Klara and the Sun

It had been obvious for days that the Cootings Machine was going to be something out of the ordinary. First, the overhaul men arrived to prepare for it, marking out a special section of the street with wooden barriers. The taxi drivers didn’t like this at all, and made a lot of noise with their horns. Then the overhaul men began to drill and break up the ground, even parts of the sidewalk, which frightened the two AFs in the window. Once, when the noise became really awful, Rosa put her hands to her ears and kept them there, even though there were customers in the store. Manager apologized to every customer who came in, even though the noise had nothing to do with us. Once, a customer began talking about Pollution, and pointing to the overhaul men outside, said how dangerous Pollution was for everyone. So when the Cootings Machine first arrived, I thought it might be a machine to fight Pollution, but Boy AF Rex said no, it was something specially designed to make more of it. I told him I didn’t believe him, and he said, ‘All right, Klara, you just wait and see.’

It turned out of course that he was right. The Cootings Machine – I named it that in my mind because it had ‘Cootings’ in big letters across its side – began with a high-pitched whine, not nearly as bad as the drills had been, and no worse than Manager’s vacuum cleaner. But there were three short funnels protruding from its roof, and smoke began to come up out of them. At first the smoke came in little white puffs, then grew darker, till it no longer rose as separate clouds but as one thick continuous one.

When I next looked, the street outside had become partitioned into several vertical panels – from my position I could see three of them quite clearly without leaning forward. The amount of dark smoke appeared to vary from panel to panel, so that it was almost as if contrasting shades of gray were being displayed for selection. But even where the smoke was at its most dense, I could still pick out many details. In one panel, for instance, there was a section of the overhaul men’s wooden barrier, and seemingly now attached to it, the front part of a taxi. In the neighboring panel, diagonally cutting off its top corner, was a metal bar which I recognized as belonging to one of the high traffic signals. Indeed, looking more closely, I could decipher the dark edge of a bird’s outline perched upon it. At one point I saw a runner pass from one panel into the next, and as he crossed, his figure altered both in terms of size and trajectory. Then the Pollution became so bad that, even from the magazines table side, I could no longer see the gap of sky, and the window itself, which the glass men cleaned so proudly for Manager, became covered with dirty dots.

I felt so sorry for the two boy AFs who’d waited so long for their turn in the window. They went on sitting there with good postures, but at one stage I saw one of them raise an arm across his face as though the Pollution might come in through the glass. Manager then stepped up onto the platform to whisper reassuring things to him, and when she eventually came back down, and started rearranging the bracelets inside the Glass Display Trolley, I could see she too was upset. I thought she might even go outside and talk to the overhaul men, but then she noticed us, and she smiled and said:

‘Everyone, please listen. This is unfortunate, but nothing to worry about. We’ll bear it for a few days, then it will be over.’

But the next day, and the day after, the Cootings Machine carried on and on, and daytime became almost like night. At one point I looked for the Sun’s patterns on our floor, alcoves and walls, but they were no longer there. The Sun, I knew, was trying his utmost, and towards the end of the second bad afternoon, even though the smoke was worse than ever, his patterns appeared again, though only faintly. I became worried and asked Manager if we’d still get all our nourishment, and she laughed and said, ‘That horrible thing has come here several times before and no one in the store ever suffered from it. So just put it out of your mind, Klara.’

Even so, after four continuous days of Pollution, I could feel myself weakening. I tried not to show it, especially when customers were in the store. But perhaps because of the Cootings Machine, there were now long stretches with no customers at all, and I sometimes allowed my posture to sag so that Boy AF Rex had to touch my arm to make me stand straight again.