Rus Like Everyone Else

by Bette Adriaanse

  Rus walked along the pictures and the empty squares to the bathroom, which was the second door to the left. Wanda’s bathroom was completely white, with a glass room that he could stand and shower in. There were sponges and bottles in pastel colors, and the floor was tiles and not a tub, like he had in his house. The water of the shower surrounded him.

  Rus opened every bottle, carefully soaping his entire body. His shoulders went down, and he thought of how Wanda had helped him with the papers and how she nodded when he put a coaster under his glass. She was there to help him, he thought, as he soaped his body, and she would be like a mother to him. His shoulders relaxed and the water was warm and it massaged his head.

  This is a dream, he thought, but like a dream it took a turn all of a sudden, because Wanda opened the door and came into the bathroom with him. One by one she took all of her clothes off, looking at Rus but not saying anything. She opened the shower door slowly. Her body was large and brown and round, and it came extremely close to him. Rus saw that there were white triangles where her bikini had been. Rus stared at the triangles.

  “Hi,” Wanda said in a soft, strange voice.

  “Hello,” Rus said. He took a step back in the shower, away from the body, against the wall.

  He wasn’t used to sharing the shower. Wanda’s body was a presence that unsettled him; he felt it was too, too close to him.

  “Don’t you want to get under the stream?” Wanda asked in the strange voice.

  Rus did not answer. He had decided it was best to close his eyes and listen to the water stream, like he did at home, just listen to the water stream over him and focus on the sound of the water, pretending he was floating in a river toward the sea.

  Rus tried this for a few minutes, but it wasn’t working. He opened his eyes again.

  Wanda had gotten out of the shower and was standing with her back to him in the bathroom, quickly wrapping a large towel around herself.

  When you deliver the post in a neighborhood, going to every house each day around the same time, like I do, you get to know a lot about people. When a person is suddenly home every day when you deliver the mail, for instance, watching television in a collared shirt and a loose tie, sitting straight up on the couch, you register this, and you register it too when, weeks later, this person is wearing slacks with the collared shirt and is lying on the couch while watching television, the curtains half closed. And you see the change in the type of mail you push through the slot in the door.

  When people get into debt, the postman always knows this, because debt collectors print their name on the outside of the envelope. When someone dies, we know it as well: first come the black-rimmed cards, and then the mail stops being addressed to Mr. and Mrs., but only says “Mrs. Blue,” for instance.

  When you’ve worked here as long as I have, and paid attention, you know a lot about everyone, you know their routines, their secrets, and, at some point, you become very close to them. You know more about them than anyone else, even though they don’t know you.

  Those binoculars you see pressed against the window over there, for instance, were ordered by Mr. Lucas two months ago. They were part of a “professional spy kit” he ordered from the Shopping Channel on the TV. He is sitting crouched behind the window on the floor with those binoculars, watching the white van that is parked in front of his door. He is not being very inconspicuous though, Mr. Lucas. When the glass of the binoculars catches the reflection of the streetlamp, it creates a lighthouse effect that we can see all the way from up here.

  Mr. Lucas does not realize this. Ever since he saw the white van park in front of his house he’s been in a panic, afraid that his past has returned to come between him and his day with the Queen. If you go really close to the window you can hear him, the dialogue he has with himself: “Get it together, Sam, control yourself, you’re imagining it. But how can I imagine something like this? It is there, I see it! Calm down now, deep breaths.”

  Behind the tinted windows of the van Ashraf is sleeping innocently, snoring lightly in the passenger seat, unaware of the panic he is causing.

  ASHRAF AND THE POLICE

  In Ashraf’s dream his brother was tapping on their bedroom window, saying in a strange voice: “It is illegal to sleep in a parking space in this area.” Ashraf opened his eyes. On the radio there was music and gray noise; it was louder than it was before he went to sleep. He looked out the window of the van. In a sleepy haze he saw a police officer looking back at him. “It is illegal to sleep in a parking space in this area,” he shouted through the window. Ashraf sat up in his seat and opened the window. Cold air came in from the street. It was dark.

  “A ticket could cost you over two hundred,” the police officer said.

  A policewoman came up behind him. “Passport and license, please.”

  Ashraf was silent for a bit. Then he said: “I usually have my license and papers, but I needed to leave them at work for copying. I start tomorrow as a package deliverer for the post.”

  The officer nodded. “A postman. Are postmen excluded from the law?”

  “No,” Ashraf replied.

  The officer looked at his notebook and looked up again. “You’re going to have to come with us,” he said.

  Ashraf said nothing. He looked up at the sky above the officer. There was a full moon. He wondered if he should plead with the officer.

  “Hello,” the officer said, tapping on his cheek. “Are you listening?”

  “Hello,” Ashraf said. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Ah,” the officer said, “so you are not deaf.”

  “I heard you in the first place, didn’t I?” Ashraf zipped his sleeping bag open and got out of the car. It was cold. He pulled the sweater from the car door and pulled it over his head. The female police officer took his keys, while the policeman walked around the van and shone a flashlight on the license plate. Ashraf wondered what time it was and how much sleep he’d had. There were some birds already singing, but aside from that it was quiet in the street. The female police officer handed his keys to the policeman. “He will drive your van to the station,” she said. “You’ll come with me.”

