Rus Like Everyone Else (32 page)

He turned around in his seat and looked at her. His thin gray hair was combed neatly around the sides of his head, and he was wearing an immaculate soft-yellow summer suit.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Where are you taking me?”

“I'm Mr. Wheelbarrow,” the man at the steering wheel said. He grinned. “The heart is a restless thing,” he said in a deep voice, “where will it take us next?”

WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER

Ashraf was lying next to the girl on the bed, their feet touching at the foot end. Her hair was still wet, and when he turned toward her he felt little streams of water going down his shoulder. Her belly was going up with each breath.

On the radio they were airing a speech from the past.

“We shall fight on the beaches,” a mumbling voice said, “we shall fight on the land, we shall never surrender.”

Ashraf looked to the side at the girl. She had her eyes open and looked at the ceiling. Her cheeks were flushed red.

“Great speech,” the presenter on the radio said. “What unity they must have felt back then.”

Ashraf looked at the clock above the bed. It was almost nine. He did not want to leave. “I don't want to leave,” he said.

She squeezed his hand under the blanket.

“When you are with someone, you can forget yourself,” he said. “Your worries.”

“I don't want to forget myself,” she said, still looking up. “You can be happy without forgetting anything. I remember that from when I was young.”

They lay together quietly for a while. Ashraf looked at her, her hair sticking wet to her forehead. He could see the blood pulsing through a vein in her neck, just below her ears; it pulsed with her
heartbeat. He had never seen anyone's heart beat before.

“It's just that I feel trapped sometimes,” he said. “I don't know, it's like whatever I do, it never makes a difference. Like everything is already determined for me. Sometimes it seems like my thoughts are even locked up or something. Like I am not free in my head. I just want to feel more free.”

He inhaled deeply, almost desperate at his lack of words for describing how he felt, and when he listened to himself it sounded nothing like what his actual feelings were.

“I don't know,” he said, “maybe I'm just spoiled.”

“You are not spoiled. You live in a van.” The girl turned toward him. She looked very serious.

Ashraf squeezed her hand tight.

“Do you know there are two kinds of infinity?” he said suddenly. “There is infinity in large numbers, like the universe, that can grow endlessly. But there is also infinity between one and zero.”

“Between one and zero,” she echoed.

“Small parts divided endlessly into smaller parts,” he said. “So infinity is in everything. You even carry it around inside yourself.”

The girl did not say anything. Ashraf looked to the side. She was smiling with her eyes closed.

Ashraf put his fingers on her eyelids and lifted them slowly open.

“What is your name?” he said. “I never asked you.”

“Laura,” she said. “Laura Zimmerman.”

PHOTOGRAPHY

It was nine o'clock in the morning, and Rus was standing in the photo store across from the Overall Company, pacing up and down in front of the service desk.

“Glossy or matte?” the photo store woman asked him. “Double or single? Thirteen by eighteen, eleven by fifteen, A4, or poster format? One-hour or one-day development service?”

She took the camera Rus had bought in the shop in the metro station from his hands and turned the wheel.

“There's a bird in the pictures,” Rus said. “He lives in the air vent above my desk. It is a gull.”

The woman looked at the camera.

“Nature pictures,” she said.

Rus shook his head. “He is in the office, in the air vent. They are office pictures. I need them to be very clear.”

“I don't develop them myself, you know,” the woman said. She leaned over the counter. “I just put them in the envelope. Then they go to the laboratory. And the people in the laboratory cannot decide what size they will be. They cannot make that decision. And if you don't make that decision, the film will probably end up in some giant bin.”

She turned the camera around in her hands.

“Glossy,” Rus said. “Thirteen by eighteen, double, one hour.” He opened his mouth. The air did not go in.

ASHRAF IN TIME

It was ten o'clock. The sun was hanging above the horizon again, shining into the eyes of the people in the traffic jam, and Ashraf was waiting in his boss's office. It is funny, he thought, how everything in nature is a circle, but time is a line. The clock above the desk ticked, twenty past ten, ten thirty. He thought of the universe expanding and expanding. He imagined that at some point it would touch its own edges and start imploding, until it was as small as a marble but still as heavy as the universe. If that exploded again, how likely was it that everything would take the same course? The same rocks forming the earth, the same cells forming organisms, forming fish that crawl onto land, monkeys turning into men and his dad meeting his mother, him kissing the office girl in the hallway by the elevator. And all the other things happening the same way.

