Moving Parts

The only league the narrator knows is full of Polish diacritics alien to the Gothic script of the signboard. They throng the screen like the Polish zlotys in the European banks and the ports of the Far East; they flutter on the stands, appear on the illuminated scoreboard, and time and again flash between the legs of the players in motion. They run rampant, unseen, in the mass singing on the stands. Where are you off to, the two of them, the hobo and the professor in the red dressing gown, ask anxiously. To the toilet. The bartender points the way. The narrator opens his wallet, but the hobo takes it out of his hands. He will pay when the time comes; in the meantime he orders another round. The narrator acquiesces without a murmur, remembering the payment promised by telephone for the afternoon. In the toilet there is no window. A determined search for a way out through the back rooms pays off. But the dark hallway, extremely long, takes him alarmingly far from the railroad station. Goodness knows where it leads. At its end is a locked door; none of the keys fits the rusty lock. The only way out seems to be a trapdoor in the floor. The narrator hesitantly lifts the flap and peers inside, holding up his cigarette lighter. He thinks he can make out cast-iron rungs suspended over a void. At this exact moment something soft touches his shoulder. He freezes; the lighter falls from his hand into the hole, though it isn’t heard to land. It’s only the hobo who was mistreated by Schmidt or Braun; he still reeks of the dumpster. Him again. No witnesses are present, and the narrator pushes him against the door; there is a crash. Most of all he’d like to grab him by the scruff of the neck and toss him like a sack of rags back down to the other end of the dark hallway; he takes hold of the army jacket and shakes the hobo fiercely, as if he wished to snap the threads of the stories that have accidentally become intertwined, but his clenched fist ends up clutching nothing but an empty sleeve. Could he have seized the other man by the throat? Yes, he is capable of that. And since he’s capable of it, why should he not recover his wallet? The hobo doesn’t have his wallet; in the space of a few moments he’s managed to lose it, though he swears hoarsely that he’s merely given it to the old man in the dressing gown for safekeeping. His eyes are popping out. Released from the iron grip, for the longest time he stands gasping. In his view the wallet would in any case be of no use to the narrator in the place he was looking at through the opening. Old Polish zlotys from before the devaluation of ’95! Even jokes have their limits. He personally advises strongly against the trapdoor; it’s not a good way out. What the hobo with the earring resents is not the torn-off sleeve, but the fundamental disloyalty toward others in the same boat; in a word, my friend — arrogance. He knows no greater sin than arrogance. He’s really sorry about the lost lighter; he tries now to give the narrator his own, a disposable one of cheap plastic. He tries to thrust it into his hand, then into his pocket. The refusal of this gift truly saddens him, but he doesn’t insist and gives up the struggle. He attempts to draw the narrator back to the bar to finish the mug of beer he left on the counter, and to face up to the events that are to come. Knowing everything but admitted nowhere, he’d be happy to enter into partnership with someone who is let in everywhere. What’s that — he’ll have to go back to the bar without him? He shakes his head; for certain reasons this is impossible. And in fact he does not go back. Slipping through the trapdoor, the narrator hears above his head the rasping sound of an undoubtedly rusty key in a stiff lock and the creak of a door being opened. He prefers to wait for a moment, hidden beneath the flap, in the empty space between two floors, clinging to the cast-iron rungs. It looks as though he has succeeded in getting rid of the hobo. Since things went so well, he wants to go back at once.