Rus Like Everyone Else (12 page)

“Apparently he has repeatedly spoken about three bottles of vodka to the ambulance personnel, but his blood levels indicate no more than two glasses, maybe two and a half. So it is not alcohol poisoning. His balance organ is fine too, and his ears look normal. I did hear him sneeze just now, so he might have a cold.”

A cold! Rus thought. Surely I have more than a cold. He had a dry throat and a thumping headache like he had never had before.

“A cold!” the girlfriend said in a strict voice. “Surely he has more than a cold.”

Rus liked the girlfriend now. He opened his eyes a millimeter, looking through his eyelashes. There she was, the girlfriend, sticking up for him. She had red cheeks, big breasts, and a white blouse with a flower-print skirt, and she pointed her finger at the doctor. “This man collapsed in the middle of the tax office. I think he needs serious care.”

Rus recognized her now. The woman was not a girlfriend; she was Wanda, from the tax office.

“And what about his sleeping?” Wanda said. “I personally find it very worrying that he is still asleep.”

“He is not asleep,” the doctor said. “He ate his pudding while we were out of the room. It is on his chin.”

“Well, I'm just scared that he is in a coma,” Wanda said.

“Right now he is looking at us through the slits of his eyes,” the doctor said. “Get up, Mr. Ordelman, you are ready to go.”

Rus sat up in the bed and seized the doctor's arm. “I'm not going anywhere,” he shouted wildly. “I am a patient now. You cannot make me leave the hospital!”

MR. LUCAS AND THE SECRETARY

“Excuse me.”

Mr. Lucas opened the window to the street slightly. He was standing behind the curtain. “Excuse me,” he said again.

Across the street, on the sidewalk, the girl he was saying “excuse me, excuse me” to stopped walking. She looked about her to see where the voice came from.

“It's me, Mr. Lucas,” Mr. Lucas said. He waved nervously, his hand sticking out of the window opening.

The girl was wearing a straight skirt with a yellow blouse. Mr. Lucas had seen her often, walking down the street to the supermarket. From a distance she looked very businesslike, but when she came closer you could see her face was very soft and nervous and her walk was without direction, intermittently slowing down and picking up speed, and she was always looking up at all the people who passed her by. She was the only person Mr. Lucas could think of asking, because she might be even weaker than him.

The girl came up to Mr. Lucas's window; he saw her face and thin black hair through the translucent curtain. “Come a little bit closer, please,” Mr. Lucas said. “Closer.”

The girl came closer to the window. “Hello,” she said. “I'm—”

“Yes,” Mr. Lucas said, “thank you. I have a secret.”

He nodded behind the sheer curtain.

“Yes,” he said again. He brought his mouth closer to the opening of the window and lowered his voice. “A secret. And you might be able to help me. It is so that I have received an invitation for the Memorial Service, to stand in the special Survivor Area, across from where the Queen and the veterans are. I have been selected for that, I, Mr. Lucas.”

“Wow,” the girl said, lowering her voice too. “That is great.”

“And now,” Mr. Lucas said, “and now I need an objective eye to see whether or not I am overlooking anything in my preparations. A female eye.”

He got even closer to the window and checked to ensure there were no other people in the neighborhood who could hear him. “I might as well tell you that in the past I have not always made the right decisions, there have been irregularities, there has been clouded judgment on my part.”

“Ah,” the girl said. “I see. A mental problem. I also have one. The doctor said I should talk to new people.”

“Although,” Mr. Lucas continued quickly, “I have to say that what I've done was not as bad as it was portrayed by some people. It was
with the best intentions, you see—I just wanted to improve things a little bit, add some spice to it, which I should not have done. But I should not get into that.”

He cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead. The sweat tickled his skin.

“And that,” he continued, “and that is why I have not been outside as often as other people may have been. And with regard to my upcoming event, this means I'm afraid I might not be completely up to date. Although I have maps and timetables and the bus schedule and I listen to the radio quite a lot, there are certain areas in which certainly I am not quite up to date. In regards to what is suitable.”

He paused to catch his breath. It was the longest conversation he had had in a long time, and it was with a real person, whose face was close, just on the other side of the curtain. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

“In the fashion sense, I mean,” he said. “I am not up to date in the fashion sense. So maybe I could get your opinion.”

With that sentence, Mr. Lucas opened the curtain and stood face-to-face with the girl who lived across his street, showing her his round, pale face, his ivory glasses, the hat with a dent, and his old green suit.

IN WANDA'S CAR

Rus was in a car with Wanda. He was holding a plastic card in his hands. The card was his passport; Wanda had brought it for him. Rus looked at the card. “Rus Ordelman,” it read, and then his personal number. Wanda had told him a long story about how everyone who was born had to have a number, because it meant you exist, and it also meant you had rights, such as the right to have a house, which you had to buy or pay rent for, so you had to get a job that gave you money, of which you also gave a part as taxes, which gave you the right to use the roads. Or something like that.

