“Because that is what I heard. Their deaths. Just as before, as with the first recording, now here, too: violence and death. There is no mistake. ”
The first recording arrives on Monday at 9am, delivered by hand to the first-floor office on St Nicholas street. The arrangement is as scheduled. I sit at the desk provided for me and familiarize myself with the cassette player. But for the cassette player, there is only a ream of white, heavy bond A4 paper on the desk, and five ballpoint pens arranged in a row. All black ink and identical. The tape cassette is handed to me in a large manila envelope at the door, by the same slim, elderly gentleman from reception who let me into the building. Inside the envelope, there is no plastic case, just the cassette tape. It is a ninety-minute home recording cassette. There is no identifying label attached, and the tape duration is printed on the black plastic casing of the cassette tape in fine, grey type. I open the lid of the cassette player and place the cassette inside the cradle on the underside of the lid, press the play button. There are five buttons: Play, Stop, Fast Forward, Rewind and Pause. The stop button when pressed a second time, ejects the tape. On the desk is a laminated card printed with very simple instructions for the cassette player, in case I need them. A silver-coloured decal indicates the cassette player is manufactured by a company I don’t recognise, with a name that sounds vaguely German.
The first recording is of a number of voices engaged in casual conversation. The audio quality is poor, and there is substantial echo as though the conversation was recorded in a large room and at a distance from the participants. The voices are difficult to distinguish, but once I’ve spent some considerable time pausing, rewinding and playing the first five minutes of the tape, raising and lowering the volume, putting my ear closer then further away from the speaker, I recognise no more than four distinct participants in the conversation. Only one is female, and the others appear to be masculine voices. I press pause and sit back in my chair, and look at the items on the desk. The cassette player, the ream of paper, the pens. I have been asked not to bring any other materials with me, and on arrival at the reception desk, the slim, elderly man – he is grey-haired, fine-boned, and today he is wearing a plain brown suit and an ivory-coloured shirt with no tie – asked me to hand him any personal possessions I was carrying, which, naturally, I did. I watched as he placed them in a small, red security box, locked it with a key from his trouser pocket and put the box in a drawer in his desk, which he locked with a second key.
I keep my wristwatch, with the old man’s consent.
I look at my watch now. I have been in the office, listening to the recording, for over an hour and I have yet to transcribe a single word. I rub the flats of my hands against the knees of my trousers. My palms are damp, although the office in which I’m seated is cool. There are three windows to my back. Tall, arched windows, without curtains or blinds. The wintry sunlight coming through the windows is very pale and clear and almost grey. The sky outside is grey. The buildings opposite are brown and grey. I am not familiar with the district, although I have lived in this city for almost three years, having moved here to gain work as a translator. The faint hum of traffic in an adjoining street is discernible through the glass. Inside the office, there are three doors. Two in the wall to my right, and one in the wall facing my desk, which is the door I used to gain entry to the office, and at which the slim, elderly man from reception arrived to pass me the envelope containing the cassette tape ten minutes later.
I rewind the tape to the beginning, and press play. I listen to the poor quality recording of an echoey room, in which no more than four people are in casual conversation. The recording has started in the middle of the conversation, and the topic, if there is a topic, is initially obscure. There is brief laughter. The woman laughs, followed by a man. Their laughter is halting, and the man in particular sounds nervous. The other two voices are absent until three minutes into the recording when a second man begins to talk. Until this point, the recording is ostensibly of an indistinct conversation between the man and woman in an echoey room. At three minutes and three seconds into the recording, a second man says something, disturbing the conversation of the woman and the first man. The second man’s voice is loud and abrupt and causes a pause in the conversation in the echoey room, which lasts only for a second, when there is then the sound of a door being opened. There is, briefly, the ambient noise of a greater space outside the room in which the recording is taking place. The sound of voices, chairs scraping, the distinct minor clash and clatter of cutlery, plates and cups being set down or arranged. This is where the third man – or to be precise, a third voice of a masculine nature – is first evident in the recording. Or, in other words, a fourth voice. This fourth voice is the most distinct and clear, and his words resound in the echoey room, once the door is closed. Suddenly, the recording becomes clearer, sharper.
The car will be here soon. You’d better all get ready. Catherine, are you ready? Where’s your bag?
The woman’s voice: Will it be over at the northern stop?
