Rus Like Everyone Else

by Bette Adriaanse

  “You people should try being more thankful,” the man at the counter said when he gave Ashraf his things.

  Ashraf looked at his younger brother, who was in the passenger seat. He had been drinking and he wanted to sleep it off in the van before he went home. But he was still holding a bottle in his hand and he did not look like he was going to sleep any time soon. “Uncle Anwar wants to talk to you,” his brother said in between sips. “You can work for him, do sales at the garage.”

  Ashraf did not reply. The wind was hurling past the van, making a whistling noise against the newly built houses.

  “He came by to see Mum today. He asked where you stayed. ‘He cannot sleep in his van forever,’ he said.”

  “You told him where I sleep?”

  His brother’s cheeks turned red. He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah,” he said. He flicked his fingers against the brim of his cap, pushing it a few inches higher. Ashraf suddenly laughed. Since his brother turned sixteen he had a whole new set of movements, movements that he’d picked up from some music video, and a cap that was twice the size of his head.

  “I’ll have a sip,” Ashraf said, feeling more upbeat now, and he stretched out his hand to the bottle. He could see his brother wanted to say something but didn’t.

  “So how are you?” his brother said eventually when Ashraf put the bottle down.

  “Good,” Ashraf said. He could see his little brother was worried. Ashraf spent the year after his seventeenth birthday drinking by himself almost every night until he fell asleep. They shared a room, but his brother had never said anything about it. Then one day Ashraf had just stopped drinking. He didn’t miss it. He was not very worried about that time himself; he just saw it as a habit he’d developed—a strange habit. There had been a kind of hum in his ears in those days, the kind of humming silence you hear when you come back from a party where the music was loud. Days passed by without him truly noticing where he was; sometimes he suddenly realized he was at school, or holding his mother’s hand in the kitchen. He did talk about it to the school counselor, but the words he said about it did not seem to have anything to do with how he felt. The drinking had made the sound in his ears go away until he did not hear it anymore.

  Ashraf put his hand on his brother’s shoulder and looked him in the eye, like their father used to do when he said something important. “It is very dangerous to drink like I did. My liver is probably damaged and all that. You should never do that. It was sad.”

  His brother looked away. He said, “I wanted to beat you up. I waited for you once with a baseball bat.” His brother looked at him. His cheeks were bright red. “I read that somewhere. That someone did that. To his brother. So he would quit drugs.”

  He smiled, but his smile faded. Ashraf took his hand. They sat like that for a while. Ashraf looked at his younger brother’s puffy cheeks. He always liked hearing that his brother had read things. Ever since he was young, he had always been reading books. He had good grades, and he had to get good grades, because Ashraf paid for his school.

  Ashraf looked out the window. There was no glass in the windows of the newly built houses yet. The houses looked a bit like skulls, with gaping black holes where the doors and the windows were going to be.

  He thought about his father, who had talked about this city and its opportunities so many times. He never talked about the buildings, how ugly they were, but he was sure his father must have found it ugly here. He had seen the photographs of the light blue and beige houses, the mosaics on the walls, and the red sand in his father’s old town. When they went to the mosque when he was little, he could never take his eyes off the red soles of his father’s feet as he prayed. The color did not fade. Ashraf looked up at the stars. A plane flew over like a gray fish in a black sea. When he got this trainee period over with, he was going to the sea for an afternoon, he decided. Next to him his brother was sleeping in the passenger seat, the sleeping bag zipped up all the way over his chin.

  Ashraf pulled the hood of his sweater over his ears and closed his eyes too.

  THE BETTER WORLD

  Mr. Lucas opened his eyes. The living room was bathing in a strange light, which made all the colors look softer. The tape was finished and the tape recorder made the sjjjjjjjj sound of empty tape.

  “I’m hypnotized,” Mr. Lucas whispered. He pushed himself up from the couch and walked to the window. With a small move of his hand he pulled the curtain a few inches open. The street was empty. There was no van in the parking space in front of Mr. Lucas’s house.

  “It’s working,” Mr. Lucas whispered as he rubbed his eyes. “The van is gone! It is gone!” He marveled at the empty spot, opening and closing his eyes, not believing his luck. Abruptly, he turned around and ran to the bedroom to look at his reflection. At first sight, he was the same old Mr. Lucas, but at a second glance there was something significantly absent from his appearance. That something that was absent from his reflection were the visual signs of his anxieties—his stiff shoulders, his darting eyes—that something that had lain like a red hair over his face all his life, a crosshair for bullies, authorities, or anyone who wanted to exercise power over someone else.

  “Yes!” Mr. Lucas said, and he punched his fist in the air. “Yes!”

  He walked back to the living room and pulled the curtain open. Not a few centimeters, like he normally did, but all the way open so the street was right in front of Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lucas was right in front of the street. There was no van: no van in front of the house, no van in sight anywhere in the street.

  The moon shone on Mr. Lucas’s face. He breathed in deeply. He felt the air going into his lungs and staying there, no sign of hyperventilation. The sea of calmness that the hypnosis had promised was everywhere around him. He could even feel his heart beat at a calmer pace now.

  “It’s working,” he whispered. “I’m free.”

