He wakes up in an apartment at the foot of the hill, downstream from the city’s historic centre, cobblestone and hulking brick structures up top. Fifty-five and living alone, he drags himself out of his single-sized bed to make breakfast- scrambled eggs and instant coffee(s). There’s at least ninety minutes before work begins and he hates to eat out in bars and cafes. They’re needlessly expensive and have only gotten more expensive with the recent ordinances about nighttime order shortening opening hours. He irons his single pricey suit and heads up that hill, back pain be damned.
He hikes up the cobblestones where buses used to pass through, along tram lines abandoned by the locals in favour of cavalcading herds of tourists, towards that hulking mass of bricks perched at the top: the ministry- his place of work.
Grandiose, you might think, granitic as all monuments are, stodgy seeming as they seem; the ministry’s dirty grey walls hide what was once its clean white façade. Across from it stands a bronze statue of the first man to hold the minister’s office, staring at the palace since the start of its days and sure to do so until their very end, both still imponent over the city, slightly aged, still steering the nation at large.
Huffing from the walk uphill he steps into the ministry alongside the other three thousand or so souls that work there, arriving from all over the city in the morning rush, the whole place turns louder and louder as more and more arrive. His steps get quicker once inside, past security and into the labyrinthic corridors and confusing expansion added there over the years. He hears those with quick fingers on the typewriters, clicking and clacking gunfire fingers, those running past with stacks of folded sheets, instructions shouted, debated, the arrangements for the visits of foreign dignitaries due to arrive at any second, as one edge of the state apparatus overlaps with another. Our protagonist feels the pep in his step, no longer huffing, brushing shoulder with all the others operating above regular life in the brains of the city’s secular God.
Where in his day to day he’s shy, best friends with the television’s chatter, inside these hallowed halls he’s made to talk.
From the instant the workday starts to the it’s very end, he’s meeting people here, meeting people there, absorbing memos with numbers and data that synthesizes all of the citizenry’s life, and translate it to speech, to internal directives, for meetings, in debates, in sandboxes, memorandums, all channelled through him, his authority to surmise and dispend information to all whom it may regard. Beginning from his peripheral office, a little cold and a little dark, he sees the city and feels all of himself in a deep breath sitting above it perched on the hill.
And at the heart of this running and reading and talking and moving about, sits the paternoster, which he mounts and dismounts a hundred times a day with a nod of his fellow bureaucrats making space for that split second where it’s aligned with the floor, carried by its continuous movement wherever he’s trying to go.
He knows the contraption by heart now, riding it at its steady speed, hopping on and off relying on gears that never stop and haven’t stopped since before his birth – that won’t stop once he’s in the ground. He’s comfortable enough to ride it blind, reading memos or making small talk, recognizing his floor by how the light reflects on linoleum floors if it’s the second or wooden ones if it’s the third, knowing it’s time to get off by the clanking sound of the gear shifting . Three wooden walls moving up and then round and then down.
Until one day, mid-winter, an unexpected, and to him inexplicable, directive arrives.
From the conservation’s office perched on top the adjacent hill comes the order, pasted on ground floor notice board saying: a lift will be installed for greater energetic efficiency, improved safety, and increased accessibility, and he, as if having suffered a papercut, lets out a muted gasp.
It can’t be, he thinks, resting by the abandoned steel ashtrays on the paternoster’s side, imagining its halted stride. It can’t be, he thinks riding it upstairs to the conference section of the ministry, past the fin-de-siecle paintings and elaborate classically inspired rugs. It can’t be, he thinks from inside that hulking ministerial mass, seeing the people move like well-oiled cogs, it must’ve been a decision taken in a rush, taken without considering its value, its symbolic nature, its poetry, just the general value of time!
So what does our good bureaucrat do? He decides to draft a memo outlining his arguments in detail to spread around. One of those unofficial officially worded memos that work as dialogue for historians to later pick up.
He spends the evening drafting it. Hours when he’s tired and old. Unperturbed by the neighbour’s wall-filtered voices and the rumbling of aged pipes. He drafts his fifteen twenty pages using a fountain pen gifted to him during a long-ago diplomatic mission and redrafts them at the ministry into first three and then two pages that read as brisk and get to the point, on the standard typewriter and the standard paper with standard headings that he could never replicate at home.
