The Beggar and the Hare (6 page)

T
he football boots.

Vatanescu found the tram stop and travelled to the city centre.

He looked for a sports shop.

He looked for the footwear section.

He looked in his pocket for the piece of paper on which he had traced the sole of his son’s foot on the day of his departure.

How long is it since I left? Is there a table that would show how much the foot of a boy of that age would have grown?

Studs, laces, Velcro, glitter, stripes, oak leaf, riders, spinners, joggers, runners, there was no mode of human progression that would not have required its own footwear. Vatanescu compared the various items of footwear with the foot he had drawn on the paper.

Nike?

Adidas?

The most expensive ones would take all Yegor’s money; those are the ones I need. A parent’s job is to guarantee his child a better life than his own.

A girl wearing a T-shirt with the shop’s logo approached Vatanescu. Vatanescu selected the most expensive boots and asked her to wrap them up. Just to make sure, he showed his banknotes.

Where is the post office? Where can I send them from? My son is going to be a striker. A goalscorer. He’s going to be admired, like the car I’ll take him to practices in.

The salesgirl took the boots from Vatanescu.

She made a sign to the assistant who was in charge of the dietary supplements counter, a mountain of muscle who looked like Lex Luthor and began his day by shaving his entire body, after which he drank a pitcher of protein milkshake and deposited a bloody stool in the john. Steroids will do that, but a price must be paid in order to make your veins and muscles stand out and your neck swell like a nuclear-power station about to explode on the coast of Japan. By this time Lex’s penis was tiny, his testicles the size of raisins, he could no longer get an erection, but who cared when he could lift five hundred pounds of cast iron from the weights bench? Lex’s real name was Rahikainen. A Lion of Finland pendant hung round his neck and he was a good and warm-hearted man, but had always hated gypsies. He had been frightened of them ever since he was a child; in the shopping mall they tried to sell you watches or drugs or steal your tram season ticket and your pocket money, threatened you with a knife, or with their brothers. He should not be seeing one of them here in the shop, because as far as he knew not many gypsies ever bought sports items for their own use.

Without a word Rahikainen walked up to Vatanescu. He lifted him by the scruff of his neck, so that the rabbit started to fall out of his armpit. Vatanescu managed to seize the rabbit by the ears and thrust it back inside his jacket. Rahikainen carried Vatanescu outside. He threw him on the pavement, under the feet of the passers-by, back to his origins.

‘We choose our customers.’

The boots don’t only have a price, they also have a customer’s face.

How can I get a face like that?

One mustn’t be wretched, one mustn’t be a beggar, the lowest of the low. One mustn’t be a leech sucking the excess from the well-to-do.

One must be one of them.

I don’t know their language; how can I be part of the group? They don’t like music, they don’t like barbecues, they don’t like cheerfulness and they don’t like apathy.

Work.

Work is what they like. The Finns like someone who works.

O
ne day Yegor had said to Vatanescu: ‘Dole money would get us a much more predictable and easier cash flow than begging. All that you men and women of the sixth European division need is a social security ID. It’s a secret passage straight into the cash tills of the job agencies, into income support, pensions, the lot, study grants, housing grants, all of it earnings-related. Stipends from the Cultural Fund and the Kordelin Foundation. When a person is just a number on a computer, that number can go on raking in money forever. Seventy-five per cent to me, twenty-five to you.’

U
sko Rautee steered the spoon to his mouth, spun his revolving chair round and looked out of the morning window at his home town. It was at once beautiful and ugly, like life or Yoko Ono. Or like Usko’s clients. The flavour of the yoghurt was nothing-
with-the
-addition-of-something-slightly-unpleasant.

Church towers and factory chimneys stood silhouetted against the sky, between them a mass of buildings, from the beautiful constructions of the nineteenth century through the monstrous creations of the 1970s to the insipid vanities of the 2000s. Though their original meaning had been lost, the church towers and factory smokestacks were still there. The production work of the factories had been moved to countries where costs were lower, the industrial halls converted into floorball courts or television studios. While people still got married in the churches, God had left the building, left the whole planet, and had moved on to the next galaxy.

Usko Rautee scraped the last spoonful from the bottom of the yoghurt carton and felt the absence of God. Yoghurt promised today’s stressed individual the same benefits the Church had earlier. Eternal life, mental equilibrium, more energy for one’s work and, after repentance, heaven. In order to get there one did not even have to die, merely get on with one’s life.

The yoghurt had a nasty taste, but there was no such thing as a free lunch. Saints had always endured privations and suffering.

