Rus Like Everyone Else (7 page)

Time jolted forward again, and the next moment Rus was pulled up from the wall by Francisco, who said Rus had to take off his clothes, because he'd arranged something for him.

“Why?” Rus almost fell over as he pulled the zipper of his tracksuit. “What?”

“We've just bought his suit,” Francisco said, pointing at the cleaner, “because it will help your case at the tax office. They don't like tracksuits at the City Department. Lean on me.”

Leaning on Francisco with one arm, Rus stripped to his underwear in the brightly lit shop. For some reason it was hard to keep his head up, and he smiled as he looked down at Francisco helping him into the brown trousers and buttoning the brown jacket over his vest. The cleaner took Francisco's clothes, because otherwise he'd be naked of course, Francisco explained, and Francisco took Rus's velvet tracksuit, which was left to him by Modu when they disappeared.

“Thank you”—Rus nodded at Francisco and the cleaner as they helped him out of the shop—“thank you for everything.”

“We have to hurry a bit, Rus,” Francisco said, pushing Rus around the corner and pulling him along as they ran down the alley away from the shop. Then Rus got dizzy again, and Francisco told him to sit down for a bit.

Rus sat down and closed his eyes, and he had a very strange dream in which Francisco told him he had to leave for a bit because the plans had changed and that they would see each other in Russia by the submarines. He dreamed that Francisco folded the fur coat around him tightly, and he dreamed that he was then left alone.

Sometimes I go for a walk around the neighborhood at night. I walk along the canal, through Low Street, and back again. These streets are called area 1958 in official post terms. It is my area, where I deliver the mail every day, and I like to walk around here at night to check on everyone. Tonight you'll walk with me, across the market square that is now empty aside from the trash on the corners, through Low Street, and down Canal Street, across from our home. If we stop here, on the corner of Canal and Low Streets, you can see our own window lit up on the seventh floor of our building, across the canal. Two floors below ours you see another light burning, over there, where the curtains are open. That is my post boss's home.

Around this hour the silhouette of my post boss often appears behind his bedroom window, his potbelly protruding as he paces up and down. There, do you see him? He has sleeping problems, my boss, because he worries about his son. Now and then he sits down by his sleeping wife and puts his hand on her throat. When he feels the air going in and out of her body he calms down for a moment. Then he gets up and starts walking again.

Here, at Mrs. Blue's house, right above us, the curtains are still open as well. You can see the flickering light of her television color her ceiling. Mrs. Blue's daily rhythm is completely disturbed now that her show is gone; she went to bed very early today, but she got up again to see if her show had come back. She's sleeping on the couch in her dressing gown now, her chin on her chest.

The windows of the houses on Low Street, to the right of us, are all dark, but if you look closely at the edges of Mr. Lucas's blinds, you can see that his light is still on. He's been ecstatic all day, smiling until his jaws hurt. But as the sun went down his daydreams got darker too, taken over by worries about his day with the Queen going wrong. He is sitting in the bathroom now, looking at his face in the mirror. He hasn't looked in the mirror for a while, Mr. Lucas, and he hasn't been out for a while either, not since the supermarket started delivering at least, some months ago. “This time,” he promises
his reflection in the mirror, “I am not going to ruin it, I am going to keep my mind under control.”

Let us leave Mr. Lucas there, muttering to the mirror, running his hands over his cheeks, and walk on to the bridge. We have one last person to check on. He's still awake, this person, and heading toward us. You see his dark shape over there, stumbling from left to right, tripping over the bench on the bridge? It is Rus, of course. He's looking for Francisco and mumbles his name as he tries to get up from the street. He can't get up, so he decides to stay down on the pavement, immediately sinking away again into a dreamless sleep.

Poor Rus, he's never had vodka before. He's even lost one of his shoes; it is lying a little farther down the road, over there. We'll give him his shoe back and return to the glass apartment building, to our apartment on the seventh floor. You'll open the door that says
LUCY
and together we'll wait for the sunrise by our window. You'll fold your hands around my shoulders and I'll glance up at you now and then, at your concentrated frown.

THE WAKING HOUR

Rus woke up because water was streaming down his back. “Woah,” he muttered. “Wuhuh?” He blinked and looked about him. He was outside. It was night. He was lying on the bench on the bridge in the night and the rain poured dark and heavy from the sky onto him. “Whaz? Whu?” Rus stammered. He had a stinging pain in his shoulder and a headache. He looked down at his body. His hands were cut and shaking; his stomach was going up and down with his quick, short breaths; his fur coat was soaking wet and the clothes he wore underneath stuck to his body, and those clothes were not his own. One of his shoes was strangely tied to his arm by the shoelaces.

Rus sat up. He felt nauseated and cold. He remembered falling over and he remembered Francisco's face and how he had gone with his tracksuit. And the house keys. And all the money. All the money.

Rus swallowed. The only thing he had left was the letter that he had somehow kept with him throughout the night. It was sticking out of the chest pocket of the oversized brown suit he had on. The rain made streams inside the suit, running down his spine and down his arms. The Russian song Francisco had taught him played on repeat in his head:

        
Da! Da! Da! Kak dila em pektopah.

        
Trust ya njet, ya njet pasha. Njet ya. Wie da?

        
Tri werst dobri Katya.

It was probably not even Russian, Rus thought, and he placed his head in his hands as if he was going to cry. Considering the situation, he expected the sobbing and the hyperventilating to start any minute now, but they didn't come. It was very strange.

