it was still red as I crossed the street and went into the parking lot outside the big shopping centre on the other side: its name stood humming in the twilight in a seething shimmer of orange and yellow. My hands turned yellow, and the people I met looked sinister, as if their faces were about to come loose from their bodies. Even the parked cars shone in the light of the store’s letters, like animals asleep in a field.
Chapter Two
More agitated than usual … yes … I put the key into old man Schiong’s pride and joy, a shining wrought-iron gate from before the First World War, given a new coat of paint every five years up until Didriksen came and took over … dried flakes peeling back like bits of black paper in a wreath around the big keyhole, I can hardly bear to think of it. But the familiar dusty and dry atmosphere inside soon calmed me down … helped me slowly but surely regain my composure. That, and the distinctive tightness of the hairnet around my head, which was like the beginning of a vague headache. There was something so blissfully imperturbable about this big room with all its machines, which I was the first to enter as usual while bit by bit it flickered and fell into place under the light of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Everything was just as it had always been. And in this calm, this majestic steadfastness, I walked around and flipped the switches, like an ancient, millennial ritual, and the deep rumbling of the machines filled me with that sensation of pleasure and peace which every morning makes me feel I belong to a world over which I am in complete control, similar to what it must be like to finally get indoors … I imagine that’s what it must be like, anyway … after being out in a fierce storm for hours.
One minor problem. A machine, number four, stopped at lunchtime, after having given us a brief warning in the form of a sweet, black puff of smoke from its valve … like a reminder of the times they ran on paraffin … only to fall silent soon after, as if someone had turned it off. The boss soon appeared. From force of habit he turned to me to find out what was going on, although strictly speaking number four wasn’t my responsibility. Two of my colleagues had already unfastened the cover and stood shining flashlights inside it. I explained to the boss, as far as I could surmise, where the fault in all likelihood was to be found, what could possibly have caused it, and in what way and how fast, if need be, we could repair it. He listened to what I had to say with a few sullen grunts, and then looked briefly around the inside of the machine as if to verify what I’d said, even though I knew only too well, as did my colleagues, that he hadn’t the faintest idea about the workings of the machines he owned, and that for him to stand studying the motor on a Hold-Martinsen 34 was akin to someone from the Middle Ages being presented with a Picasso. Then he stared at me again, with an angry look, as if he wanted to tone down his helplessness by demonstrating that he wasn’t quite sure if he trusted my professional opinion. He, who is completely at the mercy of these assessments. His lips had sunk back into his mouth and didn’t come out again, even when he spoke. Then he put a paternal hand on my shoulder and nodded approvingly before he shuffled off and crept up once more into that rat’s nest of an office he has, half a story over the workshop floor, with its tinted window … the embrasure as we call it … where he can see us, but we can’t see him.
Jens-Olav, who’d had his head stuck down inside the machine for almost a quarter of an hour, turned and peered at me with those little slitty eyes of his, as if he wanted to draw my attention to some oversight. I don’t know if it was to get away from that accusatory look … and I’ve asked myself several times if it feels accusatory because it’s justified? … but anyway I did something that I usually only do when the situation is so serious that it’s demanded of me: I walked over to the boss’s office and knocked on the door. I regretted it immediately, because going in there was, as always, awkward. The exterior door to the office was down on our level, so that after you’d gotten your “come in” and had opened it, you still had the stairs left to climb: the first thing you saw was the boss’s head, high above, like that of a sweaty little god, hovering on a cloud of solid wood, which in reality is an ordinary desk, but which seems enormous when seen from underneath. And as you ascend the three or four steps … aren’t they unusually high as well? It feels like that, anyway … he, the boss, has ample time to study the person approaching him.
I took off my hairnet the way you’d doff your hat to the lord of the manor. The company’s only computer was on the desk in front of him, in the one place where it was probably of least use. There was a bowl of honey on top of it, which he used to lure flies. The window overlooking the street was kept open all summer long and ensured a constant supply of the species … they were everywhere … and it didn’t make any difference if the window was closed because the flies still kept on pouring out of their snug hiding places in cracks and ventilators and everywhere in the gaps in the moulding, they obviously settle in there, legions of them, in the walls and floors and behind the wallpaper, and continue to breed as long as the warmth keeps them alive. Enticed by the heavy sweetness from the honey bowl, or by the lure of the skirting boards, candy red against the white of the walls, they head out and lose their way in the open … a short, intense flight … until the swatter catches up with them and mashes their quivering happiness into a shapeless yellow pulp. He always gets them. He never misses. He says he can feel it. He knows when the time is right and he can strike with everything he’s got.
The boss pointed something out to me once, the fact that it’s impossible to kill a fly with a single blow, no matter how hard you hit or how accurate you are. Maybe it’s because of the mesh in the swatter, which is there to reduce drag … another thing I’d never considered until he mentioned it … and which always leaves a small part of the insect unscathed? All you’re doing is knocking them unconscious. Even when they’re badly messed up, even when the white vestiges of life are oozing out of them as a more than demonstrable sign of their defeat, it’s still, according to the boss, just a matter of time until they come back to life. He’s told me how he’s seen some of them dragging themselves across the desk, just barely intact, the tiniest remainder, but alive just the same … like a buzzing mote moving across the table top, as he so vividly described it. You have to go further if you want to get rid of them for good. He’s explained it all to me and shown me how he does it. On the small display table, with the coffee and the kettle on top, he keeps a plastic bag: with his hand inside it, so he avoids touching them, he picks up the unconscious fly and crushes it between his fingers, and then, as a last precaution, he drops the remains into a glass preserve jar, where there are already thousands of earlier victims, and screws the top on tight over the mass grave. I’ve never seen him empty it, not once in all these years has the stock diminished … maybe his goal isn’t to rid the office of them but to fill up his jar?
Now that I’d disturbed him … while he was in the middle of something utterly unimportant, no doubt, and without any particular goal in mind, I just stood there … my mouth slightly open perhaps … in front of the desk, probably looking confused and indecisive … as indeed I was. Besides that, the smell of the honey was making me dizzy. Maybe that’s why he keeps the bowl there, I thought, not to attract the flies but to anaesthetise his visitors, all of whom without exception he regards as his enemies, to knock them off balance before they have a chance to cross the starting line. What was I going to say? What impulse had brought me up here? And then it was as though I had only now realized how unreasonable this situation was, the entirely random and extreme absurdity of the fact that he, this little rodent, should be sitting there as my superior, and I, Andreas Felt, should be standing there with my cap in my hand bowing and scraping for what little he might spare me. Was this pathetic figure sitting there, five to ten years my junior, really the person to whom, according to the rules, I was obliged to defer? To be at his beck and call, to cater to his every whim, whatever it might be at any given time, every single day from early morning until the working day was done? It made me furious now that I thought about it. This anaemic huckster, this pallid character who had brownnosed his way to the top and hadn’t lifted a finger since, just sat idly for hours on end in an overheated office in front of a computer he barely knew how to turn on and off … What real power did he have over me, when it came down to it? On the contrary, wasn’t it closer to the truth that the power relationship between us was so fragile, so completely removed from reality, constructed upon formalities and nothing else, absolutely nothing else, that we only needed to leave the premises and go to another place up