A Fairy Tale (23 page)

F
irst there's a screech of metal against metal, then a loud buzzing noise. The conveyor belt sets in motion. The first crate of letters comes rolling towards me. I pick it up and carry it over to my workstation.

Behind me, Kasper's lips perform a drum solo to the music from his headphones. We work two men to each booth. In this hall we hand-sort all the letters that don't fit into the machines. Parcels are sorted in one of the halls above us.

The first hour is always the hardest. After that my eyes find the postal code on the letter and my hands pass it on, instinctively putting it in the right pigeonhole. The pigeonholes are made from blue metal. The conveyor belt keeps moving; the crates are made from yellow plastic.

“Oi, Turk,” I hear.

I turn around. Kasper points to his bare arm where his wristwatch should be. I take off my headphones.

“Break time, Turk.”

For a couple of years now my name has been Mehmet Faruk. It's the name on my passport and on my health insurance card. The name on my employment contract when I got the job here in the sorting office. Most people call me Mehmet, others Faruk. Kasper only ever calls me Turk. He says, What's the difference between a Turk and a hedgehog that has been run over? Then he laughs.

I follow Kasper along the conveyor belt. His clothes are crumpled; he has stubble and greasy hair. He looks like a homeless guy and has since my first shift here. We walk up the iron steps and down the corridor to the break room, which is only big enough to accommodate a single shift. The small room is already thick with smoke. By the wall are two coffeemakers which are switched on all night.

“She has to learn,” Kasper says, nodding in the direction of the new girl Erik has pressed up in the corner between the coffeemakers and the fire exit.

Erik wears thick glasses; he's short and wide and is among those who have been here the longest. His breath smells of filthy carpets. When he talks about the sorting machines, his arm movements always get wild. Japanese machines, he says. They'll take over soon and make us redundant. When he isn't ranting about the sorting machines, he talks about being fired from the council office where he used to work.

Everyone in the break room has a reason for being here. Sitting at a small table along the wall is Michael, whose band is this close to a record deal. He's talking to Flemming, who used to be a long-distance lorry driver, but kept falling asleep at the wheel. Dorthe, over by the coffeemakers, had a job in a cheese shop before she developed an allergy to milk.

The hand on the
clock reaches twelve, break time is over. We've managed one and a half cigarettes. I follow Kasper down the iron staircase. We put on the white cotton gloves that always makes me think we're about to perform a mime act on the concrete floor.

The hours pass, the letters keep on coming.

Early in the morning
we line up at the exit. One hundred and fifty people with their shoulders slumped, their eyes reduced to tiny cracks. The guard sits in his booth behind the glass window; he looks at us, then he nods and presses the button. The lock buzzes.

I emerge outside in
the cold, windy February morning. I walk down the street with my collar turned up.

The wind always feels icier when my body is tired; it forces itself under my jacket and clings to my bones.

I walk past Hovedbanegården where the hookers stand outside the entrance, drinking coffee out of paper cups and getting ready for a long day's work.

I
'
m wearing headphones when I wake up. The sun is setting behind the rooftops and casting a reddish light through the small skylight in the roof. The room I'm renting is an attic room in a luxury duplex apartment.

Two slices of toast are still sitting in the toaster, slightly burned on one side. Once again I fell asleep before I got around to eating them.

I get dressed. I splash water on my face and walk downstairs. Elsebeth has left her shopping list on the kitchen table. I find money in the metal tin next to the coffeemaker.

The supermarket is packed with people with tired faces and children tugging at coats and refusing to sit still in shopping carts.

Elsebeth would never ask me to do her shopping for her, but she's old and needs very little. Her change has its own special pocket in my jacket.

I always start with her groceries; I find crispbread and some caraway cheese that I know she likes. I get buttermilk and lemon marmalade. Then ham and cheese for me, food that can fit between two slices of bread.

No matter how short or long the line is, I always choose till number three. From there I can watch Petra, who works in the kiosk. She has the whitest hands I've ever seen. I know her name is Petra because it says so on her name tag.

