The Last Compromise Read Online Free PDF Page A

visitor. A visitor is not a prisoner.’ He placed the empty
tea glass on the empty saucer, took it into his right hand, stood upright again
and continued. ‘But a visitor is not the same thing as a guest . You
might leave the country as a guest of our consulate. We are currently finding
out whether this is possible. What you said about this gentleman in Luxembourg
needs to be verified. In the meantime, you are a visitor.’
    He
turned around, walked out with the empty glass and saucer, and softly closed
the door behind him with his free left hand.
     
    Wincheringen,
Germany
     
    Boris
Zayek put the plastic shopping bag down, turned on the light in the small
hallway and closed the door behind him. He had just come back to the tiny German
border town on the river Mosel from which he was commuting every day. It was
dark outside. He lived on the top floor in a small three-storey building with
one apartment on each floor. The landlady lived on the ground floor.
    The
truly local population in this town were old people like his landlady. Retired
peasants, mostly. The rest were commuting to Luxembourg or to Trier or to
somewhere else, and now they’d all be getting ready for dinner like he was. That’s
what the neighbour downstairs was doing, too. But the indigenous locals would
already be sitting at the corner pub right now, getting drunk on regionally
brewed beer and locally produced white wine. Not that it was any more
distinguished than any random type of beer, or any random sort of wine. Zayek
wasn’t much of a drinker himself. He was more of a smoker than a drinker, and
he wasn’t even much of a smoker to begin with. The cigarette pack he’d bought
this morning was still sealed, lying buried deep inside his jacket pocket. The shopping
bag contained no alcoholic beverages, either. It contained pasta, a glass of
tomato sauce, a net with three onions, a cucumber and a bar of chocolate.
    Zayek
had long ago switched to what he liked to think of as just-in-time delivery. It
was part of lean production, they had taught him during his studies. Every day
he would only buy supplies that he needed for the evening, either at a
supermarket or at a petrol station with a groceries section. He alternated
between the two, to keep the market forces in balance, even though he knew perfectly
well that he, as a single customer, couldn’t possibly tilt the profit-and-loss
account of either of the two stores in any particular direction.
    He
took off his jacket and hung it on the hook that he’d nailed to the wall the
year before. Until then he’d been putting his street clothes on a chair in the living
room.
    He
picked up his shopping bag and carried it over to the kitchen, which was about
as small as the hallway. He liked his kitchen a lot, precisely because of its
small size. He had optimised it to his needs. There was one piece of
everything. One flat plate, one soup plate, one small bowl, one glass, one cup,
one fork, one butter knife, one sharp knife, one pan, one pot, and so on. He’d
bought the cutlery, like most of the rest of his furniture and kitchen tools,
at Ikea. The German one near Saarlouis, not the Belgian one across the border
on the other side of Luxembourg. And wherever there had been sets of two or
four or six, he’d taken out one for use and stored the rest in the cupboard. It
was extremely efficient. In case he needed more he was well-equipped, but for
daily use he had one piece of each to handle and hence only one piece of each
to clean afterwards. He didn’t want to waste any more time than was strictly
necessary on cleaning. That was also why his furniture was relatively
minimalistic, so that he could easily wipe the surfaces and reach behind corners
when he was vacuuming the place.
    He
washed his hands. He put water from the still running tap in his pot and placed
it on the stove, cut up one of the onions and the cucumber with his sharp knife
while he waited for the water to start boiling. Once it had started