Crumbs (10 page)

I woke up during one of their recitations.

‘He who sings is blind.'

‘Oh, so you like Stevie Wonder, too?' I joined the conversation.

They fell silent. As if I'd let out a loud fart at a funeral. They didn't even look at me. The poisonous snake poured hatred on me. Selim and Ibro walked through the door.
They sat down a few tables away. I got up, politely said goodbye, nodded to poet, and went to sit with Selim and Ibro.

They watched me with disgust for joining company of that sort.

Selim introduced me to Ibro. Ibro to me. We shook hands. His hand felt shapeless. Not a soft damp sponge, nor a contact with a person of character.

Selim ordered a round. I excused myself for a moment and went to piss.

When I sat down again they were drinking in silence. I wasn't in a hurry.

I asked Ibro, ‘When do you start work?'

‘Tomorrow,' he said.

I took the magazine from under my T-shirt and put it face down on the table. They fixed their gaze on a cigarette ad.

I emptied my glass and put it on the table. I took the magazine, pushed it to the middle, and turned it over.

Selim's jaw dropped. His hands reached forward by a whole ten centimetres before he stopped them. I opened the magazine. Slowly, with pleasure, I turned the pages. Looked at Selim's face. When I'd gone past Nastassja, I closed the magazine. The ad lay on the table. I moved my hands away. I lit a cigarette. I've always loved theatre. Ibro was looking at us. Selim was staring at the photo of a cigarette packet, his wrists over the table edge.

He was ripe for at least four crates.

I smoked half of the cigarette before he lifted his eyes and looked at me.

He asked, ‘How much?'

I looked at him with surprise and misunderstanding.

‘How much what? Nothing. It's yours.'

I shrugged my shoulders and opened my hands. I was asking myself how anybody could be such a bastard.

Had I told him a price, Selim and I would have immediately finished the deal. This way I'd done him a favour and I'd be able to drink half litre bottles from his gratitude for years.

Slowly he reached for the magazine. Leafed through it once more. Ibro was peering over his shoulder. Selim put the magazine under his T-shirt.

Remained seated.

Suddenly he came to and shouted, ‘Waitress! Another round!'

We got it. Not just one. One after another. Selim was euphoric. He was blabbing nonsense. He did nothing but drink and piss until closing time. Everything was beginning to get lost in a fog.

‘TIME TO GO!!!' shouted the waitress.

Leaning on each other, we stood at the foundry fence.

‘Where to?' asked Selim.

‘Let's go to the dormitory,' suggested Ibro. ‘I've got dice, we'll play dice.'

He pulled some poker dice out of his pocket and showed them to us. We agreed to play. We went to the shop to buy a case of beer and stuffed the bottles in grocery bags. We each carried a bag.

We slowly went to the dormitory. Walking wasn't very easy for any of us. A local bus came by and stopped at a stop two hundred metres ahead.

‘Let's take the bus,' Selim shouted and ran.

We followed. I was clumsy with the full bag. It kept hitting me on the knees. Selim was the first at the bus, which was already moving. He said something to the driver, who wasn't listening. He pressed the button to
close the doors. Selim grabbed the two closing halves and stopped them. I could see his muscles flexing under his T-shirt. He opened the door. Something in the mechanism made a noise. The driver started shouting. Selim whispered something back. The driver shut up and shrank in his seat. He didn't try to drive off. I reached the bus. I looked back and saw Ibro struggling about twenty metres behind me. A stream of water from a broken pipe at the foundry was running across the road. Ibro's running rhythm would have led him straight into the water. He adjusted his steps and jumped over. The bag pulled him down. He lost his balance. Stayed on his feet with great difficulty. I thought I could see something small falling.

‘Are you coming?' I shouted. Ibro was bent over looking for something on the ground.

‘Fucking hell, I lost the dice!' he shouted and went on rummaging around like a chicken in the weak light of the streetlights.

Through my drunken brain a flash of recognition. History is a circle, not of people, but of events which are repeated over and over. What once Caesar did was now repeated by Ibro.

