The Appointment Read Online Free PDF Page A

leave the paved sidewalk and circle around the group of bins, without quite meeting. From up here the bins look like ransacked cupboards with the doors torn off. Once a month someone sets them on fire, the smoke rises and the garbage is consumed. If your windows aren’t shut, your eyes start stinging and your throat gets sore. Most things happen outside the entrances to the shops, but unfortunately all we can see are the rear service doors. No matter how often we count them, we can never match up the twenty-seven doors in back with the eight front doors belonging to the grocer, the bread shop, the greengrocer, the pharmacy, the bar, the shoemaker, the hairdresser, and the kindergarten. The whole rear wall is riddled with doors; nevertheless, the delivery trucks stop mostly in the street, out front.
    The old shoemaker was complaining he had too little room and too many rats. His shop consists of a workbench enclosed in a small space that is partitioned from the rest of the room by a makeshift wall of wooden planks. The man I took over from was the one who fixed the place up, the shoemaker said. Back then the building was new. The space was boarded off then too, but he couldn’t think of anything to do with all those planks, or maybe he just didn’t want to; anyway, he didn’t use them at all. I knocked in a few nails and ever since I’ve been hanging the shoes up by their laces, thongs, or heels, they don’t get gnawed on anymore. I can’t have the rats eating everything—afterall, I have to pay for the damage. Especially in winter, when they’re hungrier. Behind those planks there’s a great big hall. Once, back in the early days, during a holiday, I came down to the shop, loosened two of the boards behind the bench, and squeezed through with a flashlight. There’s nowhere you can put your feet, the whole floor skitters and squeaks, he said, it’s full of rats’ nests. Rats don’t need a door, you know, they just tunnel through the ground. The walls are covered with electrical sockets, and the back wall has four doors leading out to the bins. But you can’t budge them so much as an inch to drive the rats out even for a couple hours. The door to my workplace is just a cheap piece of tin—in fact, more than half the doors in back of the shops aren’t doors at all, they’re just tin plates they built into the wall to save on concrete. The sockets are probably there in case of war. There’ll always be war all right, he laughed, but not here. The Russians’ve got us where they want us with treaties, they won’t be showing up here. Whatever they need, they’ve shipped off to Moscow: they eat our grain and our meat and leave us to go hungry and fight over the shortages. Who’d want to conquer us, all it would do is cost them money. Every country on earth is happy not to have us, even the Russians.
     
    The driver returns,
eating a crescent roll, in no particular hurry. His shirt has slipped back outside his trousers, as if he’d been driving the whole time. His cheeks are stuffed with food, he runs his hand through his hair, clutching a half-eaten roll and making more of a face than the effort of chewing calls for. Now he tidies up on the step up to the car, although not for us. For us he puts on a grouchy face so no one in the tram will dare utter a word. He climbs in, his other hand holding a secondroll, while a third is poking out of his shirt pocket. Slowly the tram starts moving. The father with the boy has taken his legs out of the aisle and stretched them between the seats. His son is licking the pane, but instead of pulling the boy away, the man is holding the little one’s neck so his little bright-red tongue can reach the window. The boy turns his head, stares, grabs his father’s ear, and babbles. The father doesn’t bother to wipe the dribble off the boy’s chin. Maybe he’s actually listening. But his thoughts are clearly elsewhere as he stares out through the saliva smeared on the