Flaw (6 page)

So what is the girl up to? She's fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room, tired after a long cry. For some unknown reason, the maid delivered this information in a disagreeable and resentful tone before returning to her work. To minding the pots. To the personals in last week's newspaper. She reads them furtively, ready at any moment to hide the paper from her mistress. She's
ashamed of wanting a better fate for herself. Her eyes swollen, she struggles through the tiny print, her index finger pushing the sluggish syllables along. She would get married at the drop of a hat, before dinner even. She would leave the pots on the stove – let them burn. The miraculously acquired provisions, gotten by dint of long waits in long lines, she would abandon just like that, leaving them where they lay in the pantry. She's had enough of the life that fell to her lot along with the linen apron. There's no lack of lawyers. They don't have to be notaries. Some are judges; others, more handsome, are attorneys. She doesn't aim so high; in the columns of advertisements, she's looking, for example, for a sign from a modest law clerk who doesn't have to be well off. He needs only to be seeking an honest and thrifty partner; prosperity will follow in due course. The maid forgets too easily that she is lacking the most important thing: the right costume, which is indispensable if her fate is to change.

Could she possibly be sobbing again? No, she's not the one who is crying. It's the washerwoman's son, the newsboy, in his hiding place on the roof of the building at the back of the courtyard. He too is evidently having a hard time, though like anyone he only wants what's best for himself. The less significant someone is, the more unseemly their self-love appears to all those around them. But even the scrawny mongrel who slinks along by the wall and lives on scraps – even he brazenly wishes for the tastiest morsels for himself. He does not value his miserable life
so very much as to hold back always in fear of the stick. Just an hour ago he managed to get hold of a loop of sausage and gulp it down on the spot. And if someone promptly let him have it with a walking stick, it wasn't to rectify the damage, because it was too late for that, but rather out of the natural exasperation that second-rate figures can cause by the very fact of possessing their own will and their own desires.

Scuttling away with a yelp, the mongrel accidentally tripped the newsboy. The papers went flying in front of the entrance to the local government offices at the very moment when the clerks were stampeding out of the building. Nothing could have stopped them. They were not in the least afraid of their director, especially since he had been the first to abandon his duties – he hadn't been seen in the office all morning. The washerwoman's boy tumbled to the ground along with the newspapers. His cap fell off; a handful of coins and two or three battered cigarettes fell out of one pocket, a prized penknife and a large bolt for fastening streetcar rails out of the other. The cigarettes were trampled underfoot, and the penknife vanished instantly. The boldface news headline under the banner, ending in an exclamation point, immediately attracted attention. The government clerks picked up the soiled papers, some bearing heel marks. The newsboy's knees were bruised and grazed. He took a long while getting up; during this time his newspapers disappeared just like his penknife, and his money went missing. While one coin rolled across the pavement and fell into a crack, another
came to a stop under someone's boot; there was no sign whatsoever of his wares. The passers-by were wrapped up in their own affairs and may not have noticed the newsboy's fall, but they would not have ignored a coin without an owner; their very consciences would have made them bend down and pick it up. All this took place very quickly. Before the newsboy knew what was happening, he was out of business. A moment earlier he had been standing in the middle of the crowd, jostled on all sides, wiping his nose on his sleeve. If I am the policeman, there's nothing more for me to do here, and I can simply stand at the street corner in my ill-fitting uniform and watch the incident with an absent stare. Yet if I am the newsboy, I'm going to have to pay for those newspapers – to hand over the last pennies that down in the basement of number eight my mother takes out of a worn purse which has seen better times. While he is still stunned by the accident, it's hard to predict whether his dismay will spill like oil from an overturned lamp and explode in flames of anger, scattered embers of which are always aglow here and there. The newsboy, sore from his fall and robbed by those more respectable than himself, was still stifling his tears yet already in the throes of a powerless rage. He was still in possession of the large bolt from a streetcar rail and would gladly have made use of it, for instance hurling it at one of the windows of the government offices.

