Mouroir

The Break

The “Terminus” — so called because it is the worst degree of a series of detention places and for the large majority of those landing there it also means the final point of their peregrination (but the correct name is the Calabozō) — is housed in a tent of enormous proportions. The roof of this tent, one can call it a circus tent, is very high. From up top banners descend, long dark-dyed flags, trapezes on oily ropes, and tatters of another material. The inside space is entirely occupied by cages made of steel bars in which the prisoners are held, two storeys high but without solid floors (everywhere the grid only) so that people can spy on one another from every angle. Between the stacked cages, every stack consists of a block covering nearly 100 x 100 metres, there are streets wide enough for lorries to pass. The streets are slushy with pools of water. High above all this the sombre roof of the tent sings and blows as if it were a membrane moved by breathing, an infundibulum perhaps. It is so high that all sounds caused by it are inaudible. Only rarely a dull ruffle is understood, or a sudden bang. It may be a flock of angels, involved in a quick accident or an altercation — you then think. Nobody underneath this roof, in any event certainly not the prisoners, can know whether it is day or night outside, grey-time or sunshine, summer or winter or autumn. In strategic places along the miry streets poles have been erected, with pale light bulbs burning permanently. But it is always too gloomy to be able to see from one end of the tent to the other.

The lorries come to remove those condemned to die when it is the time to execute them. (In the tent one referred to “prisoners of death” or PODs.) The place of dying is apparently somewhere in the city. On the flat bed of the truck is a steel cage exactly like the units in the tent itself. Armed guards in khaki overalls make the reprobates climb on to the lorry and then into the cage. The prisoners have their wrists handcuffed. While they are being led to the lorry, often with blows and curses, they sing their leave-taking songs. Usually they are already in a trance and the corners of their mouths are stained by a whitish froth. The prisoners remaining behind swing like apes from their own bars to shout good-byes and other encouragements, hasta la vista compadre, vaya con Dios! or to sing in company nearly as defiantly as those being removed. Some just look on with stiff jaws and the knuckles of the hands clenched around the staves white also.

The truck is parked in the alley between Block C and Block D. Prisoner 3926/75 looks down it from his cage, sees how the PODs with great difficulty clamber on to the vehicle until the barred container is filled to bursting. All at once he notices the last passenger of death, shackled like the others: C. He can’t believe his own eyes and with the shuddering shock he has to grab hold of the bars to remain standing. Wasn’t C in particular one of the privileged class? Surely he was not condemned to die and indeed, according to the rumour running from section to section, was even due for release in a few short weeks! It means therefore that no one can be safe. Or that the selection of executees is arbitrary. South African roulette! Or that the number of detainees is just thinned out from time to time. That all eventually are destined for the strangling cord!

C looks up at him with a pale face, tries to smile one last time and to wave with his entangled hands. The hair falls over his forehead. He is wearing his winter-issue moleskin jacket. 3926/75 hears his call: “You can grab my lunch ration this afternoon, amigo.” As one of the last he is helped on to the lorry. The engine snores and the exhaust emits blue fumes. The guards lock the grill with the rattling of keys and key-rings and then get into the cabin with the driver.

3926/75 jerks and tugs at his bars and suddenly notices that the door of his cage gives way, that for some reason it was not closed. The truck has just started moving off. In a flash he is outside his cage, jumping from there into the oozy street, and in a loping run he catches up with the conveyance and climbs up behind the cooped-in prisoners. There he squats down very low, flinging his arms round his knees. If only the warder next to the driver doesn’t detect him!

It is a windy day outside with heavy tumbling clouds in the heavens, like an amorphous and inconceivable sea battle. But the passage from eternal twilight in there where he grew old and empty to the penumbra out here is nevertheless blinding. It could be autumn. It would seem that the city is deserted, rocking slightly, or perhaps the route to the abattoir is selected thus with special care. They go rumbling on and he has to lean into the wind so as not to be blown off. Thick and hot tears are squeezed from his eyes.