  The hypnosis had not only placed a veil over all the fears and anxieties in his mind, but a veil over his eyes as well. The street looked much more beautiful and inviting to Mr. Lucas now that he was hypnotized, and the yellow light of the moon had never seemed so nice to him before. Shivering with joy, he squeezed the curtain in his fist.

  “I will make it, I will make it. I’m going to see the Queen.”

  THE EMPLOYEE

  At eleven thirty Rus was in bed with Wanda. She had pushed the beds together the night before, so it was one bed now. She had ironed his suit and put his clothes on the chair by the door. She had given him a pair of leather shoes that the man who lived there before him had left. They were brown with leather tassels. The alarm was set for seven o’clock.

  “Tomorrow is the first day,” she said, pinching his arm when they were lying next to each other in the bed. “That is probably where your mind is at right now, I get it.”

  “Yes,” Rus said. And he was lying awake while Wanda fell asleep next to him, snoring softly. He thought about the paper the lawyer had given him, the paper that said that “he, Rus,” “from hereon referred to as the employee,” would work “forty-five hours a week” for the Overall Company, “abiding by the Company Guidelines,” in exchange for “a salary in scale 10.”

  Rus thought about the glass office of the lawyer, the polished file cabinets, and the secretary who talked about trading names for jobs and about how all kinds of things would start for him now. But Rus wasn’t sure if he wanted things to start; he really preferred things to stop.

  Rus’s memories of the day turned into thoughtless images now: he stood in the glass elevator of the office and he was lowered down into the building, gliding past the departments filled with desks and screens. In the distance below him Rus saw Modu. It was ten years before, when Modu took him to the pool. There was a hot wind in the entrance hall of the pool, and they had to wait in line to buy a ticket. You could see the pool behind a big glass window. Modu pointed at it and said he could play with the other kids. But the other kids were shouting and running, they already knew each other, and Rus w
as scared. In his dream he held on to Modu’s shorts, and he was so tense that he had to gasp for air every few seconds instead of breathing automatically.

  The strange thing about nightmares is that they don’t count. You experience them as real, but because they are not real, they don’t count. You fall an endless fall, your stomach turns and turns; you are chased by people with knives in an abandoned building and you are more terrified than you’ve ever been. Have you ever had that? You’re sweating, your heartbeat is increased: your fear is real. But when you wake up, you shake it off and get ready for work.

  Our secretary is having a nightmare right now. She dreams she’s lying in her bed. She has her eyes open, but she is unable to move. The man is in her room. He holds the knife in his fist, close to the secretary’s face. He is scraping the color off the nightstand, all the yellow off the nightstand, and he scrapes all the blue off the lamp. He scrapes the red off her lips and pink off her skin; he scrapes the black out of her hair. The secretary is lying paralyzed in her bed, and she sees her apartment the way she always sees it: everything is the same aside from the man’s dark silhouette looming over her, working carefully and precisely with his knife.

  Later he places one knee on her chest, and while she can hardly breathe and screams inside her head, he makes incisions in her eyes and takes the green out. When the first rays of sunlight come in, he puts the knife away and steps out onto the fire stairs again, where he came from. Her window is still open; you can see her curtains blowing in the wind over there, right across from us.

  THE SECRETARY WAKES UP

  The secretary stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She was pinching her lips. Her lips were gray and her eyes and skin were also gray. The bathroom was gray and the light was gray. The color had been taken from every object, it seemed.

  It had been like that since she had woken up that morning. At first she hadn’t registered it, because she woke up feeling panicked, her body sweaty and cold. Her window was open and she got up to close it, trying to remember what she had been dreaming about. The only thing she remembered was that it had been scary.

  When she closed the window she noticed it had rained into the house, because her feet were wet. That was when she noticed that her feet looked strange, sickly almost. When she studied them she noticed that there was no color in them at all. They were gray. She’d rubbed her eyes and looked again. Gray. Then she looked up to the sky. There were gray and white clouds, but there was no blue in the sky, no yellow and no orange in the sun, there was no green in the trees. Everything was colorless.

  She gasped. She closed her eyes, opened them again. She held her head under the tap for minutes with her eyes open, but it didn’t help. She went back to bed to wake up again, but that didn’t help either. After that she sat quietly on the edge of her bed for a few moments, trying to think, and she looked on the Internet to see if there was something like acute and total color blindness, but there wasn’t.

  Now the secretary studied her face in the bathroom mirror. She pinched her lips long and hard. A vague shade of red came briefly to the surface and disappeared again.

  “This is mental,” the secretary said to herself, like Dr. Kroon had said to her. “This is a mental problem.”

  Strangely calm, eerily calm almost, she took a shower, put on a gray skirt and a gray blouse, and stepped out into the colorless world. Even though it was ten o’clock, and she was already an hour late, she surprised herself by walking slowly through the street, not making haste at all.

  RUS GOES TO WORK

  It was nine thirty in the morning and Rus was not at work yet. He was stuck in the metro hall, trying to get out onto the crowded streets of the business district, but the business district spat him out each time he tried to enter it. All he wanted was to get to the traffic lights on the other side of the sidewalk, but the sidewalk was crowded with a stream of people walking at a pace that Rus considered running. Each time he tried to cross the stream he got sucked along and ended up pressed against the wall a hundred meters farther down the road.