The policeman's official diligence has its limits: it's possible he would close an eye and pretend not to have seen such an act. In
fact, considering the extent of the disturbances already alluded to, present here in the form of newspaper accounts, the sound of one smashed windowpane would be an inadequate finale. Even a dozen broken windows would have meant equally little. Then let's say that the bolt hit the national emblem mounted over the entrance to the government offices. The sharp sound of a police whistle would confirm such a turn of events. As will become apparent at once, the emblem was not made of real metal; proof could be seen in the shards of gilded plaster strewn across the sidewalk, the crown knocked off along with the head, the beak elsewhere. Since it's come to the destruction of a symbol, the same one for which the policeman once risked his neck in the trenches, the offense will prove to be a lot more serious. In such a case the boy would have to be dragged by the ear straight to his mother, the washerwoman at number eight. Let her sign the police report and pay a fine; if she doesn't have the cash, let her borrow it from a neighbor. When the news-boy pulls free and runs away, the policeman will not give chase. He'll promise himself through gritted teeth that he will not let this go unresolved. No kinder solution will be possible.

The clamor and confusion were nothing but a distant echo – and only one of many – of a catastrophic upheaval that was the start of all the troubles. Without it there would have been no political crisis, no crash or subsequent panic. Yet this upheaval could neither be seen nor heard; there was not a word about it in the papers. This is because it took place beyond the circle
of the streetcar rails, beyond the ring of buildings that the eye could trace, in the marshaling yards used only by the workers in overalls. There the eardrums of the masters and apprentices were almost bursting.

AMID THE OMINOUS TURMOIL
, which rings with nothing but false notes, I don't need to listen intently, or even to guess, in order to know only too well what has happened. With eyes closed one could tell that the catastrophe was brought about by the machinations of those who have too much to hide. Without ever having seen those supposedly abandoned warehouses, the breeding ground of shady business, one could predict every element from the masonry to the roof tiles and not be wrong in a single detail. Hence the walls of blackened red brick and the permanently unwashed windows coated in gray industrial grime. Even if the occasional one is missing its glass, any pale ray of light will still be instantly swallowed up in the dust-clogged air. Electric bulbs glow dimly, powered by current that has been diverted here illegally; in the gloom they barely illuminate piles of cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and burlap sacks. Nor is there any need to open these packages to know what they contain: bars of brass for engraved nameplates, lengths of genuine mahogany veneer, real marble tops for café tables, and even window frames and copper plate for sills. Underneath are heavy cases with the familiar silver nails, unimaginable quantities
of which keep being listed, though later on it's impossible to find out what they have been used for. The scale of the undertaking has evidently warranted the surreptitious addition of a narrow-gauge rail line. The siding cuts among the filthy shops, making it easier for the men in overalls to transport the goods that have been put into a second, illicit circulation among stories. It's thanks to the small freight cars that a feverish trade has arisen, the culminating success of which will be a pure profit distilled from the turnover – bottles of untaxed alcohol locked up somewhere in a storeroom. It is a certain thing that at the moment of the great crash, the shops too shook to their foundations. It's even possible that the odd bottle broke; yet all the others survived, packed in cases in their dozens.

The tremor was accompanied by the ringing laughter of the masters and apprentices. The object hurled from high up with such a din was not even a homemade bomb. Rather, it had the weight and dimensions of the missing safe – exactly those, to a T. Yet it struck precisely at the solar plexus of the infrastructure, at the underground bunker hidden beneath the turf, in which the valve of a gas tank used for heating was right next to some electrical equipment and the compressor of an air-conditioning unit. As a result a hole was smashed in the ceiling, a transformer was crushed, and several pipes burst. The series of electrical discharges had catastrophic consequences, though, as had been planned, the far-reaching impact of the subterranean explosion did not affect the red-brick warehouses. The shocks
traveled far, perhaps along the water lines. Whoever conceived the plan probably supervised the operation in person. Not alone but in the company of the overalled workmen, who made off-hand comments on the course of events, detecting from the color of the smoke and the sound of the explosions that the compressor alone must by some miracle have survived. In that case, they joked, instead of heating there'd be cooling. As they spoke, bandying strong words, they drew on filterless cigarettes and spat out shreds of tobacco. With a malicious pleasure they applauded the echoes of a disaster that demolished their own labors. Nothing captures hearts and minds quite like the monumental ebullience of destruction. Effortlessly multiplying the losses of the owner and employer, they gave him an appropriate seeing-off: let him regret not sitting quietly while everything except the safe was still in its place. As for me – because I was the one the safe belonged to – it was true that I began to regret things at once.

