A Fairy Tale (25 page)

W
e're one and a half hours into the shift when the supervisor comes over to me.

I distribute the letters in my hands before I take off my headphones.

“The boss wants to talk to you.”

“Now?”

“He's waiting. It sounded important.”

Kasper grins. “What's Turk been up to this time?”

The supervisor produces a strained smile, isn't sure whether it's appropriate to join in.

“The Turks are always trouble . . .” Kasper shakes his head.

I walk past stations where the same actions are repeated over and over. I walk as slowly as I can. The boss only works the night shift a couple of times a month. Or if something important is happening. Perhaps he wants to talk to me about Kasper's acid import, but I don't think so. They wouldn't have picked me up while I was standing next to him if that was it.

I know what the boss is going to say to me. I'm only wondering how they found out.

At first I tried to get work without any papers. But my dad had failed to prepare me for the new era of bar codes and computers. A world where the black market is only for black people, as a builder said to me. Unless, of course, you've finished your apprenticeship, he said and then laughed.

I started frequenting small shops on Nørrebro. My room filled up with pens, bags of nuts, and pomegranates that rotted over time. I had stacks of videos that I couldn't play and a pyramid of cigarette packets. I wanted to be known as a regular customer; I wanted them to feel safe with me before I asked for papers. Most of them said they could get me some; but every time, I ended up being offered only stolen toasters and VCRs.

Late one night I was in a pizzeria. I hadn't been there before and I had only gone inside because I was hungry. I'd almost given up so I just asked for papers straight out. At first I didn't think the guy behind the counter had understood me. He smoked a cigarette while the pizza was in the oven. I read a three-day-old newspaper and I could feel his eyes on me.

I had the pizza box in my hand and was heading out the door when he said, “Don't forget your receipt.”

On a small piece of paper he'd written an address, a greengrocer in outer Østerbro. He told me to say hi from Öztürk.

The papers were expensive but genuine. I was now twenty-one years old and my name was Mehmet Faruk. I got a birth certificate and a health insurance card and was assured that Mehmet Faruk was no longer around. He might have gotten the wrong girl pregnant and left the country or maybe he was lying in a ditch somewhere.

I got a passport. I opened a bank account. I went to job interviews and started working as a postman. Later I moved to the sorting office.

After my first shift I went for a beer with the other postal workers at Bjørnen. They told me I didn't look very Turkish. I said I was only half Turkish, that my mother was Danish. The redhead gene that wouldn't roll over and die. After a couple of beers they said yes, perhaps, if you look closely.

I'm standing with my
hand on the door handle to the boss's office; I take a deep breath before I open it.

He's alone. I can smell tobacco. There's a calendar with building cranes on the wall.

“My son works with one of the really big ones,” he says, and gestures with his hand for me to sit down.

The boss used to be a builder. He had his own business until his back went. Then he had to retrain.

“I might be wrong.” The boss touches a pile of papers in front of him. “But I've gone through these. Several times. And . . .”

He looks at me; perhaps he's hoping I'll say something. Break down and confess. I force all explanations and apologies to stay behind my teeth.

“Can it really be true that you haven't taken any holidays since you started working here? None at all?”

I gulp, then I nod.

“I could turn a blind eye, but then we'll have the union on our backs. They always think we're trying to work you to death.” He grins. Then he raises his eyebrows, big bushy eyebrows. “Listen, you have to take your holidays.”

He pushes a holiday request form across the table. The first line has already been filled in: Mehmet Faruk, it says.

I'm about to get up.

“And another thing, as you're here. You work with Kasper Rasmussen, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“The shop steward will probably have a fit because I'm asking you. But, even so, does . . . does he do his job?”

“Yes.”

“What I mean is . . .” He searches for the right words; he has to tread more carefully here than he did when he was on a building site. “You haven't noticed if he does things which could be regarded as . . . a little different? Odd, possibly?”

“No. Or . . .”

“Yes?”

“No, it's probably nothing.”

“It'll be between us, of course.”

“During break time . . .”

“Yes?”

The boss looks at me. His eyebrows hang in the air like the wings of a gull.

