Chapter 3
The October Appointment
You’re picking up where you left off.
The announcement was made on the evening of the 3rd, on the internal network and by posting, in fourteen lines.
Élise read it on the board at block Oost, at twenty to eight, with thirty or so other people, in the cold of the porch. Nobody shouted. A woman asked out loud whether it was for everyone and a man answered yes, and that was about all that was said.
She climbed the three floors. The corridor strip held its four minutes.
Jonas was already there, which never happened on a Wednesday, sitting on the chair, elbows on his knees, with his coat still on.
“You've seen,” he said.
“I've seen.”
He nodded. His hands were clasped and he was looking at the floor between his feet, and she knew that position: it was the position of a man who has spent the day not sitting down.
“Do you want me to tell you about it?” he said.
“Not tonight.”
“All right.”
“Tomorrow.”
“All right.”
He got up and took off his coat, and hung it on the back of the chair as he did every day, and went to wash his hands, and she got the bowls out.
They had a way of cooking that belonged only to them and that they had never talked about.
He chopped. She cooked. He chopped badly, coarsely, without hurrying, holding the knife too high on the blade, and for the first three years she had corrected him, and one day she had stopped and since then it had become something she watched with a tenderness she would have found hard to account for. He cut the leek into two-centimetre rounds. Nobody cuts a leek into two-centimetre rounds.
That evening he chopped an onion, a potato and what was left of Tuesday's leek, and he said, without looking up:
“Van der Meer asked why it wasn't repaired in 2141.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He asked it quietly, at the end, in the corridor, to me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said that in 2141 I signed the budget for the Yerseke quays.”
She stirred. The barley always caught on the bottom of that pan and it had to be stirred.
“You did right,” she said.
“Signing the quays?”
“Telling him.”
He put the knife down and looked at her, and he made that small movement at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile and that with him meant thank you.
They ate. He took her bowl from her to wash it.
Then they did the things they did, in the order they did them: she sat on the floor with her back to the radiator, he put water on for the tisane that was not tisane, he told the story of the man from the next office who had spent the morning discussing the roof of the school at Kapelle two hours after the vote, and she laughed, and he did the man's voice again, and she laughed again.
Then he said:
“Kapelle. The roof.”
“Yes.”
“We voted it through.”
“You voted the roof through.”
“We voted it through, Élise. Unanimously. Afterwards.”
She put her cup down.
“Why?”
“Because it rains on it.”
They looked at each other, and something happened that she could not have explained to anyone else: they both laughed, properly, for a long time, a laugh that was not cheerful at all, and by the end her eyes were stinging and so were his.
They had an argument they had been replaying for four years and that had never been a real argument.
It was about a chair.
In 2146, Jonas had brought back from the salvage depot a chair with a bentwood back, missing one spindle, and he had said he would mend it. Élise had said he would not mend it. He had said he would. She had said she would take that bet.
The chair had been in the hall for four years with its spindle missing, and they used it every day to put things on, and two or three times a month one of them would allude to the bet, and the other would answer with the same sentence as the time before.
That evening, clearing up, Jonas put the pan down on it.
“You've got thirty-nine days,” said Élise.
“I've got time.”
“You said that in 2147.”
“I had time then too.”
It was exactly what he had been saying for four years, word for word, and she laughed the way she had been laughing for four years, and he looked pleased with himself the way he had looked pleased with himself for four years.
She never found out what became of the chair.
On the cupboard, under the magnet, was the paper.
It had been there since 7 February. It was half a sheet of yellow paper, stamped twice, with both their names, a file number and an administrative sentence saying that the joint application Vantroyen-Reyners was accepted subject to removal of the device at term, and the term was 19 October.
They had walked past it two hundred times. They no longer read it. It was part of the cupboard.
That evening, straightening up, Élise looked at it.
Jonas followed her eyes.
“The clinic closes on the 28th,” he said.
“I know.”
“You can have it brought forward. I can have it brought forward.”
“No.”
“Élise.”
“No,” she said. “Not you. Not that.”
He did not argue. It was one of the things she loved him for and did not realise she did: that he knew exactly, to the word, where to stop.
