Blok D

Blok |D

The students have gone home, dragging their wheeled suitcases up and down halls.

But one sturdy fellow remains here.

Above or below me, maybe to the side of me, his voice has been talking for two or three hours now. Is it a monotone?  Is that what you call it?  He seems to hover about one tone, which is just suited for making a pipe or some piece of metal in the wall vibrate.

He has been talking for two or three hours.

I would like to strangle him.

His voice accompanied me as I fell asleep two hours ago.

His voice was there when I woke with sandpaper eyes.

When will he stop?

The students have gone home, but the students are not noisy.

The cleaning ladies are noisy when they do teamwork. One shouts loudly from the end of the hall to her sister three or four doors away.  Doors slam loudly.

All noises are amplified by the empty walls and empty halls free from carpets or unneeded niceties.

Then someone slams down a bucket

The student is still talking.

There is, as well, the four-wheeled cart of one cleaning lady, our local queen.  The wheels resonate loudly and rattle a tiny bit on the uncarpeted floor.  Most days there are no lights in the halls and it is dark.  There is a light switch but we practice a form of austerity here.  I like to think of it as ancient austerity, dating from the dark days of Communism.

Our local queen of the cleaning ladies might shout too.  And, she has the trick of slamming doors down to an art.

Best of all, though is her cart.  You hear it rattling, coming towards you from far away.

On a good day you can even hear a cart moving on the floor above.  The wheels spin as the body rattles and the sounds on top of the non-smooth motion forward make for an echoing sound in the naked halls.

Not to be surpassed.  Those staying in the halls bring their own wheeled contraptions which hum and rattle and create an unlovely cacaphony no less painful than the cleaner's machines.

And then there are the ladies whose heels strike and echo up and down the empty halls:  CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK

With luck the lady drags as suitcase behind her so that her wheels can roll and scream too.

But then there are the keys with their metal number plates.  They too click, but it is a metallic click all their own--echoing on their own before they resonate in the empty, dark, halls......You cannot open a door or even begin to think about opening or lock a door without setting them in motion, and creating the awful sound of the key being hit by the number plate.  No mad genius could have better invented a device of aural torture which was easier to use and more effective in reducing an audience to idiocy.  (Thus the origin of my current mental state.)

The mad cleaning lady riding her skateboard could not be noisier.  If only the wheels are metal or
hard, but not in any way covered by rubber--that, too, a kind of Communist style austerity.....

The student is still talking?  Perhaps he is mad and he has no audience.  I don't care.  I'd still like to strangle him.

Studentska 22
Blok D
Pardubice,
The Czech Republic

"But we gave you our nicest flat!."

Addendum:

I neglected to mention (as a sound now reminds me) of another beauty of BLOKD
Scraping, dragging furniture:

Itself a chapter in torture
We can drag chairs, briefly,
or drag larger items,
and doors can squeak as well.

Some days, the doors squeak at five or six,
accompanied by the sound of empty boots marching,
-must be ghosts---
And then the chairs scrape above my bed
at five am
at six am
at ten pm
or even at ten or eleven pm

there's a girl too who I can hear talking
and laughing
at all hours

It seems that this new mad male has replaced her

All in all
it
is
driving
me
MAD!