peat ([info]peat) rakstīja,
@ 2017-10-08 21:43:00

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Captain, Eve, Dawn, the Sweepers un Sapratne (5)
I get on the tram , take a seat by the window, and start to think about what Jana had said yesterday. I can’t quite piece it together. Did she mean we’d not get our day pass-codes to get over the river? But what would that have to do with the sweepers, the tribute, and the Kaposta? I can’t click it together and as the concentration has nothing to grip on, I let it sink for the journey. It might be clearer later: maybe Nuchi can put the pieces together.

The seat in front of me is occupied by a tough old customer ignoring the conductor, who’s trying to get him to cough up for a ticket. The scene plays out as we move over Damp Street, over the railway bridge to Sinners’ Alley. I try to ignore it and stare out of the window. Everything is in motion: the tram, the wind, the sap, the planet, the stars and of course the sun, under whose influence the hues of the buildings change from a muddy brown through a rusty orange to a bleached yellow.

“Buy a ticket if you want to travel. 1 Kaposta!”

He had been put aboard by his bottle brothers at the stop. I had noticed because there had been some gravity to the handshakes and the heavy hands clapped on shoulders in their farewells. Now, his silence is dense and long and seems to unsettle the conductor, whose chipped pink fingernails start nervously tapping the ticket machine. She looks away and says in a disappointed way (as if her granddaughter had left the milk out overnight and now she was going to have to throw it away), “Now, I will have to call the control.”

He sticks his head against the window and speaks for the first time; hard, low, slow and with a measured impatience:

“Then you call the arsing control.”

“Sinners’ Alley” declares the tram’s recorded message, “next stop Freedom Street.”

I decide to get out here. I fancy a short walk, and because I am in the mood I offer my ticket to the gentlemen in question. I stand there holding it in front of him. I notice his deep urban tan and take in the smack of grain spirit. With some this is the damp stink of failure, but some men straight off give a sense of having being asked vastly tougher questions than you have, and even if they are ready for a standing count, they still know they are of far more account than you. He was one of these.

“Fuck it, take my ticket.”

He slowly reaches out his hand and picks it warily out of my paw. I move away and catch the face of the conductor. We share a glance – hers a muddy mix of disapproval and relief.

There is a peaceful feel to the centre this morning. People are on their way silently, save for the click of heel on pavement. Car wheels whisper past intermittently, the odd bubble of sound blows out of open windows – a snippet of song here “This is the day love came to stay…”, a fragment of simmering political discourse there, “No, no the restructuring is yet to be…”.

I see the van parked on yellow lines by the chemists already. Nuchi has already started - there he is already coming out of the apoteka, counting some sheaves of Kaposta as he does. We greet at the front of the van, and he shows me the notes.

“Hi, Listen Nuchi, we forgot about Vera.”
He taps the hot hood of the engine, an aid to thought.
“Mother, mother, what do you want to do?”
“How much did you get off them?”
“Not so much this time – about 70, so a profit of around 40, I guess – you know better than me – how much did they want?”
“About 30, yeah.”
“Over here, what she needs will be about 30 at least.” I figure.

We stand there for a few moments weighing it up.

“Well, we can’t stay here.” he concludes.

I nod my assent, he throws me the keys, and we get in.

As I start her up, I say “Let’s see at the end of the day where we stand.”
“Of course,” agrees Nuchi, winds the window down and lights up.

I stick her into first, take off the handbrake and pull away.

We only have a few packages for relatives this time, so most of the morning is taken up with offloading the perishables and prescription pills. Odd that there is so few of the bought or otherwise acquired for the loved ones this time (a couple of small heavily taped boxes, and a pram - we did the taping by the way: you can never know what some smart alec is prepared for us to risk on his behalf). Since the crackdown on our lot working over there without papers, the word has spread, and this little service often makes up the bulk of the load.

I do the driving and the lifting. Nuchi’s charming small talk is hitched with a haggler’s awareness. Actually, when I listen to him, he really does seem to be interested in the ailments of shop managers‘ relatives – and in that southern style, too. He seems to suggest another way of living to them; and this topped of with a dash of the illicit and the profitable-for-all-concerned means we do reasonable business, and sure, seeing as its his van I don’t begrudge him the 60% he takes.

