Peter Terrin - The Guard

The resident turns his attention to the right-hand screen.

I put the glass down on the floor.

“Wait,” I hear as I’m disappearing into the lobby. His heels click on the concrete and for the third time he lays his hand on my shoulder. This time the hand asks for understanding, but that’s not necessary.

“At least take my elevator then,” the resident says. “It will get you back down in a good forty seconds.”

He leads me to the door.

“If anything comes up, let me know. Okay?”

I step into the cabin and the resident reaches past my chest to the buttons. “You too, sir,” I say dutifully in his pointy ear.

My reply amuses him. “I’ll do that, Michel.”

The last I see of the resident is a gold eye tooth that looks out of place in his mouth and almost turns his broad smile into a sneer.

185

The walls and ceiling are white, padded leather, all sound is absent. There is a very fleeting awareness of motion, the acceleration is probably staged to spare the residents the sensation, however brief, of falling into nothingness. I neither hear nor feel a thing. The panel has two buttons, 0 and −1, and a dark window no larger than a postage stamp. There is no indication of the passing floors. I could just as easily be hanging motionless in the shaft. Nonetheless I am heading for the basement at full speed. After having spent a long time high up in the building, it’s as if I’m traveling to the center of the earth. The basement. The thought of seeing the familiar basement again in just a few seconds! Big warm tears roll into my beard. An enormous sense of relief makes me as light as a feather, floating in the falling cabin. I hear Harry’s voice. I feel his mustache against my ear. I feel the strength in the arm he’s wrapped around my shoulder. He whispers that I’ll be back soon. Do I understand what he’s saying? Soon I’ll finally be back where I belong. He asks what on earth I’d accomplish by joining the elite. What would I do in a fenced garden where the guards bump into each other and don’t even know each other’s names? What? He wants me to tell him that. What would that teach me? He says my challenge is here in the basement, in the emptiness, more than a thousand square meters of it. How big had I wanted my challenge to be? Maybe I was born to be a guard. It’s a possibility I can’t exclude. Yes, this is my last chance, Harry says, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t ended up in the right place after all. Some people find their place quickly, others at the very end. Mine is here at the entrance to this building and I mustn’t forget it. I have 29 cartridges, Winchester, 9mm, and a Flock 28 in excellent condition. It was wrong of us to turn away from the entrance, Harry says, a gross error, but no matter what’s happened in the city and the basement in the meantime, my precision and 29 cartridges will get me to the storeroom. Waiting for me there are 2,250 cartridges, corned beef and drinking water. That’s all I need. I have to prepare myself for a big adventure; what’s gone before will pale by comparison. Every second, a test. The door is about to slide open. Like the acceleration, the deceleration will be gradual. I won’t feel it in my bowels. I have to be ready because forty seconds don’t last much longer than this. Harry hugs me, squeezing the air out of my lungs. After a kiss on my forehead, he arranges my cap at the prescribed angle. I’ve been away, he says solemnly. But now I’m back again.

PETER TERRIN was born in 1968 and is the author of two volumes of short stories and four novels. The Guard , a winner of the European Literature Prize 2010 and shortlisted for the A.K.O. and Libris prizes, is his first to be translated into English.

DAVID COLMER is the prizewinning translator of novels by Gerbrand Bakker, Arthur Japin and Dimitri Verhulst.