When I've paid for the shopping, I go over to buy cigarettes from her. Other days I buy a newspaper or some sweets for my night shift at the sorting office.

A couple of times I've bought football pools coupons, even though I don't know how to fill them in.

She asks if there's anything else.

I shake my head and find the money.

I let myself in.
I can hear classical music through the door to Elsebeth's drawing room. First I put her groceries away, then I take my own up the stairs and put them on the windowsill, up against the glass where they will keep cold.

The radio lies under the bed; I balance it on my stomach, a small short-wave radio with a long antenna. It was the first thing I bought myself when I got the job at the sorting office.

I put on my headphones. I lie there listening to the news from German, English, and French radio stations. Little snippets. Yesterday there was flooding in a town in Brittany. No one died, but the emergency services rescued a man sitting on the roof of his car. He was clutching a small, black-and-white spotted pig. He said he always drove around with it in the back seat. It had been a struggle to get it up on the roof and its trotters had scratched the paintwork.

I hear the bell
ring and I turn off the radio. Elsebeth is standing at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me. Her legs can't manage the steps these days so she rings a bell instead. Today we're having meatballs in a sweet curry sauce.

“Cooking for two is no more hassle,” she says, “and much more fun. They can keep their ready meals with instant mash and meatballs still frozen in the middle.”

After dinner we drink coffee and Elsebeth talks about her two husbands, both of whom she survived. The first one walked in his sleep and always managed to find his walking stick, no matter where she hid it. One night he walked out in front of a car. Her second husband was scared of cats; he said they had evil eyes and stole your dreams while you were sleeping. I've heard the stories before, laughed at them before.

Elsebeth takes out a bottle of cognac.

“You should never save these things,” she says.

The bottle is older than I am.

Elsebeth always concludes by talking about life before the two world wars. About being a little girl in a big apartment filled with people. When they played hide-and-seek, the game could last hours. When our glasses are empty, I ask if it's all right if I leave.

She laughs, tells me I'm young and that I quite naturally have better things to do with my time.

I return to my
bed and put on my headphones. More news, more snippets.

In Stuttgart a man has built a car out of bottle caps. He's still trying to get permission to fit it with an engine.

I keep an eye on the clock. When it's past midnight, I put on my coat and walk down the stairs. I can hear Elsebeth's snoring through the door. I don't think she'd be able to shout as loudly as she snores, even if she tried.

I walk on wet cobblestones, skirting around puddles.

I pick my bar depending on the weather. I choose from among four or five. If the bartender's smile is a little too familiar, I give it a couple of weeks before I return. Today the weather is drizzling and I go inside PÃ¥fuglen.

I watch the other guests in the bar. I watch them drink, I watch them talk, I watch the way they hold their glasses and smoke their cigarettes; I draw them in my mind.

I'm not the only person drinking alone. I draw the lonely people, those who sit at the bar or in a corner with a beer and a newspaper in front of them, pretending they're enjoying their own company. They stay put until they've picked someone in the room they want to mix with. Then they move closer, find a chair at the neighbouring table. They take their newspaper with them, but leave it unopened.

I draw them in my mind as they slowly turn their chairs. One centimetre at a time. They wait for the right word. The one that lets them join in on the conversation.

I never seek out company and still it finds me quite often.

I'm on my second beer when she sits down on the bar stool next to me.

She's blonde and very tanned. She looks like she's in her late twenties but is probably older.

She places a cigarette between her lips. Finds a lighter in her bag and puts it down on the bar. She looks at it as if she has forgotten how to use it.

Then she turns to me and asks me to please help. Says she always scratches her thumbnail on it and that she has just had her nails done. She holds up her hands so that I can see them. The nails are long and bright red and quite clearly not her own. She bites hers, she says, and laughs.

She offers to buy me another beer, pulls a banknote from a wad.

Tells me she's a model.

She buys drinks with umbrellas for us and tells me she makes porn movies.

When she gets home at night, she has seen so many dicks that she dreams about elephants trumpeting all night.

“O
i, Turk, I'm going for a slash. Leave my sweets alone, do you hear?” Kasper laughs. “You Turks are worse than the bloody gypsies.”

