The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  Somewhat removed from Felix and his fickle moods, Masha was immersed in her perennial concerns. For her, it was essential to consider the hotel as a whole, to encapsulate the life of the building in a single, constant thought—which nonetheless would be activated all of a sudden—to understand the more or less mysterious way it functioned as a hotel, and the role that she, as the supposed heir to Salgado, played in its continued existence. It was clear that everything burdensome and negative had fallen to her, while the good parts, if there had ever been any, were relegated to a forgotten time. These feelings helped her give shape to a desire. Masha always tried to insert herself, even if only partially, into the lives of the travelers who less and less frequently found their way to the hotel. She understood this as a right she had earned; for her, it was the most tangible product of her dedication, and the one onto which she inscribed the most hope. The realization of this desire did not depend on her will alone, however, and while it would be fair for her to assume that she and the hotel would appear in the guests’ memories in one way or another, it was a sign of Masha’s vanity that her ambition was to leave an explicit mark, not so much in a bid for permanence, but rather as a way to prove, to herself above all, the concrete importance both she and the hotel could project onto the world.

  In the furthest corner of Moscow, the kind of place where real tourists and travelers rarely set foot, where residents forgot all about the city in which they lived because it could be any city, a suburb indifferent to its surroundings where people would even forget the nature of their own activities or business and wander the streets wearing a blank stare; in this furthest corner of Moscow, the hotel rose up like a fortress, powerful and removed from whatever might be happening around it. Still, anyone looking at it for the first time would see one more building among many that, largely abandoned and having seen better days, housed all kinds of people simulating life and work.

  One night long ago, when the late hour meant that the only sounds to be heard were whispers of the hereafter emanating from the hotel’s basements and hallways, Masha found a thick bundle of money in one of the rooms. She was making her last rounds. Her route was different each day and followed no particular logic; she tended to let her thoughts wander as she absentmindedly confirmed that all was in order. Nothing ever happened; she had never discovered anything out of the ordinary and knew for a fact that she was the only one to set foot in some of those places, that everything would remain just as it was, silent and isolated, until the next time she passed through. Even so, just as she was drifting down a long hall, something unexpected caught her attention, as tends to be the case. She couldn’t say what it was, but it was as if something common or familiar, yet unforeseen, had stirred her from slumber.

  In that instant, Masha was distracted by the memory of a dream she’d had the night before: she was making her rounds without knowing when she had begun or if she would ever finish. This didn’t matter in the dream because she could have kept walking as long as she lived, just like there was nothing unusual about the fact that the corridors, vestibules, and the external walls only went halfway up. The hotel was an enormous aerated structure held up by some unknown law of physics: not only were the columns and the top half of all the walls missing, each level also lacked a ceiling, yet somehow everything remained in place. At the same time, though it was night and the city and sky had sunk into their typical darkness, the building’s interior, despite its new open form and the apparent absence of any lights, maintained the same gloomy dimness as always. Masha remembered little more of the dream; it was an endless ramble, though she couldn’t even be sure of this—perhaps it was only a fleeting impression that had lasted an instant while she slept, or its vague recollection, and that instant was now amplified, by some particular effect of her sensibility as she paced the hotel, into a sequence of identical events.

  As suddenly as it had come, the memory of the dream was interrupted, or continued in its mysterious way, when Masha sensed that something unexpected was happening and gave in to the urge to push open the door to the fake floor where she was making her rounds at the moment. (“Fake floor” was what people at the hotel called the lofts constructed to take advantage of the building’s remarkably high ceilings. Sometimes it would be just a single room, or sometimes several would be grouped together in the same wing. In any case, they produced a sensation of claustrophobia and precariousness from which it was hard to recover. They were made from an assortment of lightweight materials, all easy to transport, so the sight of them inspired thoughts of a silent but irreversible invasion. Meanwhile, to the uninitiated these little rooms might seem like toys or miniatures: that person might believe a more human virtue lay hidden behind that assemblage of scraps. The fake floors also invited thoughts of labyrinths, networks of tunnels, stairs, and rooms set at different heights and with outrageously inconsistent dimensions. The most striking thing, though, which left the traveler with a mixture of sadness and confusion, largely because it was hard to understand at first where one was, was the feeling of being in the presence of something secret, something made in darkness and sheltered by neglect, something about which one should not speak though it served no purpose whatsoever.)

