The Beggar and the Hare Read online

  Vatanescu shook the last drops of morning urine on the gravel and prodded his memory in an effort to understand where he was and why. Which of the recent events were part of a dream, and which of them were to become reality. Around him he saw caravans, dubious electric connections, a shack and a spherical barbecue grill. In a brazier burned a fire on which a coffeepot was heating; on the horizon the city was dimly visible. Balthazar, too, now appeared in his true dimensions, and not as a mental image formed on the basis of a disembodied voice. The old man lacked an arm and a leg.

  Balthazar replied to the question Vatanescu had not asked. He said he had left his arm and leg somewhere along the way, just as people always leave something behind: some forget their watch, some their heart, others leave their coat in the cloakroom. Then he thrust a bundle of newspapers into Vatanescu’s hands and explained to him the importance of layers. You had to cram as many newspapers and bits of cardboard under your clothes as you could, until you could hardly move. The toilets in hamburger joints were good places for getting warm, but Yegor’s men reported any unauthorised absences to their boss. There was one toilet break a day, and if you broke that rule you would have to wear nappies. If you had the money you could buy wool, quilting and down, but if the donors could see them under your rags they would feel cheated. A beggar could afford no anachronisms or breaches of style, and below a female beggar’s ragged skirt there must be no flash of Manolo Blahniks, or even of fancy trainers.

  Vatanescu sat in the metro, stood on the escalator, sat at his place of work. Today and from now on it would rain; autumn was here, which out in the country meant clear bright air, red and yellow colours everywhere, and rubbish burning in gardens. In the city, however, autumn was a colder, wetter and greyer affair. Vatanescu tried to empty his mind, but some advertising image or passer-by or sound always brought him back to reality.

  If one forgets about the knee pain, the need to urinate, the homesickness and the shame, this is the most boring job in the world. A conveyor belt job in which neither the conveyor belt nor the worker moves, but the world does instead. How many building workers enjoy their work? How many briefcase-carrying men and suit-wearing women?

  They do their share in order to obtain their share.

  Don’t worry, Miklos, you’ll get your football boots.

  When a coin fell into the cup you had to express your gratitude by an imperceptible movement of the head. Not a word, especially not in English, Yegor had instructed. You had to keep playing your part, which was that of a person who came from nowhere, understood nothing and was capable of nothing. You had to stay at arm’s length, the length of two cultures. Beggar and donor had to be strangers. Any familiarity would end in acceptance, mutual understanding and a solution. Bad for business.

  Passers-by who all looked the same, coming and going, never stopping. A child pointed at Vatanescu, asked his parents, ‘What’s that?’ and received a tug at his sleeve in reply. A middle-aged man spat at him. An old woman blessed him and handed him a religious newspaper.

  The average daily wage was one and a half euros, of which one euro belonged to Miklos. Vatanescu was tormented by hunger. In the stores downtown you were lucky if fifty cents bought you two sticks of liquorice. A hungry person was cold all the time, a cold and hungry person caught flu. And a person who was hungry, cold and suffering from flu did not perform well at work. The darkness repeated itself, one’s head became filled with gloomy thoughts.

  Why would anyone ever have wanted to live in a climate like this?

  The wind is torture. The sleet penetrates one’s skin.

  Vatanescu had calculated that the nuclear-war survival rations were enough to last a month, but one day Balthazar finished them off. He excused himself by saying he could not control his hand and mouth, otherwise he would never have swallowed such crap.

  Hunger, the beginning and end of everything. Vatanescu sat in the buzzing metro and stared at a child several seats away, especially at the hamburger the child was munching.

  Just as Vatanescu was about to lunge in the direction of the French fries, the train stopped at a station above ground where he noticed a large open-topped container in the back yard of a building.