A couple of times a week Kasper leaves his place at the booth, but he never walks towards the washrooms. If the supervisor comes by, I tell him Kasper has a stomach bug and the supervisor says that it's probably the lousy coffee they serve here. We both laugh and the supervisor walks on.

Kasper comes back ten minutes later, a little flustered. We carry on working, back to back.

We're halfway through the
shift when the conveyor belt grinds to a halt.

“Not again,” I hear.

“For God's sake.”

“Overtime, there's definitely going to be overtime,” says someone a couple of pigeonholes further away.

People start emerging from their booths.

“False alarm,” someone calls out from the far end of the hall.

The conveyor belts start moving again, people breathe a sigh of relief, no need to wait for an engineer.

Kasper and I swap cassette tapes before we continue sorting letters.

When there's only one
hour of the shift left to go, I feel Kasper's hand on my arm. I take off my headphones.

“Oi, Turk,” he says. “Would you do me a favour?”

I nod.

Kasper glances around before pulling out a buff A4 envelope from under his sweater.

“Take this with you when you leave.”

I tuck the envelope under my sweater.

“Don't you want to know why?”

I shake my head.

We line up in
front of the exit. The guard sits behind his glass window as usual; he has yet to press the button that lets us out.

“What the hell are we waiting for?” says someone at the back of the line.

“Wake up, man.”

Then we see two guards in dark blue sweaters with radios on their belts. They walk along the long line of postal workers.

“What the hell's going on now?”

They stop in front of Kasper, tell him it's just a spot check, and ask him to please follow them.

“Are you sure you wouldn't rather have the Turk?” Kasper nods in my direction, but they don't smile.

Kasper goes with them; shortly afterwards, the lock buzzes.

I walk down the
street; I try not to walk too quickly.

Kasper's letter is starting to fill up my whole sweater; the corners of the envelope are pointy and making their way through the stitches in the fabric.

I go inside Bjørnen. The bar's real name is Bjørn's Bodega, but I've never heard anyone call it anything other than Bjørnen. Postal workers get a discount at Bjørnen. A schnapps and a beer will take away the dryness in my throat, the smell of paper glue, and help me sleep in a couple of hours.

It's the end of the month and the bar is almost empty. One of the regulars is sitting in a corner, leaning over half a bread roll and a shot of Gammel Dansk bitters. He used to be a postal worker.

I buy a beer and flick through a tabloid newspaper. Roy Orbison is turned down to a low crackling on the speakers. Beer number two is lined up in front of me when Kasper walks through the door.

“You should've seen their faces,” he says. “You wouldn't believe how disappointed they were.” Kasper laughs and orders beer and schnapps for us. “You should've seen their faces.” He raises the shot glass to his lips; his hand is shaking.

I take out the letter from under my sweater.

“Open it,” he says.

There's no sender on the manila envelope. Inside it are four photocopied sheets. The paper is mottled, as though it has been water damaged; the text is smudged. I read the first couple of lines.

“
Richard the Third
,” I say.

“I didn't know you Turks could read.”

He takes a sip of his beer, lights a cigarette.

“You probably shouldn't touch those sheets for too long,” he says. “They've been dipped in LSD.”

Kasper puts them back in the envelope.

“You have them sent here from Amsterdam,” I say. “No sender, and to an address that doesn't exist. And so they go back to the post office. To the box for dead letters.”

“You've already worked that out,” he says. “Yes, the dead letter box, where I pick them up. Only this time something appears to have gone wrong.”

Kasper orders more drinks. While the bartender pours them, Kasper puts money in the jukebox.

“Stop by my place tomorrow,” he says, and drains his shot glass. “I have something for you.”

He writes down his address on a coaster.

When I wake up,
I can still feel the schnapps at the back of my head.

I drink a glass of water and eat an apple. Then I do Elsebeth's shopping.

Petra is standing in the kiosk. When she sees me she turns around and takes a packet of the brand of cigarettes I always buy. She asks if there's anything else.

I stand there a little too long. Then I shake my head and put the money on the counter.