Читать книгу BASEMENT COMMANDMENT - Bahram Zaimi - Страница 4

She opened the door. The ball of money and her panty stayed behind on the floor. The elevator door was open and she entered. She looked at the buttons, waited, and thought, how can I manage this time to deal with the landlady’s scolding complaints; to calm her of my two month’s overdue rent, given the money I spent on the mirror. She was there when the men were carrying the huge mirror up the stairs for me. I cleverly walked behind the moving mirror past her front desk. Last time she caught me, I had to listen to her nagging for more than half an hour. Her husband doesn’t seem like a bad guy, though too obedient to her. I have never seen him look at women straight in the eyes, bashful and afraid of his wife’s wrath. Apparently she is the real owner of the building, the business, and her husband. Fortunately, the couple is asleep at this time of night, I hope. She pushed the first-floor button, and the elevator door closed.

The old landlady and her silent husband were working behind the counter at the side of the corridor, exceptionally late this night. She was declaring the apartment numbers of the tenants with overdue rent with her husband bent over the countertop, submissively as always, writing them down on the day’s collection sheet paper. She used to stand at the elevator side of the counter with her husband in her shadow; by the time the elevator doors would slide back, she was there to corner the renters in arrears before they had time to escape. They would either pay with many apologies to lower her naggings as much as possible, or run away to save their eardrums from the nastiest insults, all the way through the long corridor while being followed by her and her mouth.

The elevator cabin was hot. Sometimes the heater did not work, and sometimes it overworked. The air conditioner was always broken. She had been sweaty before entering, and was now sweating further going down five stories in the heat; the perspiration had completely saturated her thin dress. It molded her body like a transparent wrapping. She tried to pull the dress out, to reshape and conceal her cleavage, but the displaced fabric reversed like a magnet to its sinful position. The confined space filled with a strange body odor.

The elevator doors slid back open to the corridor. The old husband was cleaning his eyeglasses to take a few moments away. Somebody went out the entrance doors at the same time, leaving them open. The cold air outside plunged headlong into the corridor, rubbing all the precious perfume from the elevator cabin, vacuuming it from the cabin into the corridor. The loaded air on its way out, in a hurry to steal all the loot gave a share to the old man’s nose. The man dropped his eyeglasses on the countertop, his mouth open, his nostrils widened to inhale a good load of this scent. The stream of the strange aroma burnt his nostrils for milliseconds; his mind paused, then a powerful wave of electricity flowed through his nasal paths with the speed of light to all six million of his sensory cells. The incompletely evolved human sense of smell was unable to assess it in any of the primitive rankings between pleasant and unpleasant, therefore he succumbed under the influence, and was paralyzed.

Floating in the passing current, anchored to the countertop in greed for the source, his upper body passed the visual blockage of his fat wife, and he lay his chest on the countertop, securing his belly to the inside edge of the reception desk in an attempt to get more share of the running air. His head, overhanging the edge of the countertop, faced the woman shyly stepping out of the cabin. His eyes got a blurred vision of a white feather angel parading past him. As she passed the intruding head, the man’s head and two fully open pipes of his nose were detecting her movement like the turning of radars. The unclean eyeglasses were smashed under his chest.

As she was passing the counter, she remembered the ball of money that was missed on her apartment floor at the door. She decided to turn back, but the elevator doors had closed and she heard the screeching noise of the cabin moving up for another passenger. I cannot go back and stand at the elevator with my sweaty back stuck to this dress in front of that man’s widened eyes. Besides, the landlady’s head is bent over a paper and I am fortunate that she has not raised it to see me. This is an exceptional opportunity to flee her nasty complaints. She sweated more when she remembered the money was not the only thing she had forgotten to pick up. Her panty.

