Off the Rack

The night clerk read the reports standing at the table in the main room, with Besnik and Dritan on the far side of it. He was young and new to the Block and read every line.

“East fence, sir. Camera four.” He laid the stills on the table. “A hole in the wire behind the laundry. Guards going out when the evening watch came off, back before dawn. Four of them, over the night. I have the names.”

He read them. Agron was the first. The second was Kreshnik, and meant nothing to Dritan until he looked at the stills: a figure bent double in the wire, and in a later frame the same man straightening and tipping his head back to the sky. Dritan had once watched the back of that head for three breaths. He had stood in front of the man a hundred times in the main room and never placed him, because the head was always lowered.

“Noted,” said Besnik. He had not looked at the stills. “File it.”

“Sir, the regulation on—”

“File it.”

Around the table, eyes found the floor. The clerk filed it. Then he laid one more paper in front of Dritan, a typed slip, the first thing in all those months to come back down from Upstairs.

The Commander is reminded that Regulation 3 applies to all ranks and to all contacts. No reply is required.

There was no signature. Dritan read it twice and thought of a sergeant’s hands on a counter, a boy and a chalk tail, a head tipped back to the sky. It fitted each of them, and he could not have said which. So someone did read what went up. Besnik did not look at it.

***

Later, over the office kettle, Besnik told him that reporting everyone who went out for some fun would run them out of guards. The wire was mended every Thursday and cut every Friday. They had an understanding. Dritan turned his cup a quarter turn and thanked him for the tea.

***

His quarters were two rooms and a kettle he had learned to love. The note he sent them was not an order, though he had written it three times.

They came to the door when their watch came off and saluted him in the corridor, and he said, “Not here. Sit.” Agron took the chair by the window. Dritan sat on the edge of the bed. Kreshnik did not sit. He had not once looked Dritan in the face since the door, which Dritan now saw he had not done in the main room either, in all the months. Dritan had put it down to the bars.

“Take me with you,” Dritan said. “The next time you go out. I want to see what we guard.”

Kreshnik went white. “Sir,” he said, “a commander who asks that already knows the rest. I would like to report something. Before it is reported for me.”

“Kreshnik—”

“Years ago. A feeding point in the hills. A donor spoke. I heard her. I did not report it. I told myself it was only words. They have so little else, sir. I knew you the day your name was read. You were looking straight at me when I turned, and you are a Fisniket. I have waited for it every night since. I will take whatever is coming.”

Dritan put down his cup. “Sit down.”

Kreshnik sat, on the stool by the door.

“I was in the room,” Dritan said. “I did not report it either.”

Agron had a cup halfway to his mouth. “Well,” he said at last, “that’s two of you.”

“Why, sir?” Kreshnik said. “Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Dritan said.

Agron drank his tea. Then he put the cup on the table with a click. “You can stop looking at the door,” he said to Kreshnik. “I know Dritan. From before he put on the bars. He’s all right.”

Dritan got up from the bed and took the other chair, the one beside Agron’s. Agron looked at the space he had closed up.

“You’ll want to see the city,” Agron said. “Not in that coat.”

***

Through a hole in the wire, past the empty ring he had taken for the whole city, the streets were lit. It was dark only along the river. Three tanned men drew no looks. The shop’s clothes were made first and found by size. He had never owned a garment not made for him. In the mirror: black hair, a tan, brown eyes in the yellow light, red under the Block’s white lamps. Agron paid. A Fisniket pin by the till cost less than a loaf of bread. He bought a notebook, the first thing he would not put into a machine or onto a form, and a pencil came with it.

The bar had no television and no radio. A man wrote a letter while a woman corrected his spelling, and a waitress counted tips that were not enough. Dritan counted with her. He had fed before the watch, so a roomful of pulses was only a smell. In a cellar afterward nobody was ordering anybody, and Kreshnik, so stiff in the quarters, danced.

***

They went back through the wire in the last hour of dark. In his rooms Dritan lit the lamp and put on the kettle, though he did not want tea, and sat down at the table in the new jacket, which smelled of the shop and the smoke and nobody he knew.

In one pocket was the notebook. In the other, folded small, was the slip he had carried out in the borrowed jacket and moved to this one in the shop, without deciding to: a street and a number, copied from a screen, not looked at since.

He opened the notebook and wrote the first line with the free pencil.

A man was writing a letter at the bar. A woman read it over his shoulder and corrected the spelling. The waitress counted her tips.