‘Found them,' reported Ibro, out of breath. We jumped on the bus. Sat on the front seats. The driver drove off. A fresh breeze pleasantly ruffled our hair. I was sitting next to Selim, squashed against the side of the bus. His shoulders took up a seat and a half.

Selim lifted the beer and me through the window of the dormitory.

The room seemed completely different. Ibro had covered all the walls with pictures of naked women cut out from various magazines. I opened the window and pissed out. I didn't feel like sneaking to the toilet. Ibro and Selim
did the same. We sat on the floor and threw the dice. At first we wrote down the points. Soon gave up. We drank and stacked the empty bottles into a pyramid.

We stopped throwing dice. Ibro and I smoked. Selim was sitting on his bed, rocking, pissed out of his head.

‘We need music now,' said Ibro.

On all fours he managed to get to the cassette player on the table. He looked through the cassettes, found the right one, and put it into the player. He turned the volume as high as it would go. He couldn't find enough strength to crawl back to the middle of the room where we were. He stayed lying next to the table with his back leaning on the wall under the window singing the refrain loudly.

‘I'LL GIVE YOU MY HEART!!!!'

I was watching him. He shouted, ‘You know who's singing?'

I tried to be nice and sociable.

‘Christiaan Barnard?' I asked.

He probably didn't hear me. He said another name, which immediately escaped me.

‘You know, I saw him. In person. Can you imagine? I wasn't more than a metre away from him. He sang and I stood in the first row. I could've touched him if I'd reached out. He who is in all the papers. I love him more than any other singer because he sings anywhere. In every village, even if there are only three houses. He's the only one of those who are on TV that you can go and see with your own eyes.'

He's right. Those who parade on TV were rarely seen around here.

‘Can you hear his singing? How can you not love him? I know, this is our music, not yours. You're always singing something in foreign languages. But still, you have to
admit he's a wonderful singer.'

I nodded. I was just about to open my mouth to tell him that in the shit of everyday existence, everybody buys what suits him most in the huge and diverse market of dreams. According to our own wishes, tastes, and means. With the feeling of guilt brought on by upbringing. It doesn't matter whether you're one of those who buy their escape from the everyday with a
shoobe-doobe-doo
or one of those who, with a superiority complex (from the same source), go for the to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question trip. It's all just dreams. But I didn't say anything. A feeling that it would be fruitless and pointless, along with the general impotence of words, choked the sentence in my throat.

Selim took a last gulp from the bottle and hurled it towards the table. He hit the cassette player and knocked it to the floor. The cassette started dragging. The tape got wrapped around the driving mechanism and tore. The music was finished.

Ibro asked, ‘What's the matter, you don't like it?'

I admired his talent for observation.

Selim got up slowly, to his best ability.

‘Listen to me Ibro,' he said, ‘you've covered all the walls with your naked women –' he pointed with a wave of his hand to the
corpus delicti
‘– without asking me. All right. But we're roommates and half the walls are mine, half yours. Is that right?'

Ibro nodded.

‘I'll divide it in half now. And that's how it stays.'

He opened the wardrobe and started looking through the pockets on his working clothes. He pulled out a tape measure, went to the corner by the window, and said to me, ‘Hold it here, will you?'

I went over and held the start of the tape. We measured
the wall. It went slowly. Mainly because of the tape, which kept slipping through my fingers and winding back into the box. Finally he decided where the middle was. I held my finger on the point he'd shown me. He again went to look in his pockets. He came back with a screwdriver and put it on the bed. He took the wardrobe door off its hinges and leaned it against the wall. With the screwdriver, he drew a line along the edge of the door. Some cunts and tits were split in two. He took the door back but couldn't put it back on its hinges however hard he tried. He gave up and just leaned it against the wardrobe.

‘Ibro, now I'm going to take off everything from my half and give it to you. What you do on your half doesn't bother me. All right?'

‘All right,' said Ibro with candour.

‘Fair?'

‘Fair,' confirmed the one sitting on the floor. It seemed he really did think so.