His boss swung the door of the office open. “He is awake!” he exclaimed. He grabbed Ashraf's shoulder. “Awake!”

“Awake?”

“Fully conscious,” the boss said, sitting down opposite Ashraf. “I wanted you to be the first to know.” He smiled, looking very different suddenly from how Ashraf knew him. “I got a call from the hospital, and when I got there, he was awake, talking to his client,
Mr. Wheelbarrow.” The boss looked enchanted when he said the name. “A very sensitive, decent man, Mr. Wheelbarrow. A writer. He and I had a talk in the waiting room. He sees my son in a very different light from most people. He said my son was highly intelligent and burdened by the impossibility of a happy existence, in the context of the world's problems, of which he was conscious at an exceptionally young age. He said he suspected my son had been eating so he would not feel so small when faced by the world.” The boss sat down at his desk and looked at Ashraf with an astounded look. “Who would ever have guessed there was such reasoning behind what he did?” he said, shaking his head. “According to Mr. Wheelbarrow, my attempts to prepare him for life had weighed so heavily on him that he never thought he could do it right.”

The boss shook his head. “I always assumed he was ignoring me,” he said. “I mean, you have a son, you are afraid he will get hurt, you don't want him to mess his life up. So what do you do? You give him some advice, you know?”

Ashraf nodded.

“Apparently, he was taking it very seriously,” the boss said, shaking his head in disbelief. “But now everything will be different. The first thing I did when they let me in the room with him—they'd made it dark so his eyes could adjust—the first thing I did was hold him by the shoulders and say, ‘Son, why in the world were you listening to me? Why?'”

The boss held on to his imaginary son in the office. “He could not reply because he was so weak, but I could see his eyes grow watery.” The boss used a tissue to wipe off his forehead. “‘Son,' I said, ‘you have to steer your own course, be who you want to be. You have to stop listening to other people. Do you hear me?'” The post boss took a cigar out his drawer and lit it.

“It was a very beautiful moment,” he said, his tired gray face surrounded by smoke, looking like an antismoking advertisement. “And I wanted you to be the first to know. We are all men of course, but sometimes a man needs someone to listen to him, if you know what I mean?”

He took his glasses off and rubbed them with a tissue.

“I get calm around you,” the boss said. “You are someone who
makes people calm.” He patted Ashraf's hand on the table. “You should do something with that.”

Ashraf closed his eyes. “Lately, I have been wondering if there is a place for me,” he started.

“Yes,” the post boss said. “About that.” He paused and coughed. “We had a call from the police this morning. They found the missing package with the racing suit in your van, half opened.”

THE DEAD BODY

The body of Mrs. Blue was on the bed. The blood in the veins was not being pumped around anymore, and there were no signals sent from the nerves to the brain and from the brain back to the muscles. If the blood pumping could be started again, too many brain cells would have died by now to make the body rise up off the bed and become Mrs. Blue again. She was dead.

THE MANAGER

Rus sat waiting for the manager in his front office. The secretary's desk was empty. All his colleagues were standing down the hallway, looking at the charred office of the lawyer. It must have caught fire or something, but Rus didn't care. He needed to talk to the manager and he was waiting for the secretary to come in and announce him. The clock above the glass hallway ticked loudly. After three minutes Rus got up and pushed the manager's door open.

Carefully, Rus laid out the pictures on the manager's desk. “These are the feathers under the radiator and here on my telephone. They are in more places, but I didn't photograph them all. I could point them out. This is the bird itself, behind the grating. This one is a little blurry, but that's its head. These are crumbs that I found. I think they come from the floor above us, the top floor, so maybe I should have a look up there. And also I think that maybe the president-director should be informed. Maybe if he knew the situation, he would put an extra chapter in the guidelines.”