Ben Smith

Filing Systems

after Béla Tarr

In the villages they are chopping up cupboards for firewood. The reports are still coming in. In the city the central plaza is empty. An October morning smudges the lamp-posts and the crooked shop-signs. At the back of the Government Building the heavy frosted windows are propped open and paper is falling into the cold cobbled street.

In the villages they are smashing dressers and chests of drawers for firewood, or because they are too heavy to carry. The roads have turned to mud. The reports still arrive but the dates are often confused; they are left in sacks in the cargo bay where the meat vans unload. In the cobbled street the paper has crumpled into drifts – a snow of secrets, years thick. The wind picks up, scattering the paper, dragging two figures in greatcoats, hunched against the cold.

They have come from the villages. They have mud on their shoes and the hems of their coats. They have nothing to report. The papers curl around their heads, cling to their shoulders and shins. Out of the corners of their eyes they recognise words they have learned by heart. As they walk the words gather into sentences; the sentences into paragraphs which congeal into reports on official headed paper, telling of two figures in greatcoats who have come from the villages, where they are smashing up cupboards for firewood.

They keep their eyes on their feet, their coats turned up to their ears. If they looked up they might see lights in the windows projecting a cold October morning. If they listened hard they might hear the hiss of hose-pipes turning the roads to mud and the far-off whirring of a wind-machine.