The Seventh Candidate Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stock, 00 emery paper and E 34 wetting
agent.
     
    The director introduced the chemicals and
tools to the candidates. He showed them via his assistant, who
translated his words onto the sheet tacked alongside the
sailor-suited girl, the gamut of shades obtainable by the addition
of Basic White or Basic Black. Next, the range of brushes, the
choice dependent on the thickness of the graffiti line. Finally,
how to produce a trembling effect (in their jargon, the “palsy
line”) in order to avoid too clear a demarcation between corrected
and uncorrected areas.
    The director paused as his assistant chose
the correct items to cleanse the boyish sailor-suited girl of his
own graffis. She was his favorite among the female poster-models.
For years he’d followed her growth on the posters from childhood
into touchingly gawky adolescence and then into the radiance of
young unemphatic womanhood. He knew her as “Helena.” He didn’t know
her real name.
    In the sixty-three stations of the capital’s
underground network she’d stood exposed for days, delicately
holding that cone inches from her parted lips, her sky-blue eyes
shining with anticipatory pleasure, only it was no cone after the
vandals had finished with it. None of them had chosen the
director’s own innocent transformation of the cone into a child’s
man with stick arms and legs.
    How was it possible to desecrate certain
things? The director had a theory about that. He’d once tried to
convey it to his assistant, in simple language. Despite her claims
to college, he doubted she had more than a high-school diploma.
    In those endless windings of vaulted
tunnels, from Central Station to East Gate ,
from Victory
Square to Three
Nuns , from Armory to Crossroads , windows had been opened for them in the grimy
tiles, he’d said more or less. Windows on a world where the dirt
and disorder, the meanness and vulgarity of their real world were
banished. In a sense, weren’t the posters, beneath the surface
mercantile inspiration, metaphors of a desired state of being?
Wasn’t it out of secret despair that the world below vented its
destructive rage on those ideal images of beauty, harmony,
affection and love? His assistant had asked him to explain
“mercantile” and “metaphor.”
    The director started with the easiest
operations. First, the mending of the lacerations: a quick
application of paste followed by a sweep of the moistened sponge.
Next, the removal of the political stickers. These were black on
red and called for a general strike and the overthrow of the
government. They infested all the walls of the capital. His
assistant’s hands, like an extension of his will, instantaneously
illustrated his words. A quick touch of 00 emery paper to abrade
the impermeable gloss, a daub of E 34 wetting agent, a number 3
spatula and off it slipped. The micro-sponge dipped in alcohol
removed the residual gummy rectangle.
    Six seconds, announced the director
triumphantly, looking up from his watch. Joyous at the implied
compliment, Dorothea Ruda barely had time to lean back and glance
at the negative evidence of her brio and clap her hands once with
loud satisfaction like an Italian. With her large dark eyes and
mobile face, the director suspected she had southern blood.
    Now, without giving either of them a
moment’s rest (although stiff and motionless at the lectern, he was
sweating even harder than his assistant), the director introduced
another elementary problem: the eradication of graffiti applied to
a solid-color background free of surcharged detail. This was
fortunately the most common configuration. Sweeps of white and
blue, the traditional hues of purity, he reminded them,
irresistibly attracted the vandals. Obviously the masking medium
must be of the same shade as the background. The ball-pointed
slogan to eradicate was “Long live disorder!” The director had
trouble thinking up authentic-sounding slogans for the tests. “My
assistant,” he said, “will now