Rus Like Everyone Else (20 page)

“Headfirst,” the manager shouted while he paced up and down the glass hallway of the office building. He was teaching Rus how to business walk. “You don't see the other people,” the manager said, “because you have a destination. In your mind you are organizing conferences, making decisions, writing important e-mails.”

Rus's fur coat was hanging from the manager's shoulders and dragged over the floor of the glass hallway as he paced up and down. The coat was Rus's part of the deal the manager came up with: essential information on corporate survival in exchange for the coat. Apparently the manager had met with a group of Northern businessmen a few years before, and despite doing everything to impress them, they remained stoic. He drove them around in his white BMW and took them to a restaurant with food that you would never think to eat yourself, but what they'd really gotten excited about was the fur coat of a Norwegian businessman sitting at another table.

This had annoyed the manager a little bit and he got annoyed again while telling it to Rus, but when he put on Rus's coat his mood cleared and his eyes shone like a child's.

They practiced for an hour together, with the manager quoting parts of the Company Guidelines book, which had extensive advice on creating a successful business mentality. The basic principle was to focus so strongly on the goal that the rest of the world became a blur.

“And when approaching a group,” the manager concluded his teachings, “always shout something first so you have their attention, and then come closer. You never want to stand behind them with your arm outstretched, waiting until there is a space in the conversation for you.”

Rus wrote it all down in the notebook Wanda had put in the plastic bag. Now and then a voice in his head said, My coat, my father's coat. But aside from that he was doing well. The manager thought so too, and he made a circle in his chair when Rus paced down the hallway without looking up once, showing that he had mastered the business walk.

“You are ready,” the manager said. “Come stand over here.” He pushed a button on his computer. On the screen the fifty-five employees of the copying department became visible, each one sitting in his or her own little square on the screen.

“Everyone, this is Rus,” the manager said.

The manager pulled Rus toward the screen and held his chin up. The people in the squares looked back at Rus and the manager. “Hello,” Rus said. He raised his hand to wave but the manager shook his head.

“Never wave,” the manager said under his breath.

“Our Rus here will be working as a number copier. He will be occupying desk number thirty-four during his trial period. Work pace two hundred files a day. Anyone want to say anything?”

One person lifted his hand. “Ah, Fokuhama,” the manager said. “Speak.”

“Can I just say what an amazing fur coat you have on?” Fokuhama said.

“What, my fur coat?” the manager said. “Chic you say?” His mouth turned into a broad smile. “It's a real Russian one. Very rare. I have a connection who gets them for me.”

WAITING FOR RICHIE

An ant walked over the pavement. It walked around a dead fly and tried to lift it. The fly did not move. Ashraf was sitting on the pavement, leaning with his arms on his knees. Richie had gone for cigarettes.
The ant on the pavement climbed over the fly. Two other ants came and started to walk around the fly too. Together they dragged the fly's body toward the gutter.

Ashraf wondered why people would compare a human society to an ant colony. Ants were very different from people. Ants probably did not dislike one another, and they also probably did not want to get more areas for themselves and sell them. He had never really seen the purpose of comparing one thing to another. If you wanted to understand something, he thought, you had to study that specific thing and all its aspects, not something else that had some things in common with it. He felt the same about this war they were having the Memorial Service for. Every conflict that occurred was compared with this war, in order to find out which were the bad ones and which were the good ones. That's how you learn from history: you don't let the exact same thing happen again. Although he was not even sure of that.

It was not very strange that someone had wanted to write a book of rules and pretend it came from an invisible person much wiser than us, who had made the world, Ashraf thought, someone who was watching to see you followed the rules and punishing you for not following them. It might be the only solution for the world. Although on the other hand it had not been a solution at all so far, it may even have made problems worse. Maybe there was no solution—problems would turn into different problems—and he just hoped he could stay out of it all.

“Money is a game,” Youssef had said. “Everybody is playing. If you break the rules, and no one notices, you have not broken the rules. There is no point in being the only one who's playing fair.” The past week, Youssef had been trying to talk him into a moneymaking scheme he came up with, which involved stolen SIM cards and setting up a premium rate telephone number. “It's not any worse than what the phone companies themselves do. They have insurance for these types of things with the big banks, so in the end you only steal from those who steal from us.”

Ashraf knew Youssef's plans and schemes. He had a new one every week. Sometimes they worked, usually they didn't; sometimes he got caught and turned his life around for a few weeks, like when he worked with the packages. When he had money,
even when it was enough to live off for a year, he spent it within a month, on rental cars and shoes and drinking.

“You've got to pick your own place in life,” Youssef said, “otherwise life will place you. And you know very well which position that is.”

