Roman Ehrlich, “Engineers of Time”

Summary

THE APPLICANT'S HAND rests on the latch of the toilet cubicle door. The applicant takes a deep breath. He looks around again and realizes that there are only two more sheets left on the toilet roll which he has just availed himself of. An emergency ration for the next person to come and sit down unwarily. The applicant tears the two remaining sheets of toilet paper from the tube as well and flushes them down the drain.

The friction of the applicant's rubber soles on the fine little hairs of the carpet in the hallway outside the toilets charges him with static electricity.

He remains oblivious. He is already highly charged as it is. The miner who has just been rescued from the shaft holds aloft a ripped-out telephone receiver. In the dazzling sea of floodlights that are illuminating the scene and from which the miner's two eyes need to be protected by sunglasses. He says this is the telephone with which they first made contact with the outside world after the accident in the mine. After the cave-in, after the workers had been buried under the rockfall—the rubble of the earth that they had been tasked with excavating. Engineers from his country developed the telephone and ordinary workers manufactured it, he says. Later there was growing criticism that the press and politicians had been utterly shameless in rushing to exploit the miners and their story. The outstretched hand of the miner. Holding the receiver. In the dirty plastic a dull reflection of the beams from the floodlights. The snaking telephone wire dangles underneath.

Among the extras on the set of the feature film that was broadcast in the evening schedule of a commercial television channel many months later and didn't stay in the memory of even one of its relatively few viewers for more than a couple of weeks was one who was struck by how grotesquely the other extras’ faces contorted and distorted themselves when they were directed to talk silently among themselves because the dialogue between two actors right in the middle of them was about to be recorded.