Pāri tiltam (2)
“Eve?” ... he asks huskily, lingering on her name. “Ieva,” he draws it out, suggests all the intimacy she could see herself clear to giving, “It’s me, Ieva, listen. I’m coming… I’ll be there… soon.”

There’s a pause, which he ends softly, “Eve, sunbeam, Eve. Understand me, I’m begging you. Eve, I’m after, I’m after… fuck it, Eve, … I’m after paradise.”

She hangs up, and he stares at his face in the polished screen of Nuchi’s patch. I pull up at the crossroads at the end of town and turn to face him.

“Where to?”

He hugs himself tight, and kicks out at the underside of the dashboard.

“Where to?” he mumbles, copying my faux business-like manner, “fucking whores, you don’t understand – you just, fuck the whore, you just sit there. I’m after paradise, and you just sit there.”

He falls into silence, the back of his neck stretched forward and his chin resting close to his chest. I turn right and we drive on to the river, the darkness spreading with the evening and tightening my vision ever closer around the beams of the transit’s headlights. It isn’t until we’ve passed through Serene and are just ten minutes or so from the customs zone that he snaps his head back up, snorts, and asks me if I wouldn’t pull over for a green stop.

We all get out. It’s fresh and damp and you hear the frogs’ kvarking straight off. I lean against the transit and while I’m watching our guest fumble with his flies, Nuchi joins me and offers me a fag. I shake my head and give an enquiring nod.

“One of my circle, you know, in the diaspora,” he says.

The tip, then: another one tipped out here after the crash.

“Changed my mind. Give us one, would you?”

Nuchi passes me a troika and I shield the flame he offers with a cupped hand. The tip: caught us all by surprise, didn’t it? Well, not that many would admit it now, but we always become awful clever bastards that little bit too late.

I flick the ash of the cigarette and it drops on to the surface of a puddle in the asphalt. The tip: my eldest daughter made me think of that word. She’d been doing her Planet History at school and while they were studying the concept of time she took to crouching and staring at a giant puddle by the bus stop opposite our block. Its shores would advance and retreat in accordance with the amount of sunshine and precipitation that befell it; the winter would see it ice over and then sit under a foot or so of snow, and the summer would see those boatmen flitting across its surface between sheaths of grass that had rooted in the depths of the mud-covered asphalt. She told me that when she’d look at it, she’d imagine that a certain eroded patch of asphalt that was by the south shore represented a fishing village. Each second represented a month of time, so if she’s waiting at the bus stop for a couple of minutes, then that’s what – 120 months, which is 10 years. And in all that time, you see, nothing changes. The wind-blown current can swing to the left the same way for centuries, until suddenly for no reason that anyone has the power to discern, the wind blows the other way and they have to change where they put the fishing nets down. Our human day for that lot is, well, it’s so long that they probably can’t imagine the great darkness of the night before: the memory of that is something they might only have tagged somewhere down in their DNA from when their ancestors had no knowledge of the light.

So, when we all got a patch each from the Commission, she decides to use hers to film the great puddle each morning while she’s waiting to get picked up – she says it’s for a school project, but I am pleased and proud to see that she was making that bit up. She does it for two days, and then on the third day she sees the great body of water that had been there for years is now sitting under a metre-high heap of hardcore tipped out there in the night.

What’s that? Overly dramatic, is it? Well we didn’t see it happening, did we? Neither one of us two at any rate: look at him there in his green stop. One day he was, like me, more or less sure what he had, and now… he can’t get to his dick to piss out here in the promised land with paradise, I imagine, being back from where he’d come from.

We both get back in the van and as he is still deep in the process, I consider him some more. It would appear that he’s made some progress: his elbow is out at the side, his hand in the general crotch area – but he’s like a puppet held up with string and the puppeteer is drunk or bored or otherwise distracted: his right leg keeps giving way at the knee and he twists around to the right. After a bit he’s corrected and hauled up, only to lean progressively forward, until once again the right knee collapses and the motion begins again. We wait for a few minutes longer, until Nuchi has enough and calls out “Juri! Juri, are you coming, eh? We have to go!”

The call seems to spark Juris out of his meditation and he starts to violently shake his head, an action that disturbs his equilibrium enough for him to fall forward flat on his face midway through his watering of the embankment.
Nuchi groans and opens the door. Juris staggers up and starts to jog forward in awkward spurts, his right hand fumbling with his dick.
“Juri! Hold on. Where are you off to now?”
But Juris is now running; tripping, rising and stumbling into the wood beyond the verge.
“Juri! Come back here, you infernal ferret!”
But Juris is gone and Nuchi isn’t following him. He returns to the van, a few shakes of the head in his gait. I slip the handbrake off. He says nothing, just winds the window up, and I push it into first and pull away.

We are soon at the Teka, her long slow flow pulsing dark patterns out through the silty delta. On this bank of her current, the small square cream-coloured units that house the Norland customs officers are almost bereft of human adornment. The truth is that nowadays the guards can hardly ever be arsed to leave their cabins. Once they see our Letzonian plates, they practically wave us through, scanning our proffered-at-arm’s-length passcodes with an absent gaze into at the dim orange streetlamp-hooded night.

