In the meanwhile the truck’s driver, a podgy, moustached man in a blue jumpsuit, had jumped down the cabin leaving the engine on. One of the two soldiers who had followed him on the jeep, which was now parked several meters away with its engine off, one remained at the wheel and the other was approaching with some clipboards and paper sheets in his hands. The rhythmic, crunching sound of the fresh snow followed his every step.
Giovanni joined them: a martial salute for the official – maybe one of those who had escorted him on the first day? He hadn’t got a good memory for faces, so he couldn’t be sure – and a firm hand shake for the moustached man.
Then, without fussing, the latter took a tubular key out of his pocket and approached the Gate. He messed about for a few seconds muttering some insults at the snow and the ice-cold steel. He took out a pair of thick yellow gloves from the back pocket of his jumpsuit, wore them, and firmly grabbed the round handle.
“Keeper Corte?”
Giovanni, who was vacantly watching the driver’s actions, was shaken awake by the soldier’s stern voice. No, he wasn’t one of those who escorted him. And he was higher in rank. But maybe, after being in the NMO for some time, everyone began to look alike in the bearing, voice, and even the hauteur. But the small, flashy tetragrams on his uniform spoke clearly: he was a lieutenant. He had to avoid answering arrogantly.
The officer was handing him a clipboard with a ballpoint pen hanging from a chain attached to it. He was also staring at him intensely, with grey eyes that seemed to evaluate and doubt his competence.
Giovanni quickly grabbed it, muttering: “I apologise…”
In the meanwhile the truck driver was bustling about in his field of view, going to the back of his vehicle and then coming back with a long tube a few inches in diameter. It looked like a cobalt blue anaconda sneaking in the the snow following its prey. Giovanni avoided looking at it and concentrated on the document that was given to him.
So: Cleansing Bill B9.22.49.C-165n. Date, hour, technical info of the vehicle, the diver’s personal details and Cleansing Operator, liters…
All that whiteness around him fuzzed him, making his eyes wet with tears. When he rushed outside he had forgotten to wear gloves or an adequate hat. The cold air was making his fingers go numb and his nose run. He quickly cleaned his nostrils with the back of his hands and coughed, then he sluggishly grabbed the pen and put it on the line that was waiting for him to sign.
“What are you doing, Keeper?”
The officer again, with the same tone of a indignant teacher scolding a pupil who had just written some mistake on the blackboard.
He had to swallow before he could answer. “I’m… I’m signing.”
“Are you aware that signing the paper means to validate what is written on that document?”
“Of course, sir.”
The officer stared at him in silence, as if he was waiting for Giovanni to come to a conclusion on his own. Then, after deciding that the clear lack of experience could at least grant him a bit of indulgence, he added: “How many liters can the truck contain?”
Giovanni glanced at the bill, even if he remembered the correct answer. “Five thousands.”
“And how many have been poured into the Tank?”
Giovanni couldn’t avoid to turn his head towards the driver, who was fixing one end of the hose to the nozzle, usually protected by the now open round Gate, using a monkey wrench. And he had the answer, clear and shamefully obvious, on the tip of his tongue.
“Still none, sir.”
The officer joined his hands behind his back while a semblance of satisfaction appeared on the edges of his mouth. He would have been a perfect teacher. The kind students hate from the first to the last day of school.
“I will sign only when the procedure is complete, sir.”
Giovanni wasn’t cold anymore. He felt an unpleasant wave of heat climbing up his neck, making his face go red to match the colour of his ears.
The soldier didn’t add anything else and set the matter aside, then he began follow the operator’s maneuvers with ostentation.
Giovanni couldn’t do but imitate him, still brooding on his behaviour. He didn’t make any mistake after all, did he? He was about to, yes, but he didn’t. Could he be blamed for his intentions?
Now that the anaconda-hose had firmly bitten the nozzle, the operator had disappeared behind the vehicle again. Mechanical noises came from his position, until the body of the big rubber reptile (which had an internal steel-thread cladding) started flexing and vibrating while vitriol started flowing inside it copiously.
The operator appeared again, taking off his gloves and putting them back in the big back pocket he had on his right buttock; he brought himself to one side of Giovanni and the officer, then took a small red and green packet out of the front pocket on his chest. “Cigarette?” He asked.
The soldier shook his head.
Giovanni smiled at him. “No, thanks. I don’t smoke.”
The man then decided not to smoke himself and laid a hand on the side of the truck. “Is this your first Cleansing, son?”
A rhetorical question, just to start a conversation. Giovanni couldn’t even give a vague answer, as the officer immediately gave him an eloquent look. The protocol didn’t allow futile chats during a procedure. It actually forbade them. The couldn’t do anything but shut his mouth and go back to staring at the Tank.
The podgy Cleansing Operator looked up to the sky for a moment. He had clearly already been deterred from starting pointless conversation many times before; so he leant more comfortably against the truck using a shoulder, arms crossed and a bored expression, and began to wait for the five thousand liters of acid to be injected in the Tank’s side.
It took less than ten minutes. Giovanni spent that time guessing what was happening in there.
The Tank’s bottom wasn’t made of a compact flooring nor dirt. There was a grating, a huge round grating on which the first guests fell when the Tank was empty: the first layer, which became the deepest one in just a few weeks, the one whence no voices or breathing came. Under the grate – which was about one meter above the soil – there an open space about half a meter tall, called Drainage Area, under which there were simply earth and rocks, and then the foundations.
The Gate of Cleansing was about one meter above the ground and was connected to a steel tube running through the whole circumference of the structure, inside the concrete. Cleansing Crown, the manual called it. It had a great number of holes, about as large as common rings, communicating with the inside of the Tank, on the lower layers of the mass of bodies. When hundreds, thousands of liters of sulphuric acid were injected inside it, the last part of the detention and punishment process, named Elimination, finally took place.
Arrest, Process, Conviction, Confinement, Unloading, Elimination: the six phases of the NMO’s penal system. The last one, the one closing the circle, was undoubtedly the most cruel; even if, for logistic and security reasons, there was no possibility of watching it, one couldn’t help but imagine what was happening.
Camp 9 was silent, immersed in an almost surreal tranquillity. The rumbling of the engine with the gearbox in neutral was part of that silence now, to which the gurgles and the swishes of the acid inside the hose acted as a counterpoint.
No sound came from inside the Tank, of course. And yet that immense dark lair, whose existence was only conceivable in terms of spatial and temporal coexistence with the candor and quietness of the world surround Giovanni, was probably filled with screams, cries and laments. Not from those who were flooded by the corrosive jets, no. Death had already come for them, granting them grace. Nobody could still be alive where the acid was injected; unless, because of some unpredictable movement of the human mass, somebody who had recently been unloaded was pulled or pushed towards the bottom of that swamp, finding themselves, so to speak, in the wrong place at the wrong time. At that point all that they could do was to welcome like a blessing the deathly touch that would deliver them turning them to nothing.