Flaw by Magdalena Tulli Page A

bases, and after particularly enjoyable banquets they would sometimes wake in completely unknown places. Wrenched from sleep, for a while they had stared in stupefaction at the anonymous walls of the hotel room papered in a striped pattern that meant nothing to them. For a long time they twisted and turned in bed in their crumpled undergarments, trying to recall how they came to be here, but their memory had retained only the round zero on the roof of the streetcar they had stepped down from at dawn. So they cocked their ears and listened intently, not understanding a thing. They looked out the window and could not believe what they saw. Afterwards, they had probably shaved in the utmost haste, cursing as they nicked their skin and passing one another a stick of alum. Astonished that there was no one to order breakfast from, they drank what was left of the coffee in their own thermos flasks, and by a side table near the deserted reception desk they thumbed briefly through old newspapers whose rustling explained little to them. The adjutant’s portable short-wave radio refused to work; from that moment it remained utterly silent even when the general attempted to tune it. They found the front door locked shut. The staff had evidently fled to their homes. In order to leave, the airmen had to combine forces to break down the door.
    Soon afterwards they turned up in the local government offices, in uniforms buttoned up tight. They passed through a series of empty rooms till they reached the office of the director on the highest floor. The window there had opened of its own accord, and the lace curtain was fluttering outside like a white flag hung out as a sign of surrender. It could also be seen from the square, alone amid so many other flags dazzling the eyes with the bright national colors. A gust of wind had blown some documents off the desk and onto the floor. The officers stepped on them unceremoniously, as though they were waste-paper; they stood around the black telephone and took turns shouting into the receiver, trying to reach the headquarters of an airfield that only they knew. Amid the dry crackling on the line, they finally heard a distant, barely audible voice that promised to send a helicopter for them. It would come after lunch, they repeated to one another, not worrying for a minute about whether it would find the place. It was questionable whether they had properly understood everything, and whether the promise made by the unknown speaker would be kept. It was enough to look out the window at the sky to realize that meteorological conditions were unfavorable. The helicopter would have to make its way through a vast covering of snow clouds, a dense and unbroken mass whose dirty white coloring would have prevented the pilot from seeing not just the network of geographic coordinates, but also the sequence of dates on the calendar.
    The airmen settled themselves in armchairs and on sofas. They began to wait for who knows what, dislodged from the routine of their daily affairs and just as lost as the refugees on the square below. They yawned, stretched, brushed the office dust off their uniforms. They killed time in accordance with their rank: the general drummed his fingers on the desktop; the major whistled as he paced from wall to wall, his hands thrust into his pockets; the captain took out some marbles, and the lieutenant began making paper airplanes out of official documents and launching them from the open window, till his fingers got caught in the window frame, at which point he cursed and quit what he was doing. In spite of everything the airmen were better off than the refugees, if only because they were not dressed in dark padded overcoats, like the crumpled rank and file of the distant catastrophe, but on the contrary in well-made officers’ uniforms at the sight of which, at dawn that day, the policeman’s hand had of its own accord snapped to the shining peak of his cap. Elegance engendered