by Asa Avdic
“I’m sorry, but . . . doesn’t this seem excessively cruel?”
I thought of all the executions, mock executions, and kidnappings I had seen in Kyzyl Kum and how they affected the people around them. Experiencing another person’s death inevitably seemed to leave traces, whether or not it later became clear that the victim had survived. The Chairman gazed sagely at a point behind me as if the answer could be read there.
“Anna, I can assure you that it’s not excessive cruelty guiding me here. The members of the RAN group are responsible for important things. Many lives. Placing a person who couldn’t handle it in such a situation would be excessively cruel, both for the person in question and for the security of the Union. But I certainly understand how you feel, and to a certain extent you are right. Cruel, yes; excessively so, no. But I’m glad you are aware of how serious this is, because this is also why your assessment is so crucial. The fact of the matter is, we must know who can handle the pressure. All of the candidates will be offered all the support and help they require in the form of psychological expertise and crisis management. This goes for you as well, of course. And naturally, you will also receive appropriate financial compensation.”
He named an amount that made me lose my footing for a second. I would never get anywhere near that sort of money, not even if I won the Union Lottery several times over.
“And besides the money—why would I want to do this?”
The Chairman gave a friendly smile.
“Well, Anna—be honest, what else would you do?”
Either he was an extremely skilled manipulator, or else he was taking a chance. Whichever it was, it worked. Because that was the thing: my job was meaningless, I couldn’t return to Kyzyl Kum, and I was a stranger in my own family. With the kind of money the Chairman was offering, perhaps I could make a fresh start. Take a year off. Travel somewhere with my daughter, to a place where it was warm and calm and undemanding, try to build up a life again, fix what was broken. Or we could buy a house in one of the bedroom communities outside the city, a house with a garden. Siri could go to a good school; I could work in some local administration office, pick her up at school on time, bake buns, braid hair. I could be someone again. Part of my own life. I suddenly realized how terribly much I had lost in the past few years, and how close I was to losing absolutely everything. My throat tightened and I could feel a burning sensation behind my eyes. I swallowed and looked up at the ceiling to keep myself from crying; to do so there and then would have been disastrous.
The Chairman went on as if he had read my mind. “Anna,” he said in a gentle voice, “I know things have been difficult for you. If you do this for me now, you have my word that you will never need to do anything else in your whole life. Not unless you want to.”
I kept staring up at the molding on the ceiling. It was the exact same color as the wall; only the tiny shadow underneath revealed that it was there at all. The Chairman waited a second or two, as if to see if I was going to say something of my own volition. And then there it was: “And we would also consider forgetting those . . . unfortunate incidents in Kyzyl Kum. They were never really investigated, if I recall correctly?”
His tone was mild, but his words landed like blows. I should have known this was coming, and yet I was unprepared. I tried to get control of my facial features before I met the Chairman’s eyes. We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then it was settled.
“I need to talk to my family.”
“Of course.”
“How long will the assignment itself take?”
“We leave at the end of the week. Then there will be two or three days max on the island.”
“And after that?”
“Then you hand in your reports.”
“And then I’m free?”
“Then you’re free.”
The Chairman rose. He opened the door for me and we walked into the hallway together.
“I need your answer by lunchtime tomorrow at the latest. My secretary will be in touch.”
He shook my hand, squeezing until my knuckles creaked, and fixed his eyes on me one last time.
“I’m counting on you,” he said.
Then he turned on his heel and vanished down the hallway as I stood there watching the retreat of his large, rectangular back. Just as I stepped into the elevator it occurred to me that I had never been given any coffee.
I MET WITH the secretary of the RAN group a few days later to get the information I needed prior to the assignment. He was a small man, thin and short, with strangely bulging eyes and a large nose. He looked like he might tip over forward with eyes wide open at any moment. It was cold in his office, and it smelled like nicotine and tar, so I could tell that he ignored the no-smoking rule and snuck cigarettes by the window. He gripped my hand with an almost audacious strength when we shook, as if he wanted to yank it free and run off with it. The secretary introduced himself as Arvid Nordquist.
