Rus Like Everyone Else (8 page)

Ashraf stood in the office of the post boss, who supervised all post and parcel delivery in the East area. In his hands Ashraf held the plan for his enterprise. He'd listed all the benefits and had an answer to every objection; he'd calculated the monthly and the yearly results.

The city was divided up in 157 package-delivery areas, 51 of them in East. Before, the postal service assigned its employees one area and let them deliver the packages in that area in Royal Mail vans. But outsourcing plans were made, and when one of the deliverers retired now, his area was given to an outside deliverer, who had his own van.

According to Youssef, who used to work there, it took seven hours on average to deliver all the packages in one area. Since the postal reorganizations, the delivery window was stretched longer from eight in the morning until nine in the evening, which meant that if you worked fast, you could do two areas in a day, like Youssef used to do. If Ashraf took on two areas by himself, and got a double month's salary, he could save up for another van. There were no limitations to the amount of areas taken on by one person, so he would then take two more areas, for which he would hire people for a lower hourly rate. Then he would save up more, for another van, and two more areas, until he had a little empire of areas, twenty or so. Then he would sell it all, pay the mortgage for his mother and university tuition for his brother, and he'd be free.

“They say there is a guy named Gregor who's done it in North,” Youssef had told him. “He started with one van and has all of the Northern areas now. Does nothing himself and makes six hundred a day.”

“My name is Mr. Bleeker,” the post boss said. He extended his hand to Ashraf, not really coming out of his chair but just stretching his upper body a few centimeters, before sinking back down in his chair again. “Everybody calls me Herman,” he said, “but I wish they didn't.” He frowned as he looked silently at the post sorters outside his office, who were singing along to “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Then he pointed at the chair in front of him and said, “All right then.”

Ashraf placed his plan on the post boss's desk. “I have my own van and I was hoping to start out with area 1979 and 1980. My friend Youssef told me they will soon be available. I'm interested in taking more areas, when possible, and hiring my own employees. It will save you ten percent in taxes and you would only have to deal with one person.” Ashraf moved on his chair. He had put
on a shirt, a tie, and his father's old leather shoes; even though Youssef said they'd hire anyone with a van, he still did it.

The post boss took off his glasses and sighed. He had bags under his eyes and there were stacks of filled-out forms on his desk, schedules with big crosses and arrows on them, and posters with reorganization slogans.

“I know that you usually want new deliverers to go along with someone else as a trainee, but I have gone along with Youssef a few times so I know it all,” Ashraf said. “I have experience.” It didn't sound as professional as when he practiced it. He sat quietly in his chair as the post boss looked through the calculations.

The post boss sighed without interruption and his skin looked gray like newsprint. Now and then his head drooped so low over the papers that if Ashraf didn't know better, he would have thought the post boss was drunk. But Youssef had warned him: “He is burned up or something.”

“Appie,” the post boss said, “do you mind if I call you Appie? You are young, ambitious. That is a good thing. You want two areas. That is fine. After that you want even more. You want to be like Gregor, I suppose.”

Ashraf nodded.

The post boss took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You should know,” he said, “that it won't be easy.” He shook his head. “You probably think it will be easy. But life isn't always easy. And it isn't always fair.”

“I know,” Ashraf said. “I—”

“For me, for instance,” the post boss said, “it has not been fair at all. As we speak, doctors in the hospital are pumping liquid out of my son, liters and liters of liquid. He went into a coma when they had to operate on his liver. It stopped working because he got too fat. His fingers are like sausages. They always have been, but now he is just bursting out of his skin. It's not a pretty sight.” He looked out the window. “I always told him he needed to go on a diet. After the operation I sat by his bed and I looked at the cracks in his skin, the way his face disappeared into his neck, and I just wanted to bring my mouth really, really close to his ear and yell, ‘Well? Was it worth it?'”

For a second the post boss looked startled, as if it had been someone else who yelled “Was it worth it?” through his office. Then he
recomposed himself. “Of course he can't reply, he just lies there with this strange smile on his face. My wife said she saw him smile in his sleep like that once, and the next morning he told her he'd dreamed that he was weeding the Queen's garden.”

He gasped.

“Weeding the Queen's garden!”