I'm alone and abandoned, Rus thought, trying to lure the tears. I've lost my only friend—I've lost everything! And all I have is some brown suit that is too big for me.

He smiled, accidentally.

It's raining and I can't get into my house, he continued persistently. It will be hours until the sun comes up. I have to pay so much money. I've probably already got pneumonia.

Rus smiled again. It was unstoppable, the smiling. Rus did not know why he was smiling. He hardly ever smiled, and it was weird that it should start now, now that he was so miserable (now that I might even die, Rus thought dramatically), but it did start. His face was pulled into a strange kind of grin.

There was nothing to be done, and Rus laid his head back and smiled at the rain pouring on his face from the gray-yellow clouds that traveled below the moon in the sky.

When his smiling was over the rain was over too. Rus stayed in the same position, his arms hanging down by the sides of his body, his mouth still half open. He looked up at the glass apartment building on the other side of the canal, where all the windows were dark except one. There was a girl with a blond ponytail sitting behind that window, and Rus could make out a silhouette of another person standing beside her. They waved at him.

Rus raised his hand and waved back. He had a sudden sense that things would get better now, for a while at least, and he pulled the wet letter from his pocket and started walking in the direction of the sender.

THE SECRETARY AT THE LAWYER'S HOUSE

The secretary woke up in the lawyer's house. She was lying under a fan in his bed. The fan was spinning. The lawyer was not in the bed, but he would probably be back in a minute. The secretary looked up at the fan. She tried to focus on one blade, following it around with her eyes, but each time it became a blurry circle. She slowed the fan down with the remote that was lying on the nightstand. There were a lot of other remotes on the nightstand as well, and they all had printed labels on them:
DVD, LIGHT, TV, BED, LUXAFLEX, STEREO
, and
CAMERA
. The fan made a buzzing sound as it slowed down. It wasn't attached to the ceiling properly; not only did the blades move, but the entire thing wobbled.

“If that thing ever falls down,” the lawyer had said the night before, “I can sue them for millions.” He pointed at the fan while he said that; he pointed at it with his finger as if he hoped to speed up the process, loosen the screws, and make the whole thing fall down
on them with its blades spinning, causing all kinds of expensive personal injuries. The lawyer knew a lot about personal injuries. He was a personal injury lawyer.

“For seventeen million, you can cut off both my hands. I mean it, cut them right off.” He held his arms up in the air to illustrate. “Left arm, eight million; right arm, twenty. Legs, eighty million in total. You get the most expensive mobile scooter, a luxurious bungalow in a warm country somewhere, staff that makes you cocktails, and a pretty young thing to put you in the shower. Nothing's lost.

“People don't know how much they can get for damages,” he said. “I had a guy in my office the other day who'd lost his thumb in a machine. He wanted to see if the company would pay for his hospital bill. His hospital bill! Can you believe it?”

The lawyer had made sure he got an extra compensation payment. Not that much, because he was still representing the company of course, and he was certainly not officially obliged to do this, but he had still done it. “The human factor,” the lawyer said while he smiled at her. “It's still a factor.”

Later he'd squeezed her breasts together and said, “Twenty thousand.” They had chatted and joked almost all night like that. It was a fun night, the secretary decided, the kind of night you hoped for when you met someone. Didn't they say that opposites attract?

The secretary took the remote that said bed and pushed the button. The mattress lifted at her feet. She let it go down again and thought about her own apartment. If you wanted something to move in her apartment you had to push or pull it yourself. Maybe he wanted to shower together. She'd been wanting to do that for some time now, to shower with somebody. But he was probably in the kitchen now, making them breakfast.

She turned up the speed of the fan again and imagined she was in a helicopter. Underneath her rivers flowed, cars drove in long lines between geometric fields, and in the streets people were walking to the supermarket, holding up umbrellas to the rain. A flight attendant handed out shrimp cocktails as they passed over clouds so white they hurt the eyes. Suddenly, the pilot appeared in the cabin, his arms spread out wide with terror! “We are going down!” The people in the helicopter were immediately swept from one side to the other, and were kicking and pushing one another.

The lawyer grabbed the secretary and pulled her to the side. “We're going down,” he said, “and there's only one parachute.” He bound the parachute tightly around her waist and he looked at her longingly from the burning helicopter as she floated down to safety.

The secretary smiled. “Yes, that is how it will be. And I will be by his hospital bed every night, wearing all black, like some dream vision.”

Somewhere a telephone rang. The lawyer was standing in the room, looking at her strangely, holding his ringing mobile in his hand. He had very little imagination, the lawyer—he'd told her that the night before. She watched him walk away in his shirt and boxer shorts, water dripping from his hair onto his neck. Maybe she should have asked him about showering together. She got up out of bed and looked through the doorway into the living room. The living room was white with a wooden floor. There was a glass table, a white couch, and a flat-screen television. She hadn't seen the living room last night; they'd gone straight to the bed.

The lawyer was standing by the window, pulling up his pants with one hand. With the other he held the phone. “All right,” he said. “The usual. And you?”

He leaned on the couch while he put his socks on. He had his tie on too.

The secretary started looking for her clothes. The lawyer came into the bedroom.

“Do you want a cup of tea or something?”

“I can't find my shoe,” the secretary said.

The lawyer looked under the bed and tossed her sandal on the blankets.

“Do you know where the bus stop is?”

ASHRAF'S ENTERPRISE