Read The Beggar and the Hare Online
Authors: Tuomas Kyrö
The Beggar and the Hare (15 page)
One small piece of a larger whole, surrounded by machines, people and explosive substances, our hero resigned himself to his fate, which was better than it looked at first sight. Piece by piece a new world was being born – a world of shopping – and being a part of its construction felt satisfying to Vatanescu. Each working day had a meaning. In one corner Jeffersson had made a miniature shack for the rabbit, and the three men lived in their home like brothers, or pupils at a school for boys.
Vatanescu pumped concrete, carried joists, learned the skills of carpentry from Jeffersson, was soon handy with the spirit level and the keyhole saw, mastered the mitre box and the laminate cutter. From Õunap he learned how to spend the evenings productively, too: playing poker with the few Finns who were present on the site. On payday he could sometimes increase his wages fivefold.
Six hundred… seven hundred… seven hundred and forty euros.
We’re getting there.
Õunap took Vatanescu to Muonio in his truck. At a grocer’s they bought cigarette papers, tinned tuna, cutprice meat that was near its sell-by date, a large pack of Finnish light beer in a suitcase-shaped cardboard box and three liver sausages, Jeffersson’s favourite snack.
Then to the sports shop.
I’m familiar with Adidas, Nike and Reebok. Is there a brand that’s even better? Money is no object.
It was the wrong time of year, the wrong season, the sales clerk said. Now they were waiting for the start of
the winter and the stockrooms were bursting with traditional skis, cross-country skis, downhill skis. Did they want those? Or maybe fishing tackle or hunting gloves? Snowshoes? Football boots would not be coming in until next April, as football was not the favourite leisure pastime of young people in Lapland.
‘They’re more into motor sledging, skiing, fishing, you know. Wilderness sports.’
Jeffersson patted Vatanescu on the shoulder and told him not to lose heart. They could order the boots over the Internet on Jeffersson’s laptop.
From the infinite selection they clicked on the boots advertised by the world’s most highly paid footballer. This gel-haired twenty-something street urchin was paid tens of thousands for every minute he lived and breathed and fumed. The price of one of Vatanescu’s, Õunap’s and Jeffersson’s minutes was about a million times lower.
Vatanescu’s order was made; now all he had to do was enter his Internet banking details.
Bank code? Credit card number? Address? Name?
Right.
I’m off to bed.
Vatanescu’s anger made him pour his concrete so well that he was promoted to the rank of truck driver. Now the Romanian beggar who had no driver’s licence took his turn in fetching new arrivals from the airport and the train station. No one knew who he was, few were interested in someone else’s past, and the future was the same for them all: hopefully better. He was called Ivan the Bulgarian Bar Bender or Miroslaw the Pole, Son of Bronislaw or the Albanian Fox.
Y
egor Kugar had had to make certain adjustments to his choices for copulation. The sudden and surprising reduction in his market value was showing in the quality of his partners. In his previous life he had been able to pick up anyone at all, and that anyone had come running. He attached the bait, cast the line in the water and always got a bite. But now the value of his stock was in free fall.
‘I had to take what I could get, and it was surplus crap. Outside the social security office in Tikkurila I found an ugly bitch from Koivukylä and held onto her, because Yegor doesn’t sleep alone. Disgusting tits like potholders and a butt like a beanbag, cellulite as thick as the palm of your hand. But she was warm and she was a woman.
‘The lady from Koivukylä was of the opinion that as Yegor had such a nice car it was best not to upset him; she was prepared to take the rough with the smooth as long as my 7 Series BMW with rear propulsion purred under her flabby ass. It had an electric roof window, roof-mounted DVD, refrigerator, turbos, the lot. All you could wish for, in cash, just name your currency.’
But Yegor Kugar’s employer took his company car away. One morning instead of the BMW there was a 1985 Lada Niva with cardboard and duct tape in one of its side windows and hardly a drop of petrol in the tank. The car was exactly the same model that Yegor’s mother had queued for in the land of the Soviets but never got. A message was pinned to the steering wheel with a knife, advising Yegor to keep a sense of proportion. He ought to count himself lucky he still had a car at all. Yegor walked to the nearest service station and
with a crumpled five-euro note bought some 98 octane in empty lemonade bottles.
‘No one else offered to employ me. I called all the numbers that used to say cheerily that they had a job here, a job there, go and collect plasma TVs from Kerava and sell them on in Malmi. Pick up three Czech broads and put them on sale for a week in the flat in Kamppi.
‘At first I got angry replies. Then I got no replies at all.
‘Nice, to be blackballed. Thanks, Vatanescu.
‘A fucking awful winter set in, one that froze balls and cars and trains. I ordered Kamagra off the Web, the poor man’s Viagra, so I could screw again and at least have something in my life that worked. I downed all the pills at once and a moment later got an erection like a red-hot poker. I asked the broad to forget about getting dressed that day. But she had other ideas.
