Rus Like Everyone Else. Bette Adriaanse

       Contents

Night

      About the Author

       NIGHT

      There you are.

      It’s night now, and if you are coming to see me you need to take the night bus, number seven in an easterly direction. The city is dark and you’ll see the yellow lights of the streetlamps flash by behind your own reflection in the bus window.

      “Canal Street,” the driver announces in a tired voice. That’s where you get off. The bus stop is on the bridge between the old part of the neighborhood, with the low flats and the three-story houses, and the new part, with the glass apartment buildings and the construction sites. You see the boats rocking in the black water of the canal; the windows of the flats across the water are dark. It is late, but if you turn around toward that tall glass apartment building behind you, and look up to the seventh floor, you’ll see one window that is lit by a desk light. Behind that window sits a girl with a blond ponytail, looking back at you. That is me.

      Down below, next to the front door, there is a list of all the people who live in my building. You press the buzzer that says LUCY and my voice says, “Of course, I’m always here for you,” through the machine. You come into my room and hang your coat over the chair, and I am sitting here by the window as I always am.

      “Come stand next to me,” I say. Then I point out the window.

      You see those flats and those houses across the water? I know everyone who lives there. I know every name and I know a lot of things about them too. In my profession you get to know a lot very quickly; it is like I have been standing in a corner of their living room, so to speak. That is how I watch over them.

      There, in that low dark flat right across from us, the light blue curtains on the fourth floor, that’s where Mrs. Blue lives. I call her Grandma in my mind sometimes. She is not my real grandma, of course, but she does look like one a lot. Her round, wrinkled face lies like a multicolored raisin on the pillow. She always wears blue eye shadow and wrinkled pink lipstick to bed. She is almost deaf; the white noise in the blue-colored bedroom comes from a radio she does not hear. That radio has been on for almost a year now, just as long as Mr. Blue has been gone. He did not switch it off when he left.

      One apartment to the right from Mrs. Blue’s, behind those white curtains, lives the girl with the black hair called the secretary. At this moment, she is having the same dream she always has, the dream in which she is waiting for something. The clock you hear ticking so loudly is in the living room. Although she’s been here for almost a year now, she still hasn’t unpacked any of her boxes. Her things fill only one-tenth of the room.

      Next to Mrs. Blue and the secretary’s building is a side street called Low Street. Do you see those old houses right at the beginning of that street? Squint your eyes and you’ll see one fourth-floor apartment on the corner. On this floor lives a young man who has no surname. His only name is Rus, after his father, a Russian sailor he’s never met. Rus too is sleeping; his short dark hair contrasts with his flowery sheets. There is something about Rus—maybe it is the way he lies like a child on his belly, or maybe it’s the soft features under his two-day beard—that makes him look like he’s not fit for this world.

      In a few hours, you’ll see the sun come up over Halfords auto-center. One by one the people in my neighborhood will wake up again. Alarm clocks will start ringing in the flats and the houses, people will walk dozily to their bathrooms, curtains open. Mrs. Blue will appear in her window over there—she always combs her hair by the window at seven o’clock. And I’ll get ready too. I’ll put on my Royal Mail trousers, my Royal Mail coat, and pull my ponytail through my Royal Mail cap. You’ll stay here, by the window, and you’ll see me cycle down below along the canal, toward the Royal Mail Centre in the business district. There, I sort the envelopes while my boss counts the days till his retirement out loud. At ten, my round starts. Like every morning I bring the letters and the bills and the warnings and the postcards, shouting “hiya” and “good morning” left and right, waking up the lazy with my mailbox clatter.

      RUS