  Masha opened the door and took in a mouthful of stale air that had probably been trapped within those walls for years, and which she tolerated with her customary professional resign. Nothing there set her on edge, she sensed no presence in that dark interior, only her own lack of concentration, as if she were still in the thrall of the dream she’d just remembered. A hand, which was hers, guided her toward the light switch; her shadow, projected onto the wall behind her, pushed her forward. Beside the still-made bed, she saw the inscrutable wooden table, the chair, the lamp that stuck out from the wall like a recently amputated arm, and it all reminded her of a scene staged by a person who immediately went on to forget his own work. As she moved haltingly through the room, Masha looked like one of those fabricated mutant or humanoid beings for whom perfection is the ability to assimilate with real people by imitating them with the skill of an impersonator. (The ruse is revealed by a minor slip, a slight pause, a millisecond’s delay in their acting.) Masha, furthermore, believed in the superiority of artificial beings, which consisted of their capacity for compartmentalized—some might say selective—thought, like a machine’s.

  It goes without saying that the room was one of the most squalid in the hotel: with its reduced dimensions and its walls and ceiling slanted to the point of collapse, it conveyed something like a penitential scene. She paused in front of the wardrobe, which struck her as absurdly deep. All of its dimensions were exaggerated (it was short and squat, at once too bulky and disproportionately small), but it was its depth, its most outrageous and unusual quality, that revealed its authenticity. She warily studied its doors—their worn surface had the same archaic, undefinable air as the rest of the piece, and they were decorated with a carved flower in each corner—and said nothing. It wasn’t that she was about to say something and didn’t, but rather that she stopped to listen. As she stood there, isolated from everything in the middle of that room, the hotel made its presence known through the manifestation of its size, which symbolized both enclosure and depth. They were not wrong, those guests who felt they were living in a cave they would never fully know, hidden off to one side of the city; in fact, day by day they surrendered to the building, or whatever it is called, as they navigated its different levels like domesticated animals that have forgotten their former vigor. Inside the hotel there was no facsimile of the world, or any version of the world that through some complicated comparison of codes or relations confirmed or refuted it; there was simply a netherworld that sought to remain hidden as long as possible, representing itself and quietly repeating, to this end, the weary soliloquy of its song composed of structural noises and currents of air.

  But what had never occurred in the other rooms did happen here, and the same imperious force that had driven her to enter now pressed her to op
en the wardrobe. The door seemed to be jammed; Masha tugged at it and it swung open abruptly. The impact echoed for a few moments, as was typical of the hotel’s furniture, which always offered resistance. She peered into its dark interior and, seeing how deep it was, thought of those pieces used for funerals. “You could fit a corpse in here,” she murmured, hearing her own voice as if it came from a different throat. As for the rest, the wardrobe creaked, barely managing to accommodate the new weight of the open doors. Masha looked into the void and saw nothing; once her eyes had gotten used to the dark, she caught the weak glimmer of something at the back of one of the shelves. Launching herself forward as if she were pouncing on live prey, she was up to her hips inside the wardrobe when her fingertips grazed a block of paper. Masha withdrew it from a sense of obligation; she thought it was a deck of cards, not that it mattered much to her, and just wanted to satisfy her curiosity and get back to her routine. As soon as it was in her hand, however, she realized it was a bundle of currency—and it seemed quite heavy and tightly packed. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before; she would occasionally find some change left behind out of convenience because it was practically worthless, dark metal coins whose sides were stained or worn down, or both, and whose edges had been mutilated by some efficient guillotine.