We get rid of the perishables first – this time round it’s the usual: the microwave dinners, boxes of pizzas, and unpasteurised beer. The packs of sandwiches and dairy products, you can only really do in the colder months. Now, we’d only take them if we find a freshly filled container round the back of a supermarket, and that’s quite rare nowadays. By and large, our lot over there have it timed and not 15 minutes goes by than the skip is cleaned out.

We make enough to make it worth it. The store managers over the river are still looking for a bit of cash in hand, and they aren’t too greedy. After all, what else are they going to do with their out-of-date stock? Being a country stalking the higher floors of organisation, the health department is financed to firmly follow what goes on over there; not like the blind eye turned here; which, should it for some reason focus, only need a few leaves of Kaposta to resume its stone-like state. Moreover, since the tip, most businesses this side are eager for anything they can get that’s off the official accounting ticket and adds a little hidden disposable to their purchasing power.

We’re almost all done by 1 o’clock – just a box of heart pills and antibiotics the chemists on Freedom Street wouldn’t take and the pram that had been fetched out by a young father from a building site portacabin. The delivery address is not far from a contact out in Swampvillage General who Nuchi thinks will be up for taking the pills. I volunteer to do it as he has to go and look after his daughter. I drop him off after splitting the money – we’ve made 400 kaposta, so that‘s 240 for Vanuchi and 160 for me – it’s OK. It’s just over half the electricity bill at least.

We agree to meet in a couple of days and after entering his contact into my patch, I pull away. Nuchi has a place in a beautiful part of town: the houses are just two storeys high, so the sky is high and wide; and here at ground level, the old crumbling asphalt is lightly covered in the blossom of the Heat trees lining the streets. I open the window; the breeze starts to cool some sweat breaking out on my back, and it strikes me once again: all this soothing Bursttime force breaking forth – is it nature’s balm to the hellish bustling activity our genetic imperative imposes on us? Or is it, or is it…? I catch myself hearing each word of the questions I am asking myself, and decide I need to commune with nature’s bounty by pulling over, taking my boots and socks off, pushing the driver’s seat back until it’s almost horizontal, and closing my eyes.

I put an old cassette of the Captain on, and the vibrating sentiments are welcomed into my surroundings. “Where there’s good, that’s where I’ll be tonight,” he declares. ‘Good’ – what did the philosophers say about ‘good’? Was it ‘good is pleasure’? Or wasn’t it ‘good is not pain’? I can’t remember. To think just a couple of months ago, I could have looked it up straight away on the network. I hope they get they it unenclosed again – it was great.

The breeze is cooling my feet, and the senses, the senses: those primitive senses– ah… why primitive? It’s really the most sophisticated wiring, laid out with sensory switches to reward us for obeying the code. But is this obeying the code? Now, I mean: drifting away with the Magic band, muscles relaxing, the mind wandering – what am I obeying here?

Where’s there woman… I think of my last kiss with Eve, and then I feel the touch of her finger stroking my dick in the hospital bed, and I remember the way her skin would pulse when we held hands when we’d danced. The pulsing: all fired by senses, powered by nerves that come pre-programmed. Is that all it is? And all the romance and feeling we throw into it – all the joy and understanding: is that just a futile reaction to the nothingness of it? I see her walking away – that straight posture, no looking back, no looking back. I see the coal-smeared skin of the toiler in the steam train, the steam: a cloud rising into the air, splitting apart, dispersing and falling, now no longer impressed on the sky, no longer of comment because it is no longer visible, no longer there – the train grinds on, grinding and huffing along the tracks: its two tracks – no looking back, no looking back, run down the tracks, and I am now settled in amongst the grass, blown there by the sweet spring breeze, now just a breath without intent, and the maniacal effort of locomotion just a subsiding tremble in the metal tracks, going, going, gone.. and I am here with the dew, the sun, and the insects, in paradise, ….paradise, ……….paradise…..


















Up, I’m up. The sounds come up. You have to trust us before you turn to dust. We are for you, we love, trust you, a loving lie – telling the truth we love you – a lying lie – the past is you, it will never die … the path is life – let the dying die…and let the lying lie.