The memo gets sent out. To his supervisors naturally, purveyors of all that goes on in his professional life, to the procurement department, to the presidential office’s secretary, to the historical conservationist department, to the public relations office, to the archivists, to his more prideful colleagues, and just broadly to anyone he can find on the ministry’s entangled organigram who might lend and eye to his memo and share his cause.
Yet no reply comes. For a day, for two days, for a week, for more time taken out of the paternoster’s life, his anxiety grows. Day by day the grey of the ministry’s dirty bricks intensifies. The bronze of the statue outside seems greener. Waking up seems to require a whole lot more might.
Yet it’s nothing compared to when the reply comes. The paternoster represents a historical curiosity and thus has no role in a place of work. The decision is final and invariable. A short letter. From above. Signed by the presidential office. No name to respond to. No engagement with his arguments. Plain statement. That evening he has a beer at home, then two, then three, then dreamless sleep.
He’s every day of fifty-five going on two hundred about to die.
That’s an oppressive feeling to carry every morning up the hill. It’s downright unbearable inside the ministry, trying to get on that soon to be jettisoned paternoster, forcing a quick step when deflated and tired. It’s pervasive once he’s drafting his own memos in a language that forces him to die and speak as ten million people represented by a couple hundred bureaucrats. Subsumed by events and homeless at his work, the feeling grows inside. Drained by meetings, drained by those samey looking suits, by the language, by the habits, by the identical meals in the canteen. He rides the paternoster’s last days feeling breathless and heavy and heaving and crushed, until he’s got a enough and his heart beats, nay thumps to be let out, allowed to speak, and in between a blink and no thoughts he’s going away, walking to the conservation office, ready to plead and present his heart on his sleeve, one belaboured step at a time.
Once there he goes through security checks. What’s your name? and he’s obviously not recognized. What the purpose of your visit? and it’s not something he can confidently share. Are you anyone’s guest? and he’s not so his ministerial card and haggling has to suffice, making himself small in the massive lobby hoping the guard’s empathy will let him sneak past.
Only once he’s inside, past the ceremonial entrance and deep in the presidential office’s dour smelling corridors can he be comfortable. By the time he arrives to the appropriate office and stares down the secretary he’s rearing to go, recognizing her for those frame-less glasses and hunched over pose, her wood-shaving pressed desk, one of the last few remaining landlines.
She tells him he’ll have to wait for a while so he agrees to wait. She looks him up and down, doubting his commitment, and he just doubles down, acting as a high official of the ministry, feeling like a high official of the ministry, his thirty year long career grants him that pose.
Half an hour passes. Then one. Then two, unrelentingly spent sitting and attempting to look dignified. He avoid the clock’s draw or questions that might get him more or less gently kicked out. And eventually having shown his devotion to public office via waiting he’s finally let inside to make his case.
Sat across the official on a creaky chair that gives up too much if you lean into it, and with a view on a courtyard filled with presidential garbage trucks, he makes his case and it’s a damn good one. It’s the perfect product of years in the public sector, made of communal flatteries about having a lot on our plate and the destinies of millions on our mind. He sails smoothly into concrete requests about an oversight of the symbolic importance the paternoster holds to those like us, tasked with maintaining continuity, and with that, the state alive.
Still the aged man staring at him from across the paled out desk, behind that blocky old computer and a mess of cheap pencils and pens answers: I get that you’re attached to it but this all feels very sentimental. A lift is cheaper and safer in terms of both use and maintenance. You can carry carts, objects, and whatnot. Plus, the decision has been made. It’s final. There’s nothing to be done now.
Liquidated in one quick sentence, our protagonist shakes hands with the man, profusely thanks him for his time, and shuffles out.
The next few days are haunted. His walk to and from the ministry is accompanied by a cracking back, poisoned fruit of thirty years spent sitting behind a desk. He takes painkillers for the back, drinks for a hollow sleep, wishing there was somebody to rub his back and hold him near. His time at the ministry cast long shadows, seeing his thirty years turn to a slick elevator being installed by hired help from the outside. His mental map forcefully refurbished after thirty years, tracing paths around spaces closed off for renovations. His thirty years of habit hearing the paternoster hum assume the semblance of a ticking clock, disturbing, constant, destined to die. Let alone when he’s home, on the fifth story, the leaky window lets in cold streams whipping him rugged. Why did you work at the ministry, why did you settle for those miserly wages, why did you always imagine your life between those gargantuan walls with their continual, eternal, historical hum, when now you’re home and in the future you’ll be home retired for all damn time imagining a ministry that’ll no longer exist, that’ll continue gutting your days, now with the paternoster, tomorrow the statue outside, its dirty walls, you’ll wailing orders at your ageing self that you won’t be able to understand in this cold and lonely home, just why.