I helped Selim to pull the photographs from his part of the wall. He put the pile on the table. I leaned on the door and watched him. Ibro's head was hanging lower and lower on his chest. He was already asleep.

Selim unlocked his drawer and took out both posters. He unfolded them. I helped him stick them on the wall. There was a drop of dried blood on Nastassja's face on the poster for
Tess
. Carefully he tore out the pages with Nastassja from
Playboy
and stopped to think.

‘Fuck the bastards,' he sighed with anger. ‘They do this deliberately.'

The bastards had put different pictures on both sides of each page. Two per sheet of paper. You couldn't stick one up without covering the other. I suggested an innovation. ‘Stick it on with tape along the right-hand edge only. That
way you'll be able to turn the page and see both pictures if you want.'

He did as I suggested.

‘What they wouldn't do to sell more. They make you buy at least two,' he added, joining me. We stood staring at the photographs from three metres away.

The pages were sticking out from the wall.

With a small piece of tape, he stuck the top left corners, too. He left enough room to the right of each picture to turn it that way and stick it down again.

It looked a lot better now.

We stood there admiring the photos. Selim was completely engrossed. My attention was drawn to a picture of Nastassja's face. It reminded me of Ingrid Bergman, when she whispers that ‘Play it…' A good scene. I adjusted my hat with my palm and moved my lips to shift the cigarette to the corner of my mouth.

Ibro was standing next to me, looking at me with surprise.

‘What's the matter? Are you in pain?'

He made me feel embarrassed. I quickly moved my hand away from the imaginary hat and stopped twisting my lips with the imaginary cigarette.

‘Give me a cigarette,' I said sharply.

We lit up. Selim was still gaping at the wall, motionless. Ibro joined him.

He didn't need long for the final verdict. He asked, ‘What's wrong with this one? Did she forget to put on her arse and tits before filming?'

He laughed. He liked the joke. But only him. He found himself caught between two murderous looks. His laughter stuck in his throat.

‘It's nothing, I was only joking,' he said and went to the
corner to mend the cassette. Selim went back to looking at Nastassja.

I drank another beer. The last one.

Ibro was asleep with the cassette player in his lap. I put the bottle on the top of the pyramid. It fell down. The sound of the rolling bottles knocking against each other accompanied me down the corridor.

I didn't feel like jumping through the window. The warden was asleep in his small room. Outside a warm spring breeze was blowing. The smell of sulphur was coming from the foundry.

I threw up leaning on the fence and stumbled home.

Tongues of flame shot up through the chimney.

 

 

 

4

I was in my blue work suit again. I climbed over the foundry fence, landed clumsily, and stopped to brush the dust off my trousers. Young bodies spilled out of the secondary school across the road. I lit up, leaned on the inside of the fence, and waited.

Long Legs came past. Our eyes met. I'd noticed her for the first time half a year ago but never got any further than looking. There'd never been a real opportunity. She was nearly as tall as me, with long hair falling down her back. A girl for canoodling with on the sandy beaches of the Seychelles, wherever that maybe.

I jumped, grabbed the top of the fence, and started climbing up the mesh.

‘Hey you, stop!' somebody shouted right behind my back.

The guard.

I let go and fell back on his territory and with a sad look said goodbye to Long Legs, who was disappearing in the crowd. I ran off. The guard behind me. To my misfortune, he was without an arm.

Old age had slowed him down. What he lacked for in speed he made up for in stubbornness.

I zigzagged between heaps of scrap metal. I stopped now and again to wait.

He always showed up from behind a bend. A crane moved above my head. I threw myself to the ground. The metal spiders legs were a metre above my head. The operator blew his horn. Lying down lost me all my advantage over the guard.

I ran into a huge building, past a container with bubbling, steaming, thick fluid. And then into the next hall alongside the railway lines.

He followed me.

I ran straight into the heat. As if I'd hit a wall. I could hardly distinguish the figures of workers in protective clothing standing around the open door to the furnace. On the wall opposite there was a clothes hanger with some protective clothing next to a lonely picture of a naked woman and the names of two football clubs.