At the corner of boulevard M and rue S where the traffic lights are, the lorry stops abruptly in front of a Wimpy Bar with glaring neon lights. One of the guards steps down quite unconcernedly, probably to go buy cigarettes or monkeynuts. 3926/75 jumps off at the back. His knees, cramped from his sitting on his haunches for such a long time, give way under him. But bent over to be inconspicuous he trots at an angle across the boulevard to where he can see the tall trees in the L-gardens groaning in the wind. Then at last (God save our gracious Secretary-General!) he is under the first trees with the lorry-load of PODs far behind him, and he jogs past the big trunks. The leaves clatter above his head.

When he got thus far he realized — whereto now? — that the story would not work out, that one mustn’t cover the ground too rapidly, and he decided to start again from scratch.

The truck with its haulage of alive and hale people who within a few hours will be under the sods, limp and cold already in the kingdom of decay has left now. The sound and the aftersounds of their ultimate dirge have died away. The trembling voice of C too, one of the contingent merely to fill the quota. (“We are all here to complete some or other quota.”) Perhaps the vision of their waving chained arms, the staring ecstasy in their eyes, the tight cords of their neck tendons — perhaps that will fade away too. In the huge dark tent the murmuring, sometimes the growling, of convict voices will huff and puff, will be black roses. The yellow light bulbs shake in the wind.

Carefully he opens the gate of his barred cage, casts a quick glance all around to see if anyone paid attention to the squeaks, and then jumps down to the street. Hardly has he hit ground when he scurries with humped back to the wall of the tent where shadows repose in thicker layers. Nobody will take any notice now. He moves away from the principal exit through which the lorry trundled just recently because he knows that this is guarded, all down the narrow alley between the last row of cages and the tent wall. There are prisoners watching him with dull eyes — eyes without the smallest spark of expectation, eyes full of ashes — but it seems as if they don’t see him.

Perhaps a quarter of a mile further along he comes across a loose flap in the wall of the tent. He pulls the flap slightly to one side and crawls out. Outside he gets up and starts walking without looking at his footprints, his back still turned to the main entrance where guards dawdle with rifles over their shoulders smoking cigarettes and kick-kicking at the mud with their bootcaps.

The earth-tracks outside are dark and wet. The sombre clouds of the sky are mirrored in the stagnant pools. From wires stretched across the road big limp standards droop, black sheets, frayed lengths of rag: in places one can still discern the bleached writing of some painted slogan. These banners are barely lifted by the wind. They are heavy with dampness. Some reach so far down that the extremities or the seams sweep over his neck and shoulders when he passes by underneath them. Like a cold hand touching his neck. He feels the shivers down his spine. He shudders at the thought and at the touch and senses the contraction of his skin.

When he has progressed further than the length of the tent he sees some back roads forking away from the route he is walking. These back streets are sludgy too, slimy with rubbish and soot swimming on the water. All along the little streets there are inner courts he can look into in passing. This veritable labyrinth is manifestly a continuation of the Department’s fief. He knew that the Department’s interests were extended over a large terrain around Central with workshops, rubbish heaps, housing for the staff, and probably also vegetable gardens, dance halls and fields for grazing.

In the backyards are labourers with big leather aprons tied around the hips. Some carry spades or pitchforks. He sees smouldering stacks of charred carcasses and he gets a whiff of the pungent and nauseating stench of scorched flesh. A purplish smoke drifts over the wooden partitions between workplaces, curling among the banners and the standards. The workers’ faces and forearms are besmirched, black. From time to time soot and ash come sifting down. In other workplaces he sees stacked bones glinting still with humidity after a recent downpour. Or he sees workers (warders perhaps? prisoners?) digging in the earth. In one spot he notices that the aproned people are wielding long whips; he sees the bloodstains on their trouser legs and aprons — as if smeared axes were wiped clean there — and also that the pools of water reflect an oily red colour. He hears inhuman sounds, a cacophony of terror as from the milling-about of the dying who smell the blood, sometimes a raw crescendo and then a fading rattle, but he does not see the origin of these sounds. The workers must observe him going by; they seemingly give it no thought though.