The post boss buried his head in his hands. Ashraf looked at the picture he kept in a frame on the desk. It was an old photo of the post boss, a small woman, and a boy smiling by a slide in the shape of an elephant's trunk. The photo was in color, but somehow the post boss's face seemed to consist of black and white only.

“So,” Ashraf couched, “do I have the areas? When shall I start?”

“Yes, yes,” the post boss said, gesturing to the door. “Just leave your license and registration papers so we can copy them. You start Monday at eight.”

THE BOSS'S SON

The boss's son was weeding the Queen's garden. He had a wheelbarrow and he pulled the weeds from under the geometric hedges. In the distance they were practicing the trumpets for the Memorial Service. The sun shone on his face.

“Gardener,” the Queen shouted from her tower, “gardener.”

The boss's son looked up. The Queen was leaning out of her window, pointing at the field behind him. “You forgot something over there!”

The boss's son turned around and bent over. He picked up the leaf and put it in the wheelbarrow.

“Yes,” the Queen said, “very good.” She retreated to her tower.

The boss's son smiled and pushed his wheelbarrow farther on down the gravel path.

RUS AT THE CITY REGISTRATION

“Name?” the lady at the City Tax Department asked.

“Rus,” Rus said. “Pleased to meet you.” He smiled at the lady, at
her shiny red cheeks and at her glasses. His suit was still wet and he was shaking unstoppably. He had waited six hours outside the tax office, but he wasn't cold anymore, he was hot and his mood was good. Very good. He placed the wet letter carefully on the tray in front of him.

“Wanda,” he said, reading her name tag, “you've sent me this letter and I am here to say I would give you everything if I had anything, but I don't have anything. Francisco has it all. Do you understand?” Rus smiled and wanted to take Wanda's hand, but he forgot there was glass in between and he bumped his hand against the glass. “Ha!” Rus said. “See-through.”

Rus did not drink any more vodka after last night. What was happening to him was more like a combination of shock, the cold, and not eating.

Wanda looked over her glasses. “The letter did not come from me,” she said. “The system sends out those letters. The system has to sign with the name of an employee, because it does not have a name of its own. And the money isn't for me either; it all goes into the system. Now if you could give me your full name, please.”

“My full name is Rus,” Rus said. “I'm named after my father.”

“Right,” Wanda said. “Was that your father's first name or his surname, then?”

“I've never met him,” Rus said. “My mother has met him, though. He was a sailor, like me. I was conceived on the deck of a cargo ship not so far from here. I can show you where it was, if you like.”

Wanda tilted her head and looked at him pensively. “Can I see your passport?”

“‘Name him after me,' my father yelled at my mother when his ship sailed out. But she never really got his name. She'd been meaning to ask, she said. But there was always something that made her forget. Eight months later I was born. So she just called me Rus until he would come back. But he didn't.”

“Did she ever even register you?” Wanda asked.

“She left me a note,” Rus said, his voice growing louder with emotion. “‘Like the birds we are going to Africa. The debit card is in the flowerpot.'”

He swallowed loudly. He felt just as moved as the first time he'd read that simple, beautiful note. He had to sit down.

Wanda came up from behind her desk and bent over Rus. She lifted his head up from his chest and looked at him. Her eyes were soft suddenly, and her hands felt nice and cool on his cheeks. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, nodding slowly. “You need someone to help you.”

“Right you are,” Rus agreed, and he watched Wanda's face and the whole tax office circling around him, and it reminded him of a cinema where he went once with Modu, where you lie on your back in your seat to see all the planets circle around the sun.

WALKING HOME

The secretary walked uphill in the sea-green dress. The bus stop was at the train station. Next to her a train was rolling up the hill very slowly. Her sandals hurt her feet. “It is no problem,” she said to herself. “We will see how it goes.”

The people behind the windows of the train looked at the secretary. It was raining a little bit. She tried to think about her diary, or the helicopter, or the letter she was writing to Glenn, but the thoughts did not really want to come. Instead she looked at the pavement and thought about how it was very likely that by next year she would not even remember walking here.

MRS. BLUE PHONES THE STUDIOS

“I just think it is not good manners to create characters, let them go through all this trouble, and then leave them there. That is all I'm saying.” Mrs. Blue had called information and asked for the phone number of the people who stopped
Change of Hearts.
She was now speaking with the public services of the Overall Production Studios.