His newfound pessimism is carried with him outside the house, to the shared glances with colleagues and acquaintances of thirty years. He sees his fellow ideologues of organization, bureaucrats, functionaries, and simple office grunts, checking out their greyed hairs in window reflections, fiddle with their watches, and rub their eyes outside the ministry as they prepare for the day ahead, hoping arduous activity can smooth their wrinkles out. And these things linger with our hero. They linger and carry over into the reflective silence of the night, when clarity shoots down from the moon reflecting all he’s seen by daylight.
All his fellow colleagues, schematizers, gears of secular might, surely they must also feel betrayed, surely they must also fear the paternoster’s removal, surely they too are suffering in silence waiting to be galvanized.
He realizes that his last chance, past pleading and desperation, rests with his colleagues, with that mass of people walking in by the dawn of daylight and leaving home when it’s dark out. They are the masses that ride the paternoster, the ones that can truly understand the stakes at play and can help him in his fight. If only mobilized, if only united, if only the truth were spoken about this goddamned edict, if for a moment the bureaucrats were men seizing the day to defend their rights!
Fundamentally, he reasons, a protest is what’s to be done.
So he spends the night making fliers, placards, posters, speeches, slogans, and plans. To gather by the statue outside. To begin with his speech and then open the floor for others to share their memories of the paternoster. To bring out the technicians to talk about its uniquely timeless design. To brag about who’s been on it, archivists can fetch photos of world leaders, business magnates, religious figures, the whole shebang, all together, next to each other, for the titanic cabin in which they thread the line between the palace and something greater, be it history, call it God!
Cutting, copying, gluing, and writing, his loneliness is vanquished by the future holders of his work. He works at the ministry during the day and for the ministry’s preservation during the night, determined and implacable until the day comes, after all the announcements have been made, the placards hung up, surely the people have been sufficiently informed, surely the stage is set.
So buzzing, enveloped in the dreamy mist of exhaustion, he steps to the plaza by the statue, ready to come alive, and waits. Waits, waits, and waits. That’s all our protagonist does. Minutes first. Then an hour. Then it’s two. No one shows up. The mist that carried him across sleepless nights becomes a veil, dark and oppressive. The crunch of snow under passer-by’s feet ceases to be a source of hope and just rings on, a continuous crunch, crunch, crunch, of footsteps of people he can’t see, with thoughts and aspirations that seem more distant by the moment, , repeating to himself the placards, imagining other voices, as they should have been read. Crunch, crunch, the polyester squeak and him murmuring slogans to himself, the sleepless nights descend on his back. They make it heavy, they make him cold, trembling, whispering to himself, leaning on the overly smooth and lifeless bronze of the statue, the mist makes it so that’s it’s just him, the statue, the snow, and the ministry, soundtracked by that distant human-less crunch.
It’s almost without realizing that he steps towards the ministry, carried by nothing now but his own two feet and aching soles. It’s without real hope or thought or reason that he gets into the paternoster, an automatism, to be propulsed up and down in one of its last rides. He stays on it, incapable of getting off, comfortable in its wooden, moving walls. He rides it all the way down and right back up, seeing the gears in the dark room where it reverses course. He sees the ministry play out in front of him, people taking the stairs, carrying papers, and waiting for the newly installed lift. No one asks him to get off. No one asks him to make space so they can get in. No one asks him where he’s headed. Life here plays out on a paper plane, and a man stuck on an endlessly looping elevator interests no one. Now they’ve got an elevator, a man riding a relic won’t disturb anyone, so he won’t show up on any documents, and the ministry will work just the same.
Tired, alone, and comfortable in those three moving walls he once imagines as the heart of the ministry and now as just his own, he takes his shoestrings, and ties himself to the paternoster’s railing, determined that at least he will stay, unwilling and incapable of ever accepting violent decreed change. Our protagonist ties himself to the paternoster and closes his eyes, finally capable of sleeping, finally capable of dreaming, finally capable of feeling a sense of peace that’s lodged firmly in that hulking mass of bricks and mortar. He’s left alone, left to be.
Around him the ministry stays the same. Decrees continue flowing down the hill into the streets and he remains undisturbed in his paternoster. The construction crew thinks removal is more trouble than it’s worth and no one asks him to leave.
