The Weekend (17 page)

The maître d’ let Jan in, but showed him to a place at the bar rather than a table. “When Mr. Barnett comes I’ll call you.” Jan deposited his bag in the cloakroom and sat down
.

Even from his seat at the bar he could look through the window at the city, the skyscrapers, streets in between, the rivers and the bridges, behind them the large carpet of little houses, in the distance the Ferris wheel and the airport tower. On the horizon the sea glittered in the sun. The sky was a radiant blue
.

Jan was supposed to deposit the bag in the cloakroom. That was all. A favor asked of him by a Lebanese acquaintance, who had also done him various favors. “If you want to go to Windows on the World in the morning, you have to be a member of the club. You can do that more easily than I can.” The acquaintance smiled. Jan weighed the bag with his hand; it was heavy. The acquaintance smiled again. “It isn’t a bomb.”

“What do I do with the cloakroom ticket?”

“We’ll call you.”

Jan drank coffee. He had performed his task and could pay and leave. He had only to make sure no one spotted him leaving and brought him the bag
.

The view from the window gripped him. All
those houses, all those people, all those lives. The energy with which people drove back and forth and worked and built. With which they owned and shaped and inhabited the earth. And they wanted it to be beautiful. Sometimes they built the tip of a skyscraper like a temple and a bridge like a harp and buried the dead in a green garden by the river. Jan was astonished. Everything looked right. But he was so far away from it that he didn’t feel it was right. He remembered the fairy tale about the giant toy. In the picture in the storybook the giant’s daughter picked up a plow, from which the horse dangled in its harness, and the farmer from the reins
.

He ordered another coffee and a glass of water. He would stay in the city throughout the day, board a plane in the evening and be in Germany the next morning. Every time he felt the temptation to drive to his wife’s house, hide and secretly see his sons. The university was on holiday, and his sons might be at home. Every time he resisted the temptation. He knew the address and phone number. He allowed himself no more contact than that
.

He hears the noise before the other guests look up from their breakfast and their conversations. Loud, dull, grinding, sucking. As if a huge threshing machine were dragging the whole building into its maw and shredding it. In the window the city is crooked, crockery crashes to the floor and shatters, people scream and hold on to the walls, to the furniture, to one another. Jan clings to the bar. The walls creak and groan. The city straightens up and
sags again, to the left, to the right, to the left. A few times the tower swings back and forth. Then it stops
.

For a moment it is utterly quiet in the restaurant. Even Jan doesn’t move. When a telephone rings into the silence, he holds his breath before bursting out laughing with all the others. The tower is standing, the phone is ringing, the city is unharmed and the sun is shining. But the relief lasts only a moment. The waiters and waitresses who want to come swarming out to straighten the tables and chairs, the guests who are reaching for napkins to wipe the spilled coffee and orange juice from suits and dresses, see gray smoke outside the windows and stiffen
.

This time the stiffness does not dissolve into laughter. The guests dash to the window, push their way to the door, into the corridor, to the elevators. Chairs tip over, broken crockery crunches underfoot. The maître d’, phone to his ear, assures the guests that he has informed the fire department. Jan looks for his bag in the cloakroom—has someone put a bomb downstairs and is the next one in his bag? In his bag there is a radio. People are calling one another to say a plane has crashed into the tower, and Jan wonders whether the radio guided the plane. The elevators aren’t there yet—you don’t usually have to wait so long for them—someone asks about the stairs, but how are you supposed to get down 106 stories on foot; someone fetches a meat cleaver from the kitchen, forces it between the doors of an elevator shaft, others pull and shove the doors aside. They look into the shaft and see smoke and flames and the rocking cable of the
elevator. They go to the next shaft and the third and see the same thing
.

The first people are already on the stairs. The people from the restaurant join a crowd of people from a conference and the staff, and in the stairwells on every floor they are joined by still others. No one pushes—they all act as quickly as they can and help the others who can’t go so fast. The only sound is feet on the stairs; no one feels like saying anything superfluous, and what would not be superfluous in this situation? Until the first group of them cough and come to a standstill and halt the descent. Jan is one of them; he too coughs and comes to a standstill. When the man next to him holds his handkerchief in front of his mouth and walks into the smoke and heat, Jan goes with him. They don’t get far. After half a step it takes their breath away
.