She walked toward the building door, her head up, looking straight. There was no sound except the provocative sound of flip-flops on the laminate floor. The movement was waving a flower pattern over the bulge at the junction of her thighs, on and off; fanning the mystifying scent from the source. The all-the-time nagging landlady was staying dead silent during the procession. The overdue resident passed her, no complaint. She was pretending to read the paper in her hands, but actually staring from the corner of her eye at the old man who was swimming over the countertop. The woman was not very ashamed of her situation under the synchronized twist of the man’s head, but rather happy that her body solved, for now, her problem with the landlady. She rewarded the poor man a generous amount of her heavy aroma while passing him. He deserved a short vacation in paradise before going back to his life sentence, punishment being the everyday ration of his vinegar-smelling wife. The man’s eyes escorted her until she passed the building’s glass door and disappeared into the dark night.

“I am so ashamed of you,” the landlady shouted at the man, burning as though fire had scorched her face. The man slowly straightened up. Looking calmly at the broken eyeglasses, he saw that one of the lenses smashed, and the other was taken out. The man’s indifference raised the landlady’s anger to fury; she added insult to her accent, “I see you don’t recall your posture old man, a few inches further and, you would be outside the building now with your head between her wet thighs.”

“I was reading.”

“Reading?” the landlady’s mood changed a bit, as she didn’t expect such an excuse for his rudeness.

“I was reading a book together with my deceased father. A fairy tale for a four-year-old son. I was leaning to his chest, sitting on his lap, listening to his articulate storyline and repeating it while looking at the text as if I could read the book together with him. I had heard the story once and never again because during the same night my father died of heart attack while I was asleep on his chest. The same night the book was lost. For more than sixty years, I lived with the guilt that I was responsible for his death. I remember I was crouching under a table, hiding behind the overhang of the table cloth in fear, staring at his coffin in the room. I overheard a conversation between two of the guests at the funeral. They were saying in a low voice that my father had felt pain in the chest but didn’t move, afraid of waking his son up,” He paused, took the unbroken lens and placed it back. “I don’t understand; you mean you could read at the age of four? Why do you say you were reading?” The landlady asked doubtfully, her fury replaced with amazement at the sudden change in the man’s behavior. There was emotion in his expressions, imperiously glancing at her.

“I don’t know. I could not recall father’s voice, but I could see myself at that age, and could read word by word every page. It was a story about thirteen fallen angels who came to earth. As the story goes, if one wants his wish to come true he must be able to recognize his angel out of ordinary people. Unfortunately, her appearance is not different from normal people, as she is wingless. The angels live among people but there is no way to find them unless you are blind. Their body smells different, inexplicable to humans’ words. The blind shape the scent as an angel in their mind, they ask for a favor, their wish comes true,” he paused for a second, facing the landlady he continued, “I can recall the whole story word for word except the ending. Supposedly, I got sleepy and he didn’t continue. I have a strong urge to know the ending.”

“But the book is lost.”

“Tonight, the woman of heavenly scent, my angel, fulfilled my wish. The location of the book was always at the back of the mind of the four-year-old boy.”

“Where is the book?”

“The boy waited until the guests left the coffin room, went out of the room to his bedroom, took the book out the father’s chair. He then went back to the coffin room, opened a gap in the lid with all the power he had, and slid the book in. A harsh punishment, the boy sentenced me to deprivation for life,” he inhaled and continued, “I am pardoned now, my freedom is granted; I am going to take back the book and read the ending.”

“You are insane. It’s in a coffin, under tons of soil,” the landlady snapped.

“So I need a shovel.” The man stood up and went to the tool room, grabbed a shovel and came back in front of the landlady who was staring at him, round-eyed in amazement.

“But you can’t see.”

“I can see enough,” he took the one-lens frame.

“I am not going to give you the car keys.”

“I don’t need them.”

“You cannot get to the graveyard at this time of the night.”

“I do not need your help; now that I have the picture of the book, I feel strong. I will go on foot with the lens, with the shovel. I will dig up his grave, open the lid and take out my book. Then I will come back here with the book, the lens, and the shovel.”

He turned to the glass doors and walked to it. The doors slid back and he stepped outside. He looked around, the woman was not there, and the greedy air left no trace of her scent. He didn’t need the scent, he had the picture. He tightened his coat and put the handle of the shovel over his shoulder, a weak body but strong steps, holding onto the picture of his father with a child in his lap, taken from the mysterious box of lost-and-found in his mind. The man walked up to the Milwaukee graveyard.