“When he has taken the last cup of coffee, he doesn't always put on a fresh pot.”

“Er . . . Yes?”

“And the sign says . . .”

“Oh, right . . . Well, thanks for letting me know.”

I walk past the stations down to my booth.

Kasper grins at me. “They're not sending you back to Turkey, are they?”

During the next break I fill in the holiday request form and hand it to the supervisor.

I
put on my coat. I finish my cup of instant coffee. It's coming up on eleven o'clock. I've just walked past Hovedbanegården and I can see the sorting office when I realize that my holiday starts today.

The first hour I drink on my own, then a man sits down on the bar stool next to me.

His skin is glowing; his clothes are clean and freshly ironed even though it's after midnight.

First we drink alone. Then we clink bottles. He tells me he's a photographer.

He has spent the whole evening looking for the right subject. He buys a round, looks down at himself.

“I'm not gay,” he says, as though he could understand why I might think so. “I take pictures of sleeping girls.”

I'm about to ask him when he nods.

“I take their picture while they're asleep. The tricky bit, of course, is to make them come home with you. You have to look presentable.”

The bartender turns the light on and off; it's time for last call.

“I go running,” the man says, and straightens his shirt collar. “I'm a member of two book clubs. Girls like books.”

We empty our glasses and stand up.

“I've got something to show you,” he says, as we step outside.

I follow him.

“I used Rohypnol once,” he says. “Slipped a couple of pills in the girl's drink and she was out like a light. I had time to rig the lighting and put the camera on a tripod. Pose her. She slept like they only sleep in the movies.”

We cross the road diagonally.

“But when I developed the pictures, I could tell that I'd cheated. So it didn't count. I tore up the pictures and destroyed the negatives.” The man points to an apartment building further down the road. “It's right up there.”

“I'm sorry,” I say.

I turn around and walk down the street, away from him. He says something to me, but I don't hear it.

I walk through the
city. The streets are wet from the rain. I step around vomit and broken bottles. I'm not far from my room in Elsebeth's apartment, but I carry on walking. I cross the bridge, I walk along the canal.

I press the buzzer, keep pressing the button. At last I hear crackling, then the lock clicks open. Petra stands in the doorway; she's wearing an oversized T-shirt with Winnie the Pooh on it and white cotton underwear. Her eyes are tiny. She blinks a couple of times before she goes back to bed.

I undress and lie close to her back. She presses herself against me.

The sun is rising
when she turns to face me. I can feel her hand between my legs. I find her mouth. She pulls off her panties and guides me inside her.

Afterwards we lie soaked in sweat, still with sleep in our eyes. It's not until then I notice the red lines on her arms.

“It's Kot,” she says. “It won't groom itself. So I take it into the bathroom and hold it under the shower. It whines and then it scratches me.”

I carry Petra's cat
down the stairs. Its skin is loose like an overcoat that's too big. Halfway down the steps it widens its eyes and sinks its claws into my arm. I don't let go. Petra opens the door.

When we're out in the courtyard, I put it down.

The cat is shaking from cold or agitation. It stands there a moment before it takes a few tentative steps. Then it starts to run and disappears into the nearest bin shed.

Petra is scared that it might run away, possibly out in front of a car. Perhaps on purpose.

“It can't get out, the courtyard is enclosed.”

“Cats can always get out.”

We sit down on a bench. We drink coffee from a Thermos. We can hear Kot move about. We watch it dart from one bin shed to another, to the bike shed and back. Then it disappears completely.

Petra is about to get up; I put my arm around her and make her sit down again. She takes a sip of coffee, but doesn't take her eyes off the shed where we last saw Kot.

Fifteen minutes later the cat returns. It's bleeding from a scratch under its eye, its tail has got a kink, and it's missing some fur. Between its teeth it holds a dead rat. The cat stops in front of us and lets its prey fall to the ground. I'm pretty sure it's smiling.

We lie in Petra's
bed. She tells me I don't look very Turkish.

“I'm only half Turkish.”

She rests on her elbow, watches me with her very pale eyes which are blue today and not green. Then she shakes her head. She still can't see it.