Usko had grouped his clients into three main categories. The first category were the coasters. The coasters, and the world, were like mercury and Teflon. The only things that stuck were the pizza crumbs on their shirtfronts and their hands on Mum and Dad’s wallet.

Usko opened another yoghurt and wondered when the world had got like this. Nowadays every kid who dropped out of suburban high school had the rights of a prince and the living standard of an earl. It was the result of progress, comfort and low prices; it was splendid and totally monstrous. It had begun with the invention of the axe, continued with the concept of the
wheel, and moved on through the mass production of cars to this world where there was a gaming console in every room. Sliced bread in the kitchen. A helmet on one’s head and reverse parking radar in one’s car.

What can one demand of a person who is born into this world? Nothing, because one is born into it as a customer, and one cannot demand anything of a customer; customers have to be served. The coaster knows exactly the level he wants to coast towards – a celebrity, a poker star or a mogul – without having the slightest idea of how he is going to get there. The coaster wears slip-ons until he dies because he never learns to tie his shoelaces.

Usko felt sorry for them, and had a sense of being different. He felt sorry for himself, too, he who had to eat health food yoghurt so he could live his life to the end. In the 1970s, in the same kind of problem environment, one was allowed to drink vodka. But now those years had to be paid for with these yoghurts.

Cleaning work – the cleaning and hygiene sector – was a gauge of social progress, just as the prison industry once had been. Office cleaning jobs did not suit the coasters. The starting pay was too low, the status of heavy manual labour insufficient. The few coasters who did accept the jobs that were offered to them fell asleep in a corner of the printing works they were supposed to be cleaning.

But coasting is always relative to the degree of responsibility. With enough debts, children and alimony payments, even the coasters reach for the spray bottle.

The baldies were a more tragic group. Their jobs had disappeared at the same time as the electric typewriters had vanished from government offices. In their day the baldies had been machine draughtsmen and system administrators at the spearhead of progress, but six years on they were now on the scrapheap or needed
only for children’s games. Unlike the electric
typewriters
, the baldies had neither the outer casing nor the inner padding to be able to sit on the living-room floor and be hammered by a three-year-old. At some point they began to feel they could do with a beer, even if they didn’t like beer. A Big Number 4, no, make that two, and a shot of vodka. Their work was now being done by computers, and there was no way out of that.

If you offered the baldies an office-cleaning job, their livers or knees were in such a fragile state that they had no hope of being able to manage the floor polisher. The baldies weren’t lazy in the same way as the coasters, but they had an over-developed sense of self-esteem, which could certainly tolerate decades of hard drinking – from earnings-related income support all the way to unemployment pay – but not a promising career in the cleaning sector.

As Usko spooned down his yoghurt, he felt his thoughts quicken. The jobs didn’t go to China because some arrogant capitalist took them there, but because the consumer wanted to buy cheap stuff. The customer wanted to save money. So why not let him, and sell everything cheap? Nowadays everyone had the chance or the wealth or the credit or the short-term loan to buy everything. It was there – in the cutting of prices – that democracy functioned most indisputably.

The third group that Usko encountered on a daily basis were the highly educated arts graduates, who would only take jobs in their own field. If their own field was ethnology, and their specialist subject the development of Judinsalo distaffs and their influence on the metrosexual dandies of the freehold estates in 1780s Finland, Usko was powerless to do anything about it. When he offered this highly educated group that vacant office-cleaning job, they asked if it was a classical
paradox, a metaphor or a stigmatisation. The arts graduates lounged off with their shoulder bags to the vegetarian restaurant across the street to wait for a grant that would never come. Bitterness arrived instead.

Usko put the lid back on his carton of yoghurt, placed the carton on the windowsill and wiped his moustache. He cleared his throat, got up from his chair and opened the door to the hallway. Someone was sitting in the waiting room.

‘Come i-i-n,’ Usko Rautee said without looking up. Then he put on his glasses and roused his computer from its sleeping state.

Usko smiled at the client; that was how he always began. Each someone was an opportunity, at least for themselves. For the system, each someone was an opportunity to remove that someone from the system.

The someone was a tired and wan-looking man who had been fired from his regular job and was ready to accept any kind of work. As work experience the man listed construction, tending livestock and cutting out half-length paper silhouettes on the corner of Bucharest Park Street and Ceausescu Square. A quick learner, not given to complaining. No references or letters of recommendation, but as a sample of his work Vatanescu snatched up a pair of scissors that were lying on the desk and a blank sheet of paper from the printer, and in a few seconds cut out a very lifelike silhouette of Usko Rautee. Usko Rautee asked if Vatanescu was prepared to do something different from creative improvisation. Was he capable of real work?