Rus Like Everyone Else

by Bette Adriaanse

The secretary stood up and walked to the copy room. The lawyer came in after five minutes. He lifted up her skirt and put her on the copying machine. With one hand he grabbed her, with the other he pressed the copy button.

  “I saw this in a movie,” he said in her ear.

  A few minutes later the secretary climbed down from the copy machine.

  She looked at the copies. Her thighs looked like big dark gray rectangles sitting on top of a light gray hand.

  “When I was eleven,” she said, “I would go to the pool and lie on my back in the grass to look and listen. It seemed like all the colors went straight into my eyes, all the sounds poured into my ears and my head and down into my body. It was as if everything said my name. ‘Laura. Laura.’ As if I were drinking up every second. Did you ever have that?”

  “I had marbles,” the lawyer said while he collected the copies and put them in a filing folder. “I had the most marbles in the neighborhood. Even candy pearls. My father bought them in America.”

  The secretary rolled down her skirt.

  “Candy pearls were very rare,” the lawyer said as he closed the door behind him.

  The secretary looked around the copy room. She tried to let the colors go into her eyes, but the colors remained attached to their objects. There was just the lamp on the ceiling and the cardboard boxes. In the hallway people were laughing. The secretary rubbed her forehead. She looked at the people who walked through the glass hallway and she suddenly felt very tired. “Hello,” she practiced. “Pleased to meet you. Got any vacation plans?”

  TOO LATE

  Ashraf ran down the street to the Royal Mail Centre. They had let him out just before eight o’clock, but he would not get his van back until he showed his license. Although he ran most of the way, he was still half an hour late. At the center his boss was sitting on a camping chair in the parking lot, smoking a cigar. He was leaning forward, resting his upper body on his arms. Behind him a fat boy was carrying boxes to his van. Ashraf brushed the sweat off his forehead when he quickly walked up to his boss.

  “My van is at the police station because I did not have my license,” he said. “That is also why I’m late. But I still have enough time to do both areas. If you give me my license I can get my van and start straightaway.”

  “I gave the areas to Richie,” the post boss said. He blew out the smoke of his cigar with an agonized expression on his face. “You weren’t around so Richie here is going to take both of the areas. You can go with him. You need to train for three weeks anyway.” He nodded at the boy. “Richie is Frank’s nephew. Frank is the district boss over here.”

  “Richie,” the boy said. He extended his hand and grinned. “Guess who I’m named after.” Ashraf did not shake his hand and did not guess. He looked at the boss.

  “You were going to give them to me,” he said. “You said so.”

  “People say all kinds of things,” the boss said, sighing. “You should learn that. It’s a life lesson.” He took the transport forms from Richie and leafed through them. Ashraf took a deep breath. He tried to think clearly, but he just felt angry. The boss pressed the paper on his knee and signed it. Richie was poking a snail on the ground with a stick; it retreated into its shell.

  The post boss looked up at Ashraf. “I know you are not happy, but think of my position. Reorganizations after thirty years of working with the same solid system. Today I have to tell someone who has worked here for twenty-five years we are going to fire him. I was with this man when his wife died, I was at the funeral.”

  His eyes shone in the sunlight. “And did I tell you my son is in the hospital?”

  Ashraf nodded. Richie was hammering onto the shell of the snail with the stick. The sound was very loud; it was almost as if it were happening inside Ashraf’s ears.

  “I do not need to be a trainee first,” Ashraf said. “I have experience.”

  “They tried to wake him today by putting electrodes in his brain,” the boss said. “He did not wake up. Of course he didn’t. I could have told them that.”

  The boss looked up at Ashraf.

  “He was a chauffeur. He had a nice car, a regular employer. Then he swells up like a balloon. Two hundred and fifteen kilograms. ‘Why, Freddy,’ I asked him, ‘why did you eat so much? Why do you keep putting food in your mouth?’ But he never answered—it was as if he didn’t care. He was not even a cook or something, he was just a chauffeur. Until he could not get in his car anymore. ‘Don’t you care that you don’t fit in your own car anymore?’ I asked him. ‘What on earth goes on in your head?’ And you know what he said? He said: ‘Obviously, it is a crying shame.’ With a stone-cold face. Like he was some kind of TV presenter. ‘Obviously, it is a crying shame’! Who says that kind of thing? And his eyes were so light and strange, it was like he really believed it.”