Why? Is that a problem? The bag.
No.
Joseph, the bag.
Silence. Then two of the male voices overlap, obscure one another. A noise from the door, as it is closed or opened again.
Time, come on. Catherine, are you with us or what?
This is shit, you know that.
For God’s sake.
I mean, we all know it, so why pretend?
Joseph, get her out of here, for fuck’s sake.
You know what I think, so-
The woman’s voice descends into anger, and is drowned out by the other, male, voices. The door is opened and is closed. Vague, urgent noises of activity from the larger space echo through the room. This continues for some minutes.
I press pause, and stare down at the cassette player. I hesitate in pressing the play button again. I hold my finger so rigidly and for so long that it begins to feel unconnected to me, as though it is an alien object attached through some mysterious means to myself. Finally, I press the play button and immediately press the stop button. I press the stop button once more, and the machine ejects the cassette tape. I do not remove the cassette tape but leave it in the cradle in the underside of the lid. I walk out of the office and down the stairs to the reception desk. The stairs are grey stone. My office is on the first floor. My footsteps echo from the stone stairs, resound from all sides, from the walls and the ceiling, very loudly. I walk carefully, at a casual pace, anticipating that the slim, elderly man at reception will hear me make my way down. However, despite having clearly heard me walk down the stairs, the elderly man isn’t looking up when I arrive on the ground floor, and when I approach his desk he seems surprised to see me. He waits for me to speak. I explain that there may be a mistake with the tape recording, and he doesn’t respond, merely looks at me. I explain that the recording is of a conversation between a number of people, an argument. That it is not the recording I am meant to transcribe. That I am not meant to transcribe at all, but to translate. Alcman. From the Greek.
The recording is alright, sir, the elderly man says. It’s a question, I realise.
It works, yes. It’s audible.
Well.
But it isn’t Alcman.
The recording is correct, the man says. And I understand that this is not a question.
I am about to argue the point, but he holds up his finger and says, One minute.
He picks up the receiver of the phone on his desk, presses a button, looks directly at me as he waits for another phone on the other end of the line to be answered. Rather, he looks directly at my face, but through me, his eyes not quite focussed. I imagine that he is picturing in his mind whoever might be on the other end of the line.
He says, Today’s cassette tape for St Nicholas. It’s correct, yes?
He is speaking to the person on the other end of the line but looking to me. Through me. He nods, as the voice on the other end of the line speaks. He nods again, this time to himself.
It is correct, he says to me as he replaces the receiver. He does not look directly at me now. His mind is already on a variety of other pressing matters that require his attention. He looks down towards the surface of his desk, as though these other pressing matters are set before him on the desk in some tangible way, that they are available to him so that he might put them into some sort of mental order. But these other pressing matters are not represented by any material evidence on his desk. They are not visible, because the desk is empty but for the phone and a book that visitors use to sign themselves in and out of the building, and a pen that is set on the desk beside the book. Nevertheless, these other urgent things are clearly taking up his attention now. When, after some seconds, I don’t return to the stairs but remain standing at his desk, he glances up to me, his fine-boned, elderly face full of anticipation and puzzlement.
Yes?
But I’m here to translate a reading of a text by Alcman. That is why I was asked here.
Yes, says the elderly man, agreeing. A smile touches the corner of his eyes, but is absent from his mouth, which remains straight and inexpressive. We are in agreement, his eyes seem to say. There is nothing here that needs my attention, his mouth seems to say. Yes, you and I, we agree, the sum of his fine-boned, pleasant face seems to say.
I shall call at the office as arranged, he says, seating himself at his desk. He appears very happy to have resolved the matter for me.
I return to the office on the first floor. I close the door behind me. I sit at the desk, and look at my watch again. I am aware now of the sound of my own breathing. I feel hot. The air expanding in my lungs seems to make my chest creak. Not the ribs or the lungs themselves, but my whole chest. I hear a faint crackle deep in my ears as I swallow. I am looking at my watch, but I have not yet focussed on the hands of the watch. When I do so I note that thirty-nine minutes has passed since I last looked at the time. The paper is blank and the five pens are neatly aligned. I stand up, turn from the desk and walk to the window – the central of the three – and look across to a building opposite.