Ashraf knew what he meant. Work for your salary. Pay half your salary to the bank, which owns your house and your car and your furniture. Pay the phone company, pay the gas company, pay your insurances, pay the supermarket. Own nothing except for some expensive clothes you bought to feel like you are somebody, have a heart attack when you are forty-five, leave your kid with the mortgage payments.

Ashraf stood up from the sidewalk. He did not want to steal; he wanted to live by his own rules, even if the world was arranged as Youssef said it was. He did not want to steal, he did not want to swear, he did not want to become bitter. He brushed the sand from his trousers. In the distance Richie was talking to a woman who was politely trying to get away. Ashraf got in the van and pressed the horn until Richie came running with a red face.

MR. LUCAS AND HIS SHIELD

Mr. Lucas touched his eyes, his cheeks, his forehead. He pinched his arms to see if he was really there, in the street, in the middle of the day. Everything was going so perfectly fine that for an instant he was worried he might still be lying on the couch next to the tape recorder, in deep hypnosis, just dreaming he was doing all this.

But he wasn't, he was really walking over the busiest market square in East, no white van in sight. The hypnosis was lying like a shield around him. He'd put on his suit for the Memorial Service and an old yellowed shirt. Normally he walked very close to the wall with his head bent, but now he walked right in the middle of the sidewalk. Luckily, the hypnosis blocked out the worst aspects of the state the neighborhood was in, the things he'd heard about in local news reports. Mr. Lucas knew there was a drug dealer on every street corner, but he was not able to see them, just as he
was unable to see the dysfunctional families, who he knew from the news were sitting drunk in their front yards with their stolen goods on display. He only saw the square and the people shopping, who looked at him with friendly eyes.

“I am hypnotized,” Mr. Lucas said quietly to the people who passed him by. “Are you going to the Memorial Service too? It is the day after tomorrow. I'll be there. What is that you say? Yes, yes, you do have to be invited. That's such a pity, maybe next year for you, who knows.” This is how he walked through the entire square until he found the stand where they sold shirts.

“That's quite an outfit you've got there,” the man behind the market stand remarked.

Mr. Lucas looked up and smiled. “Thank you,” he said, “I dyed it myself.”

He bought two shirts from the man, in expensive black silk. The fabric was shiny and it would look perfect with his suit. The man carefully wrapped them in paper before he put them in the bag. Nodding almost without interruption now, Mr. Lucas made his way back to his house, taking his shirts out of the paper every five seconds to marvel at them.

And when a man behind him prodded his shoulder and started talking to him about the world that was going to hell nowadays, about youngsters putting out cigarettes on random people's faces, Mr. Lucas did not panic. He nodded calmly and answered, “I myself experience it very differently at the moment, but I have certainly heard that on the news, certainly.”

THE BEAUTY OF THE NUMBERS

Tiktiktiktiktiktiktiktiktiktiktik
. This was the sound of the office, and this sound came over Rus like a wave when he opened the door. The other sounds were: phones ringing, people talking, printers going
kzzk kzzk kzzk kzzk
, and the air-conditioning blowing in the background, filling up Rus's ears with a low, steady hum.

So there he was, Rus, at his first job, his hands a bit shaky and a tingle in his stomach. All the desks had numbers, and across the department he saw his own number, 34. Rus started walking
between the desks, counting the desks that he passed by left and right. His coworkers looked up from their screens as he walked by.

Rus walked as the manager had taught him to, eyes on the target, headfirst, but he could not help but notice that everyone wore black suits and no one wore brown, and he tried to hold the plastic bag behind him a little bit, so they wouldn't see it.

Desk 5, desk 6. Number 34 seemed very far away, and all of a sudden Rus did not remember how he used to move his arms when he walked. Did he move his right arm forward when his right leg moved forward, or was it the other way around?

Finally, Rus reached desk 34 and sat down in a chair that had wheels under it. There was even a sign that read
R. ORDELMAN
, and a phone, and a keyboard, and a screen. The plastic bag Rus folded and placed on the floor under his table. Fokuhama, who sat across from Rus, rolled his eyes when Rus tried to find the button to switch on the screen, which was in a different place from where Wanda had explained.

The work he had to do was to copy the numbers in the files from China and to write them in Arabic numerals on the screen. The manager had given him a list of the Chinese number system and a dictionary. A stack of files was waiting on his desk. For some reason Rus had expected the work to start more slowly, that he would look around a little bit at first, then perhaps start tending to some work, maybe adding up a few numbers, but no, here he was, with a desk, a screen, and a pile of files.

The pile of files was so high that Rus could not imagine how he could ever be expected to finish it. With sweaty palms he picked the first file up from the stack. “
,” it read, “
,” and “
.”