The Architect

by Connell, Brendan

  “But maybe Herr Nachtman is not such a bad fellow to have as an ally,” he thought.

  XI.

  Summer gave way to fall, to rain and denuded trees, and fall to winter—short days, and the equinox passed.

  With limited daylight, the workers found themselves in the early evening working by the light of huge floodlights, their bodies casting bizarre shadows.

  In the middle of January a huge storm came in. Mounds of snow fell from the sky. Down below, the cities were paralyzed. Trains did not move, cars did at their own peril. It was the heaviest snowfall in fifty years. Over 90 cm fell in 22 hours. Trees, heavy with snow, collapsed across roads and railroad tracks, impeding movement. Though it was almost impossible to get materials to the site, Nachtman still insisted that the men continue to work.

  Dispirited, wrapped in huge coats, they went about their business—clearing the construction site of snow, building fires to keep the mortar from freezing. No longer did they sing and show their naked chests and at lunch it was not wine they drank, but hot broth which they chased down with abundant brandy. They smoked continuously, seeming to fancy that those tiny cherries, those cigarettes that they held between stiff, trembling fingers, would keep them warm. And, indeed, their hands were so cold that they could barely clutch their tools and the rock they chipped away at seemed as if it were great blocks of ice, it seemed as if they were building an enormous igloo for the worship of some Inuit deity of cold weather systems.

  And for those who had to work on the western side of the structure it was even worse. A freezing cold wind came incessantly with such force that it could easily sweep a man away, make him lose his balance and send him spiralling off the cliff.

  “If you lose your life, it doesn’t matter how much they pay you.”

  “I’m already giving my last blood.”

  “It’s a dirty story.”

  “Yes, I’ll be damned if I kill myself for a few thousand lousy francs a month.”

  And, as if in answer to these words, just then a man was seen slipping, falling off the building, being dashed against the rocks. He had slipped on some iced-over scaffolding.

  Nachtman, in a pair of huge, fur-lined boots approached the foreman.

  “The conditions are horrible,” the latter said. “If we could halt work until early spring…”

  “Impossible. The building must go up. We cannot stop work every time one of the men feels a little chilly.”

  “But the danger—another man has just fallen!”

  “Well, that is something we can take care of in spring. In this weather his body will certainly be well preserved.”

  XII.

  A wood stove dispensed heat throughout the tent. Herr Alexius Nachtman sat at a table, beneath the light of an electric lamp, refining certain details of his plan, altering a line, changing a measurement. To one side of his diagrams sat an ashtray, in which burned a cigarette. To the other, a half empty bottle of beer.

  He heard a scratching at his tent door, as if an animal wanted to be let in.

  “Who is it?”

  The flap was lifted. An exquisitely white face peered out from beneath an ermine hat and the luxuriant collar of a sable coat. It was Maria.

  “Do you mind if I come in?”

  “Are you here to disturb me?”

  “I hope not. I am only here to talk to you.”

  “It is rather late.”

  “I was able to find my way in the dark.”

  He rose from his seat and advanced to greet her. His nose inhaled her perfume, sandalwood oil, as his hand shook hers.

  “May I offer you something to drink?”

  “Yes. A Scotch. Neat.”

  “You know how to drink!”

  “When the weather is chilly…But, it’s cosy in here,” she murmured, settling down in a chair near the stove. She watched the architect as he poured two drinks. “I always find it exquisite to sit by a warm fire when it is cold outside. It makes me feel very young and happy.”

  “Well, you are not old,” he said, handing her a glass, a third full of gold-coloured whisky.

  “But I am no longer young.”

  “It is a matter of perspective. From my point of view…”

  “But you are a man in the prime of life!”

  “I am not much under sixty. Of course, my virility is more intact than many much younger beasts.”

  “I believe that a man like you needs…”

  “Yes, tell me what I need.”

  “I believe that a man like you must need a very strong woman.”

  “A strong woman. An oxymoron. I have yet to meet a strong man. Is there such a thing as a strong woman?”

  “There is.”

  “And what would I do with her?”

  “Anything you wanted.”

  The tone of her voice was so naked that her meaning could not be mistaken. Nachtman was not a shy man. He grinned. His maxillary canine teeth, capped with silver, let off a slight sparkle. His shadow stretched off to one side, a distorted mass. His face, in the rather weak light of the tent, appeared manifestly infernal. A huge nose that seemed in the process of being swallowed by a jutting bottom lip, below which rested a grotesque mound of chin and neck. Maria moved towards him.

  “Come as close as you wish,” he said boldly.

  She mixed her lips with his, devoured his ugly face with kisses.

  XIII.

  The next morning he awoke rather late. He was alone.

  “Ah, the little bird has flown back to her own nest.”

  He threw a few logs into the wood stove, which still had hot coals from the night before.

  Then, after dousing his face with water, oiling his mouth with a coffee mixed with schnapps, he put on his boots and left his tent to look over the project. A fierce wind howled, blowing about the strands of hair that fringed his skull. Snow was piled up on all sides and, driven up against by the wind, let off wisps of crystal which swirled about. He trudged forward, his breath forming puffs of white vapour.

