Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

pair of men’s shoes with highly polished black wingtips, too polished to be from the neighborhood. They were possibly Stasi, an apparatchik dropping off a car, or a diplomat wanting to buy one. He could see sharply creased, gray-cuffed wool suit pants, not the bell-bottom, orange, and blue striped polyester synthetics with lapels the size of pizza slices in which agents with access to Western stores customarily strutted. Instead, cuffs ironed to a sharp crease broke carefully over the shoes, revealing just a glimpse of fine, black cotton socks beneath. He guessed that his visitor could be on a day visa from West Berlin looking to buy spare automobile parts on the black market cheap.

Next to these feet were another pair of smaller feet in larger shoes made of unpolished brown leather; clearly a woman who worked for a living. Scuffed, frumpy, indelicate, not feminine, these belonged to a cleaning woman. The heels were a bit higher than hiking boots, one oddly higher than the other, and more brutish than the heels of women from West Berlin.

Also visible was the hem of an unfashionably long flannel skirt the same color as every structure in East Berlin, the color chosen under the current Five-year plan for all women of the worker’s revolution. The skirt reached her mid-calf, hiding most of what looked like a leg brace. Her legs were bare and unshaved, true to Eastern European style. These two may have come together, but they were not together.

When one spent his days seeing life through a ten-centimeter gap under automobiles, one became a shrewd judge of pants, cuffs, hosiery, and footwear.

With a scratchy scrape of metal casters against concrete, Zerrissen pulled himself out from under the derelict car on the creeper, and hoisted himself to his feet, pausing to wipe his hands on a red rag that left his hands no less greasy, reached for the smoldering cigarette, nearly forgotten in an ashtray made from an old piston turned upside down. Nicolaus waited and watched the ceremony patiently, silently, noting black deposits of cigarette tar formed around the edges and interior of the piston. Drawing the last puff, Zerrissen looked at them both through the spiral of smoke curling around his head. A grease covered radio with one of the two bulbs illuminating the dial, its tuning mechanism long since broken and forever stuck on the only station allowed by the State, broadcasted a live performance of an orchestra playing an approved classical piece.

“Yes?”

Zerrissen stared into the young man’s face. He noted his clean shaven, blemish-free, smooth skin of salon caliber, square jaw, cleft chin, dark hair, dark eyebrows, teeth like the white keys of a new Steinway piano, and intact nose. He was good looking. He had the lean, chiseled features that spoke, not just to sophistication, but to money, and the knowledge how to spend it. An irresistible combination to women. And yet here he was, with a cleaning person who barely resembled a girl. A light fragrance surrounded him, but it was more subtle than cologne, and more as if he had just left a room containing an open bottle of cologne, without wearing any of it. The ambient air around the girl, on the other hand, was of dust, and candle wax. Perhaps it was just Zerrissen’s imagination. He squinted through the smoke at her to be certain. She was not easy to look at, but the large black eye made her hard to ignore. Zerrissen wondered if the black eye might be part of the story the stranger had to tell.

Since his exodus from the Bunker twenty years ago, life for Zerrissen bouncing between Allied interrogations, de-Nazification, the assignment by the State to this auto repair shop, and not being eligible or interested in becoming a member of the Party, was consigned to the rest of the population that must wait in hour-long food lines for basic edible food, drinkable water, coal for heat. This daily struggle legible on his undernourished face in the form of creases and poorly shaven folds of skin, dried out from smoking and other abuses of vice, mostly of the vodka persuasion.

“We were told,” offered the young man, “that we would find Raynor Zerrissen under one of these cars. Would that be you?”

Zerrissen nodded but declined Nicolaus’ extended hand, showing his greasy palms instead. Nicolaus shrugged his understanding and reached over to turn up the volume on the radio nestled among the orphaned engine, alternator, and brake cylinder parts; it was now loud enough to be heard across the potholed street in front of the shop. The potholes being serenaded were now two years old, grew each winter to eventually join into a larger one, like cavities in a neglected tooth, and reaching a vintage that, by East Berlin standards, nominated their eventual repair to sometime in the next two years.

Zerrissen looked sideways at the radio currently broadcasting an original Russian opera extolling the virtues of Soviet life, wondered how this well-bred young man found volume would improve this libretto of obvious propaganda. Guessing his thoughts, Nicolaus signaled with his hands, pointing at the ceiling of the shop, then to his ears, an unmistakable silent communication that Zerrissen’s shop was bugged.

Microphones and cameras hidden in public and private places in East Berlin were not news to anyone, so the proposition that Zerrissen’s shop was under surveillance did not surprise him. What was surprising to Zerrissen, however, was that Nicolaus dared acknowledge this otherwise unmentionable fact to a stranger.

Over the sound from the radio, Nicolaus spoke into Zerrissen’s ear, “Herr Zerrissen, do we look familiar?”

Zerrissen did not immediately recognize them and did not care to play games, especially with memories and at least two liters of vodka that he had worked so hard to swallow before lunch break. Zerrissen drew on the last of the cigarette, stubbed it out as he contemplated the possibilities while eying the leg brace poking out from under the girl’s dress.

“Ah. You must be Pyotr, or is