“I had your photo because everyone who comes into the tax office has his picture taken by a hidden camera while he waits for the sliding door,” Wanda said as she took a turn. “It's a very nice system.”

All the while she was talking Rus was staring at this passport. The picture of his face that the secret camera had taken was the first picture ever taken of him. But mostly he stared at the name that was written below it. Ordelman. He could not manage to say it out loud yet. It didn't suit him at all, this name. Although he had never really thought about his surname, he knew he had not wanted it to be like this. Ordelman. The name had sounded slightly familiar in the hospital, and he remembered now that the name was written on his mother's debit card too.

“I was just walking past the hospital yesterday,” Wanda said, “on my way home from work. There was no one waiting for me, so I just thought I'd check on you.”

She glanced sideways.

“And today was my day off, and since you don't seem to have anyone else I thought I'd arrange these things for you. I felt responsible. But now I know you are all right.”

Rus did not feel all right. He would have liked a name that was a bit more adventurous, like Cloud, or Ocean. Rus Ocean. But it was not possible. Wanda had explained it. Your name is determined even before your body is there, and the reason you can't change it is because it is very difficult and there are lots of papers and you just can't have everyone going around changing everything.

“My mother never told me I was called Ordelman,” he said.

Wanda was not surprised. There were some other things his mother did not tell him. There was a history of suspicious transfers in her name, and it seemed as though her boyfriend, Modu, was not nicknamed Snow because he liked to play in the snow but because of shady business. Also, it seemed like they had not left for Africa for the birds, but for the business. The money on the debit card was a monthly disability benefit, which she clearly was not entitled to and had to be stopped now, obviously.

Even though Rus listened very carefully, it did not make sense to him and only made his headache worse. He pressed his hands against his forehead.

“How are you feeling?” Wanda asked him, looking sideways from the steering wheel.

Rus did not know what to say. He had just found out he had an awful name, he had vertigo, and he was in a car with a woman
whose breasts bounced up every time they went over a bump in the road. He did not understand why they sent him out of the hospital when he was obviously so miserable.

“Only physical problems,” they said when he told the doctors about the letter.

Rus looked sideways at Wanda. Her face was brown and she had painted her cheeks pink. She was wearing a blouse and glasses. She drove through the busy city center with brisk turns, throwing angry glances at other drivers if they tried to get in front of her. If she got such a letter, she would certainly know what to do, Rus thought. They probably would not even dare send her such a letter.

Rus did not want her to leave anymore. He had a vision of Wanda taking care of him, of Wanda filling out his forms and driving him around in the car.

“You look like an angel,” Rus said, “with your glasses.”

Wanda did not respond. She looked at the road. When they were at a red traffic light she took a wrinkled envelope out of her bag. “Here's the letter back,” she said. “You cannot return your letter to the tax office; you really need to pay your bill.”

“Oh,” Rus said.

“And your key was in your suit,” Wanda said. “I put it in your coat.”

Rus searched the pocket of his fur coat. The key was there. Now he could go home, to where the collectors were probably already lining up in the street. “Thank you,” he said, almost without a voice. They were silent again for a while.

Rus tried to cry without sound, but he was not very good at it.

“First,” Wanda said after a while, “you have to make a résumé listing your professional experiences. You said you were a sailor, so you make a list of the ships you have worked on and for how long. Then you appeal the decision of the taxes. There are some costs regarding your registration process, because you have to go through foreigner screening. You will need a lawyer for this, but you can apply for compensation. In order to get compensation you do need to report at the Foreign Bureau, which will have to define your current status.”

“All right,” Rus said, almost inaudibly. “A résumé of the screening. The ships where I worked. Applying for the forms. I will do all
that. Thank you.” He was sitting with his head bent and pressing his hands against his eyeballs. Wanda's words sung around in his head without getting any meaning—“appeal” and “registration” and “screening”—and he really missed his mother, he wanted her to come back and give him another debit card and tell him not to worry. But they weren't coming back, they had left him, they had left him for the money, left him to rot. He had never realized before how awful his life was.

“Also,” Wanda said, “the ambulance bill is two hundred fifty. Because you did not have insurance. You need to get insurance too.”

Rus pressed his fingers harder on his eyeballs, but the colors dancing around behind his eyelids did not relax him anymore like they used to. He was all alone and would never be someone like Wanda, who could shout about “make way” and “coming through” and wore glasses and had a car and knew all about everything. His bed was going to be sold and his kitchen, and he was going to end up on a bench in a park with a blanket, just like the unemployed.

“I don't want to be unemployed,” he whispered.

Wanda looked at him sideways. He did not want to look at her and shrank into his seat.

“Do you know what an alliance is, Rus?”

Rus did not know, and she guessed that because she answered for him.

“An alliance is a cooperation of two different parties. Together they are stronger and have more of a chance to survive. But both parties have to stay in the alliance and honor the agreement. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

Rus wasn't really sure what she was talking about, but he nodded because she looked so serious.

“But the alliance only works if both parties stay in it,” she said. “They can't just form an alliance with someone else, leaving the other party with all the new furniture.”