I open my eyes. Something’s wrong: I slipped into a dream and it has made me uneasy, but I don’t know why. What was it? Where have I just been? I need to try and piece it together – take the negatives of the dream and hold them to the light. I rub my face, and haul the seat up. Something about paradise. After paradise – ha, that’s what the guy we gave a lift to yesterday said: the one in Nuchi’s circle. That’s what she said to me once. How many Ievas would he have in his patch? I try to scrub the thought, but it is still there, of course. What does it matter, anyway? It is going, going, gone into the past, and the past is you: it will never die. I’m hungry and I have a roll of notes promising reimbursement upon demand, so as the Captain says - let the dying die and let the lying lie: it is what it is.

Within half an hour I am cruising the wide streets of Swampvillage. For those of you who haven’t been here, it’s in the dormitory grid and was built in the Prole Council times, about 40 years ago. So, I’m sure you get the picture: decaying impersonal blocks, within which flat-sized pockets of various forms of family life are slapped together.

I take a left by the back of the hospital, and keep my eyes out for Peat Street. Nuchi said it was down here by the new sweeper. And sure enough, after I come out from behind the 15-floor hospital block, I catch sight of the shiny, dark, windowless tribute collector. They still take a little time to get used to; their long elegant oblong blades slowly rotating horizontally in a clockwise direction atop their tough polished 20 metre-high domed stumps. One for every 10 square kilometres in the city, and for every 50 in the countryside. Some people say they look out of place, but presumably these are the people who would have an idea of what looks in place in a grid like this. To me, they just symbolise another change, soon, in their turn, to be a piece of history, decaying along with the Prole-era factories and this here central hospital erected after the revolutionary war nearly 60 years back.

Nuchi has given me a name and a number. I pull over and call it.

“Hi, Is this Dawn? Hi, I work with Vanuchi, he gave me your number… ah, you are in the course of things. I’m in Peat Street by the new sweeper, uh huh….“

She tells me to come down the little artery reserved for ambulances and hospital supplies. I’m waved through by the guard, and pull the van up to a loading bay. Following Dawn’s instructions, I take the box of heart pills and antibiotics down into the basement.

The dark is feebly illuminated with an orange light and the air is rank with the stink of cat shit. I make my way past the disinfectant departments where the diseased bedding is being cleansed of its intimacy with death, avoiding the gaze of a huddle of porters waiting for their limp loads of laundry to be processed, and keep going until I find the door marked Supplies.

“Hi! Dawn?“

Two faces look up at me from the small desk butted up against up the wall. Dawn looks about 60, and is a short peroxide blond. She is on the land line, but she points towards her colleague, a tall elegant, silver-haired middle-aged man in a white doctor’s robe sitting opposite her. He stands up, takes the box from me, and starts languidly looking through its contents, taking a couple of packets out and turning them over in his hand with his long fingers.

“Just these?” he asks.
“Mmhm.”

Dawn is laughing in a jolly but controlled away in the background, promising to “surely think of something”. I take a look around the strip-light lit room. It’s about 40 metres long, about 10 metres wide and mainly full of trollies with their shelves full of bedding. On the wall opposite there’s an independence-day poster from 30 years ago fading over boxes of detergent and bleach.

“Well?” says Dawn on replacing the receiver.
The man in the doctor’s coat shrugs his shoulders and mutters that “it’s possible”.
“Well, if Sergey says it is possible, then it is possible. What do they say? ‘Impossible is nothing’ - that’s clear, isn’t it?”
“Clear.” I consent and find myself smiling – as if I have been pulled into her arms for a quick lunatic turn on the dance floor.
“Well then it is clear that nothing is clear, if that’s clear, that is.”

The guy in the coat puts the drugs down and gives a series of non-committal gestures: a small lift of his right shoulder, a slight upward pull to the left side of apathetic lips, a gentle stretch of both hands in tandem, and a small nasal exhalation. He then turns to leave, straightening himself as he does so.

I remember Vera, and stop him.
“Doctor, excuse me…”

He turns to look at me, his eyes registering a surprised, yet quite gentle reprimand. He then shakes his head, turns around and pushes the door open.

Dawn shakes her head. “Oh dear, oh dear” she says with a smile on her face.
“Is he not a doctor?” I ask

“Sit down.” she says.