“How far have we come?”

“Six, seven, eight floors—I don’t know.”

They go back, and everyone turns around. But their ascent soon falters as well. From above they hear that the other stairwells are also blocked. “Onto the roof! Let’s wait for the helicopters.”

Jan stays behind. He doesn’t feel good and sits down on a step. The clatter of feet fades away, but the fire is getting noisier, and the smoke is rising higher. Jan stands up, opens the door leading onto that floor and looks into a hall with open doors. He goes from door to door, from office to office; he doesn’t know why he is doing it and why he is staying here. He knows he has to get onto the roof—soon he will run away
.
He doesn’t run away. He walks into an office, walks between partition walls and desks to the window, and sees that the other tower is burning as well. He nods. He wouldn’t have thought the Arabs were up to it
.

He hears a quiet knocking and calling and follows it to a door. He tries to open it, it jams, he pulls on the handle, pulls the handle off, kicks the door in. It’s a windowless photocopy room in which a young woman is blinking distractedly. She only heard the noise and felt the impact, then the light went out, and the tower swayed, the door jammed. She has no idea what has happened. She thinks she has finally been rescued. Jan takes her by the hand, starts running, pulls her with him. When he opens the door to the first stairwell, the heat and smoke are so powerful that he immediately closes it again. He runs to the other doors, she, holding his hand, asks desperately, What’s happened, why is it burning, who are you? The other stairwells are nothing but smoke and heat as well
.

Jan walks to the window with the young woman and shows her the other tower. She asks, “How will they get us out of here?” He doesn’t know what to say. “Do they know we’re here? Have you called?” She sees his hopeless face. “You haven’t called!” She fumbles for her phone in her pocket, dials 911, gives details of the floor and the office, the smoke and the heat in the stairwell. “So,” she says, “what now?” He feels the floor heating up beneath his feet. The air in the room is sticky and tastes of smoke and chemicals. Jan takes a metal wastepaper basket and smashes it against the window, first with its bottom
,
then with a corner, and the glass splinters and breaks. He knocks the rest of the window out of the frame
.

“The floor’s getting hot.” She lifts one foot, then the other and gives an embarrassed laugh. He nods. “We’ll have to push a table to the window.” When they do, the floor is already so hot that they hurry—they hop comically from one foot to the other
.

The young woman also knows that the heat will reach the table they are now standing on. “What will we do then?”

“We’ll jump.”

She looks at him and wonders if he’s being serious or if he’s joking. She realizes that he’s being serious. “But …”

“They’ve stretched out huge canopies. You just have to take care you don’t land on your head.”

She leans out the window and looks down. “I can’t see anything.”

“You can’t see anything. Modern canopies are made of transparent synthetic material.”

She looks at him, doesn’t believe him, starts crying. “We’re going to die, I know it, we’re going to die.”

“We’ll fly. We’ll take each other by the hand and fly into the morning.”

But even that doesn’t help. She cries, she shakes, as he takes her in his arms and tries to calm her she pushes him back; she wants to go home, she wants her mother, she fumbles for her phone again, gets the answering machine and leaves a message that she loves her mother. Jan listens and wonders whether he should
say good-bye to his wife and children, one first and last call home. But the moment quickly passes. He isn’t going to get sentimental just before he dies. He wants to help the young woman. Like the orchestra on the
Titanic.

The floor covering softens, and the table legs sink into it, not all at the same time, not all equally deep. The table tips over and stands at an angle. The young woman loses her balances, cries out, tries to hold on, but misses Jan, a partition wall, the window frame, her arms reach into the void. She tumbles out of the window and falls, flails her arms around, pedals with her legs. Jan struggles, but keeps his balance
.

He has to jump. The table is getting warm, it will soon be hot, it will burn, flames are licking at various spots in the floor. Jan knows he won’t scream and wave and pedal. But he doesn’t want to tense his muscles and clench his teeth. He wants to fly. He wants not to be afraid of the quick, brusque, painless end and enjoy the flight. He always wanted to be free, he has slipped all bonds, he has lived in the light of freedom and with its terror. Everything he has done was right, if he flies now
.

Jan jumps and spreads his arms
.