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Authors: Tuomas Kyrö

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I
f Yegor Kugar had taken a breath test he would have been well over the legal limit. So he asked Vatanescu if he was able to drive. The latter nodded, aware that the less one says the less likely one is to say the wrong thing.

Vatanescu slowly eased the van out of the mouth of the ferry into the shimmering brightness outside, from which he felt excluded. Following Yegor Kugar’s instructions, he chose the green line, nothing dutiable, nothing to declare, just things to conceal, and great difficulty in changing from second to third gear. Yegor Kugar tapped the destination into the satnav, which said it was just under a mile away.

Driving behind them out of the bowels of the ship were Pentti and Ulla or Holger and Agneta. In a Nissan Primera that was always punctually serviced, and
whose driver, front-seat passenger and even the car itself knew where they were going. If Pentti were to have a heart attack and die, the car would take the dead man to the driveway of his home, an oil-heated house in a rural location where each piece of furniture had occupied the same place since the Helsinki Olympics of 1952. The only object that changed position was the women’s magazine that each week got moved from the television table to a bundle of old newspapers tied together with string and donated to the local junior football team’s recycled paper collection.

Vatanescu drove along streets he didn’t know with a man he didn’t know. The sun struggled through the dirty windscreen, it was hard to make out the traffic lights, and as he focused on them he forgot to focus on anything else.

Suddenly a hare bounded out into the middle of the road.

‘Go faster, run it over, kill it!’ Yegor shouted.

Vatanescu turned the steering wheel the other way, the hare disappeared, and all that remained was Yegor Kugar’s indissoluble rage at the fact that someone had defied his orders.

You don’t run life over, you go round it.

On the corner of a street between the Art Museum and the ‘Sausage’ building, Yegor ejected Vatanescu from the van and threw a sheet of cardboard and an empty disposable coffee cup after him. Then he gave him a quick rundown on the terms of his future employment.

There was no question of sick leave, and he could forget about paid holidays and earnings-related social security. Yegor believed in doing things the American way. From now on Vatanescu would be on his own. Eyes down during working hours. The attitude and
expression of a whipped dog. If a beggar had a smile on his face it robbed him of credibility and showed up as reduced cash flow. If you made people feel pity and guilt, one got mercy. Mercy was money, mercy was the biggest thing in Protestant religion and life in social democracies. In the Nordic countries people had such a low pity threshold that their coins burned a hole in their pockets.

‘We help to make it easier for them,’ Yegor explained. ‘The donor ends up with a good conscience. I take seventy-five per cent, you get twenty-five.’

On the sheet of cardboard there was a description of the beggar’s wretched living conditions, his
impoverished
poor children, his deep religious faith and his aspirations, which were rather modest. Yegor explained that one needed stories; stories breathed life into goods that would otherwise be lifeless and lacking in history. Stories brought the product closer to client, buyer and donor.

‘Keep your smile up your ass, not on your face.’

 

Vatanescu began to feel pain instantly; he found it hard to keep his back straight. Time slowed down; the minutes were hours and the hours were the length of a whole generation. Now and then a coin fell into his disposable cup. Vatanescu would have liked to smile and say thanks, but the trick was to remain poker-faced, sad and fearful. It was best if you were able to look ugly but in a touching way.

When the daylight failed and evening arrived, Vatanescu nodded, then dozed, then lapsed into a state between sleeping and waking, and finally sank into a snoring REM slumber. There he saw pictures of things whose origin he could not account for. Firewood being chopped, logs floated, bridges under construction,
a busload of people on their way to a mass suicide. Determined men of a northern land for whom everything was possible as long as they showed themselves to be persevering, creative and unyielding. The strange dream came to an end when Yegor announced with a snarl that Vatanescu had just spent his lunch break asleep.

 

On his first official day of work as a Romanian beggar, Vatanescu had earned five euros and eighty cents, a toy car and four cigarette stubs. Added bonuses were cold, hunger and ankylosis. He folded up his cardboard sign, put the money in one of his pockets and the begging cup in the other. In his inside pocket were the work roster Yegor had given him, a map and a tram timetable.

The metro map was just a straight line, so he managed to find the company housing before midnight. A
windswept
field, Caravan Number 3. Inside the caravan, somewhere in the middle of a somnolent fug, a cigarette glowed on and off. Vatanescu put his bag on a vacant bunk together with the last tins of corned beef. The smoker introduced himself as Balthazar, but Vatanescu was already asleep.

V
atanescu shook the last drops of morning urine on the gravel and prodded his memory in an effort to understand where he was and why. Which of the recent events were part of a dream, and which of them were to become reality. Around him he saw caravans, dubious electric connections, a shack and a spherical barbecue grill. In a brazier burned a fire on which a coffeepot was heating; on the horizon the city was dimly visible. Balthazar, too, now appeared in his true dimensions,
and not as a mental image formed on the basis of a disembodied voice. The old man lacked an arm and a leg.

