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transaction, then the same three hundred kilometers back until we entered Dust Street. We’d park the truck in the shed and open the doors of the vault. As we opened the lid in the corner of the shed, we’d say, “Come on!” and even if they didn’t know the words, our gestures would immediately tell the immigrants what to do and they’d disappear through the hole just wide enough for a human to fit through.
    Father had had the reservoir installed two years ago. Due to the security necessities of the chaining method—that was dependent on the steps prior and subsequent to the delivery, which could end up being delayed—he’d decided the shed was no longer suitable. So he’d called in constructors from Barnak, a village two hundred kilometers away, and told them, “I want a water reservoir.” He’d even drawn a water pipe from the main grid to the reservoir so they wouldn’t get suspicious. Although the men had pointed out that the reservoir should be nearer the house for the stability of the water pipes, they hadn’t been too insistent since my father was paying their wages. When he said he wanted a cast iron door, they hadn’t made a peep, since it was much more costly than a simple iron door. It wasn’t their problem if some nut wanted to seal off his water reservoir like it was a manhole!
    When the lid was installed, further confirming my status as a sewage worker, we had at our disposal a hell pit large enough for two hundred people to fit in, provided they sucked in their bellies and stayed close to one another. A perpetually warm tomb where the tropical maps on the damp concrete walls and the ponds accumulating on the floor constantly shifted places and shapes. A cell lit by the diffused shadows of spiderwebs rather than by the bulb I had to replace two or three times a week. A cellar we used to age people in …
    Yet the immigrants, who’d traveled who knows how many thousands of kilometers to get here, never paid attention to the décor and immediately lined up to sit on the wet floor like they came here every day, resting their heads between their palms and taking up their pose of the waiting. The perfect waiters! They could wait days, weeks, months without tiring. Once they rested their heads on their palms, they disengaged like space shuttles and sank into a strange sleep until they were woken up again. A kind of standby mode that wasn’t quite like sleep … auto-anesthesia!
    Since experience had taught me that sitting on that wet floor eventually gave them diarrhea and left me with longer sawdust-sweeping duty, I handed out pieces of newspaper and Styrofoam. Then, for obvious reasons, I’d put buckets in front of them. One per family. One per set of friends. I’d ask the lone ones, “Who would you like to shit with?” They wouldn’t understand, of course. I couldn’t be bothered to explain.
    Just as I was headed to the six wooden steps leading up from the reservoir to the shed, one of them would step forward and ask. They usually had a spokesman. Someone who could string together about four words in English or who’d had the right mind to learn useful words in the languages of the countries he’d be traversing. Someone clever … I’d know what he was asking, of course. But I’d pretend I didn’t. “When?” he’d say. In all the languages he knew. He’d ask when they’d be setting out again. I’d tell him to forget about it and concentrate instead on the more pressing issue of what the hell they were going to do when they had to use the buckets in a few hours. He’d make nothing of this long reply and repeat his question. I’d ignore this again, of course, and walk out. I’d return with a clothesline for them to stretch from the hooks on the walls and an old sheet to hang over it, and hand these to the spokesman who’d be in my face again. As he stared dumbly at me, unaware that he’d just been given the materials to partition their home measuring twelve by six meters in