Her patch rings from her jacket pocket: a modern pulsating techno beat. She takes a look to see who the caller is and starts shaking her head. As she lifts the device up to her ear she manages to gesture to both the small red kettle on her neat-but-battered desk and to a pack of coffee on the shelf above.

“Yes, Oscar.” she says in a serious tone.

As the kettle starts to slowly stir the water around the coil, Dawn barely says a word – that is apart from an occasional ‘hmm’, or ‘well Oscar, you see’.

Oscar is not letting her finish. He can sense an obstruction in the water, and evidently feels more pressure is needed. The kettle starts to hiss, so I can’t hear the current of words he is releasing downstream. Dawn, however, seems unmoved. She grimaces silently and looks up at the ceiling. I find a cup advertising a state-sponsored private pension fund, add some coffee, and put my hand on the kettle - the hiss of which is reaching a climax. Oscar must sense his words are unable to shift the blockage and are now circling around in doleful eddies.

‘Well, Oscar darling – let’s see if you think of something.’

The hiss gives way to bubbling, and Oscar’s call is ended.

“Sorry dear – listen, I’m going to have to go. I promise you a coffee next time you come round. Look, take one of those boxes there.“”

She gestures to the boxes underneath the independence-day poster.

“What’s in them?” I ask, picking one of them up.
“The usual,” says Dawn, picking up a clipboard and looking at me a little impatiently, “bleach, toilet paper, washing up liquid, soap”.
“Umm, we usually get paid in the folding obvious.”

“Sweetheart, does it look as though we have cash? Now, my ray of sunshine, I’m sure your wife would appreciate what’s in there, and if not your wife, then your mother, and if not your mother… am I right, or am I…?“

I don‘t answer straight off, but start looking with what I hope is disinterest into the box. However it‘s Dawn who is leading this particular dance, and she soon starts tapping her clipboard. “You can’t stay here, dear – take one box or the other.”

“OK” I say, pick up the hospital supplies, and walk back through the heaps of disinfected linen and cat shit out into the light.

On the first floor of the block holding Dawn and her supplies is the visitors‘ entrance, which also holds a foodnica. I haven‘t eaten since breakfast, so I put the box in the van, lock up, and make my way to the front of the building. It is early afternoon, the sun is out, and yellow butterflies are flitting amongst the weeds. Some of the patients are out in their dressing gowns and slippers, walking and breathing through the grounds with a certain slow reserve.

The foodnica is half-full, mostly with patients and their visitors, although there are a few white-coated staff in attendance. I take some battered skant, cheese sauce and buckwheat; and, as I’m fumbling for the sheaves of Kaposta to pay for it my passcode slips out of my wallet. As I go to pick it up, I see the doctor looking at me. He’s standing at the end of the queue and has just broken off a conversation he’s been having with a slim guy in his late twenties.

I don’t nod – just hold his gaze for a second. I‘ve decided it is quite fair of him not to want to talk about anything other than cut-price drugs past their sell-by date. It’s the honest, safe way to behave – he needs to engage with a certain facet of me, and that is all.

I take a seat by the window, the same seat I sat at when I was well enough to take visitors. I’d sat here with my wife, and then, a few days later, with Ieva. There’s the same dusty dusky-blue hued painting on the opposite wall: a surreal night scene at a train crossing: dwarf-nosed rubber dolphins leading a giant train, its great piston rods protruding vein-like from the engine room and the lights of oil-lamps burning from the slit windows of its carriages. Funny to sit here again, funny to try to recount how it was. My wife with crossed arms and sighs: my illness another weight put on her shoulders, sure – and her touch at the end: both hands on mine, and a look that had required a moment or two of composition to get tight - two tired tied-together travellers late at night, tenderness expressed only after swallowing all the irritation of companionship.

I am hungry, so the reheated fish with its soggy batter sliding off the wing of meat is just fine. I look up at odd intervals at the procession of the queue. It seems that the young gent standing just in front of the doctor is shooting me a look now and again. The doctor himself just looks at the selection, tapping his trouser pocket as he does so.