Further than the fenced-in nest of workshops and studios, than the burbling smoke, the shrieks and the bone-scraping aching of power saws, he reaches a point where fields and untilled scrubland gently heave and roll away in the distance. On either side of the road a hedge of brambles. The grass in the fields a dirty green. The inhabited area is already quite far in the background from whence he came, it lies veiled in a thin smokiness. Roads start turning away from him, roads leading to arable lands or sometimes even to clumps of trees which he can see as denser blurs of green on the horizon, and he must decide intuitively like a hunted animal on the right way, or the most convenient one. When he reaches a gap in the hedge he sets off to the right, all along the edge of a field lying fallow. He must try working his way back to the city in a wide, cautious curve, and then to R’s house, for that has always been the intention — that he should, if he could make the break, try to reach R’s house; the latter would then as go-between effect the contact with his people.

He hears a faint halloooo and one or two distant thumps like inflated paper bags being exploded by a fist very far off. He looks up and sees a few persons hardly bigger than the palm of his hand: they are dressed in red jackets, or red shirts maybe, or maybe their torsos are burnt very red from an excessively long exposure to the sun. He sees how they gesticulate and lift long objects to their shoulders: then there are sudden little eruptions of silvery-white smoke. Much closer to him he sees the leaping hither and thither of a hare, elegant to the eye, the zig-zag course and the abrupt changes of direction over shrubs, tufts and stones, the long ears down in the neck like blinkers which have slipped down, the bobbing powder-puff of the tail. He lies low in a hollow in the earth with his nose nestled close to the dirty wet soil. He doesn’t hear the hare and he doesn’t hear the grassroots either. Nobody will bother about him here. He does hear a vague rumbling which may emanate from tanks being deployed behind a distant hill. There is neither sun nor birds.

In the dog-watch of the night he arrives at R’s house on the outskirts of the city. He knocks and the door is opened. R is not at home — or is the old man with the grey crewcut and the heavily framed glasses R after all? In his memory lies a grey desert of empty time-passages, of tastelessness and cottonwool and cardboard. The inhabitants of the house are not surprised to see him. The house consists of a large number of small rooms, all painted white and roughly plastered, and nearly all situated at different levels so that you continually have to climb up a few steps or step down to the next room. The house is full of women and girls in white nightshifts, their eyelids swollen with sleep. Their cheeks have the hue of tomatoes. Must be R’s family, he reflects.

He explains that he should like to reach his own people but that the authorities have probably started a manhunt for him by now. R, or the convivial old gentleman who might have been R, his friend from youth, says that there is no hurry and also no need to worry. That much time has evaporated in the meanwhile. That his own wife no longer resides where she used to live before but elsewhere now in an unknown sector of the city, and in any case that she remarried and so she has another family. Also that it will not be necessary for him to apply a disguise, only that he should get rid of his prison garb, but that has already been taken care of, look, here is exactly the right white shorts and here a white shirt for tomorrow, they will fit him. And that they will then put a bicycle at his disposal so that he may go looking for his people somewhere in Market Street it would appear, hard by the yellow cathedral. But for now he must first relax, listen, he should take a bath and then eat something — why not a few peaches? That it is after all still night outdoors and that they are glad to have him there with them.

It is still night outside and wind pushes cool against the walls of the houses, rustles in the papers and the tatters on the street, the dusty branches. He hears the muted rumbling of the city which never really sleeps. He is taken to a small white room where there’s a bath. On a chair, next to the bath, there lie a pair of white pants and a white shirt neatly folded. A girl — R’s daughter? sister? niece? third wife? — has placed an oil lamp on the table with its dark marble top. He sees their shadows flowing excessively large and grotesque against the white walls. Like fire they move. Now she brings pitchers with steaming hot water which she pours into the ancient bath. He enters the bath. One should not cover the ground too rapidly. She also lifts her nightdress over her head and takes off her glasses. Her breasts are small and crumpled. Without the spectacles her eyes are huge and watery like those of a hare. On her thin thighs small black hairs grow. She gets into the bath with him. Under the water her yellowish body seems to be shivering. The bathroom has no door. He is aware of other figures in their nightclothes in the corridor. And the huff-puffing fluttering of shadows against the wall.

She slides down lower in the bath with her knees pulled up and the small creases of the water over her belly. He pushes her knees apart and covers her body with his. With the fingers of one hand he feels her genital organ which is small and round and stiff under the water. The stone of a fruit without any flesh.