near the crushers, glad that, during the struggle that ensues, the growling and the raging, the stench and the filth, I don’t have to see what I’m touching, what I’m pressing my cheek against, which body part I’m supporting with the top of my head. Or how Harry’s coping with the crotch around his neck.

I hear it rustle as it falls, shorter than a moment. In the absence of a visual denouement, the abrupt release from the heavy weight makes me feel like I’m floating a couple of centimeters above the ground. The impact is a cacophony: empty tins shoot off in all directions, rolling for meters in the steel container. When the very last sound has died out — clearly a round tin which, after defining ever-decreasing circles, produced a crescendo by spinning around its center of gravity — I hear Harry flick a switch on the control panel. There is no electricity to start the motor, we know that, but Harry still messes around with the buttons and, as I’m thinking, it’s impossible, it can’t be, after all this time the crusher can’t have even a remnant of hydraulic pressure left, generated by one of the servants for God’s sake, and as Arthur appears in my mind’s eye, Arthur from the Poborskis on 39, Arthur in his dark-blue dustcoat, there is a click and the wall slides slowly over the floor, reaching the first tin, the second, sweeping the rattling tins into a pile, pushing the guard along too, and, as I’m thinking, now the slide is going to stop, now it’s run out, now it’s too heavy, I hear the internal rumbling increase and, just before the crusher dies on us, a sound like a trash bag popping in the depths of the container.

125

We’re walking to the elevators. It is inconceivable that we’re doing this. Residents, visitors, staff: Harry and I walk toward them. The only entrance to the building, a solution that has been forced upon us. Forty luxurious floors, virtually forgotten, rise above us in full glory. We’ve never seen so much as a glimpse of them! It is inconceivable that we’re doing this. With the intention of leaving the basement, Harry and me! And yet we’re walking to the elevators. Our exit. The basement, where we live, will become a basement again, an empty car park. With each step, I’m dreaming. My pulse pounds in my temples; I can feel it shaking my head. The excitement. As if the resident has been hiding in one of the elevators since the exodus. Harry and I have finally discovered him, soon we’ll meet him. I see the distance growing smaller and know that it is inconceivable. I try to remember what Harry has said about the man, the man we have to save. I get no farther than a shaven head and black clothes. A few meters before the elevators we stop and stare silently at the smooth gray doors, impassive in their steel frames. Everything has been an exercise, preparation. Now it’s time for it to really start.