And Eve – why, she’d been looking at an elderly couple at the next table – looking at them so intently I’d thought it was almost rude. Looking at them with eyes that looked bruised from tiredness. I’d closed my eyes and felt the room sink away – felt I was above the planet – out in space – where I could say anything, make any connection.
‘You are exhausted’ she’d said and touched my fingertips with hers, leaving sparks and and a charging swirling current in my blood stream. Ek… I close my eyes, and try to shake it again: let it be, let her go, let it…
“Excuse me, may I?“
It’s the guy who’d been standing by the doctor. He is slim and quite elegant, and standing there with his tray. He is dressed all in black: black slacks tight at the ankle, polished black dress shoes; and, despite the heat of the day, a thin black zipped-up sweater.
I look around and see there are a few spare tables. He catches me doing this, and adds, “Well, you see, I would appreciate a consultation.“
“Sure.” I say, flattered and a little intrigued.
“Thank you.“ He sets his tray down, pulls the seat back squarely, sits down with a straight back, and proceeds to carefully arrange his cutlery. Before he starts to eat, something seems to strike him as humorous, and with a confident but respectful little smile he says, “I see you had the skant.”

I don’t reply straight off, but this doesn’t disturb him in the slightest. He cuts his cutlet precisely: no tearing of the dead flesh.

“You see,” he continues, “there is an interesting thing about the skant. They rely on electromagnetic senses to locate their prey.”
“As with sharks.“

He nods while eating and doesn’t stop to speak until he’s swallowed.
“Well the interesting thing is that scientists have discovered that electrical signals are being sent from the underside of the fish several hours after its death.”
“Uh huh.”
“Really, you have to wonder why, don’t you? I mean if a thing is dead, it is dead.”
“Maybe then, it isn’t dead?”
“Well yes, that would be interesting. We could redefine the word ‘death’ based not on the thing’s ability to respire, swim and so on, but on whether there are electrical impulses being passed from its, from its …”
“Corpse?”

He laughs again; his eyes are small, his nose elegant and straight, and his thin, light hair is placed crisply across his tight forehead.

“It’s also interesting to think about the ‘its’ isn’t it?”

He takes another mouthful, and although his upbringing (I’m assuming) won’t let him utter a word while masticating, he places his fork down, brings his finger to his mouth and emits a quiet ‘mmm’, designed no doubt to indicate that he is ready to elaborate on the point just made.

“I mean, what is the ‘its’? Who or what does it refer to?“
“Well, corpse means dead body, and the its refers to whose…”
“Yes, yes, but if, let’s say we talk about ‘your corpse’ – excuse me…”
“No, go on.”
“Well – your corpse – you are? What are you? The memories and associations that others have of you? It is a functional possessive tool, excuse me… word, which can help us at the morgue know who is who, but …”
“You work at the morgue?”
“Used to.”
“But we can still talk about ‘my life’ can’t we? I am dead, but my life is…”
“Over, I’m afraid. Once you are dead, your life, excuse me, was.”

Someone drops a saucepan in the kitchen, and there’s a momentary pause in the conversations, the eating, the drinking, the serving, the choosing, and maybe, possibly, the thinking. But it only takes a moment, and soon everything is restarted: it has to.

“You mentioned a consultation?”
“Yes, I did. Well, it is part consultation, part proposition.”

I place my plate to one side. I try to give every impression of being interested yet sceptical, but for some reason even though he is the one doing the selling, I am the one who seems to be under pressure.

“I’ve been given to understand you deal over the river in Norland.”
“Do you need something?”
“No, well… yes.”

He takes another bite, and I wait for him to finish.

“Since our northern neighbours have cracked down on our little economic migration, it’s very hard to get across the river, so… well I’m going to assume you have a merchant pass on your passcode, probably for a week a month?”
“15 days a month.”
“Okay, they are not easy to get,” he says with a faint smile and a searching look.
“No, they’re not.”
“Unless, of course, someone in the issuing department is in your, well… circle.”
“Well, that might do it.”
“OK, I understand… I am called Paulius, by the way.”
“Janis.” I notice that neither of us offer to shake hands. In fact I feel stiffly stuck in the position I’ve adopted despite the hard tip of the plastic chair digging into my shoulder.
“Janis, I would like to …”
“… introduce you to someone? Well, I’m afraid that’s not really possible, Paulius.”