  The post boss bent forward and leaned on his arms again. He put out the cigar stub with his foot and sighed deeply. Ashraf felt a lump in his throat and his blood was racing. He tried to determine what he should do, but his thoughts did not want to start. The shell of the snail was making a breaking sound.

  “Yesterday there were flowers by his bed,” his boss said. “‘I am ill when you are ill,’ the card said. ‘Lots of love from Mr. Wheelbarrow.’” The boss shook his head. “Mr. Wheelbarrow was his employer. My son used to drive him to the television studios every day, and to lunch and a thousand other engagements. But such a card. Is that normal? I just don’t know anymore.”

  Ashraf did not listen to the post boss. He thought of the areas and his plan. “It is not fair,” he said with a choked-up voice. “You promised me those areas, I was counting on them.” He knew he sounded like a child, but it really wasn’t fair to him.

  “Well,” the boss said, “all right. When you are done training, you can start with one area. 1985 will be free by Friday.” Then he got up from the chair and walked toward the Royal Mail Centre. “Four days training, with Richie there.”

  A girl with a blond ponytail drove past Ashraf and Richie toward the center. She waved at them.

  “She likes me,” Richie said. Ashraf did not answer. He took the stick from Richie and threw it away. They both looked down as Ashraf picked up the snail and put it in the bushes. Then they silently loaded the boxes into Richie’s red van.

  MR. WHEELBARROW

  Mr. Wheelbarrow sat by his desk, staring at his computer. The screen was blank. He couldn’t write anymore, not while Freddy was in the hospital, he couldn’t. He could not start his day when he did not see those large, soft hands gliding over the leather of the steering wheel. The moment Freddy pulled up in his driveway was what he looked forward to most in the morning; it was for him that he ironed his linen suit and put on a tiny bit of cologne behind his left ear—because it was close to Freddy’s nose when he opened the car door for him.

  Mr. Wheelbarrow stared at the screen. His head was filled with nothing but mist, a thick white mist, clouding all his thoughts, ideas, and memories.

  GRACE IN THE STORY

  The garden gate slammed closed behind Grace. With the gun still feeling warm in her hand, she ran out onto her street. The main road was quiet, quieter than she ever remembered it to be. There was a strange, thick mist hanging above the ground, and she couldn’t see if it was morning, evening, or night—no moon, no sun, no stars.

  There was something chilly and empty in her body, as if she had just stepped out of a warm bath into the cold air.

  EVERYTHING WAS GONE

  “I had a carpet,” Rus said. “And a bed. And a tap that dripped.”

  He stepped over the threshold of his empty apartment. His footsteps echoed a bit.

  Wanda placed her hand on Rus’s shoulder.

  “Well...” she said, and “look at it this way,” but Rus didn’t listen. He walked around the empty apartment, over the large white square on the floor where his kitchen used to be, over the empty space by the window where his bed always stood.

  “Everything is gone,” he said.
“Not everything,” Wanda said. She pointed at the bottle of lemonade in the corner. “The law does not allow them to take food. To protect people.”

  Rus sat down by the window. His eyes fell on a bright white envelope, lying in the corner of the apartment on the floor. “More bad news,” he moaned, and he was right, of course. The letter came from the Department of City Planning, who had come very early that morning to Rus’s door.

  Dear Mr. Rus,

  Very early this morning a representative of the City Planning Department came to your door. The apartment inspection carried out by this representative has revealed that, first of all, there is no bed in this apartment and, secondly, no television. These are both indications that this house is no longer inhabited (see Book 3, Signs of Habitation, Article 2).