After the slow ten-minute drive, we pull in to a short line near the Letzonian end of the bridge. The old feller with his clipboard and his orange jacket is out making notes. He approaches us, quickly brushes the strands of white hair from his worn bony face, checks our number, and then quickly and furtively jots something down on his docket. He will be back in five minutes doing exactly the same thing. The flow of his route is occasionally blocked by a customs guard or a stretching, smoking chelovek in transit, and when this happens he tends to stop, look down, and articulate a right-angled manoeuvre – 90 degrees to the right for three paces, 90 degrees to the left for another three, and then – you get the picture – all in a shuffling short gait, which is the manner of the wound up. He is tolerated.

Soon Kaspars comes out: look at him with his torch and sweeper – he is in his place for sure – a checkist with humour: yeah, here he comes – carrying his squat frame with a fast purposeful gait and an amused look on his full red face.

“Fresh from your research work, lads?” he bellows as he heads off to the back of the van to cast a cursory torchlight through its dusty windows.

“Well, we have some samples,” says Nuchi as we pass him our passcodes on his return.
“For the lab?”
“For the lab.”
He sweeps the passcodes, hands them back, and rests his forearms on the wound-down window. “Very good, lads. Now I did not get where I am today by standing in the way of science, as you are well aware.”

So, as in the ordained rhythm of things, I open up the back and Nuchi loads me up with a couple of boxes we’d already put aside. I carry them along the narrow pedestrian lane of the bridge. There is no queue, so I just push open the door (scuffed, off-white and a little on the flimsy side) to Head Officer Jana Liepa’s office, and open with a “Hi ho, my dear” (which to the uninitiated, and I don’t know who I am currently addressing, is informal and businesslike, and signals a desire to enter the world of my circle).

“Leave them by the door, tomcat, and come and sit down,” she says, putting her patch down. She makes a show of clearing her desk of stamps and tickets and various documents, and then with a little smile and a tired and gentle sigh lays the following information on me:

“Well, Janchuk, as from next month it looks as though we might not be seeing you anymore. Unless, that is, we can come up with something.”

There’s a rattling on the polystyrene ceiling as the cloud of mosquitoes gathered by the strip lighting rises on a swell. “The word is,” she continues pulling her heavy middle-aged frame up in a hunch – a movement which shortens the arms of her stiff navy blue customs uniform, “they won’t be taking the Kapostas anymore.”
“How so? And who is ‘they’?”
“You don’t understand, love?”

That is how she talks to me. She has a heavy position there in the authority, but like I said, I am in her circle, and that’s one of the many things in this world that you have to understand to know.

“They, my little tomcat, are the tribute lot.”

I just smile. I don’t get it, and I’m not going to say right there in her office that I don’t pay any tribute at all – you can’t be sure they don’t have some tag in the place.

“The word is that now they’ve got almost all the big sweepers up, they’ll be going over to the Rialto.” She says that not in a gossipy way, but in a matter-of-fact style. Then raising but softening the pitch of her voice, she runs her hand through her thick, dyed blond hair and adds that “it will mean you will be needing a cartridge and the flash, though, of course, in your case, well…” and with a sad smile (her lips pulled in and her cheeks dimpled) she looks over my shoulder at the box I’d left in the corner, “it is better you know now so as to work something out.”

I give her a look that I hope conveys both my mature resigned understanding of the situation and my comprehension of the necessity of applying a rational assessment (drawn from the generally available pool of rational assessments) of the possible solutions to the situation. Actually, I’m not sure I fully understand how this information will have any effect on our little operation. I have to tell you that because it is true. It wouldn’t do to kid you. After all, you might be one of those smart types and have this whole thing sorted out. You’ll obviously be reading this in the future and have all that tremendous hands-on-your-hips, over-your-shoulder sight, and, really, bully for you, too.

“Got it,” I look back at the boxes of expired barcode coffee and the bottle of paid-for-in-full Norland spirit, and ask a wordless question, to which she replies with a smile and a shake of her head and a silent “not that”.

We change the subject and find out out how it is going for our relatives – fine, generally, considering. Her daughter and son-in-law are doing well over in Norland. He is a practical sort and has got work in a boatyard. He may even get his papers sorted out soon, which would help considering the declining level of esteem in which our lot are held over there. I give her the usual information in the accepted manner, to which she replies by implying an understanding of what I have glossed over. The informal formalities are done with in no more than five minutes, and I’m soon gripping the steering wheel and watching the coil signal indicate I can turn the key in the ignition.

We cross the river. Nuchi is sleeping, but I bet he can feel the difference between the land on the two banks by the general knocking, bouncing and shuddering affecting his slumber. Since the tip, you see, the roads are worse over here – great dark holes left uncovered after the winter freeze rock and stun the van’s progress; you can sway and drag the transit all you like, but you can’t avoid them all. The vegetation is higher, too: grass and fern alive with snail, tick, mosquito, and frog; the woods between the villages are wilder: thin birch white in the night striking out at strange angles; and it’s generally darker in the inhabited areas: no lighted footpaths, and fewer pockets of plugged-in humanity.