  As an old mercantile city and the capital of many republics, in Moscow unknown currencies often had a diffuse value that fueled the fantasies of all. Radical political changes had established a new reality, one of the lasting effects of which was the confusing sensation of living a prior experience that overcame people in various situations. There were facts, words, and unspoken prohibitions with unclassifiable resonances that belonged to an inexistent social order unknown to many, but which nonetheless functioned as the erratic remainders of memory, appearing and disappearing, seemingly of their own accord. When the person who had unexpectedly found currency under the floorboards, in the lining of a jacket, or in some forgotten piece of furniture would discover it had lost its value or could no longer be exchanged for anything, which was the same thing, this excitement would be transformed into disappointment. Those bills were the door through which the world of the past, or at least the world closed off from the everyday present, peered in. In general, the possession of money was associated with secrecy, even more so if it was the result of chance: the lucky individual quickly traded elation for fear (this fear turned out to be the anticipation of the punishment he would receive if his peers found out).

  In any event, the cash would always be stowed somewhere, and the person who found it would be thrilled and feel grateful for their good fortune, until their next disappointment. Money revealed its fickle, unpredictable nature once more; its abstraction didn’t matter, as long as it served for something. The ideas of circulation, of possession, and wealth outmatched the reality of the currency, which in this sense acted as a facsimile. Not everyone was naïve, many people understood that the world is full of currency no longer in circulation, but no one was exempt from feeling, at some point, that they were in the presence of a magical device—divested of its powers, perhaps, but poised to recover them like a machine that might start up again at any minute. The idea of a lavish fortune preserved by destiny and made available only to her would fill Masha with joy and confirm her personal notion of justice, which was that it might be a long time coming, maybe an infinitely long time, but that it repaid the wait generously when it did arrive, even if this compensation seemed to be no more than coincidence. Felix certainly knew no one like Masha, who could wait patiently forever, even in the face of adversity. Things began to sort themselves out that night, correcting a situation that Salgado, who was probably her father, had created by taking all her worldly possessions from her.

  When she examined the money—settled in under the prosaic lamp hanging from the wall, as I mentioned, like a mutilated or moribund apparatus or the tired arm of a hidden being, with the small, intensely red shade that more than one visitor must have taken as a bad omen—Masha could not tell whether it was a good thing or not that the bills were in a different language. She could read only the numbers, and the quantity of zeros she saw all over confirmed her suspicion that she had found a fortune. The colors, too, in their indefinable shades and combinations, came from different ones she remembered as sharper in real life, in everyday things, but which in these bills seemed to belong to an evasive, distorted category. Then there was the graphic dimension of the currency—the landscapes, portraits, scenes and monuments, the arches and columns, the scrolls and spires, and the flourishes at the end of the numbers and letters—adornments Masha saw as perfectly aligned with the wealth it proffered. She felt that a part of reality meant only for her, and with which she could do whatever she pleased, had just appeared, and that the money’s power consisted in being its manifestation. Meanwhile, the wardrobe let out a dry creak—it was the wood, adjusting to the open doors; together with the noises of the rickety bed, sensitive to Masha’s slightest movement, these sounds seemed to come from the depths, as if some subterranean being or entity were complaining about being disturbed.

  As soon as she finished studying the money, she began to count it; this was her way of bonding with her mysterious and providential possession. Because that is precisely what the bundle of currency was: an invaluable, for now, possession that inspired contradictory feelings in Masha (excitement, happiness, fear, menace) and imposed a new order upon the Hotel Salgado. That room on a fake floor—one among so many abandoned rooms in that palace, built from scraps and grown shabby at what was ultimately the periphery, a room that opened onto a secondary hallway, one might say the ancillary branch of a principal hallway—that room had suddenly become the epicenter of the building and had the power to start the complicated machinery of the hotel, which had so long lay dormant. In reality, this new nucleus would center on something that was, essentially, nothing, because the hotel itself was merely an illusory mechanism that was real to only Masha and a few others who wandered, like her, with a poorly defined but ostensibly vital purpose, just as Felix would do before long, for example, or how the few other visitors did on their long journeys to rooms or bathrooms.

