around the room, naming all the equipment, and even let him look into the back room where he had first gone to talk to Poscik. An iron drum hung on the wall with copper rails leading down from it, and on the floor was a large container full of coils which, Woch explained, would protect against fire if the drum, which was a breaker, sprayed out burning oil.
“What’s under the coils?” asked Stefan, trying to sound reasonable and relevant.
Woch looked at him coolly. “Why should anything be under the coils? There’s nothing.”
They went back to the room. A small bottle of eighty-proof vodka and a sliced pickle had appeared on the table. Woch poured out tiny glasses, drank to Stefan’s health, then corked the bottle and hid it behind a pillar, announcing: “Vodka is bad for us.”
He said nothing more about what had happened during the storm, but he got friendlier. He ignored the old man, as if he were not even there. He took off his jacket and hung it over' the back of his chair. His gray sweater stretched across his chest. He took out a tin tobacco box and some cigarette papers and offered them to Stefan. “It’s strong,” he warned.
Stefan tried to roll a cigarette, eventually producing a crooked weed whose ragged ends he licked so hard that the tobacco fell out. Woch, who had been pretending not to watch, took a paper and a pinch of sawdust-like tobacco between two stubby fingers, snapped his thumb up, and handed Stefan a cigarette ready to be licked. Stefan thanked him and bent over Woch’s lighter. The flame nearly burned his eyebrows, but Woch deftly moved it aside. The first puff choked Stefan, tears came to his eyes, but he tried his best to look natural. Woch pretended not to notice again. He made another cigarette for himself, lit it, and they sat silently as the smoke merged into a single blue cloud under the lamp above their heads.
“How long have you been working in this field?” Stefan asked, realizing that the question might sound foolish but unable to think of anything else. The operator puffed on his cigarette as if he had not heard, then suddenly slapped his hand down.
“I went to work when I was a boy this high,” he said, holding out his hand. “No, this high,” he said, lowering it. “In Malachowice. They didn’t have electricity yet. The French came to set up the turbines. The foreman was an honest man. When he shouted in the boiler room, you could hear him out on the ramp. But he didn’t scream at kids, he was patient and tried to teach them. The first time you went up on the high-tension circuit-breaker to dust it off—because that’s how you start—he’d show you the brush with the dead man’s hand on it. You never forgot that.”
“I don’t understand,” Stefan said.
“Just a regular paintbrush. Horsehair. That’s what you use to dust. But the current has to be off in the cables, no tension. If you forget and touch a live cable, flame shoots out and that’s it. Anyway, this was a brush from someone who forgot. A guy fresh from the village. I didn’t know him, he was before my time. His fingerprints were burned into the handle, black as coal. In fact, the corpse was black as coal from head to toe. Burned to a crisp.
“Anyway,” Woch went on, “that’s the way to do it. Nobody ever learned our trade from talking. Good eyes, good hands—that’s what you need. And always look alive. I liked the work. And my boss liked me. I went from low voltage to high voltage. I worked on the lines for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it. The lines aren’t for me. Put on the irons, climb up, climb down, pull the lines, over and over again, from pole to pole. Everyone gets sick of it, so they have to keep hiring new people. Vodka is the only joy in that work. One mistake, one wrong cable, and bang! Everlasting glory.”
The half-finished cigarette stuck to his lip so he had both hands free, though he wasn’t using them at the moment.
“I worked with a guy named Jozef Fijalka. All he did was drink. He was already drunk by the time he got to work and he never talked, just mumbled, but he was a good worker as long as he was on his feet. He drank from payday until his money was gone. The first half of the month, he was an angel, the second half, the hell with him. Once he disappeared right after payday. They looked everywhere and finally found him in the switching station. He’d gone to sleep right between the high-tension cables, but he was drunk and nothing happened. They picked him up by the legs and pulled him out. Very carefully. Eventually he got himself killed. It was on a transformer. I went to see him in the hospital, and he was covered with bandages. He asked me to lift up his arm, and when I did, there was nothing in his armpit. Just bones. All the flesh was gone. He died fast.”