‘She confided that she found it humiliating to sit in the front of an unheated Lada. She couldn’t have warm feelings for the owner of a cold Lada. She explained that she’d be happy to go out with a
rich
Russian, but there were plenty of poor Finns at home too.
‘Fuck, it’s hard to listen to that kind of thing when your cock is XL size. The broad started talking about how her parents had a Lada when she was a little girl, something about traumas and class conflicts. They’d taken her to Mänttä every summer with the radio playing Sinikka Sokka and those bearded guys from Agitprop. It didn’t mean anything to me; all I know is that a
sokka
is a pin you get in hand grenades.’
And Yegor Kugar was left sitting naked on a kitchen stool, with a futile erection in his groin. His girlfriend, his other half, his lady, call her what you will, Kaarina, got her things together, put them in a plastic bag and left the building. Yegor was unable to act, unable to stop her, unable to keep her by force, or even throw a beercan after her, which was his usual way of resolving conjugal crises. He rose from his stool and looked out of the window. Kaarina was getting into a car that was waiting by the front door.
‘It was some ex-ice hockey player. I lost my broad to some guy named Niko from Hyvinkää.
‘On my first night alone I cracked up. After that I could only sleep with the help of pills, and I took them in the daytime too. I paid a last visit to my former employees Pirita and Marketta on Vaasankatu Street, who gave me enough cash to last a week, and from the four beggars who were left I took everything they had. Then I retired to my pad.
‘My body was used to screwing at least once a day. If it’s any less frequent than that, my dick juice goes up to my head. I lose my concentration, my nerves go to pieces, I make the wrong decisions or I don’t make any decisions at all.
‘I lay on my mattress covered in sweat, trembling all over; it was the same kind of shaking and fear of death and longing for death I experienced when I came off opium in Yobistan. And the same lack of interest in my own fate.’
The only friend Yegor Kugar had left was an Indian gentleman named Naseem Hasapatilalati, who ran the convenience store downstairs. If they had anything in
common, it was loneliness, melancholy, and a seething bitterness that had become the most powerful fuel of their lives.
A week after the Organisation had relieved Yegor of his duties, the landlord rang his doorbell. When Yegor failed to open up, the landlord went away and returned with the police.
‘Do you think I have a clean credit history, with banking IDs and a savings account? Do you think the rental agreement was in my own name? It was in the name of Kostomuksha Pipe Systems PLC, and now the rent had not been paid. After the palace in Moscow I had only lived in places that the Organisation had arranged or dictated. Sometimes they were basements, sometimes they were luxury penthouses you got to by taking a lift from the basement straight to the thirty-eighth floor.
‘I looked inside my leather jacket and found my last banknotes, the currency of four different countries, pushed them through the door slot, and got a few weeks of peace. I phoned down to Naseem at the convenience store to bring me grub.’
O
ne very ordinary Thursday, as Vatanescu ate grandma’s meatballs from the microwave, the first snow began to float down from the sky. Back in his homeland it only snowed on the loftiest, sharpest mountain peaks. Here it was all over the place; the cotton wool covered everything. It settled in a smooth, even mass, and it was cold but bright. It covered the earth-moving equipment and the unfinished buildings, and it blotted out all human traces.
Vatanescu walked in the snow in his long johns and bare feet. Õunap slammed the door to keep the heat in, and called to the madman to come inside before he caught pneumonia. Vatanescu spread his hands and turned round. He fell on his back. He opened his mouth and tasted snowflakes on the tip of his tongue.
Life is a fairytale.
T
he developer Kerkko Kolmonen knocked at the door of the shack at five in the morning. He promised to double the wages of his best construction team for all the days they managed to knock off the original schedule. They knew, however, that if the weather got any colder or it started to snow in earnest, the pumping of concrete would be impossible. The cement guns would freeze.
‘Five hundred euros in advance for each guy,’ Kolmonen said.
Now I’m the richest man in my village.
Let’s get to work.
At the same moment, seven hundred miles to the south, Iina Rautee was studying the satellite photographs of the national park site. She had found her vocation. Her job was to save the world. She must save it from machines, human beings and the all-destructive greed of capital. She regarded herself as free from the fetters of money and material goods. The world also had to be saved from the thoughtlessness of her parents. Her mother used makeup that was tested on animals. Her father ate health yoghurts manufactured by a
multinational
company and refused to give them up in favour of organic products.
The only poster in Iina Rautee’s room was one of Ulrike Meinhof. As part of the literature course she
had taken at school she had read an autofictional novel about a German terrorist group and wanted to be part of something similar, in the same way that the boys in the class dreamed of a professional career in ice hockey or rock music.
Terrorism was exciting. It took a lot more balls to be Ulrike Meinhof than it did to be Andy McCoy of Hanoi Rocks. With bombs and assault rifles towards a better world, sacrificing one’s own life and those of the capitalist pigs.