Flaw by Magdalena Tulli

success of which will be a pure profit distilled from the turnover – bottles of untaxed alcohol locked up somewhere in a storeroom. It is a certain thing that at the moment of the great crash, the shops too shook to their foundations. It’s even possible that the odd bottle broke; yet all the others survived, packed in cases in their dozens.
    The tremor was accompanied by the ringing laughter of the masters and apprentices. The object hurled from high up with such a din was not even a homemade bomb. Rather, it had the weight and dimensions of the missing safe – exactly those, to a T. Yet it struck precisely at the solar plexus of the infrastructure, at the underground bunker hidden beneath the turf, in which the valve of a gas tank used for heating was right next to some electrical equipment and the compressor of an air-conditioning unit. As a result a hole was smashed in the ceiling, a transformer was crushed, and several pipes burst. The series of electrical discharges had catastrophic consequences, though, as had been planned, the far-reaching impact of the subterranean explosion did not affect the red-brick warehouses. The shockstraveled far, perhaps along the water lines. Whoever conceived the plan probably supervised the operation in person. Not alone but in the company of the overalled workmen, who made off-hand comments on the course of events, detecting from the color of the smoke and the sound of the explosions that the compressor alone must by some miracle have survived. In that case, they joked, instead of heating there’d be cooling. As they spoke, bandying strong words, they drew on filterless cigarettes and spat out shreds of tobacco. With a malicious pleasure they applauded the echoes of a disaster that demolished their own labors. Nothing captures hearts and minds quite like the monumental ebullience of destruction. Effortlessly multiplying the losses of the owner and employer, they gave him an appropriate seeing-off: let him regret not sitting quietly while everything except the safe was still in its place. As for me – because I was the one the safe belonged to – it was true that I began to regret things at once.
    A discreet silence would at least have made it possible to spare the installations, the buildings, and the pavements. What can be better than silence when truth leads nowhere? The masters have common sense enough not to expect me to believe in their good intentions. But they don’t give a hoot; they’re not in the least afraid, since they’re satisfied that once again they’ve succeeded in not giving themselves away. After all, didn’t the safe appear again at once, though empty? Did they not offer the required show of goodwill, eloquent expressions of falseearnestness that for the sake of balance they must have laughed at in private? In the cross fire of questions, one after another of them would have presented his explanations, hesitating and stammering like would-be polyglots who only out of necessity are speaking in a foreign tongue. They would have maintained with hand on heart that the safe had been left in one of the warehouses by a simple oversight; that they had suspended it on the arm of a crane for the sole purpose of installing it in its rightful place without delay; and that everything that happened subsequently was a regrettable accident which was no one’s fault. As they were prepared to testify, the reinforced door was opened by the impact of the fall, and its contents, in their view, were swept away by the wind. It all scattered, no one knows where to: title deeds to local apartment buildings in the names of various clients of the photographer or parents of one or another grammar school pupil; certificates of treasury loans left in safekeeping by the school custodian and the policeman; security deposits for the rentals of stores; wedding rings waiting in pairs for the big day; various IOUs, the top one bearing the extravagant