“Oh, like the coffee from the olden days?” I said, mostly to have something to say. He stared at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. Instead he walked over to the short wall of the rectangular room, where he spent a long moment fiddling with the code to a large gray cabinet and took out a hefty stack of papers and folders, which he then dumped onto the table in front of me with a thud.
“Everything you will see in here is strictly confidential. The information must not leave the room, and you may not write down any notes, at least none that you take with you. If you need to leave the room to use the bathroom, you must lock the documents up again. Anything you remove from this room will be stored only in your mind; we can’t risk any of these documents ‘walking off.’” He made quotation marks in the air with his skinny fingers. His expression was accusatory, as if I were already guilty of unforgivable violations of confidentiality.
The following hours passed slowly and began with a run-through by the secretary. He showed me nautical charts, maps, and drawings of an island by the name of Isola, which was very small and situated all on its own at the very edge of the outer archipelago. The only way to reach it was by private boat. There were only two structures on the island: a boathouse and a main house. But the main house was a very unusual building. On the surface it looked perfectly normal: two stories and a basement that contained a medical station. But the house contained more than met the eye at first. There were small corridors sketched into the walls between every room; they were large enough for a person to stand in, and the secretary explained that there were tiny holes in each wall. A person could observe what was going on in the house through the walls.
“So that’s why I was given this assignment, you couldn’t find anyone else thin enough?”
It was meant to be a joke, but the secretary looked at me blankly and then continued to present the blueprints. A thought struck me:
“Wouldn’t it be easier to use surveillance cameras than to sneak around inside the walls?”
The secretary shook his head. “We prefer not to retain any documentation from these sorts of assessments. Tapes can certainly be erased or locked up, but they can also be forgotten, purposely or not. They can be abused.”
He pointed at a hatched area under the basement.
“And here, under the medical station, there’s a subbasement: the Strategic Level. That’s where you will spend nights and compile your reports when you’re dead. You and the doctor are the only ones who will have access to that part of the house.”
“Who’s the doctor?”
The secretary smiled for the first time.
“Katerina Ivanovitch, medical doctor and an expert in trauma psychology at the College of Defense. I can tell you she is a very trusted person who has worked closely with the RAN project from the start. You are in very good company.” Judging by the secretary’s expression, he had greater faith in her than he did in me.
“Th
e door to the Strategic Level is opened and closed with a code lock. You’ll find the code in this envelope. You and the doctor will be the only ones with access to it. Be sure to memorize it well. Like I said, no notes.” He rose from his chair.
“Now I’ll leave you here with your homework. I’ll come get you in a few hours.” The secretary left the room. I sat down and stared at the nautical charts, the maps, the blueprints in front of me and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
THE BEGINNING
IT’S ACTUALLY QUITE strange what can make us see another person, truly see them. Because to truly see is to acknowledge that you are in love, to suddenly catch sight of that other person there, across a room, as if it is the first time you have really seen this person, any person. When I truly saw Henry Fall for the first time, we had been working in the same unit for some time, and the strange thing was that it was just a tiny gesture that made me notice him.
We had been invited to the home of our boss, a young man with great ambitions who was said to be the right person to “streamline operations.” The whole unit was there, all a little bit uncomfortable with and foreign to one another, a little more dressed up, a little more made up than usual, and with delicate glasses in hand instead of our usual old coffee mugs. Many people were wearing clothes that were brand-new, a little stiff. I noticed a price tag sticking out at the neck of our unit secretary, an older woman with helmet hair. Perhaps she still had the receipt in her wallet and intended to try to return the garment the next day. And get her coupons back. I could picture her at the register, the blouse in a sweaty plastic bag, arguing over the receipt, complaining about the quality, the size, a seam. The tired, heavily made-up face of the clerk. The unit secretary would presumably succeed.