There is a row of square windows through which I can see empty offices: desks placed against the walls, calendars hanging from the walls against which the desks are arranged, computer monitors, and tins with pencils and pens inside on the desks, a mug left on a windowsill, a withered houseplant in a small terracotta pot, a sprig of silver tinsel hanging sadly from the handle of the window, left over from Christmas. There are no people, the offices are vacant. There were no people when I arrived. The offices were vacant then, too. I wonder if the employees of the offices opposite are all on vacation. I wonder whether the offices in the building opposite are associated with whichever company owns or rents the offices of the building in which I am currently standing, whether it is a shared enterprise. I imagine myself in the office directly opposite. It is the office with the mug and the withered houseplant in the window. The mug sports the image of a well-known cartoon character, I can’t remember the name. There is a motto or phrase printed in a speech bubble issuing from the well-known cartoon character’s grinning mouth. The succulent has collapsed, its tall, blade-like leaves lying folded against the windowpane rather than suspended upright, a halo of condensation where the two separate matters meet. The leaves, I imagine, should be green but instead are yellow and brown. I imagine my colleagues from that other building, occasionally popping their heads around the edge of my open door, and asking for my advice or help with a project or an issue with our employer. I imagine myself watering the succulent to see whether it might revive, and when it doesn’t I imagine myself replacing it with a more attractive plant, one that may flower in spring or in summer.
I take the underground train home. After dinner, I sit in my armchair in the window of my flat. I have poured myself a glass of water, and as I sip it I try not to recall the rest of the recording or the oddly refined nature of the elderly man at his desk. As promised, he had knocked on the door of the office at 4pm, collected the pages on which I’d transcribed by hand the conversation recorded on the cassette tape, and taken them, along with the cassette and the envelope, down with him to the ground floor, leaving me in the office and closing the door behind him. Ten minutes later, he knocked once more on my door and told me he would let me out of the building. He returned my personal items, and I signed myself out. He seemed tired, but despite that he was very cheerful when wishing me a good evening, having guided me back safely to the street.
There was only a little modern Greek on the recording to be translated, and only the four voices that I had identified. The recording itself lasted only 32 minutes of the 90 minute duration, and perhaps 20 percent of this was silence, or rather the pauses in conversation and then the static silence of the empty room, following the incident. In order to be thorough, as well as transcribing the words of the conversation, I gave written descriptions of the ambient noise within the room, but only when I felt it was relevant or when the noises disturbed the recording itself, obscuring the conversation or limiting my ability to transcribe the words of the conversation accurately. It seemed the least I could do, in the circumstances, and I felt it necessary in order to justify my being there, and being paid. The work was not difficult, and not as I had expected. The last minutes of the recording, once the shouting dies down after something has been thrown violently against the floor – a chair? a small sideboard or desk? – were of the room itself. By this I mean there were no more voices, no words, only the sound of the empty room. The room may not have been empty, however, and so in my description I made sure not to make such an assertion. Instead I attempted to note down in words the nature of the apparent silence of the room. This silence was a new noise rather than an absence of noise. There was a low auditory tone, as it were, which seemed to rise and fall, almost but not quite like a body of water swaying. It echoed from the walls and became atomised and abstracted by the fluctuating magnetic energies the tape head created against the oxide side of the recording tape. Many broken individualised sounds that merely by their expansive number form into a singular constant body, a hum. Not a hum exactly, either, but close to a hum. A sound like the enveloping hush of blood you register in your head when you place your fingers in your ears. The room was empty of noise but, at the same time, full of noise. The silence grew louder the closer I listened to it, and was punctuated by small disturbances that may have been sudden noises from traffic outside the room, or voices in adjacent corridors, or a nearby TV. There were no more voices apparent on the recording, no more speech, but I sensed one, perhaps two people had remained in the room, but were trying very hard to be quiet. I sensed but did not know. How? Because of the sound waves, the disturbances in the hum as it passed by and around and through their bodies.
It was the sound of someone trying to be quiet, I thought. And it was very, very loud.