  He got out and headed for the container. People were climbing up into it. A moment later they jumped down again with full plastic bags in their hands. Vatanescu also swung himself over. The container was like something out of a children’s movie, a world made of chocolate discovered in some gloomy forest. There were steaks, sausages, cartons of fruit juice and milk, cold cuts of ham and cheese, loaves of bread, oat-flakes. There were spices, strange pies filled with rice pudding; there were candy bars and condoms. Someone was throwing it all away because its sell-by date was the same as the one on the calendar.

  Vatanescu did some hunting and gathering, and that evening he barbecued a kilo and a half of corn-fed pork shoulder on the spherical grill. With Balthazar, he chopped the peppers and the meat, added cream, and spiced the whole dish as only the inheritors of a rich gastronomic tradition know how. They ate it all in silence, scraped the grease and gravy from their paper plates with crusts of white bread and smiled. Everything seemed better with some food in one’s belly. Next batch onto the grill, and party up!

  The drinks for the pig-feast came from a cruise ship. For old Balthazar knew that the passengers on ferries from Estonia were particularly careless, and so, behind a pillar in the sea terminal, he had got his hands on three boxes of red and white nectar.

  Intoxication sharpens the senses and slows the passage of time, so Balthazar and Vatanescu quietly filled their begging cups over and over again, engaging first in small talk and gradually moving on to more serious matters. Balthazar talked about the neo-Nazis in Hungary who had used baseball bats, and he talked about an old Danish passer-by who had put enough money in his cup to support him for a year, with neither demand nor explanation. He talked about his family, whom he had not seen for so long that he did not know if they were still alive, or if his wife had found another man to change the light bulbs.

  The fire crackled, and the wine warmed Vatanescu’s stomach and mood. Balthazar muttered that of all the people in the world the one he missed most was his mother, that ugly old witch with whom he had never stopped quarrelling.

  Every day my son learns something I ought to be there to see.

  Every day my son fails to learn something because I’m not there to teach him.

  ‘Don’t make life into a romantic problem,’ Balthazar said. ‘There’s no shortage of things to complain about in everyday life. Even the owners of three-storey mansions have grievances. So do prime ministers, consultants and charismatic leaders.’

  Then he opened a pack of meatballs. After that there were grilled steaks with peppers and spicy butter.

  Balthazar was afraid that his career as a wandering beggar would never take him home again. He had embarked on his foreign mission in the early 1990s, as soon as the borders were open, or rather as soon as the shrinking employment and social security options at home had forced him to cross them. He had always thought, I’ll spend the autumn, winter and spring up here, and then I’ll go home. But now was not the time to fret about it; today was harvest day.

  Someone produced an accordion, and Balthazar played ‘Mad Solsky’s Polka’. He played the end of ‘Summer of Tears’. He played and played, until Vatanescu lost his memory and Balthazar his sense of balance and they lay in the gravel with their arms around each other’s necks, surrounded by a wasteland that had been turned into a diabolical mess.

  Chapter Two

  In which we learn how Yegor Kugar, a lone drug and human trafficker, grew up and lost an ear

  Yegor Kugar was a professional in the security sector whose career began in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Later on, the artificial Union filed for bankruptcy, but that change of affairs had no effect on Yegor Kugar’s life and deeds – at least not of a negative kind. Regimes may fall, but the security police remain. The security p
olice are the regime. From Kugar’s professional point of view the nosedive of the Bolshies was actually a positive event, one that improved the state of the markets. Unstable domestic politics and power vacuums always mean brilliant new opportunities for those with no shortage of nerve and testosterone.

  ‘I brought the poppy flowers of the mullahs to the nouveau-riche of my own land. A briefcase full of opium, several briefcases full of banknotes. Our kind of agricultural subsidy. That way the level of my income rather swiftly reached that of my clients. I bought a Nokia mobile phone the size of a beer-crate but couldn’t use it to call anyone, as there weren’t any network towers in our neck of the woods yet.’