  “I have to be at work at eight,” he said. He hoped they would take him to the nearest police station. The female officer walked him to the police car. Together they drove through the dark streets. Ashraf closed his eyes.

  “You’ll probably have to stay in for a few hours, until we get the paperwork done. Then you can come back to show your license and registration and take your van with you. You will get a fine for sleeping in a restricted area, but I’ll try to get them to give you a break for your license.”

  Ashraf was silent. He heard the friendly tone of the police officer and knew he should say something, he should say thank you, but he really had nothing to thank her for. “Thanks,” he mumbled.

  The police lady looked at him. “Well,” she said, “just remember to bring your license with you next time. It is obligatory for everyone, including you.”

  “Yes,” Ashraf said.

  “It is just a rule and rules are made for certain reasons. You never know if people are who they say they are. You could be an illegal immigrant. That van could be stolen. The only thing you can rely on these days are papers.”

  Ashraf sank lower in the backseat. He tried not to listen to what she was saying, he tried not to think about it. He regretted thanking her.

  “And imagine if all the tourists came here and slept in their cars in the streets,” she continued. “How disorderly. Imagine stepping out your front door and seeing tourists sleeping in their cars all over the street, making their food on gas cookers, not paying their parking money. There would be no parking spaces left, the hotels would be in trouble, and the order would disappear completely. We have to have rules like this, you see?”

  Ashraf squeezed his hands. He felt blood rushing to his face, but he said nothing, clenched his teeth together, and turned as far away as possible. The car was silent. After a while, t
he policewoman parked the car. She was not nice anymore, because he hadn’t answered and had turned away. He tried to open the door but it was locked.

  “I am not going to run away,” Ashraf said. His voice was hoarse. “You can just open it.”

  The police officer did not reply. She walked around the car and asked for assistance in her walkie-talkie. He kept quiet as they walked him into the station holding both his arms.

  THE BOSS’S SON

  “Gardener, gardener,” the Queen shouted through the window. “You need to keep me company, gardener. I need to talk to you.”

  The boss’s son walked up the stairs to her tower chamber. The Queen’s eyes were red rimmed when he came up to the room, and she was staring at the framed photos on the wall of when she gave her memorial speech.

  “What do you see when you look at me?” she said as she turned around toward him. “What do you see exactly?”

  “I see the Queen,” the boss’s son said, his face turning red. “She is very beautiful. A bit sad, but she still looks very beautiful when she is sad. Even the red spots on her cheeks are so... they are—”

  He stammered and bent his head. The Queen covered her face with her hands.

  “Nobody understands.” She started crying. “I am all alone.”

  The boss’s son started walking backward toward the door, assuming she’d want to be alone, but the Queen pointed at the chair by the door to indicate that he should stay. Quietly he sat there while she cried.

  IN THE CELL

  Ashraf was lying on his back on a bed in the police cell, thinking. Someone had written MR. LI IS IN EAST on the wall. He pictured a Chinese mafia person walking around on Canal Street. He hoped that his van was all right, that the policeman had not driven it too roughly. It was not his first time in a cell. There was the time when he was little, and the time when he was drinking with Youssef and they’d gotten into a fight, and the police came and put both of them away.

  He looked at the empty ceiling of the cell. He had once surveyed a woman for City Statistics who said she never felt alone because God was always with her. She said God talked to her sometimes, saying, “Today you should take it easy, Annie,” or “Ask your husband to bring you to work.” When she was robbed in the streets ten years before, God had given her a message not to go out alone, but she hadn’t listened. Now she always listened and nothing bad had happened for ten years. It sounded very pleasant, but Ashraf did not go to the church meeting she had invited him to. He did not go to the mosque often either. In fact, he never went outside of holidays anymore. When he was young one of his uncles had taken him aside and pointed at the sky. He said, “There is nothing up there.”

  It had turned out not to be true. There was a lot up there, a lot more than there was down here. There was the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the sun and the stars. Ashraf wrote the number on the wall of the cell. Ten trillion times ninety-three billion kilometers. The diameter of the observable universe. Ashraf smiled. The idea of infinity, of endless possibilities, gave him comfort, like God did for Annie.

  If there really is infinite expansion, then everything you could possibly think of will someday be true somewhere, Ashraf thought. Everything you believe in will exist somewhere. There could be another Ashraf somewhere staring at a ceiling in a cell with the same thoughts. Ashraf pictured his mirror image in a cell in the universe. In his mind he reached out his hand to him, and his belly swung as he let the images of himself and Ashraf number two overlap for a second, and he felt number two’s hand holding his.

  THE MORNING AFTER

  When Rus woke up, he did not see the hospital, like the day before, nor the bridge, like the day before that, nor his house, like all the days before that, but a woman. The woman was Wanda, of course. He immediately felt wide-awake, although it was still dark outside.

