At first, like music. Like rock: powerful drumbeats on the gates of our consciousness, driving the body into motion, but a clenched and terrified motion, as though in self-defense. All around us the machines shuddered, so the ground shuddered and the old building’s foundations with it. Then the shudder moved, crept over the floors and up the walls, shuddering the beds and chairs and cupboards, the gas ranges and the sinks on the wall. And all this at an intensity too slight for the naked eye to see or the flesh to feel, its frequency low as low can be—passing through pores and setting veins and arteries trembling, swaying the limbs in opposite directions, prompting an uproar within, denying sleep, even rest, to each and every living being—which is to say, to every human, the stray cats having long been driven from their perches on the staircase.

Every human except one man, that is. It was as though he’d been searching for a building just like this. He showed up one day as part of a team investigating the complaints and said (he and his colleagues said) that they did not themselves hear any sound at the volumes reported, but that (confronted with the residents’ fury) they would make sure their superiors heard (the fury not the sounds). A few days later, the man was back, not to resolve the problem but to inquire, to their astonishment, whether there was an apartment to rent in the building.

And he did indeed take an apartment, paying its lucky owner enough so that he could live elsewhere while the young man moved in among them. Whenever they asked, he’d say that the complaint was taking its course. Other times he’d insist they be patient until the construction work was complete. Sometimes they’d be angry with him, sometimes they’d be conciliatory: he was their only entrée to the local council after all. Some of them realized, though, that his story might have been the strangest of all, even stranger than theirs.

When he told it to us—this young man who’d brought us up to his apartment—we were so astonished that for a few, brief moments we quite forgot the tremors that shook us as if we were on a train endlessly readying to depart.

10

THE SOUNDS OF THE WORLD WITHOUT EXCEPTION – OR – MY RED GLASSES

We were descending the dirt slope away from the empty village, the sun now a clear-cut fact in the sky. We went on away from the main road, the way it was in Bahr’s plan, whose secrets he still kept close. Up a rise onto high ground dusted with green. Further up still, stones looked down on the silent dwellings, and we realized that these must be the graves.