The next day continues much as the first. I arrive at five minutes to nine, and I am admitted into the building almost immediately. I sign my name and write down the time of my arrival in the visitor book, and I am shown up to the same office on the first floor in which I had spent the previous day. At nine o’clock exactly there is a knock on the door of the office, and when I open it I am handed a manila envelope containing a single cassette tape. I place the cassette tape into the cassette player and press the play button. The recording begins, and I recognise these voices as distinct and different from those of the first recording. The ambient noise is different, too, and the participants of the recording seem to me to be in a smaller room, more casual and comfortable than the room in the first recording, perhaps with fabric upholstered furniture and curtains or carpets. There is very little echo, and the voices are much clearer than in the previous recording. They seem relaxed and happier. There are perhaps three women’s voices, and later a male voice is introduced. The conversation is good-natured, and overall the mood seems light. I am about to begin transcribing when I notice there are no pens on the desk. There is the cassette player, what appears to be a fresh ream of paper. There is also now the empty manila envelope. But no pens.
I get to my feet, walk down to the ground floor and ask the slim, elderly gentleman on reception if I may be given my five pens. He goes about the task very briskly, taking a small key from his pocket, and opening a grey, enamelled filing cabinet behind him. He removes a handful of identical ballpoint pens from a drawer, counts out five, replaces the others, closes the drawer, and locks it with the key. As he does so, I am able to glimpse a large number of cassette tapes stacked in their transparent plastic cases, on a shelf at the top of the cabinet. There may be two dozen or more, and they appear identical to the tapes I have been handed these last two days. The man returns to the desk and hands me the five ballpoint pens.
He is very cheerful, the man, and if you hadn’t been paying attention you might mistake him for the man from yesterday. But it happens not to be the same slim, elderly man from the day before, but a different one. He is wearing an identical plain brown suit and ivory shirt without a tie, and his elegant bearing is much the same as that of the man on the first day. He has the same grey hair, combed back from his forehead. But his face is quite different.
Is it his day off? I ask, as casually I am able. I follow the question with a smile.
The slim, elderly gentleman looks to me, a little puzzled. Then, as if it is my smile that clarifies the question, he nods, and says, My turn today, yes.
What’s his name? I ask, stepping back from the desk, in order to reassure the gentleman that this will be my final imposition.
Peter. I’m Christopher.
I thank him, and climb the stairs to the first floor and continue to transcribe the day’s recording until the time is four pm, when I leave.
I return home, but instead of taking the underground to my normal station, I get off a couple of stops early, wanting to be rid of the restless energy that has accumulated in my legs and in my chest while I’ve been at my desk. I walk from the unfamiliar station, in the general direction home. I pass market stall holders clearing up now that it is dark. The pavements are slippery with cabbage leaves and overripe fruit, and grey, muddy water spilled from buckets. The market stall holders shout to each other from opposite sides of the pavement as they pile their unsold goods into large plastic trays, to carry into the vans and trucks waiting, parked up on the pavements nearby, their engines idling, and exhaust fumes climbing, thickly, into the cold air. The men take no notice of me. I make sure not to appear to be interested in their casual, idle talk, but every now and then, as I continue along the street, a word or phrase will be yelled so loud it breaks into my thoughts, startling me. The men laugh, seeing me jump. I pass a nail bar, and glance inside to the nail engineers going about their work, their unsmiling faces concealed behind blue medical masks. The customers, each that I see, are on their phones with their free hand, scrolling through posts or text conversations, their attention fully on their screens, ignoring the women labouring at their fingers. I move into a street where it has either rained or else a street cleaning vehicle has only recently passed. Gutters run loudly with draining water, and the road surface shines with reflections of the orange streetlights overhead. It seems so bright and liquid that it hurts my eyes.
That night I sit alone before the tv, in the dark. Sit in the ceaseless blue light of the screen, without absorbing whichever programme is on. I consider calling my wife. She should be home by now, should be getting ready for bed, or running a bath. She is my former wife, my ex-wife. We are divorced, yet I still call her my wife, both privately, to myself, and to her. I refer to her, when talking with others, as my wife, too. I cannot break the habit. I realise as I begin to dial that I don’t have much of anything to tell her, and the little I would like to discuss – the job at the building, the strange routine of things, the voices on tape – are precisely the subjects I am not allowed to talk of. It was stipulated when I called about the job, made quite clear to me. Not that I believe I could discuss it with any enthusiasm anyway, not tonight. The particular manner in which I would describe it, choose to describe it, would bore her. And besides, she’ll be tired. She was always tired after work. So I don’t call, and in the morning, after sleep, I get up and wash, and dress. Then I am at the building on St Nicholas once more.