Before dinner itself, which was laid out in a spacious living room with a view of the bay, we were served Rotkäppchen from a chrome serving cart full of bottles. I stood there feeling annoyed at the fact that a little snot like our boss could afford a luxury flat in one of the new buildings way out on Lidingö, with a view of Karlsudd and the military base on Tynningö, with a serving cart and Western-import booze; it probably meant that he had family members high up (which, in turn, would also serve as a welcome explanation for how he got the job). Henry was standing, as he usually did, slightly on the periphery of a conversation. Suddenly I saw him nonchalantly grab a bottle of expensive cognac, pour it into his glass, drain it in big gulps, and then silently set the glass on the cart as if it had never happened. It actually wasn’t a particularly charming action; in another person it might even have been alarming, an indication of alcoholism, nervousness, weakness, poor upbringing. But in a person as controlled as Henry, it turned into something else entirely: a hunger. When I saw Henry gulp down that cognac, it struck me for the first time that he might not be the man I thought he was, and that he might pose a danger to me.
Once I started to observe Henry, I noticed more things. It was like picking mushrooms in the forest. At first I saw nothing, then I saw something, then suddenly the whole ground was full of them. The second thing I noticed about Henry was his laugh. He was a man who laughed. That might not sound so remarkable, but most men don’t. They smile mildly, maybe give a cough, maybe chuckle a little, but they don’t laugh for real. Henry did, in a wide-open, unguarded way that didn’t entirely fit with his subdued image. The longer we worked together, the more often I found myself trying to bring out that laugh, just so I could see him doubled over the desk or leaning back in his office chair with tears running down his face and his even white teeth exposed. That was a third thing: he had unusually lovely teeth.
Henry was actually a rather ordinary man. He attended to his work duties with zeal but a lack of originality. He didn’t take risks. When it was his week for kitchen duty, the kitchen was immaculate. He wasn’t closed off but nor was he open; he wouldn’t share any personal information unless you asked a direct question. And then his response would be polite but brief. What he had done over the weekend, what he thought of the latest film, where he planned to go on vacation. He gave neither more nor less information than a response to the question required. Instead he often turned the conversation around to the person who had asked, not because he actually seemed very interested but out of politeness or maybe, as I eventually began to suspect, in order to avoid talking about himself. When colleagues sent invitations to birthdays, barbecues, beers after work, he almost always declined, politely and with perfectly plausible excuses. His aunt was having a birthday, he had booked the laundry room, he would be out of town, unfortunately. Next time. He was a man who never bothered anyone, thus no one bothered him back. Everyone at work was in agreement that Henry Fall was a pleasant person, but no one noticed when he wasn’t there. Yet once I had started to observe him, it struck me that this friendly distance, this almost artful humbleness, was probably not a coincidence. It was of his own making, and that was how he wanted it.
His outward self didn’t say much of note about him either. He looked like a small-town boy, one who grew up on a well-tended lawn behind white picket fences. Team sports and trading cards, summer camps with the Pioneers. He was slightly above average height and had angular shoulders, like someone who had played sports as a kid but had later given them up. Not overweight, but not thin either. Friendly eyes, brown hair. He didn’t get his hair cut often enough, but his cheeks were clean shaven every morning. You could see a hint of freckles on the pale bridge of his nose, but it was impossible to determine whether his shoulders turned brown or pink in the summer sun. In the winter he always wore both hat and mittens. Sometimes he wore colorful socks with cartoon characters on them. You could imagine him owning a Santa tie but never wearing it. His voice was restrained and slightly creaky. He seemed like someone’s neighbor, someone’s childhood friend, someone you had met before but couldn’t quite remember where. A man who vanishes into a crowd. If I hadn’t seen him taking those big gulps of cognac, I probably never would have really noticed him.