“Tell me about your family,” she says.

“There's not much to say.” I fumble for the cigarette packet on the bedside table.

“Or not much you want to tell me . . .” I can still feel her eyes on me as I light the cigarette.

“I grew up with my dad.”

“Who is Turkish.”

I make no reply.

“Tell me about your dad.”

“Later, perhaps.”

“Then I won't tell you anything about my family. Nothing at all.”

“I know your dad is Polish.”

“And that's all you're going to get.” She turns over and grabs the duvet.

I hear a sound from her, a soft sniffle which might be laughter. I stub out the cigarette and I hold her until we fall asleep.

P
etra wakes me up. She's in tears. She's scared that her cat is dying. I find it in the kitchen, lifeless with milky eyes.

We wrap it in a blanket and carry it downstairs. The vet isn't far away. We wait in reception; Petra rocks the cat in her arms. I can see a paw with exposed claws sticking out of the blanket.

The vet carries the cat to a steel table in his surgery. Unwraps it, squeezes its paws, examines its injuries, and looks into its eyes.

He can give it an injection; put it out of its misery, that's all he can offer. Petra's crying so hard she can't speak. She keeps shaking her head.

The secretary calls us a taxi.

We take it to an animal hospital. Petra runs inside with the cat while I pay the driver.

They give the cat an injection, open up its cuts and clean them. Petra squeezes my hand until I can no longer feel it. Five hours later we're told we can take the cat home with us.

I spend the rest
of my holiday looking after the cat while Petra goes to work. I apply ointment to its cuts and force the syringe with antibiotics into its mouth. Soon my hands are just as scratched as Petra's.

“I
t's easy and fairly safe. It's almost legal.” Kasper puts groceries into the shopping cart. “The best time is late in the day and early in the month when the shops are busy.”

His voice is louder than usual.

“Visibility is part of the trick,” he says, taking a box of cornflakes from the shelf. He throws it up in the air; it floats under the ceiling before it lands in the trolley. “No one expects you to talk about shoplifting in a super­market. Just as no one expects you to try to shoplift something this big.”

When we reach the till, Kasper takes a single bottle of beer and puts it on the belt. The girl has sleepy eyes after a long day at work. She rings up the beer. Kasper doesn't say anything about the crate of beers under our trolley. We carry it out of the supermarket between us.

“If you're caught, you can always act dumb,” Kasper says, without lowering his voice. “I didn't check the till receipt, did I? Or you say you did tell the checkout assistant. At this time in the day their memory is like a goldfish's. How much is that? Three, four seconds?”

We're only a few steps down the road when Kasper sets down the crate and calmly lights a cigarette.

“The beauty of the beer-crate trick is that you get money back when you return the empty bottles and the crate. The supermarket pays you to drink beer.”

We haul the crate up the stairs and pass the bottles through the hatch, one by one.

Whenever we sit on Karlsson's roof, he does most of the talking. Kasper says he saves up his words.

Today he talks about the school he and Kasper went to. About morning assembly. The suburb they come from was well-heeled. It's taken real effort to sink as low as they have.

“Or rather high, to sink as high,” Karlsson says and flings out his arms, taking in the rooftops around us, the sun which is going down and glows gold and orange on the windows.

When the city lies in darkness and the dew has fallen, we go inside the shed.

Karlsson lowers his voice. Even here on top of the city, alone on the roof, he fears that someone might be listening in. He's no longer talking about himself or the art of catching a pigeon. He's talking about bombs. How easy it is to make a bomb from items you find under your kitchen sink. He says that a bomb is only worth its target. A bomb is a sentence that doesn't get a full stop until the next day's newspapers.

I glance at Kasper. He just smiles, rolls joints, and looks as though he's heard it all before.

Karlsson wants to bomb a lot of places: the National Bank, the stock exchange, Christiansborg Parliament, Lego.

Especially Lego.

“It's all about symbols,” he says.

Late at night we
fly kites.

I hold on to the string. Kasper stands a few metres from the edge of the roof with the kite above his head. He holds the string tight until the kite tears itself loose and takes off over the rooftops.