Balthazar replied to the question Vatanescu had not asked. He said he had left his arm and leg somewhere along the way, just as people always leave something behind: some forget their watch, some their heart, others leave their coat in the cloakroom. Then he thrust a bundle of newspapers into Vatanescu’s hands and explained to him the importance of layers. You had to cram as many newspapers and bits of cardboard under your clothes as you could, until you could hardly move. The toilets in hamburger joints were good places for getting warm, but Yegor’s men reported any unauthorised absences to their boss. There was one toilet break a day, and if you broke that rule you would have to wear nappies. If you had the money you could buy wool, quilting and down, but if the donors could see them under your rags they would feel cheated. A beggar could afford no anachronisms or breaches of style, and below a female beggar’s ragged skirt there must be no flash of Manolo Blahniks, or even of fancy trainers.

 

Vatanescu sat in the metro, stood on the escalator, sat at his place of work. Today and from now on it would rain; autumn was here, which out in the country meant clear bright air, red and yellow colours everywhere, and rubbish burning in gardens. In the city, however, autumn was a colder, wetter and greyer affair. Vatanescu tried to empty his mind, but some advertising image or passer-by or sound always brought him back to reality.

If one forgets about the knee pain, the need to urinate, the homesickness and the shame, this is the most boring job in the world. A conveyor belt job in which neither the conveyor belt nor the worker moves, but the world does instead. How many
building workers enjoy their work? How many
briefcase-carrying
men and suit-wearing women?

They do their share in order to obtain their share.

Don’t worry, Miklos, you’ll get your football boots.

When a coin fell into the cup you had to express your gratitude by an imperceptible movement of the head. Not a word, especially not in English, Yegor had instructed. You had to keep playing your part, which was that of a person who came from nowhere, understood nothing and was capable of nothing. You had to stay at arm’s length, the length of two cultures. Beggar and donor had to be strangers. Any familiarity would end in acceptance, mutual understanding and a solution. Bad for business.

Passers-by who all looked the same, coming and going, never stopping. A child pointed at Vatanescu, asked his parents, ‘What’s that?’ and received a tug at his sleeve in reply. A middle-aged man spat at him. An old woman blessed him and handed him a religious newspaper.

The average daily wage was one and a half euros, of which one euro belonged to Miklos. Vatanescu was tormented by hunger. In the stores downtown you were lucky if fifty cents bought you two sticks of liquorice. A hungry person was cold all the time, a cold and hungry person caught flu. And a person who was hungry, cold and suffering from flu did not perform well at work. The darkness repeated itself, one’s head became filled with gloomy thoughts.

Why would anyone ever have wanted to live in a climate like this?

The wind is torture. The sleet penetrates one’s skin.

 

Vatanescu had calculated that the nuclear-war survival rations were enough to last a month, but one day
Balthazar finished them off. He excused himself by saying he could not control his hand and mouth,
otherwise
he would never have swallowed such crap.

Hunger, the beginning and end of everything. Vatanescu sat in the buzzing metro and stared at a child several seats away, especially at the hamburger the child was munching.

Just as Vatanescu was about to lunge in the direction of the French fries, the train stopped at a station above ground where he noticed a large open-topped container in the back yard of a building.

He got out and headed for the container. People were climbing up into it. A moment later they jumped down again with full plastic bags in their hands. Vatanescu also swung himself over. The container was like something out of a children’s movie, a world made of chocolate discovered in some gloomy forest. There were steaks, sausages, cartons of fruit juice and milk, cold cuts of ham and cheese, loaves of bread, oat-flakes. There were spices, strange pies filled with rice pudding; there were candy bars and condoms. Someone was throwing it all away because its sell-by date was the same as the one on the calendar.

Vatanescu did some hunting and gathering, and that evening he barbecued a kilo and a half of corn-fed pork shoulder on the spherical grill. With Balthazar, he chopped the peppers and the meat, added cream, and spiced the whole dish as only the inheritors of a rich gastronomic tradition know how. They ate it all in silence, scraped the grease and gravy from their paper plates with crusts of white bread and smiled. Everything seemed better with some food in one’s belly. Next batch onto the grill, and party up!

T
he drinks for the pig-feast came from a cruise ship. For old Balthazar knew that the passengers on ferries from Estonia were particularly careless, and so, behind a pillar in the sea terminal, he had got his hands on three boxes of red and white nectar.

Intoxication sharpens the senses and slows the passage of time, so Balthazar and Vatanescu quietly filled their begging cups over and over again, engaging first in small talk and gradually moving on to more serious matters. Balthazar talked about the neo-Nazis in Hungary who had used baseball bats, and he talked about an old Danish passer-by who had put enough money in his cup to support him for a year, with neither demand nor explanation. He talked about his family, whom he had not seen for so long that he did not know if they were still alive, or if his wife had found another man to change the light bulbs.

BOOK: The Beggar and the Hare
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