  At first Yegor sold sackfuls of poppies, then opium, but having been brought up on the street he soon realised that the longer a small businessman works up his raw stock the fatter his wallet will be. With his takings Yegor Kugar bought what every newly rich motherfucker throughout the world buys: an outsize four-by-four. It might do the tramcar-riding intelligentsia good to find out what it feels like to go rolling along in one’s very own bulletproof, family-car-eating Hummer.

  Yegor needed a temporary residence for holidays, so he bought a floor of the former Party members’ apartment block. When the heroes of the Great Patriotic War on the floor above complained about the noise, Yegor bought that floor as well and moved the heroes out to the street. In his new home Yegor Kugar celebrated his own ego, the good sides of his small part in world history, among presidents, sports stars and the bearded, pointy-hat-wearing radicals of the Orthodox Church. It was an endless shindig, like the one in Yegor’s favourite book The Dirt, which describes the everyday life – or rave-up – of the band Mötley Crüe. For in Yegor’s eyes two beings were superior to all others: Vince Neil and Joe Stalin. Yegor himself puts it like this:

  ‘I’ll tell you straight, as it’s important if you want to understand my character and don’t just want to stick me in the slammer. I’m mad about screwing. It’s the only way I know to get the shit out of my head when I’m under this goddamn stress all the time. Screwing is better than fighting, no? At first I never did drugs myself because I knew it would immediately screw up the stock records and the sales chain follow-up.

  ‘What’s the alternative? Drinking puts you out of action for several days. It’s better to empty your head with screwing.

  ‘Two weeks of business, two weeks in my pad with Miss Uzbekistan. There are all kinds of broads in the world, of all races, sizes, smells and tastes. There are the Pam Andersons and the Finnish beauty queens (but there are also the junkies, the halfwits and the Alla Pugachevas). There are the semi-uglies who are also hot nymphos in an easy-going sort of way. There are the seventeen-year-olds who look like women of thirty and there are the forty-seven-year-olds who’ve kept their resale value. There are the rump roasts who are bigger and lovelier than the sum of their holes. And there are the ones who are just holes, for whom I just meant money, drugs and connections; in other words a hole through which they could sniff coke with NHL hockey players. But fun was always had on both sides, until it got embarrassing, at which point I’d tell the ladies to go, and order new ones. It didn’t seem possible that such a life would ever end.

  ‘I just can’t sleep alone; I need someone beside me; it doesn’t matter who it is as long as she has a good body. That’s how it is with the women back home, but over here the ladies have been let into the labour market; they have too many opportunities so they can let their figures go and quit wearing makeup.’

  Yegor Kugar wanted more serious challenges in his life, and so he expanded his business activities from drugs to arms. A market was offered to him on a plate: hostile armies. The most important thing was that conflicts were ongoing, that no peace negotiations were started, that the situation did not become normalised. As long as the hostile army was within binocular range and antagonistic, one could trade drugs for arms.

  ‘Shitistan, Blackanistan and blah-blah-blah. I got my supply of happy dust from the tribal warlords, paid in cash, or rather in Kalashnikovs. Then, just for form’s sake, a little skirmish with those same warlords, and at the same time an application to HQ for leave, which was granted, of course, as I slipped in some powder as a sweetener.

  ‘The problems began when the enemy side began to tighten up their morale. Worst of all were the separatists, read B-league fundamentalists, read clerics. They’re an obstacle to free trade, a bit like your social democracy here. They scared the pants off me, because they weren’t scared of us at all. Kind of like the Finns during the Winter War: let the Russkies bring their millions of tanks, we’ll mow them down with our bows and catapults. In place of fear and flight they had hate and faith. Extremely dangerous. I respected them and despised them. But dang and drat it, if they’d gained such unlimited power, why on earth did they go on living in caves and ruins? They made threatening videos, took hostages and muttered their holy scripture, though they’d have done better to make music videos and build swimming pools in their basements with pole dancing, billiard tables and drinks cupboards.

  ‘I realised that they didn’t know much about screwing, either. That they could only get it up when they were able to rape someone. Their male cousins.’