Today the arrangement is broken. There are two tapes. Not concurrently, first one, then the other. But before this particular disruption to the routine, causing within me a not significant note of disquiet, a much greater disquiet has come over me. To be more accurate, it has remained with me from the day before and the previous recording. More than that, it has grown or become elevated, inspired more than mere disquiet – anxiety. It was those women. Three women, I believe, but I may be mistaken about the precise number. Those women in their place of work. That’s how I pictured it while listening – some workroom. Say, a laundry. There was the sound of water somewhere, or at least a functioning sink. Or perhaps it was a tailoring outfit. Soft sounds, surrounding fabrics to absorb the higher register of sounds. At least three women to my ear.
Now dead, those three women.
Because that is what I heard. Their deaths. Just as before, as with the first recording, now here, too: violence and death. There is no mistake. So quiet it was, in that little workroom of theirs, and their gentle chatter, some of it very clear and precise and charming, in fact. Everyday chatter, about family and home, a few jokes, the kind where the humour is only ever fully understood to the subjects. But it is apparent anyway, in their laughter. It registers.
And now they are dead. Or perhaps they were dead before – before I had heard the recordings. Well, naturally, they were, of course. But when, I ask myself? This week? The last? Years ago? Time does not reveal itself in sound recording, not really. Not unless the recording is truly historical, alive with static and compressed voices squealing down through the centuries, via wax and celluloid and shellac.
How Now Brown Cow.
Mary Had A Little Lamb.
Three women, at least. And then gunshots so loud they are indescribable, inaudible. Just noise on the tape, as indistinct as a fire burning. As white light is to sight, so was this noise to sound. A flash of fire no more. A cosmic disruption. An abuse of the ears. And then silence. But that heavy, pregnant silence that bears so much in it. Full of sound and noise that cannot be heard. The whistle of blood in the ears, of starlight, of oxygen expanding. Chemicals, that’s all. Recording is the advancement of chemical engineering, now almost obsolete. Tape. Magnetism. Old and defunct.
As are those women, I tell myself, when the slim, fine-boned man arrives with his envelope. His name is Christopher. We exchange – what? A look, a nod, a gesture of recognition? And then he is away, and I close the door. Now I am at my desk, emptying out the envelope. Placing the cassette in the cradle. Pressing play.
I press stop.
No, not yet. Some time more, minutes only, but a little more time. More silence. Or quiet, at least. Because now I hear an aeroplane somewhere high above the city, sense its contrails unthreading, like so many loose stitches, across the sky. I hear the heating pipes beneath the floorboards, sense the slow expansion of wood and nails throughout the building, and beams settling. Hear the cloth of my shirt scrape my skin. Loud as bombs.
I press play, reach for the first of the pens.
Mercy. The recording is silent. Just the electronic hum of the tape head, the sound of the mechanism of the machine before me. It goes on, like this, for a minute. More. I turn the dial on the side of the player, raising the volume. After another minute I push the dial as far as it can go. I’m nervous, wary of the slightest noise. With the volume at this level any loud noise on the recording will fill the room I’m in, dash against the walls, cause me to wince. I hold my thumb against the dial, prepared to lower it as soon as any voice registers. I am aware that I am holding myself very still, barely breathing. Small, shallow breaths so that nothing audible will be missed. And then the recording is over. Just the hiss of clean, unused tape. I fast forward, and press the play button at random points, in order to check I’m correct, but there is only the hiss. I rewind the tape, play again.
Again, nothing. I remove the tape, and write on the first sheet of paper that the recording is free of any voices, and there is nothing to transcribe.
I sit at my desk for an hour, and do nothing. Just sit. Outside, traffic continues somewhere, occasionally a bird, a gull, cries as it passes over the street. They were sewing, the women, I’m certain of it now. I see them in my mind, seated in a circle, working at their garments. They are very used to the activity, have done it all their lives, and so they talk as they work, not afraid that they may miss a stitch or lose a thread because their wise, experienced hands do not forget. I see them as clearly as I see my mother, and her sisters, my aunts, in my memory.
When there is the knock at the door, I am so shaken by the interruption, I begin to rearrange the items on my desk, ready to leave for home. I have lost all track of time. I assume it is the fine, elderly gentleman come to collect the tape and my paper, come to let me out. But when I open the door, he is standing there with another manila envelope. He is stooped, his face carrying a ridiculous expression, child-like. He is abashed.