Woch paused and took a drag of his cigarette. He fell into a reverie.
“The union paid for the funeral, and they did right by his family too. That’s how it used to be. Later on, in the thirties, they started laying men off.”
He crushed out his cigarette with a look of disgust.
“I had a repair crew working under me. You sit around all night waiting. A bird lands on a line and gets fried, a branch falls and knocks something down, a kid shorts something out flying a kite. All that stuff is natural. But then in the thirties this new thing started. I’ll never forget the first one. Not as long as I live. Suicide. A kid tied a wire around a stone, held the other end of the wire in his hand, and threw the stone over the cables. He was burned completely black, his hand fell off, and the fat that melted off him was strewn all around. If I hadn’t known him—but I did. He worked in the railroad yards, but they laid him off because he wasn’t married. They laid the bachelors off first. The girls liked him, he was a nice kid. People hadn’t known that electrocution was a quick death, but now they found out. And it was easy too, especially since the French ran the cables next to footbridges. It was cheaper that way. Very economical, the French. All you needed was a stone, a wire, and an easy toss.”
Woch was holding onto the edge of the table, as if he wanted to lift it.
“After that, every time the telephone rang when I was on duty, my heart stopped. By the time the third goddamned one did it, the whole city knew. There was an employment office right near the power station. We’d go out there, and they were lined up like sheep—the unemployed. Somebody once shouted, ‘There go the pallbearers!’ Pieluch, my assistant, shouted back, ‘Jump in the goddamn river, and we won’t have to bother.’ When they heard that, that was it. It’s a good thing we had a good driver, because the stones were flying. That Pieluch and I had words after that. He was no operator, but he had a sick wife. I could have had a hundred better men instead of him, and that made me angry. ‘You were rotting away down there a week ago yourself,’ I told him, ‘and now that you’ve had a couple of days’ work you say the hell with the rest of them.’ He was hot-tempered. He came back at me. So I busted him in the mouth. Later he came in begging for his job because his wife was dying and he didn’t have any money, but what could I do? And his wife really did die on him. That fall. When he came back from the funeral, he stuck his head through the window—I was on duty—and said, very quietly, ‘Die a slow death!’ Less than a week later, we got another call to go out to the bridge for a suicide, and damned if it wasn’t him. Baked like a goose. You could’ve stuck your finger in his chest. It was roasted crisp.”
The old man put two tin bowls of thick soup on the table and sat on a box nearby, balancing a steaming pot on his knees. They ate slowly. Stefan burned his tongue on the first spoonful. He blew on the next one. When they finished, Woch brought the tin box of tobacco out again. They smoked. Stefan was hoping that the operator would keep on telling stories, but he didn’t seem to feel like it. He sat there gray, massive, and gloomy, breathing heavily, exhaling smoke, parrying Stefan’s questions with monosyllables. When Stefan found that Woch had worked at the power station in his home town for a few years, he remarked, “So it was thanks to you that I had lights at home.” He wanted to emphasize this as a bond that would always connect them.
Woch said nothing, as if he had not heard. The rain had almost stopped, just a few drops falling from the eaves outside the window. Stefan hesitated to leave; he did not want to part from Woch in the mood of distance that had arisen. The conversation had petered out, and Stefan, looking for a new theme, picked up Woch’s engraved nickel lighter from the table. “Andenken aus Dresden” was engraved on one side in Gothic script. He turned it over and read, “Fur gute Arbeit.”
“A beautiful lighter,” he said. “Did you work in Germany too?”
“No,” said Woch, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank. “The boss gave it to me.”
“German?” Stefan asked, a bit unpleasantly.
“German,” Woch confirmed, looking closely at Stefan.
“For good work,” Stefan said with a barely perceptible sneer, though he was well aware that this was not going to improve the mood.
“That’s right, for good work,” Woch replied emphatically, almost belligerently. Stefan had lost any sense of how to approach Woch. He stood up and, feigning nonchalance, strolled around the room, walking close to the equipment, willing to expose himself to a harsh rebuke about safety, anything to break the hostile silence. But in