  Rus sat up in the bed. His pillowcase had a drawing of a rose on it, and letters that read SWEET DREAMS, WELTERUSTEN, and BONNE NUIT.

  Rus switched on the light on the nightstand and looked at Wanda. She was lying in the bed next to his, sleeping silently. The sheets followed the shape of her body. Her body seemed harmless to him now, not like when she came into the shower, but a bit like the mountains Modu described when he talked about the country he came from, where there was nature as far as you could see. The land of milk and honey.

  Rus looked at Wanda. He would like some tea with milk and honey. His mother always used to make that for him when he got wet in the rain. Now he thought about his mother, and the memories of the empty debit card, Francisco, and the debt collectors tumbled into his head straight behind it, the sign they put on his door saying IMPENDING AUCTION.

  “Wanda?” he said in her ear softly. “Wake up.”

  Yesterday, after the shower, when she was drinking more of the wine and came into the room where he slept, she told him she had moved too fast when she went into the shower, and Rus nodded, although he did not think she was fast, she had been very slow in the way she took her clothes off and all that, but he did not want to think about that again. There was a long story about a man who had left her, despite what he promised, and although Rus fell in and out of sleep while she talked, he understood why she was sad. “I have been left too,” he had said half asleep. “First I was left by my mother and Modu, and then by Francisco. Francisco told me he was my friend, but he left me. Now he is in Russia with his uncle. He said they are always looking for people to work with the submarines,” Rus mumbled to Wanda, who had fallen asleep in the bed next to his. “He said, ‘We will go together, Rus, you and me.’ But then he took my clothes and the money and he left me behind on the bridge.” Mumbling like this, Rus had slowly fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed of Francisco in the submarine in Russia with his uncle and other men who did not fit in. They all had dark curls and dark eyebrows like Francisco, and Rus dreamed they were drinking and singing in their underwater home, steering the submarine from one harbor to another, waiting for him.

  Now it was early in the morning and Rus was awake again in this strange room. In the distance a police siren sounded. It was the same kind he heard when he was at home. Rus pinched Wanda’s shoulder. She opened her eyes. “Can we go to my house? Can you drive me to my house?”

  Wanda’s eyes were not soft when she looked at him, but hard, like they were in the tax office when he first came in. “We go at nine,” she said. “The alarm will notify you.” Then she went to sleep again.

  Rus pulled the blanket up to his chin and looked at the ceiling. He had no money for the bus, and he did not want to make Wanda mad. Lying very quiet he watched the first rays of sunlight enter the room, light up the tiny hairs on Wanda’s earlobe, then creep farther to light up the hairs on her upper lip and her chin. Quiet and immobile, he stayed under the sheets, not breathing too loud, waiting until he would hear an alarm go off.

  ONLY THE SUN COMES UP FOR FREE

  The secretary walked into the office. She felt strange as she sat down. She wondered if things would be different today, now that she’d met everyone at the party, now that she might have fallen in love. She took the new diary out of her purse and placed it open next to her computer. The people in the hallway walked by hastily without looking in.

  How about that party? the secretary practiced in her mind. Me, for one, I slept with the lawyer. Yes, the food was very nice—

  “Secretary.” The manager interrupted her thoughts from his office. “Secretary!”

  The secretary got up from her desk and went into the manager’s office. The manager was eating chocolates at his desk.

  “Secretary,” the manager said, “you are a very nice person.”

  He offered her the bonbons. “But,” he continued, “you are, in fact, too nice a person. That is why I will tell you a secret, which will change your position in the office.” He leaned forward toward her and pointed a laser pen at her chest. “The e-mails from pharmaceutical companies who offer medicines do not need to be replied to.”


  “Oh,” the secretary said.

  “It will save you time,” the manager said.

  “Yes,” the secretary said. “Thank you.”

  “You will have much more time,” the manager said, “which reminds me that I need my dry cleaning picked up. Dearest secretary.”

  “All right,” the secretary said. She got up from the chair.

  “And, secretary,” the manager said as she was opening the door, “you also don’t have to send e-mails around asking everyone if they need that kind of medicine. It comes across as strange.” He pointed the laser at her forehead. “People think you’re strange.”

  When the secretary sat down again she deleted the e-mail she was writing about sleeping aids and called Sammy at the Wash-o-Matic to say that she would pick up the manager’s laundry at eight. When the lawyer walked past her office he did not greet her, but he did put a file on her desk.

  “Twenty-five thousand, no less,” he said in his phone when he walked away. “Only the sun comes up for free.”

  The file came from the Company Guidelines and it was about professional conduct and interoffice relationships. The lawyer had circled “personal relationships of any kind should not be visible to fellow employees.” Below it the lawyer had written “Copy room in five minutes.”

  The secretary opened her diary. “Copy room,” she wrote in it. “Appointment.” She circled the word “appointment.” The sun shone bright through the windows of the glass hallway and reflected patterns on the paper of the diary. It reminded her of when she went to the pool with her parents and the sun shone in the water. She remembered how blue the sky was and how green the grass. Even when it rained there were colors everywhere.