  Surprised by the silence around him, he looked both right and left. No men clung to the sides of the structure. No hammers resounded. The machines lay dormant, their engines grown cold. The place was abandoned.

  Two figures made their way towards him.

  It was the foreman and Peter.

  “They have left,” Peter said gloomily.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just like he said,” Fabrizi added. “The work has ground to a halt. The men won’t go on in these conditions. They say you need to raise their pay by at least forty percent if you expect them to continue through the winter. Otherwise they will be back towards the end of February, when the weather starts to warm up and the snow to melt.”

  “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “Because I agree with them.”

  “Ah, now I see how things are,” the architect said with an ugly twist of his lips.

  An emergency meeting was called. The architect’s tent was where it was held. The four board members were present, as was Peter and the foreman, who sat silently to one side—for he was there not so much to participate, as simply to answer any questions that might arise.

  “The situation is serious,” Nesler said. “These men want more money, but we are going to have a hard enough time maintaining the accounts due as it is. Materials have cost more than anticipated. Several of the Society’s investments have recently proved the contrary of profitable. And now the workers want raises, but such a thing, from a financial point of view, is scarcely possible.”

  “Indeed it is,” Nachtman added. “And these lunkheads who spend more time scratching their bellies and smoking cigarettes than labouring should not only accept their current wages, but should do so gratefully, for in all truth a wage reduction seems far more in order than a rise.”

  “Yes,” Maria agreed, “they should be penalised.”

  “They are men,” Fabrizi could not help but putting in, “not beasts. They have families to suppor
t.”

  “Enough with the socialist clichés,” cried the architect. “Such high-sounding phrases have no place in a convocation of intelligent men…And while we are at it, I suppose you wouldn’t mind an augmentation of your salary also, would you?”

  The foreman rose to his feet.

  “I do as my men do. If their salary is increased, so should mine be.”

  “You dog! You have scarcely got dirt under your finger nails these past nine months, and now you talk about additional money! Yes, you might be handsome, but that big square jaw of yours will get you nothing from me—from us. As it is you are only being kept on as a matter of charity—as a matter of formality, so that the great louts we have shovelling sand and chipping away at stone can have someone to lavish their idiocy on.”

  “I would recommend that you be quiet.”

  Nachtman bared his teeth.

  “Quiet! I hardly need to be quiet before an inferior, a subordinate, a rebellious toady who knows as little about architecture as a—”

  It was at that moment that his words were cut off by the fist of Fabrizio Fabrizi, a lump of bones and flesh which shot forward like a hand-drilling hammer striking at a masonry nail.

  The older man lay sprawled on the ground, rubbing his jaw. Maria ran to him, kneeled down beside him, took up his hand and kissed it. Then, turning a flashing gaze on the handsome foreman, declared:

  “Ah, you are really a very stupid person!”

  “I defer to your judgement,” the other said and then turned, left the tent with his head held high. And proudly he followed his golden moustache into the unknown and the valley below.

  XIV.

  The next day another meeting was convened in Lugano, at the offices of the Society. The portrait of Dr. Körn looked down. That man of paint seemed almost to be chuckling to himself, his eyes, magnetically moving spheres, inhabited by some dark angel, manipulating men from unseen planes.

  All present were seated around the large, glossy oak table but Nachtman, who stood erect, proud, a band-aid plastered across his chin.

  “We have a crisis on our hands,” Dr. Enheim proclaimed.

  “It is a problem, not a crisis.”

  “Yes, it is only a problem,” Maria confirmed.

  “We could still negotiate with the workers.”

  “No,” said Nachtman. “That is out of the question. I will not tolerate those traitors on my work site.”

  “Cheaper labour must be found,” Nesler said in a whiny voice. “We can no longer afford to pay outlandish prices for arms and legs.”

  “We could bring in Poles,” Borromeo suggested. “I have heard that they work well for very little.”

  “I have nothing against Poles,” Maria commented.

  Nachtman waved the idea aside with a gesture.

  “But why bring in Poles,” he said, “when we have an untapped resource. After all, worldwide membership to the Society is formidable.”

  “I am not sure I follow you,” Enheim said.

  “The followers of Körn are all loyal citizens. Let them, with my guidance, build their own meeting place. Why rely on outsiders, who we must pay, to do what so many would be grateful to do voluntarily.”

  Nesler’s little eyes gleamed. “You are right. We would save a great deal that way.”

  “But many of our members—the great majority—live abroad. Some in India. Others in China and Africa.”

  “Then let them come—from everywhere let them come!”

  XV.

  And so it was that disciples poured in from the four corners and eight directions of the Earth to lend their labour to the vast project. They arrived in great numbers, rolled up their sleeves, and set to work.

  There were blonde-headed Swedes and dark-skinned Africans. Japanese stood beside Greeks and clean-shaven Russians laboured next to South Americans with silky black beards. A Ukrainian woman with a handkerchief tied around her head shovelled sand. An inadequately dressed young lady from California carried water. The people came, from north and south, from the mountains and the coast, uttering words in half the languages of the earth. The whole recalled some scene from the Old Testament—a vast undertaking such as might have been done by pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty.