I BEGAN TO gather information about him, what little there was. He never mentioned any children, no wife or girlfriend, so I assumed he lived alone. One evening I saw him on the platform in the company of a woman who didn’t work in our unit. She was beautiful in a way that brought to mind the old upper class, chocolate-brown hair in an even pageboy and a coat with fur trim, and when she laughed she placed her hand on his arm in a way that made me think they were a couple, or had at least slept together. I tried to imagine them together, having passionate sex among crumpled sheets, but it was hard to picture it. The thought of Henry without his calm demeanor just made me feel embarrassed, but it was like it still got stuck in my head. I found that I often sat staring at his hands when we were at work, and in my loneliness I tried to imagine how they would feel on my body—but it was totally impossible to even picture a situation in which that might happen, and it made me feel idiotic instead of excited. It was too absurd. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
SOME TIME AFTER I saw him drinking the cognac, we ended up on a project together. It was a standard assignment, nothing special, the kind of thing that just needed to be done. But as we began to work together, something happened that I think surprised us both: we functioned well together. What had started out as the blandest, most boring of work assignments suddenly became interesting, and as the weeks went on we spent more and more time alone together at the office, engaged in discussions about details that no one else cared about. There was an intuitive understanding between us that made it pleasant to be together. I found myself looking forward to those evenings when everyone else had gone home and the great sea of the office was dark, except for the island of fluorescent light where we sat together, with our coffee cups, our stacks of paper, and the plastic-wrapped pickle sandwiches we bought from a vending machine in the hall. It was as if Henry had crawled out of his shell and become more human, his sleeves rolled up over his elbows and his hair on end from running his hand through it, apparently unc
onsciously, time and again.
The work we did resulted in our unit being nominated for an award for excellent contribution to department service within our area of expertise, but when the award went to another unit I didn’t think any more of it. For me, the big, unexpected prize was the discovery of Henry. But when I ran into Henry by the coffee machine the next day, I realized he wasn’t at all satisfied with the results. When I mentioned the award, he looked grim, and his response was something short and sharp. He was, I suddenly realized, furious about our loss, in his very controlled and correct manner. That was when I learned that Henry, despite his quiet demeanor, was a competitive person.
A FEW DAYS later we were invited out to dinner by our young boss, who wanted to take the opportunity to show us how much he appreciated our good work even if it hadn’t won us any awards. “As far as I’m concerned, as your boss, you are all still winners,” he wrote in his weekly newsletter when the restaurant dinner was announced. I suspected that he had plucked those phrases straight out of the department’s leadership manual.
The dinner was held at one of the city’s most buzzed-about restaurants, one known for having imported pineapple on the menu and for almost never having power failures. On the other hand, the food was dry and expensive and the waiters were snooty. I sat beside Henry and felt a little uncomfortable about being with him in front of other people, as if we would reveal something private about ourselves just by sitting there and sharing awkward toasts to the project that hadn’t won any awards, so I failed to notice how many times the stiff waiters refilled my glass. By the time dinner was half over, I realized I was drunk. Henry responded to my ever more incoherent and personal questions in a friendly but distant manner, and in a completely different tone from the one that had blossomed between us during our nights alone at the office. It was as if he were politely trying to put distance between us again, and instead of talking to me he spent the better part of the dinner interrogating a colleague of ours about the pros and cons of maintaining a compost heap in your yard. Regret rose in my chest even in the taxi on my way home: the feeling of having made a fool of myself without quite knowing how. Lone night wanderers plodded home or away across the Avenue of United Friends as snowflakes chased at their backs. I tipped the taxi driver far too generously, unlocked my apartment door, kicked off my shoes in the hall, stepped out of my clothes on the living room floor, and lay down on my bed, on top of the covers. Nausea rose in my throat like a sour chill and it felt like my bed was hurtling too fast through an invisible tunnel. I lay on my back, trying to concentrate on a point on the ceiling, and eventually I fell asleep without noticing. And then I dreamed about Henry. We were lying in a bed together, in our underwear, in a large white room with curtains fluttering at a blind window. It was understood that we would soon kiss, but things kept getting in the way. Time kept expanding and contracting. Suddenly a big party was taking place in the next room. People came in, searching for things; Henry went out to look for something too, and he did come back, but he got right back up again. “Soon,” I thought in the dream, “soon he will kiss me.” When my alarm clock woke me up, I had no idea where I was at first, but the moment I realized I was lying in my bed, my first reaction was an urge to claw my way back into the dream.