He took the paper, folded it in two, and put it back under the magnet folded, which served no purpose at all, and they went to bed.
Later, in the dark, he said:
“They turned down eleven sector requests.”
She did not move.
“Is that a lot?” she said.
“It's normal. We turn down ten every quarter.”
There was a pause. The radiator made its radiator noise. Down in the yard somebody was dragging something heavy across concrete, very slowly, stopping every three metres.
“Jonas.”
“Yes.”
She had the sentence ready. I had 5.2 at canal four this morning and there's sand in the Zuidvliet chamber. Twenty-three words. She was holding them the way you hold a coin in your hand, flat.
“Nothing,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
He laid his hand on her belly, flat, the way he did, and she put hers on top of it.
She woke at four and lay still.
There was a sound in the room that she knew by heart and had stopped hearing years ago: the block compressor, down in the basement, which started every forty minutes and ran for eleven.
She listened to it start, run, stop.
She thought that in six weeks that compressor would not start any more, and that this sound, which she had heard every night of her life without once listening to it, would not exist anywhere.
She waited out the forty minutes and listened to it start again.
The next morning she went to the unloading quay at Wemeldinge because she had been asked to fetch two drums of grease before the store went, and that was where she saw the man with the cargo bike.
He was arguing with the storeman. He had been arguing for a while, judging by the way the storeman was holding his clipboard against his chest, like a shield.
“I'm not disputing the stamp,” the man was saying. “The stamp's good. I'm saying that with the stamp I can't buy anything.”
“The books have been frozen since yesterday.”
“I know they're frozen. What I'm telling you is that I delivered four hundred kilos of seed corn on the first, that you have it, that it's there behind you, and that what I've got is a piece of paper.”
“You'll be paid at the thaw.”
“There won't be a thaw. You're leaving.”
The storeman said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and the man stayed where he was, one hand on the handlebar of his trailer, looking at the shed.
He was about thirty, with hair cut anyhow, a leather jacket patched at the elbows with cloth that did not go with it at all, and you could smell him three metres off — sweat, chain grease, and something else, smoked.
On the roof of his trailer was a glass panel a metre by sixty, clean, without a mark, in a wooden frame remade by hand.
Élise signed her chit for the two drums and waited for them to be brought out.
“You're the one who reads the canals,” said the man.
She turned round. He was not looking at her; he was checking a strap.
“How do you know that?”
“You've got a probe sticking out of your pocket and grease to the elbow. There aren't thirty-six trades.”
“Do you want something?”
“I want four hundred kilos of seed corn or enough to pay for it,” he said. “But it's nothing to do with you, so no.”
He pulled on the strap. It held.
“When are you leaving?” he said.
“When I'm told to.”
“Have you got a number?”
“Not yet.”
“You'll get one. You're from the inside.”
He said it without any aggression at all, the way you comment on the weather, and that was exactly why she took it badly.
“And you, what are you?”
“A carrier.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I sell salt, seed corn, glass cells and news,” he said, “and that when a Zone starts packing its bags I'm the last to be paid and the first who has to clear off.”
He went round behind the trailer and began taking out the chocks.
“You know what's funny?” he said. “There are ninety-four thousand more of you than there are of Brabant. And you're all going to knock on their door.”
“Nine hundred and forty.”
“Sorry?”
“There are nine hundred and forty thousand of us.”
He stopped. He straightened up slowly, a chock in his hand, and for the first time he looked at her properly, and she saw that he had not known.
“Nine hundred and forty thousand,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“And how many are you getting out by lorry?”
“Four thousand a day.”
He did the sum. He did it fast, and without moving, and she saw the exact moment when he hit the bottom.
“Right,” he said.
He put the chock back in the trailer box, shut it, and stood for a second with his hand on the lid.
“Do you know you're already dead, here?” he said.
“I'm sorry?”
“Not you. This. All of it.”
He jerked his head at the shed, the glasshouses, the crane, the dyke behind.
“You think you're going to leave. You're not going to leave. You're going to spread.”
He got into the saddle.
“Good luck with your canals,” he said.
And he went off, without forcing it, along the earth bank, with his glass panel catching the sun at every bump.