A discreet silence would at least have made it possible to spare the installations, the buildings, and the pavements. What can be better than silence when truth leads nowhere? The masters have common sense enough not to expect me to believe in their good intentions. But they don't give a hoot; they're not in the least afraid, since they're satisfied that once again they've succeeded in not giving themselves away. After all, didn't the safe appear again at once, though empty? Did they not offer the required show of goodwill, eloquent expressions of false
earnestness that for the sake of balance they must have laughed at in private? In the cross fire of questions, one after another of them would have presented his explanations, hesitating and stammering like would-be polyglots who only out of necessity are speaking in a foreign tongue. They would have maintained with hand on heart that the safe had been left in one of the warehouses by a simple oversight; that they had suspended it on the arm of a crane for the sole purpose of installing it in its rightful place without delay; and that everything that happened subsequently was a regrettable accident which was no one's fault. As they were prepared to testify, the reinforced door was opened by the impact of the fall, and its contents, in their view, were swept away by the wind. It all scattered, no one knows where to: title deeds to local apartment buildings in the names of various clients of the photographer or parents of one or another grammar school pupil; certificates of treasury loans left in safekeeping by the school custodian and the policeman; security deposits for the rentals of stores; wedding rings waiting in pairs for the big day; various IOUs, the top one bearing the extravagant signature of the student, though it's easy to imagine that there are no funds to cover it; and finally, thick and thin bundles of government bonds. In a word, everything that was of value in the entire neighborhood, and to top it all, a satin-lined box containing a diamond necklace of unknown provenance. And now it's all gone with the wind. Interrogated on this subject, the masters would even
have turned their pockets inside out as proof they had not taken a thing.

The apprentice with his bag of tools, a half-smoked cigarette in the corner of his mouth, sent precisely where there is strictly no unauthorized admission, will say nothing because he knows nothing. He pressed all the buttons in the crane as he was told to, in the correct sequence; when the impact came, all he did was blink. And look around in surprise, because he'd done exactly what his boss asked him to, nothing more and nothing less. In the cloud of dust that had instantly risen into the air, he could not have seen anything anyway. He merely wiped his watering eyes. And in that cloud of dust he himself also vanished. Even if someone had managed to take a photograph at the time, it would have recorded nothing but an impenetrable gray haze. The shock moved in a wave from the epicenter to the peripheries. The alleged accident shifted the layers of loose sand beneath the distant foundations. This circumstance, from one perspective most unpropitious, from another had many advantages. The more dramatic the events that the men in overalls managed to unleash, the more unquestioned would be the mass writing-off of every possible item from the inventories of one or another story. Having achieved their end, because once again they have succeeded, the masters and apprentices lock themselves in the storeroom and break out the bottles of untaxed spirit. Harmonica music accompanies them, plaintive and out of tune. They drink and sing, sing and
weep. In the depths of their isolation, each of them separately becomes helpless. It is then that the greatest pain strikes them. They ask in a slurred voice why they are condemned to a life without women – them alone? In their despair they smash the empty bottles till the sound echoes away in the void into which they have been cast. Up on the heights they would at least have been something in the nature of angels with a golden touch. Yet what have they actually become, what? – they repeat, their furious gaze passing across the ceiling. One can only imagine the pandemonium they would create if on top of everything else they were given women. They'd probably suffer less, coming to terms with the shortcomings of their existence. The matter of their life without women is to remain closed for good. When they have emptied all the bottles, the balance sheet of their profits will be back at its point of departure. But business will continue to flourish, filling the same storeroom with new cases of bottles.