  But before Yegor Kugar occupied a position of command in the security services, before he was a drug dealer and arms trafficker, he was a zip-suited Soviet child. Mama Kugar made copious use of what analgesics and psychotropic medicines were obtainable in the army sector, and exploited to the full the limited competition that was characteristic of real socialism. It would not be unfair to call her a rather lazy and ineffectual mother.

  Mama Kugar shirked as many of the aims of the five-year plan as she could, consumed her vodka by the gram and left her child to the regime. All Yegor Kugar had seen of his father was a single photo, and that photo was still in his wallet along with those of Vince Neil and Joseph Stalin. In it his father had the look of his son, the eyes of a gambler and the shirt of a sailor. A look of the kind that awakens a woman’s desire but also signifies conjugal violence.

  Yegor Kugar spent the first three years of his life, so important from the point of view of psychological development, on a nuclear submarine base. For eleven months of the year his father was away on assignment, and his mother was down and out at the same time. Like her only son, Mama Kugar was mad about screwing and incapable of sleeping alone, because if she did, reality and responsibility came calling. When it became clear to Yegor’s father what Mama did in her free time, it took only four minutes for Yegor and Mama to find themselves standing on the potholed highway some tsar had built with serf labour for his journey to the Arctic Sea.

  The father disowned his son.

  Later the son disowned his father.

  Such was the dough from which Yegor Kugar was baked.

  School did not interest him. He began the cycle that moves from lockup to prison to reformatory to juvenile detention centre to prison camp. He was interrogated by the security police who decided that, both out of economic considerations and in the interests of reducing the homicide figures, it would be better to make the troublemaker a part of the organisation, rather than its enemy.

  Training.

  Hot meals.

  A mattress and a blanket.

  Acceptance by the community.

  Yegor Kugar was not afraid of anything – he knew how to use a firearm and had no scruples about inflicting harm on his fellow human beings as long as it was preceded by an unambiguous order from above. In his gala uniform on graduation day Yegor Kugar got an erection that took control of his whole body.

  The social crisis. The drug trade. The arms trade. Women.

  ‘For a long time I stayed clean, but sure enough in the end I succumbed. I could no longer look at a Coke Zero in my hand while others were snorting happy dust, and so I discovered how to enjoy life. For me the most important thing was that with cocaine I could screw for longer.

  ‘The gay lads from a TV interior design show came to do up my p
ad. That meant that more and more girls knew my door code, and the last party went on for a month. I invited Mötley Crüe to come and play and they probably did, but I can’t remember anything about it.

  ‘It’s just a shame that one morning I woke up next to quite the wrong girl – a broad named Irma Mölsä with big boobs and diamond earrings who was the girlfriend of my boss, Vyacheslav Mölsä. She was a dead fish in bed, in spite of her perfect ass.

  ‘The situation worked out exactly as we’d been taught in training school. I ended up in an industrial area of St Petersburg under the ramp in a car repair shop where a disturbed mechanic gave me a clout on the ear that seriously damaged my skull. After that I had a total blackout, but I woke up in a hospital that reeked of potatoes, missing an ear and an eye. I was alive because I was to be an example to others. That kind of thing has been going on since the time of the Romans.’

  And so Yegor Kugar ended up at the hospital exit, concussed, homeless, broke and dismissed from the security police. Next he found himself sitting in the back seat of the car of a Romanian hi-fi salesman who took his rings, phone and watch as payment. The journey ended in a suburb of Bucharest, where Yegor Kugar’s new career began.

  ‘A rough country, with rough people. Damn gypsies, the lot of them. I went to night school, which means that I began to roam the streets to show them how barmy I was. That’s how I began to get work. The main commodity was broads aged seventeen to thirty-four, and the main market was Central Europe. In between there were these deadly boring trips to the North to collect the pennies scraped together by beggars like that loser Vatanescu. I should never have gone anywhere near him.’