I’m sorry, he tells me. I’m afraid I gave you the wrong tape.
I say nothing immediately. I look at the envelope in his hands.
Here. He extends his left hand, waves the envelope until I take it from him. Please, could you give me the first tape?
I nod. Of course, I say. Or I believe I say it. I’m not fully cognizant of myself. I’m still in that room, ringed by the women and their soft, fractured talk.
I walk to the desk, place the envelope with the new tape on the desk, then take the first tape and place it in its envelope, and return to the door.
Thank you, the man says, when I hand it to him. Hid head is tilted down, as though he is suddenly unsightly, an eyesore. Something not be looked at directly, unless it blinds or repulses. He looks older.
You’re Peter, I say.
He does not acknowledge that he is, he simply says, I was not supposed to be here today. But I was called. That’s why I gave you the wrong tape. Please forget you listened to it.
I am about to tell him not to worry, that it was blank. But he is already on his way back to the stairs.
The second tape contains the recording of a family as they are executed. The events last the full length of the tape. I transcribe the conversations, and do my best to describe in detail the events as they occur on the tape. When I am done, I replace the tape in the envelope. I stand and look to the window of the office in the opposite building. It is already dark outside, and there are no lights on in that other building. I see a gleam of orange light flicker where I know the tinsel to be hanging. A reflection of distant streetlights.
But you’re eating?
I’m eating. I eat, I always have. You know that. If I didn’t I would be much slimmer and men would look at me more.
I would look at you.
If you lived here, you would. How is work? You said you had a small job.
It is evening and I am talking to my wife. I am standing in the small kitchen area of the flat, waiting for the kettle to boil so I can make tea. I like to have a cup of tea at hand while I speak with her. It is our habit.
Only a short contract. I’m nearly finishing. Are you tired? You sound tired?
Is it at least interesting?
It pays money.
You should push your own work. Your own work is better than most of what you translate.
Unfortunately, you are not the arbiter of literary taste in this country. If you were, I’d be a rich man.
You are rich. You’re the richest poor man I know. Why did you call tonight?
I always call you.
But why tonight? You have something on your mind.
I am struggling.
Are you drinking?
With work. This job, I don’t like it. But soon I’ll have done enough to quit.
Do you need money?
When do any of us not need money? But, if you’re asking, do I need to borrow some money, no. I do need to finish this job, though.
Have you been thinking about him again?
My father and mother died many years ago.
Do you know you have the habit of answering a question with an undisputed statement of fact?
If only everyone did, the world would be a better place.
And questions would never be answered, opinions never given.
A better place, yes. I laugh, but my wife does not laugh.
Are you in trouble?
I don’t think so.
An opinion. I feel spoiled. Thank you.
Tell me something – your brother, do you think of him? How he died?
My wife’s brother had been in the army, served abroad. On his return, while awaiting discharge, he had been killed in a terrorist bombing. He had been very young.
You know I do. Death is on your mind?
Not death, no. It is a lie, of course I’m thinking of death and murder, and my role in it. No, not death, but loss, perhaps.
Haven’t you lost enough? Go to sleep. Forget about the world tonight. It can go on without you.
That is what I fear, I say, and I smile so that she can hear it on the other end of the line. She smiles, too, and tells me goodnight. As I put down the receiver, I hear the faint click of an apparatus on the line, before the signal dies.
It is Friday when I recognise one of the voices.
I am seated at my desk. It is almost ten minutes past eleven in the morning. It is a cold day, and I have brought my scarf with me to warm me as I work. Unusually, the slim, elderly man at reception named Peter has allowed this one concession today, and I am grateful for it. The scarf is wrapped around my throat, a scarf my wife bought me some years ago, when we had a particularly cold winter far from here. I have not shaved, and the scarf catches on my beard when I look down. I keep having to rearrange the folds of the material so it doesn’t snag and disturb my concentration.
