It had been easy.
A smile crept into the corners of her mouth. It really had been easy. She, Lotte, was being inde-pen-dent, all on her own.
She was handed a bunch of visitor’s passes by the boy standing beside her; she kept one and passed the rest along to the girl on her other side and was instantly absorbed in the tour group as a man in front called for quiet.
Lotte looked around as the man began to speak. To the right were offices as far as she could see, and to her left were closed doors and blank walls.
The November breeze ruffled the net curtains in the office closest to her; the painted walls were a faded white, but the edges looked yellow and were crumbling away. A poster of a fuzz of kittens playing with a ball of wool had caught her attention when the loud voice of the man erupted:
‘And now we shall show you how these sacks become whole pieces of paper again,’ he said, as though about to perform a magic trick. ‘The sacks are brought down here, one at a time, to one team. We shall take a peek in here first,’ he said, leading them into a room next door that was almost identical, but there were no posters on the wall here and the room was not empty. The swarm of students gathered in the doorway like bees in a hive. Lotte joined them as they all bustled in.
A woman with a round face, small glasses and flat salt-and-pepper hair waited while the students filtered in. ‘Continuing tours when we have missing documents?’ she said. ‘You could try helping us rather than putting us on show,’ she added and then left, with a flask in her hand.
‘Thank you, Pepin,’ Herr Benedict said with false cheeriness as the woman walked away. Then he addressed the students. ‘We’ve been conducting tours in recent months to try and raise awareness and funding. This is important work, after all.
‘If you can all line up along the wall, so as not to interfere . . .’ He pointed to Lotte. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Over this way, that’s right – that’s right.’ Lotte moved further into the room and skirted the entire group, beckoned by Herr Benedict. He was almost double her size and had an enormous belly. Small framed glasses were squeezed onto high, round, flushed cheeks.
White net curtains floated around her and the cool breeze from the window fanned across the nape of her neck. She heard the gentle rhythmic patter of rain on the sill. Without the rumble of noise from the students, this would be a rather peaceful room, Lotte thought.
There was an enormous table in the centre, made up of three smaller ones pressed together. Each desk had a table mat, some sellotape, paper bags and two or three trays, which had smaller inner compartments, not dissimilar to a cutlery tray.
A young woman worked at one end with a mountain of shredded paper between two different table mats.
‘No smiles today, Sabine?’ Herr Benedict asked the dark-haired woman with the shredded paper. She looked up at him and then at the group. Lotte saw the minute shake of her head before she lowered her gaze.
A man on the other side of the table cleared his throat loudly. He was sitting next to an old lady, her chin resting on her chest; Lotte realised she was asleep. There was an empty table mat in the space, which, Lotte presumed, belonged to the woman, Pepin, who had just left.
‘Each worker takes a few handfuls of paper from the sack,’ Herr Benedict said, demonstrating with the sack on the floor between the empty desk space and the old woman. ‘Then they sort through it – that’s what the trays are for. They’re looking for type of paper, texture, colour; whether the words are handwritten or typed, pen colour, indentations. You name it, they sort them into similar items, and once the trays are full they start to see if the pieces fit together.’ Herr Benedict placed both hands on the table.
‘Isolde,’ he said at last, looking at the old lady. She breathed audibly, long, slow, deep; sleeping. ‘Isolde,’ Herr Benedict said again, more loudly this time, and the woman looked up, dazed, and wiped her hand across her mouth, surveying the group watching her. Lotte giggled and waved a hand in greeting as Isolde’s wet green eyes found hers among the many.
‘Isolde is our oldest worker,’ Herr Benedict said. Isolde looked sharply at him. ‘Our longest-standing worker,’ he swiftly corrected himself.
‘Indeed,’ Isolde said. Her voice was raspy almost gravelly, exotic to Lotte’s ears. She had never really known anyone old, and, fascinated, took a step closer to Isolde, if only to be nearer her voice. ‘What is it you want now, Herr Benedict?’ Isolde asked. ‘Surely there are some cakes that want eating somewhere?’ A small gasp punctuated the room. Herr Benedict didn’t seem to hear the gasp, or at least he didn’t react to it.
‘Can you show us how it’s done,’ he asked. ‘Please.’
Isolde, sitting upright, licked her lips. She looked at the empty table mat and equally empty tray in front of her.
‘Here you go, Mama,’ said the man sitting to Isolde’s left, and he passed her his full tray and took her empty one.
‘Thank you, Ralf,’ Herr Benedict said. ‘So, as you can see, Isolde is taking one of the sections, typeface, black ink . . .’
Isolde looked up. ‘Do you really have to narrate?’ she asked, with an unwavering gaze directed at Herr Benedict, who abruptly fell silent. ‘I may be old, but I am perfectly capable.’
Lotte watched closely as Isolde’s fingers deftly moved the papers so that they all lay with the words facing up. Isolde’s skin looked like moth wings, almost papery. She looked up at her audience.
‘These young people seem to have working eyes, and thinking brains too, no doubt. I’m sure they know that with any puzzle you start with . . .’ Isolde scanned each and every one of them. Lotte followed her gaze, but none of the students said anything.
‘The corners,’ Lotte said.
‘The corners,’ Isolde confirmed, and smiled, looking back at the pieces on the mat in front of her. Lotte leaned in a little, to see exactly what she was doing, and saw three triangular pieces that were clearly corners. ‘Then I would look for . . .’ Isolde prompted, not looking up.
Lotte didn’t wait for a pause from the others. ‘The straight bits,’ she said. It was the first time in as long as she could remember that she’d been able to answer a question posed to a group not only first, but without the others having the answer.
She thought of the long hours in the ‘reading’ corner of the classroom in lower school when, unable to participate in the teacher’s assigned lesson, she was told as always to sit quietly in the corner and work on a puzzle.
‘Then you go from the straight bits into the middle,’ Lotte said boldly, watching Isolde’s gnarly fingers push paper around the mat.
‘Clever girl,’ Isolde said, and beckoned Lotte closer to see. ‘These pieces have been hand-torn, which is much easier.’ She was working and talking at the same time. Her head was low, covered in downy white hair, like fluff. ‘When we get the machine-shredded sacks, it’s migraine season in here.’ She looked at the dark-haired woman on the other side of the table, sifting through paper which had obviously been machine-shredded. ‘That’s very close, difficult work. For young eyes.’ The younger woman smiled into the paper she was arranging.
‘Hand-torn documents,’ Isolde went on, ‘tend to fall into a pattern. Once you have mastered one page, the others in the same pile come easier. That’s why we work on one sack at a time. You can find some pattern to the individual doing the ripping.’