  Masha immediately dismissed the idea of taking the money somewhere else, figuring there was nowhere in the hotel it would be safer. The reception area was no good for hiding anything, and besides, there was nowhere she could: the most prominent thing there, the front desk, which inspired awe with its stature and trust with its sturdy wood, was actually a facsimile, hollow behind its surface. This almost exclusively ornamental object did, nonetheless, convince many of the travelers who sometimes passed through of the benefits of staying at the hotel: they entertained the hope of finding in the rest of the premises the cozy security that it—somewhat makeshift, but solid—transmitted. In these dismal environs, the reception desk became a symbol of the real Russia and presented itself in the same way: coarse and hardened, yet authentic. So Masha left the money in the lost room, convinced that no one would go inside by chance. (There was, she thought, a reason it had sat there forgotten for so long.) And she decided to make two daily trips to check on the treasure, even if it disrupted her routine. Each time, she would count the money twice: first by number of bills, and then by value.

  Masha easily adapted to this new habit of checking on the money; at the end of every morning and every evening she made her visits, which the aura of mystery and her vested interest turned into private ceremonies. The following week, however, as she plunged her arms into the wardrobe at midnight she found something unexpected, which she withdrew with a mix of caution and eagerness (she couldn’t yet see what it was, and entertained the fantasy of its being another bundle of money). When she realized it was a book, she felt tricked and betrayed. An unfamiliar order was asserting itself, everything was falling apart. For a moment, she thought the money had vanished, or that it had never existed at all. Perhaps because she was used to doing everything alone, Masha tended to believe in the workings of chance, whi
ch included her own confusion and forgetting, rather than the intervention of other people. As such, she felt particularly defenseless at the loss of a possession, no matter how recent or providential, that she had made such an effort to take care of. Frustrated with herself, she slammed her fists several times against the wardrobe and hurled the book in no particular direction, as if she were trying to make it disappear—in her fury, she saw the light reflect off its spine as it bounced twice across the bed. She thought for a moment. She was inclined to give up and console herself with the idea that she had been the victim of her own fantasies, but some vague sense of dignity told her it wouldn’t be right to accept the loss without really searching. So she dove back into the wardrobe.

  Masha plunged inside with the speed of a person trying to recover something essential. To an observer, the scene might call to mind an unexpected amalgamation, the birth of a new figure: part human, part man-made object. An extraordinary event that depended on the near total darkness was unfolding, and would soon be forgotten. Masha found the bundle of money almost immediately—it had been waiting in its usual place, one shelf up—and was relieved. For a moment, she had imagined herself dispossessed and futureless, dedicating herself to the same old tasks, dreaming day after day of the providential foreigner who would spare no expense when buying her gifts, specific or non-specific things, depending on the circumstance, perhaps driven by Masha’s unlikely kindness, or more probably by the air of squalor and need that surrounded her. The money would free her from this reality, though she wasn’t entirely sure by what mechanism, or what action she herself would have to take. As for the rest, she could say little about the book from that distance; for example, it struck her as having many pages. She walked over to the bed to grab it, then returned to stand under a slat window that had been cut haphazardly in the furthest corner of the room, through which an artificial glimmer filtered in from outside. She managed to see its cover, in yellow and other colors; slightly to the right of center, she made out the image of a pioneer woman almost hidden behind the flag she held up with no apparent effort at all, despite the fact that it was twice her size. The wind was blowing at her and her dress rippled with the same movements as her hair, though with less energy than the flag. In Russia, books were all very similar; this one, Masha thought, would probably have been overlooked not only by the person who lost it, but also by whoever found it (she was proof of this). Masha wondered if the book and the money had belonged to the same person, and whether there was some connection between the two that she should keep in mind. But the meaning of the relationship didn’t matter to her; she simply took the book, keeping in mind the circumstances under which she had found it, as an object well suited to hiding the money. (A fairly common use for Masha, who had spent her childhood and much of her youth watching Salgado hide his savings between the pages of countless worn volumes.)