  Rus looked at his watch. It was 9:42. He felt as if he was going to faint. His shirt was sticking coldly to his back and armpits. Finally, an old man in a wheelchair came out of the metro station and rolled right onto the sidewalk, making the stream part like Moses did the Red Sea in the story.

  Rus waited by the red traffic light, together with hundreds of people. Across the street hundreds of other people were facing him, waiting to cross the other way. When Rus saw that the old man was already across the street, determinedly making his way through the masses, he was certain that he was not capable of this. He tried to look calm and steady like the people across the street, who looked like they were not really there on that busy street, as if they were already in the office in their minds. But Rus was there. He was right in the middle of it, and he saw every car racing by, he saw every face, he heard every sound: the ticking of the traffic light, the honking of the taxis, the conversations on the phones, and even the seagulls yelling high above him.

  Suddenly, Rus jolted forward and was pushed along by the people crossing the street. Across the street the masses started moving too. The two walls of people merged smoothly with each other, except for Rus, who got stuck on someone’s backpack. He bumped into everyone.

  “Sorry,” Rus said. “Excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry,” and he looked into everyone’s faces and saw all the wrinkles, the glasses, the foreheads, the noses, and he bumped into someone’s chest and fell against the person behind him, got pushed to the side, “sorry, excuse me,” stepped on someone’s suitcase that pulled his leg away from under him.

  “Excuse me,” Rus yelled, and he felt like he was sinking, and he was sinking, he was on his knees now, pushed down by the city, walked over and trampled until everything was clear around him. In a beautiful silence he lay there on the street, bathing in the white light of the waiting cars by the traffic light, which suddenly weren’t waiting anymore, but all started up at once.

  “Stop!” Rus yelled. The broad white hood of a car came at him at a very high speed. He tried to crawl up and shouted, “Help,” but he stepped on the edge of his coat and fell over again. The car stopped only centimeters away from his nose.

  Rus gasped. He tried to stand up and to pull his plastic bag with his pen and his lunch from under the wheel.

  Whrum. The car inched forward so suddenly Rus fell over again. He closed his eyes in his fall, thinking, This is it, but it wasn’t.

  When he opened his eyes he saw the manager hanging out the window of the BMW. “I got you!” the manager yelled. “Didn’t I?” He smiled broadly, his eyes shiny.

  “I got you!”

  Rus could not answer. He saw the manager in a haze, slamming the steering wheel with laughter. Cars were driving around Rus and the BMW, honking at them. His knees and his hands were shaking uncontrollably. He started to feel himself moving out of his body but a hand pulled him back in, grabbing his forearm. The manager had opened the passenger door.

  “Russian!” he said. “Get in.”

  Smoothly and soundlessly, the car drove away from the crossing.

  The manager tapped the ashes off his cigarette out the car window and looked sideways at Rus, who was still coming around on the cream-colored leather car seat. He said: “I want to make a suggestion.”

  MRS. BLUE IN A COLD ROOM

  This morning Mrs. Blue woke up at the time she always woke up and found herself in her blue bedroom, where she always woke up, but today the room suddenly seemed cold and lifeless to her. She got out of the bed by pulling herself up with the handle Glenn had attached to the wall the last time he was there, and walked barefoot through the dining room to the kitchen as she always did. The floor felt cold under her feet. Her things—her small cat sculptures, the vases, the painted porcelain cups, the picture frames—seemed to have become hostile objects overnight: they seemed ridiculous dead objects to her now. Even the walls looked cold and unfriendly.

 
; In the kitchen Mrs. Blue took a cup out of the cupboard. She wanted to open her tin of instant coffee, like she always did, but she stopped suddenly. She let the cup drop; it fell down in the sink with a dull and hollow clunk.

  Mrs. Blue walked back to the living room, leaning heavily on her cane. She lay down on the couch and switched between the channels. She looked at the snow-filled channels with her eyes squeezed almost shut, to see if Grace was floating in between the programs somehow, in the gray noise.

  GRACE IN THE STORY

  “Magic moments, when two hearts are caring. Magic moments, memories we’ve been sharing,” Grace sang as she walked on through the empty world. Her voice was small in the silence. It was her favorite song and the song she had wanted to sing to Rick after the wedding ceremony.

  “Time can’t erase...the memories of...these magic moments.” She sang it slowly, taking a step with every syllable.

  As she walked Grace had been trying to recollect the past day, the events leading up to that strange recurring moment by the dresser. But all she could remember was just one moment, when she sat in front of the mirror in her negligee that morning, talking to herself about what Rick was hiding in the dresser. After that she could not remember anything: she could not remember having breakfast, she could not remember putting on the wedding dress. There was just a big gap in her mind.

  Other memories were missing too. She did not remember ever making love to Rick, for instance. She only remembered the moments leading up to it: him pushing her against the wall and kissing her wildly that night of the tropical storm, and the evening he proposed to her, when he unbuttoned her blouse amid hundreds of candles.