  Not that it would be habitable anyway, by normal standards at least (see Book 10, Normal Standards, Article 4), with its poor structure and ridiculous walls. Just look at how those plywood walls are constructed, the chinks in between them, the crooked nails that stick out of the wood. Not to mention the leak stains all over the ceiling, the color it’s all painted, that ill-fitting door.

  Rus looked at the wallboards and the chinks in between them. He had looked at them every day for as long as he could remember; he knew their shape and he knew the way the draft coming in through the chinks would stroke his knees when he stepped out of bed in the mornings. He used to watch the water stains on the wall from his bed in the afternoon, and to him they looked like a map of a light brown world.

  Obviously, the rules of aesthetics have never seeped into the brain of the person who once lived here, the person who wrote “395 bananas” and drew his own silhouette on the wall. To make a long story short, the house will soon be demolished. Not only because it is abandoned and illegal but also because its shape and color do not correspond with the shapes and colors that we like in this area, which are more serious and straight. Now that the house is abandoned, there is nothing to prevent us from wiping this stain from the skyline, and soon the long arm of the law will come and do just that. Kind regards.

  Rus dropped the letter on the floor of the apartment. He did not speak or look up at Wanda, who took his hand and said, “Shush shush shush,” in his ear.

  “Come,” she said after a minute, as she took his arm and led him to the door.

  IT WAS NOT REALLY A HOUSE

  “It was not really a house anyway, was it,” Wanda said as they sat in her car on Low Street, looking out at the canal and the tall glass building across it.

  Rus did not reply. The words did not come.

  “You are better off without it, in my opinion,” she said. “And you can stay at my place, if you want. You probably want that, don’t you?”

  Rus was quiet. There were no words in his head. He heard Wanda, but he did not feel like he could respond.

  “That was my house,” he said finally. “It was mine.”

  “To be fair,” Wanda said, “it was not your house. It was an illegal construction that your mother decided to inhabit. If everyone just started inhabiting whatever place they felt like, imagine what the city would be like.”

  They sat silently in the car. On the pavement an old lady in a fur hat passed them by, pushing a rolling walker. She wasn’t walking as fast as all the other people, and she pulled her upper body to the right every time she had to lift her left leg, swaying from side to side as she made her way down the street.

  “Bad things are going to happen to everyone,” Wanda said. “The government is not there to be nice to you. Even your friends and the person you are in love with will choose themselves if they want to. The only thing you can do is build as much security for yourself as possible. You get all your papers sorted, you get insurance and a house where things are in the places where they should be, you have a schedule and a stable job and savings for when the roof leaks, and a partner who will not leave you for your best friend. Then you have regularities and stabilities, and they become like a shield, a shield lying around you.”

  Wanda’s eyes glowed as she talked about the shield.

  “If you listen to me, Rus, and do as I tell you, your life will be a line going up. I will get you a job interview, and you can stay in my house and we will have dinner together and go to a restaurant every Thursday and I will take care of all the letters that come in. All you have to do is cooperate.”

  She looked up.

  “What do you think about that, Rus?”

  “I don’t know,” Rus said. He’d never been to a restaurant; he’d never seen a reason to go anywhere other than the Starbucks. “Francisco said that people like him and me...”

  “Francisco disappeared. Stole your money and disappeared,” Wanda said sharply. “Think about it.”

  MR. LUCAS HAS A PLAN

  “Test, test,” Mr. Lucas said in the tape recorder. He had replaced the old leaking batteries with new ones and put a new tape in it. Mr. Lucas cleared his throat. “Test, test,” he tested again.

  “Test, test,” the machine spoke back.

  Mr. Lucas smiled delightedly. The recorder made his voice sound a bit weaker than it really was but, more important, it worked. He placed the recorder carefully on the table by the couch and went to the book chest, purposely keeping his back to the window at all times. He had resolved not to look out of it anymore.

  Mr. Lucas had a plan. It was a brilliant plan, if he could say so himself, brilliant. He’d come up with the plan halfway through the night, while he was looking out the window, hidden behind the back of his chair. He told himself it was all in his mind, and that if only he could control his mind it would go away. And that was when the plan dawned on him. If he could not control his mind from the inside out, then he would try to control it from the outside in.

