Peter Terrin - The Guard

169

Harry’s dead. He’s in a state of decomposition. It’s as if I can’t find anywhere in this immense building to put him down. I keep searching with his body slung over my shoulder; the reek of rotten potatoes. I try the stairs to a higher floor: head down, pulling his feet up and angling him across the steps, arms dramatically spread-eagled. A fatal fall. I leave him where he is for a moment. Yes, he’s good there. When I come back, I don’t like the look of those spread arms. I dislocate his shoulder and hide one arm under his torso. His shirt is bloodstained. He was dead before he hit the ground, he didn’t feel any pain. I break his neck too, so that he’s looking almost backward. I take off a shoe and lay his cap a few meters away, blue satin up. I take him in from different perspectives. He doesn’t look bad, but the location is slightly contrived. Maybe I should keep searching.

170

I can’t worry about Harry anymore. I have to keep going. Until he shows up, I have to act like he doesn’t exist. Claudia begs me to stay, hanging off my arm as I try to reach one of the locked doors. I drag her over the parquet. I feel compelled to intervene but even after a firm slap in the face — once the moment’s astonishment has passed — she persists in holding on tightly to my trouser leg with both hands. I kick her. First lightly, as an announcement of intent, then harder, with the toe. I tell her I’ll kick her full in the face, but that doesn’t scare her. Suddenly I swing my leg away from her, as if kicking for goal; I hear her fingernails breaking.

I slam the door behind me, turning the key in the lock.

After a few seconds in the hall, I am struck by something familiar. At first I don’t know what it is. Claudia leans against the other side of the door. She says it’s walnut, a hint of fresh walnut, just fallen from the tree, with a hard green hull. She says he’s looking for me. He fell behind. He had trouble finding all of the stairs and has only just reached this floor. She says he wants to play it safe, he doesn’t want to squander the opportunity. He’s planned it all. We lost each other and then a terrible accident happened. In the confusion I, Michel, died, fatally wounded by friendly fire. Harry is inconsolable, but he keeps his back straight, his chin up. You can’t turn back the clock. This is what his trusty partner would have wanted: him dedicating himself completely to his new task.

171

Claudia and Mr. Olano don’t know Harry.

172

At the end of the hall I lie flat on my stomach. Am I imagining the smell I know so well? Am I imagining the smell because I hope it’s a way to track down Harry without his noticing? And if I really can smell it, am I tracking him or is he lying in wait for me?

173

I creep along on my elbows, the scabs break open, the familiar pain flares in my bones. The day is coming to an end, twilight has laid claim to the halls and rooms. I combat my thirst with memories of drinking the bathwater, scooping it up out of the sarcophagus with my hands before it disappeared completely down the drain. I no longer think about how hungry I am. Hunger has become a part of me. Just as I have two arms, two legs and one head, I am hungry. I crawl through a portal and enter an atrium. White Roman busts in niches around me, radiating light. A draft drifts over the smooth floor and as I, breathing half through my mouth, pick up the smell I would recognize from thousands, I see a leg moving beside the central ornament, a foot, a black shoe slipping out of sight.

I don’t even flinch, but still feel everything within me move. His name is on my lips, I’m about to softly blow life into it.

I manage to swallow it just in time.

174

Sometimes I hear Harry. While creeping along, he sometimes slides his shoes over the ground. It’s not so much the sliding I hear, as the slight drag when the sole catches on a groove or a join in the floor.

175

He grew up on a farm in the north of the province with two brothers, Jim and Bob, guards like Harry. A pioneer family. With a war veteran dad to boot. I wrack my brains, but can’t remember anything else. After all that time in the basement, this is what I actually know about Harry. After all that time washing his underwear with my bare hands.

176

Why bother reacting? What kind of answer should he have given to the announcement that it was, for instance, Wednesday? He could hardly object. I was the one who studied the calendar. Every morning he relied on my calculation. Maybe he listened, maybe he didn’t. Maybe it didn’t make any difference to him whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. And he was right; it didn’t make any difference. But maybe, for a few minutes after my announcement, he did let the day of the week sink in. It’s even possible that he kept a record of the days too. That his silence was a sign of assent. And that he would have corrected me, immediately, if I had made a mistake.

177

“You and me.” He never said anything else, not once. He always said, “You and me.” He always dreamt about the elite for both of us. Us, Harry and me, sitting in a garden a hundred times the size of the basement, out of harm’s way in the countryside, enjoying a blue sky and eating juicy fruit. But nudging up the flush button in the toilet, the simplest of gestures, was too much for him, remembering to do that was beyond him, despite my repeated requests. Even though it was audible everywhere, enough to drive you crazy, Harry stayed deaf to the whistling in the pipes. It was too much trouble for him, even for his Michel, with whom he, in the near future, would be promoted and by whose side he would spend many more years as a guard. Harry with his gruff, handsome, square face, always one step ahead, ordering me time and time again to think, to just think, mostly when what I thought was different from what he thought. Harry, who was tempted to waste ammunition on a fly.

178

How can he possibly not smell me? I’ve been following him for two hours now. I don’t stink any less than him.

Does the pungency of walnut keep all other smells at bay?

I find it hard to believe he hasn’t noticed anything. Sometimes I come very close to him, but not once does Harry stop for more than a few seconds to smell or listen.

Is he leading me somewhere?

Is he laughing to himself as his Flock comes down on the ground with yet another click?

179

It happens in a room filled with moonlight. In one continuous movement he goes from creeping to raising his pelvis, kneeling on his left knee, bringing his other leg forward under his body, putting his foot flat on the ground and pushing himself up with his hands on his thigh. I expect him to speak to me and half raise my body, as if I’m ashamed at having followed him in silence, my partner, him and me at the same post together for so long. I kneel behind him and off to one side in the doorway of the study Harry is ignoring: he looks out of the window at the city deep below us. I see the moon shining through his beard, casting a glow around his head, and him staying motionless as if he’s not really looking, not really seeing anything, just staring into the night in a dream. His Flock hangs in his hand beside his upper leg, index finger curled around the trigger. Now that we’re no longer hugging the ground, the distance between us is ridiculous, just four or five steps. I see him blink. Once. A man who is calm and has himself under control, the master of the situation, certain of what will come next. I look a fool here on my knees. Is that why he keeps looking out, to give me time to stand up? Is he allowing me time to compose myself after this shameless pursuit over several long hours, letting me assume a pose worthy of a guard? Or is he giving me time to think about how he has got me into this position: on my knees high in the building, trapped? Is he glowing on the inside, glorying in his advantage? Is he telling me through his silence, by making a show of not turning around: Look at yourself. Here I am, Harry, in the uniform that’s made for me, cap perched on my head the way it’s supposed to be, headed for the elite, where I belong, and there you are, Michel, been to university and all, down on your knees like a mangy, desperate beggar. I should finish you off like this, without turning around.