He smiles and moves his head forward, motioning for me to do the same, which for some reason I do.
“I want,” he says very quietly, “to offer you some money – quite a lot of money in fact – for the use of your passcode.”

It’s hard not to laugh. “Paulius, you seem a very intelligent young man, but you ought to know that it’s a personal pass with my name and my code on it. If that wasn’t the case, I would have flogged it ages ago.”

“5,000 Kapostas“ he says slowly and quietly, not looking me in the face, “and please don’t say anything for a minute.“

I don’t. I just sit and look at him as he finishes his lunch. The claustrophobic sounds of ‘I love Rock and Roll’ are bumping and banging along in the background – ‘I got up and asked him for his name, that don’t matter he said cos it’s all the same’. It doesn’t make sense. Is it a joke? I don’t know what the catch is. 5,000 would solve a lot of problems, but it doesn’t make sense. What does he want it for? ‘Make use of it’ he’d said. Does that mean I’ll get it back? What’s he going to do over there with a passcode in my name? And how is he going to get there and back? Jan and her crew on this side might not check if we ask, but she’ll want to know who this Paulius is, and you can’t just claim someone’s in your circle for too little – especially not with a such a contact with as much influence as Jan. And even if they look the other way, the other lot on the other side of the river will check, for sure.

“I don’t understand.” I finally say.

Paulius sighs.

“I just need to get across… for a period of time, and I think this is the best way.”
“Then you will be me, won’t you?” I fish it out of the inside pocket of my jacket, take a look at my photo, and then compare it with his visage. “You’re appreciably younger, Paulius.” I note, passing it over to him,
“Well, I think can get around it.” He smiles, takes a look at the passcode, and then places it on the table between us.
“I don’t know.”
“If I have to doctor it, I will tell you. You will then just have to report it at as stolen once I am over. It is just a small fine, and a wait of a few weeks, if I am not mistaken.”
“During which, I’ll not be able to get over there. And this is, unfortunately, the only income I’ve got.”

“Janis – has no one told you?” He shakes his head and gestures to the cashier. “Look at that machine over there by the till – the pan. You can’t stuff leaves of Kaposta in it. Well, you can try, of course, but it won’t get you a wing of skant. And anyway, soon there will be no Kaposta: no cash, you understand.”
“So what?”

He looks at me and slowly shakes his head. I find myself start to redden.

“What are you going to buy all that out-of-date stuff with?”
“Realia.”
“And how are you going to get those Realia?”
“We exchange for them at the port.”
“With?”
“Kaposta.”
“And when the Kaposta is no longer legal tender?”
“Then in the, what’s it called, the Rev…”
“Rialto.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, and how are you going to sell your black market goods bought over there in tribute-free exchanges over here with a digital currency where every product and service is scanned, and every exchange is collected by the sweepers, and logged for tribute and personal income. How? For Barter? For boxes of bleach?”

So that’s what Jana had meant. Christ, I can be dense.

“There is always a way. I say, “There has to be. We’ll work something out. We always do.”

Paulius starts rubbing his temples, he sighs again, looks around the now half-empty foodnica, and then looks me full in the eye.

“Listen, Janis, I don’t know what is keeping you here. I don’t know why you made the choice to stay here when even the grandmothers were bussing it over there to earn more picking mushrooms than what the state saw fit to pay the doctors back here.”

He pauses, but I don’t answer.

“If a man wants to be able to live, he needs to get over there now, and find a way to stay there. They’re trucking our lot back now – the unskilled ones, but if you are well-trained, they’ll keep you. I don’t know your background, but listen to the advice I am giving you. If you don’t take my money, then use your passcode to get across and then stay and live.”
“So, you plan to stay there. How will I get my pass back?”
“Your pass will be useless in a couple of weeks, unless you have some other plans for it.”
“So you say.“”
“OK, 6,000, but if I return the pass, you will return me 5,000. That is fair, I think.”

He grasps his tray, looks me in the eye, and says “don’t decide now, but come back here on Friday if you are interested – let’s say at 10 o’clock. That will be Changeover Day, if I’m not mistaken. Goodbye, Janis.”

I nod my assent, we shake hands, and he gets up and leaves in the same assured manner in which he arrived.


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