Rus Like Everyone Else (30 page)

Ashraf stared at the fields behind the building, the ditches and the long, narrow lanes. He would miss this if he left; he would miss the flat horizon, the different shades of green. Although people sometimes suggested this was not his country, it was. He could feel it, and if they could open his mind they would find green, yellow, and red rectangles; black ditches; and a bluish-gray mist that filled the air and lay down between the houses in the mornings. He closed his eyes and rested his head back against the seat. “I feel alone,” he said suddenly.

Ashraf looked up. His voice had been loud in the van. He knew he felt alone, but he'd never accidentally said it out loud like that. When he was a child he had always looked forward to growing up, but so far it had been a bit of a downward spiral.

He wished he had something to believe in, something to hold on to.

“There are at least two sides to every story,” he remembered his teacher saying in history class, “but often even more. There are no absolute truths. Everything that happens becomes a story, nothing more.”

He looked at the lady standing in her nightgown in the parking lot. Her quivering voice traveled all the way to the van.

“Grace. Gra-cie.”

The words disappeared into the dark fields. No one responded.

MR. WHEELBARROW

Mr. Wheelbarrow pushed the gas pedal of the car down with his cane. The car jolted forward. His good leg he used for the brake. He hadn't driven a car in a long time—Freddy always drove him—and he'd been taking a taxi to the hospital.

Mr. Wheelbarrow smiled. He could see the funny side of it as the car jerked on the empty highway, slowing down, then lurching forward.

“Grace,” he said as he drove along the highway, “where did you go, sweetie? Everything is all right now. We need to get the show started again. For Freddy.”

NAMES ON THE DOOR

“Maybe she could not make it,” the boy said to Mrs. Blue. He was standing next to her.

Mrs. Blue did not look at him. She looked at the flat horizon from the parking lot and the landing lights that made a web in the dark landscape. A plane came down to land but went up again as if someone were pulling it by a string. She held her hand over her
eyes. The feeling that someone was looming over her, the feeling that something or someone was steering everything came over her again. The sky was getting lighter, and the stars were almost invisible now.

The boy looked up too. “They say that if the universe is infinite, every single thing you can think of will exist somewhere. That means that in the end, everything can be true.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Blue said. She was silent for a while. She felt very tired suddenly. Then she said, “I don't think she is coming.”

For the first time since she buried Harold she felt like she was going to cry. A lump came up in her throat and her lips were shaking.

“Excuse me,” she said. She turned away from the boy and walked to the service station building, taking small, careful steps. She wished she hadn't refused when the boy offered to take her rolling walker out of the van. “If I walk slowly, I can go without.” Now she felt his eyes burn her back with pity as she shuffled foot by foot to the bathroom. She felt how old she was, how old her bones were, and she hated that she could not walk faster, she hated that she would fall over if she did not hold her hands out to the sides as she walked, and she hated that she was scared to fall.

In the toilet she sat down. She took her handkerchief out of her purse. She did not want to cry in front of the boy. She brought the handkerchief to her nose to suppress the sound when she saw the name written on the toilet door.

GRACE WAS HERE
, it read.

Underneath it, in curlier, old-fashioned letters:
AND MRS. BLUE
.

DRIVING MRS. BLUE

Mrs. Blue looked out the window of the van as they drove down the highway. The sun was coming up and the sky was turning orange. She remembered it all now; she remembered how it all happened to her before and how it was happening over and over again. She remembered everything that was going to happen to her when she got back to her apartment, she even remembered what the boy in the driver's seat was going to ask her in a minute or so.

She closed her eyes in the backseat. There was the pain in her
hip, and there was the tiredness, but she did not care for any of it now. A lightness had come over her, making the pain tolerable. This is the feeling a runner must have when he is close to the finish, she thought.

Outside the window the ring road was filling up with cars, the first traffic jams were forming.

The boy cleared his throat. “I was wondering,” he said hesitantly, “do you think life used to be nicer when you were younger? Was it really better than it is now?” His voice was nervous.

“No,” Mrs. Blue said resolutely. “It was not better, not worse.”

The van stopped in front of her flat on Canal Street. Mrs. Blue looked up at her apartment on the fourth floor. She knew what was going to happen at home, but she did not feel scared at all.

ALL PEOPLE WANT

Ashraf sat down on a bench near the canal. The old lady had insisted on walking to her house by herself. He had planned to try to take her to the hospital on the way back, but she had seemed so content and calm all of a sudden that he chose not to. He hoped that by the time he was her age, people would let him make his own decisions too. It was just before seven o'clock now. He still had some time to rest before work. He felt light with tiredness and pulled his knees up to his chest.

A man sat down next to him on the bench. “The whole world is going to hell nowadays,” he said. “And it is only getting worse.”

Ashraf looked sideways at the man. He was around forty and wearing a corduroy jacket and glasses. “Don't you have anything better to do?” Ashraf wanted to say, but it only reminded him that he had nothing better to do himself. He looked at his shoes in the mud, the dawn light in front of him, the houses with the closed windows.

He thought of the text message his mother had sent him earlier. It had question marks instead of spaces between the words, because she never used her mobile phone.

Please?come?home?

“All people want is things,” the man next to him said. “And sex and violence. Clothes only last one month nowadays. Kids as young as
four learn how to shoot guns on the computer. It is getting worse every day, and the politicians just talk and do nothing.”

“How does this help anyone?” Ashraf said to the man. “What good does this do?”

He did not wait for the answer. He got up from the bench and started to walk away.

“You are a spoiled generation,” the man shouted after him. “You don't know how good you have it. In my day you were thankful.”

Ashraf covered his face with his hands and breathed in deeply. He walked to the apartment building and stopped in front of the entrance. He had remembered the office girl's apartment number without realizing it. Four hundred twenty-four.

GRACE IN THE STORY

Grace looked over her shoulder. The car was driving along the hard shoulder, slowing down and jolting forward, but coming straight toward her. She left the asphalt and walked into the dark fields, away from the road. Her feet got slippery in her sandals from running through the wet grass, the straps cutting into her heels.

Two beams of light illuminated the field in front of her. He had gone off the road and followed her.

Grace stopped. She crouched down and closed her eyes. She wished she were far, far away from here. She wished she were with Rick again, lying in his arms in the bedroom under the silk rose-colored sheets.

A car door opened behind her. She kneeled deeper down in the grass and bent her head between her knees. She knew what it meant to be alone by the side of the road, with footsteps that were getting closer and closer.

“I'm going to die,” she cried. “Just like in the movies.”

NEW PERSON

“How dare you? How dare you do this to me!”

The secretary opened her eyes under the blanket. It was morning.
The lawyer was on her answering machine. His voice was shouting through her apartment.