The recording today is that of three men engaged in a hostile conversation that appears to me to be an interrogation of some sort. The man under question is the eldest of the three, judging by his voice. I do not recognise it immediately, but when one of the other men, the most aggressive of the pair, calls him by his name, I recognise the man under interrogation to be Christopher. It is quite clearly the elderly gentleman’s voice. At precisely thirty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds into the recording, one or both of the interrogators begin to strangle Christopher. I believe he is tied or secured to his chair in some manner. He struggles but there is no sound of his kicking out or standing up, no fight. There is only the sound of him choking, wheezing, and finally becoming silent. The recording ends. I complete my report and wait for Peter to arrive at my door. Thoughts of the man I had met that second day cloud my mind. His voice, the pain in his rasping struggle for air. The torture of it, unbearable. This arrangement, this institution for which I am contracted, they did it, I tell myself. They murdered him, and others. How many? Numbers appear in my mind’s eye, old footage of crowds, black and white and hungry and waiting. How many, I ask myself, and then – does it matter?
It is four o’clock and still the slim, elderly gentlemen from reception named Peter does not arrive. I walk to the door, and in doing so I notice I am breathing in an unpleasant way, almost panting. My chest is tight and I can barely breathe at all. I feel a rigidity in my body, my toes clench involuntarily in my shoes. Sweat breaks out across my face and my neck. I return to the desk, but I cannot wait any longer. I need to leave this place, just go, walk outside, get out. I long for there to be another cloudburst like the one I watched from the windows this afternoon, so I can walk under the rain, feel it against me as it runs through my clothes. The sensation of cold, hard rain. Bliss. That is the word that comes to my mind, ridiculous though it may seem. And I stop myself, for to feel bliss right now, to even imagine it is repulsive, gross, inhuman. Vulgar. I am not a vulgar man, I tell myself, but other voices murmur a reply that I barely hear.
I open the door and dash downstairs. I’m carrying the envelope with me, and presently I drop it down on the desk by the door. The reception is empty, Peter is nowhere to be seen. I have noted each day how he pushes the red button that activates the door to the street, and I reach over the desk for it now, and hear the lock mechanism release.
Then I am outside, but the stuffy atmosphere of the room on the first floor remains with me. The laboured breathing of the dead man. The exertions of those squeezing his throat, their small grunts and cries, the tremendous work they needed to put into the act. It is not quick, not simple, to murder even an old man. This is what I have learned today. My lesson, given to me by a length of recording tape.
I am passing by the corner, on my way to the underground station, when I see a man watching me from the opposite side of the street. He is dressed in a grey suit, and his hair is wet, as though he has been outside all afternoon. He stares at me, and sees me looking back. But he does not turn away, just continues to stare. I stumble into a woman pushing a pram, apologise, and continue on to the entrance of the underground, when I feel a hand on my sleeve. I turn, startled, only to see Peter, the man from reception standing there. He is waving a small white envelope in my face.
For you, sir, he says. I was meant to give it to you. For you. His face is frantic, tired. He must have run from the building to catch up with me.
Automatically, I take the envelope from him, then glance to the other side of the street. The man in the grey suit is no longer there.
Thank you, I say, and Peter nods. Be safe, I add, and I see a small tremor of confusion followed by gratitude cross his face. He does not know why I am advising him to be safe, but he is grateful nonetheless. It is a warm gesture, a gesture of comradeship, perhaps, and he recognises and acknowledges it. Clearly, he does not know that I have heard his colleague die today. He is an ignorant man, as Christopher was ignorant. As I am ignorant.
I forget the envelope until I am about to sleep. I get up and go to my coat, barefoot, listen to the dull slap of the soles of my feet on the linoleum. I seem very aware of things tonight. I feel the greasy texture of my skin, the itch of the roots of my hair against my scalp. I feel the oiled movement of my joints in my shoulder and in my hips. I feel the meat of myself, the cartilage and muscle expand and contract, the creak of blood and all the restless, hectic energy of organic matter. I feel the smallest increments of time in the resistance of my sinews and brawn. I feel all the time it takes for me to cross the floor of my small flat in this city, in this country, in this continent that does not feel like it is mine. I retrieve the envelope from the pocket of my coat, walk back to my bed. I open the envelope and take out a single sheet of folded paper. It is a handwritten account of a conversation. The words are set out very sparsely and clearly on the page. A dialogue, and one I recognise. It is an exact transcription of the conversation with my wife from three days ago.
