someone tell me things were so bad? Why didn’t that fool of a doctor put it in one of his chatty reports? I can help get you out of here. It will mean moving a few files and changing a few orders.” He pursed his lips. “This isn’t the best time for that, but it can be done.”
I said that things were fine as they were and I planned to stay.
“Really?” The shock in his voice gave way to sarcasm. “I forgot; you must be in ecstasy, just you and these trees.”
“I have my reasons for being here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They were planning to send you to a camp. The only reason you’re here is because I convinced them to put you on this hill instead. They assured me you’d have a house.”
“Am I supposed to be grateful? I don’t need your help. I never did. We agreed we were not brothers anymore, or have you forgotten?”
He wasn’t listening. “The longer you stay, the more they will be convinced that you deserve what you got. Maybe they’ll be right.”
“The longer I stay, the more I realize I don’t want to go back to that madness.”
This stopped the conversation.
“Never wise with your words,” my brother said finally. “Lucky for you, no one heard it but me.”
“Are we done?” I went to the door. “Because if we are, I’m sure you have things to do, memos to write, all of those things that the Center has to have or the world will grind to a halt.”
“As always,” he said, “you are your own worst enemy. Have it your way; stay up here until you rot.” He never came back.
2
After the first load of lumber was used up, I decided to test the limits and phone for more. It wasn’t clear who was on the other end of the line.
“Seasoned lumber,” I said. “Galvanized nails, otherwise they rust. And wood screws-try to get the ones with the flat heads. That way I can countersink them. Wait, I also need sandpaper. Two sheets of fine, one medium, and one coarse.”
“That’s it? Nothing else?” The voice on the other end sounded surprised. “Screws and sandpaper?”
“Can you get them?”
“Sure I can get them. I’m a magician. I wave my magic wand and everyone gets everything they want. Last week, a man called from another place-I can’t say where-and asked for fresh fruit. He said his gums were bleeding. I’m still looking for fruit. Screws will be no problem.”
About two months later, the old man in the old truck was back with a shipment of boards, a box of nails mixed with screws of various sizes and types, and three or four torn sheets of sandpaper.
“The guards at the bottom of the hill emptied the box and looked at every damn screw. Normally, they wave me through without a second glance. There must be something going on.”
“As long as it stays at the bottom of the hill,” I said, “I could give a fine fuck.”
“Yeah,” said the old man, “that’s what I thought.”
One of the few things I had brought with me, besides my grandfather’s tools and a few pieces of furniture he’d made, was a radio. Reception was poor, but I could hear something over the static the few nights a week I got electricity. At first there was only electricity a few hours a day and some days not at all, but by the third year the outages were only on Thursdays and usually only in the afternoons. At one point, I wondered if rumbling on Thursdays had anything to do with the power outages. Maybe every time they set off a charge, they blew over a power line by mistake. When I was in the army, things like that happened more than ever made it into the reports.
A doctor visited twice a year. He said they told him it was owed me because of my family’s loyal service, but I had a suspicion my brother had sent him up to spy on me. If he was a spy, he was melancholy and soft-spoken. The second year, he brought books that he thought I should read. He brought Tolstoy and Chekhov in Russian, which I read slowly and with some difficulty. The third year, he carried in his pocket a small book that must have been read a hundred times.
“What is this?” I asked as he handed it to me.
“Kafka,” he said. “Make sure it’s a clear, sunny day and sit outside when you read it. Don’t try to read it at night, and whatever you do, don’t read it when the wind is blowing.”
“Why not?”
“If I know you, you’ll want to devour it in huge chunks. Don’t. Sip it as if it were boiling- hot soup. If you’re not careful, you can hurt yourself with Kafka. It can make you very cynical.” He smiled.
3
The house had not been so difficult to build. It was a simple structure, basically a box with two windows in the front and one in the back, a front door, and a flat roof. The ceiling was low, but I didn’t have many tall visitors. A few times every winter, I had to go up on the roof and shovel off the snow, so eventually I built a simple ladder permanently up the side. Rough carpentry was less a problem than perfecting the skills it took to make wooden toys. I didn’t have all the right tools, but I had a lot of time. I made cars and trolleys and sometimes boats. I could make a trolley a week; a boat took longer. Sometimes, what started out as a trolley turned into a boat, usually an ocean liner. For some reason, it never happened the other way around. A trolley is relatively easy-a few dowels to make the windows, an open platform on either end, two long rectangles for the ceiling and the floor, and a couple of round pieces as the headlamps. Cars were more difficult. At first, the cars looked like the ones we used in the Ministry to pick up subjects for questioning, but I didn’t want to think about that, so I started making them with only two doors, room for two people in the front seat looking out at the scenery. If the doctor noticed the change in models, he didn’t say anything. He usually took four or five-whatever I had ready-when he left.
Living on the mountain, I trained myself to stand in one place and do nothing but watch the light move and the layers of the scene in front of me unfold. It was against all of my instincts, contrary to years of experience in the Ministry, to close down those nerve endings that had been put on permanent alert. I forced myself to become oblivious to distractions; I battled down the nervous habits of the hunted, the learned behavior of always shifting one’s gaze, ears twitching at every sound, ceaselessly trying to escape danger, to twist away from the doom that moved from front to back, right to left, at every moment.
It took me almost a year, after I was finally settled, to purge myself of the urge to be completely aware of my surroundings each second. In the quiet, it was easier to do, to let the world pass without the overpowering need to recognize the shadow of the hawk, the soft beat of the owl’s wings, the talons that were just above your neck. It was only when I learned to be so still and hear things without listening that I caught the pattern within the rumble of explosions-three in a row, several seconds apart. The explanation from the farmer about the dam building had stopped making sense one crystal clear morning when I went to the top of the mountain and saw-across the valley that lay behind me-a heavy truck coming out of a building built directly against a hill. Big construction vehicles don’t come out of buildings next to mountains unless the buildings are covering tunnel adits.
The old truck driver gave me a blank look when I asked him about the explosions. “I never hear them,” he said. “I don’t know about what I don’t hear. Maybe neither should you.”
When the doctor came up in September, I asked if he had an idea what the explosions could be.
“Blasting,” he said. “Dams, mines, tunnels-could be anything. This is a funny part of the