  And it must be here said that the congregation were from all walks of life, from all strata of society. The rich, the educated, shoved themselves forward with as much vehemence as the illiterate, showing indeed that wisdom cannot be taught in schools and that the laws of social facilitation apply to all.

  Businessmen unknotted their ties, slipped into overalls and let their soft hands, used to nothing heavier than banknotes, nothing harsher than the keys of a computer keyboard, make contact with abrasive work, while the lower classes lurched forward, calves taut, pulling at thick ropes, like donkeys or oxen. Lines of men, like tribes of ants, made their way about the structure, their backs bent under huge loads, the palms of their hands raw wounds from pushing against blocks of stone.

  By the beginning of March they had ten thousand men assembled. By the middle of the same month, the number had more than doubled and by April there were no less than eighty thousand—enough to fill a small city.

  The work force was divided into four gangs, named, respectively: the Friends of Körn, the Sons of Zeus, the Brothers of Julian the Apostate, and the Sisters of Future Well-being, the latter of which was put under the supervision of Maria. Each gang was then divided into five phyla of around five thousand workers respectively. With this huge, though admittedly rather unskilled work force, the building grew visibly day by day and seemed to be slowly revealing itself as if by magic—trembling in the light and sighing in the darkness; eating the rays of the sun and drinking in the moonshine. The walls wrapped themselves around the foundation and great pillars began to make their appearance, columns which stretched themselves out like fingers, seeming thereby to replicate the digits of the very hands that made them—those appendages of the ever-zealous Sons of Zeus, who indeed proved themselves to be the strongest, the most energetic of the phyla.

  One of their number, an old Swedish man with a long white beard, went about his tasks with especial vigour. He had his feet eternally resting in a pair of hiking boots and liked to dress in polypropolene and polyurethane materials. He strained his thin arms, stuck forward his bird-like chest and worked in silence, rising well before dawn and not discontinuing his efforts until long after dark.

  “Who is that fellow?” Nachtman enquired of Nesler.

  “His name is Olaf Lidskog. He is an eccentric millionaire well dedicated to the cause.”

  “So he has donated?”

  “Heavily.”

  There are few things in this world more frightening than voluntary slavery. The slave in shackles is without freedom, but has a will and hope, things which the voluntary slave has not. He has renounced the power to think for himself and without analytical thought, mankind would be nothing more than a hive of rather large insects—a horde of giant larvae feeding on every other living thing in their path. And yet there undoubtedly must be a certain kind of horrible peace in renouncing free-will, as the vast majority of human-kind is ready to do so, only needing to be asked by the right apostle.

  Nachtman drove those disciples on with fiery words, kicks; hot exhalations of his stinking, liquor tainted breath, the pressure of his knuckle-studded fists. His voice, through almost constant yelling, grew hoarse and he seemed to be digging his words up from the depths of some horrible cave which respired sulphur and spat flames.

  Dr. Enheim seemed determined to set an example and often arrived to lend his two hands to the great task. His labours were almost biblical in proportion. Stripped to the waist, sweat streaming down his face, he pushed along blocks of marble, with great burdens on his back climbed up the dizzying scaffolding like a baboon.

  “If all of our workers were like him, the place would have been finished long ago,” Nachtman commented.

  He himself would not even pick up a hammer.

&
nbsp; “Physical labour will drain my mental abilities,” he said. “And God knows we need them.”

  XVI.

  Aside from the work forces previously mentioned, there was another, an elite group called the Company of Good Men—a group hand-picked by Nachtman from the largest and most durable of the male devotees. Rivers of tendons and mountains of muscle. There was a fellow from Iceland with scant blond hair and a forlorn gaze who could pull along a tractor with his teeth and a pair of brothers from Pakistan with huge biceps who were able to play catch with enormous boulders. Men of maximised muscle. Men with predatory jaws. Columbians who could bend iron bars with their hands and Ukrainians who could jog about with 150 kg barrels under each arm.

  Nachtman took these specimens, these already Herculean young men, and injected them daily with extract of dog testicles and anabolic steroids and kept them fed on abundant quantities of beef, chickens and baby food.

  These men, who could each do the work of fifty, were the pride of the work site and seemed to vie with one another for performing incredible tasks. They dragged huge carts of gravel, were able to pound in nails with their bare palms, break up rock with their fists, and scale slick walls without the need of scaffolding or ropes. Their huge arms flung about blocks of stone, pulled them to the heights with pulleys and they worked almost without rest.

  The architect took special care to make them his own, having them swear by secret oaths and their duties certainly went beyond that of mere workers, as they stood by ready to champion his cause, and even give their lives if need be.

  “Master,” Sergei from Russia said, “I am hungry.”

  “Ah, you boys eat so much. But I need to keep you healthy. A truckload of sheep has just come in for you and Pedro to unload.”

  And as the flowers of May shoved themselves up from the ground, those huge men shoved barely cooked and even raw flesh into their mouths, ravenously chewed on mutton.