Tonight I do not sleep. My mind takes me to incidents in the past, to my own family, to my mother. Sleep won’t come. I fear it will never come again, although I know, rationally, that it will. Given time. Perhaps what I mean is that peaceful sleep will never be here, for me, not now. I know that to be a truth, one I can set down confidently in black ink on perfectly white, perfectly plain paper. A fact, not to be disputed or qualified, you understand. Peace is in the past, existing only in pockets of calm memories that we must create in order to reassure ourselves that this calm had once been present and real to us.
It is late when my wife calls, and I do not answer. Rather than risk hearing the phone ring again, I dress myself and go outside, and I walk. My wife’s brother was a good man, but he did not like me. On the few occasions we met, he barely spoke to me, I remember. I felt his jealousy, if not for the love his sister had for me, then at least for the attention my being in her life cost her, cost him. While he was serving he would write to my wife every week, long, detailed letters that rarely addressed whichever district he was stationed in or the events of his day, but explained in explicit terms what he felt about the life he would lead once he was free. Not dreams, because he was not a dreamer. He planned assiduously, he plotted. He intended, he said, to begin an enterprise with my wife, a private school. It would teach children not how to spell, nor to add and subtract numbers, but how to question. It would be a school of philosophy and science. It would produce leaders of a future society that would look upon its citizens with kindness, compassion and ambition. Three weeks before he was due to return home, he died along with four colleagues. I was secretly glad. I had been dreading his return. When the news came I comforted my wife, and cooked for her, washed her when she had lost the inclination to wash herself. She could not work, could not sleep, and when she was not crying, she would sit catatonic, unspeaking, deaf to my voice or the words of her friends and the remaining family. I took six months leave from my teaching job and cared for her. And, privately, I had never been so happy.
I walk down streets that are not familiar to me, turning when the notion comes to me, walking on with no direction or destination in my thoughts. As I go, I glance into windows of the houses I pass. I see a woman hitting her boyfriend. I see a father chasing his children. I see three bare-chested young men yelling in each other’s faces, snarling like animals. I see all this and walk, and rather than my wife’s brother in my mind, or my own parents, long dead, I think of the women at their work, and only now do I begin to cry. I feel the tears sting behind my eyes, throb with a dull, amnesiac ache. I feel my face become tender as though I have been scolded by hot steam. My face, flushed with pain. And I am sobbing. I do not know how I reach the park. I recognise it, but I have never arrived here by this gate before.
I follow the trail now overgrown with grey weed and wet grass. Up into the bare pines. The air strikes me like a wholly new sensation, invigorating me. All at once I feel I can breathe again. There is a hill before me, and I climb it, scrambling up the loose banking, to see the view from the top. From here, looking down, I can no longer see the terraced housing, or the streets. A mist is growing, obscuring the horizon, the city and its roads. As I look there is a sort of glimmer in the pond to the right.
Too dark to see clearly, but it is a bird. And I think of my wife. I have the very unusual sensation that she will be here soon, as though we had arranged to meet. I know it’s not true, I’m not deluded. And yet, the feeling is more than that, closer to a conviction.
Soon she will be here, I tell myself. I smile, staring up to the treetops moving in the breeze. The night sky rises like a wall around me, around the copse of trees in this corner of the park. I can hear a car’s engine now, struggling up the gate of the park. Her car, my mind tells me, though I know it is impossible. And on all sides now the sky, the land, appears blank and formless. Yellow bars of streetlight appear to me through the gaps of the pines, sickly yellow striped with shadow. I can hear footsteps through the trees. There is no horizon. I am high up. Just the sky and trees and the sound of the canopies swaying in the wind, the odd crack of a pair of branches as they strike together, like distant gunshots. Everything appears to be swaying, making me dizzy.
I stand there for what seems like an eternity, the strange yellow light against me, casting the trees and the dull brown earth in sickly hues, and there is a flash of blue grey in the clearing.
I think I see a heron, and then there is a sharp popping sound to my right.
A bus passes on the road, only the top floor visible from here, and a child’s face in a window, shining pale beneath the interior lights. A boy. And suddenly I am this boy watching in the warmth of a passing bus. I am the boy looking to the park, to the shape beneath the sickly yellow light, to the man. And I think, what it must be to see a man killed, on the journey home, on the journey back, where I will sleep and think of this moment for years to come, not altogether believing it ever quite happened. And it will not be in my mind as I fall asleep, as I lay myself down, as I dream. But in the morning, when I am walking back to the bus stop, I will be reminded of a flash in the shadow, and the man falling. And I will remember.