  Mr. Lucas looked through his book chest and the piles of books that he had thrown on the floor when he was searching for the suit. He pulled The Guide to Psychotherapy out from the pile and opened it to page eighty-three, self-hypnosis.

  RUS THE BUSINESSMAN

  Rus was standing outside a store in the shopping district. Wanda told him to wait outside, to calm down and to think about what she had asked of him, but Rus couldn’t think. In his head there was a silence. There were only a few images floating in his mind: his duvet, his curtains, his calculator. He was not even talking to himself at that moment, which was very unusual for him, but also understandable, because he had lost everything he had in a matter of days, everything except for the fur coat he had on.

  Wanda was in the shop buying shaving cream and a tie. She had a job interview arranged for him. They had gone to the shopping district in the city center, a street where Rus had been often before during the long walks he used to make. Back then he only noticed things like the clouds and the seagulls, the rain making circles in the puddles, the sound of an empty can rolling down the road. Now, for the first time, he noticed the buildings, the brands written on them, the clothes in the shops, and all the people passing down the street.

  For the first time in his life Rus felt like he had something to do with all these things, because he had nowhere to hide anymore.

  Slowly, Rus started walking down the street, looking at the shops and what they sold. Across the street from Rus there were giant photos attached to a building, pictures of women with shiny faces and wet bodies, men in their underwear with sweat on their foreheads. Rus stopped below a large photo of a bare-chested man looking into the distance with a briefcase and a woman lying at his feet. The man looked very relaxed, and he had his foot on the belly of the woman to make sure she could never go away.

  Rus could not take his eyes off the man for some reason; there was something about him that made Rus feel like he was connected to him. Under the picture it read, WHAT’S IT GONNA BE? and it was as if this question was aimed directly at him.

  “What’s it gonna be?” Rus whispered. “What is it gonna be?” Slowly, very slowly, an idea about what it was going to be came into his mind.

&
nbsp; Maybe I have lost my house, he thought, and the space in my head. But I have new things. I am a person now, with a number and a suit. Yes, I have a suit, and a résumé, and Wanda, and in that way, I am very similar to, for instance, that man on the board. When he thought this, Rus felt himself growing a little taller, and he held his arms away from his sides a bit to look broad. Then he frowned like the man in the photo as he looked at the shop windows across the street.

  Reflected in the shop windows across the street was a strange-looking man in a fur coat looking back at Rus, holding his arms a little away from his sides to look broad.

  Startled, Rus lowered his arms and stepped toward his reflection. Was this him? His face did not look strong at all; he had dark circles under his eyes and his cheeks looked very thin. The brown trousers of his suit were much wider than the trousers of the men in the photos and too long—they didn’t end right where the shoe started, but a bit farther, causing the extra fabric lying around on his shoes. Even the buttons on the jacket were strange, too big and too many, not to mention his shoes. The yellow plastic bag that contained his résumé hung sadly from his arm.

  Rus felt himself getting warm as he thought about how he used to walk around East shamelessly, pushing people aside on the market square, and the one time he cut in line in the Starbucks because he was in a rush to see the flock of sparrows that flew over the street. Rus’s heart started pounding. He felt so ashamed, so ashamed all of a sudden, for that day and all the days he had existed, walking around like he really was someone, and all the while looking like this.

  Rus hid the plastic bag under his coat and walked along the wall back to the shop where Wanda was, making space for the people he came across and avoiding their eyes. When he did not see Wanda he was sure she had left him. The sweat under his armpits felt cold.

  “Wanda,” he said, “Wanda!”

  He walked hurriedly through all the people, searching for her; she was the only one who could help him become a new man. “Wanda, Wanda,” he begged as he ran down the street, scanning all the faces of the people passing by him. When he finally saw her, waiting for him in the car park, he walked right up to her and clenched her arm tightly. “I don’t know why you want me,” he said to her, “but I am going to keep you. I’m going to do everything you say. I will become a real man, like the one in the photo.”