His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a sense of impending doom. The feeling seemed as real as his daydreams. He turned round to look at the undulating tigress, and his body went cold. He realised that the dead rat was in fact himself.
Terrified that his wife might find out his true identity, he slipped under the bed. Everything seemed larger underneath. He wondered why the dead rat’s eyes had been so wide open, and he hoped his own weren’t open so wide. He crawled into the kitchen. From the ground, everything looked familiar, yet strange. He glimpsed parts of the kitchen he’d never seen before. Underneath the sink he found a large web with two spiders sleeping in the centre, locked in an embrace. Between two empty bottles he saw an old sprouting potato and a jar of mustard he thought he’d thrown away months ago. The sky outside the window was getting lighter. He tried to decide on a plan of action. The tigress would be waking up soon. He rose to his feet and set to work on making breakfast. When he realised he must first tackle the pile of dirty plates, he slipped into a daydream, as he always did before starting the washing-up.
He climbed into the control cabin of the steamship and grabbed hold of the wheel. But instead of letting the ship fly into the sky, he steered it down into the deep blue sea. A maintenance worker ran over and told him to stop. He said the ship had sprung a leak and was sinking fast. ‘Why are you still steering?’ the worker asked, glaring at him sternly.
A few months later, the professional writer saw the editor creeping through the corridors of the People’s Cultural Centre. He seemed to move like a ball of dough that was being pulled by invisible hands. His wife had thrown him out of the flat, and he was spending his nights on a fold-up bed in the corner of his office. Without a woman to lean on, he had lost his bearings and developed all the characteristics of an old man. He had become dirty, slow-witted, forgetful. His body gave off an indefinable odour that made one’s stomach turn. His fashionable clothes looked out of place on his now withered and hunched frame. At noon he would walk down to the Cultural Centre’s forecourt to play chess with the old pensioners who gathered there. The writer was taken aback by his transformation. Looking at him then, no one would have believed that this grubby old man had served as editor of the town’s most prestigious literary magazine for fourteen years.
The writer’s mind turns to the female novelist, a woman he slept with once. Immediately he remembers the smell of make-up and tobacco on her face. He still bumps into her sometimes outside the Writers’ Association or at some literary event, and is taken aback by her haggard appearance. It always amazes him how some women seem to turn old overnight. He holds her responsible for their moment of intimacy. One night two years ago, he went to her flat to offer advice on her latest novel. When he arrived, he found the lights were dimmed, there were candles burning, and Old Hep was out of town. He fell into her trap without resistance, but regretted it almost at once. He found her shallow, and resented what he saw as her undeserved literary success.
She had no imagination, he says to himself She relied on her string of affairs to provide her with material for her tearful love stories. The critics claimed she was a great writer, they said her books were inspired. To achieve success as an author these days, you have to have led a troubled life. The more you have suffered, the better your books will sell. Today’s women understand the importance of time, but ignore the need for direction. They focus on the colour of a lampshade, they worry about which parts of their bodies to cover or expose. As soon as they find a man to act as their safe shore, they start floating through life like a boat drifting aimlessly out to sea. She was a boat stranded in mid-ocean, and the editor (it sickens me even to think about the old man) was a dirty sock she had discarded years before but was still floating by her side.
Today, the editor is an old pensioner who walks through the park every morning, listening to his portable radio. His wife divorced him last year and opened a hardware store in an empty room in the Writers’ Association. This innocent-looking shop is in fact a front for a variety of black market activities. Through her father’s military connections she is able to secure many sought-after licences and buy products that she can sell on for double the price. She has made a small fortune, and has lost interest in writing. Her business career is much more compatible with this crippled society, and it has given her the ultimate signs of success: a Western Dream mattress, wallpaper, electric kettle, a 28-inch television, a set of porcelain crockery, ajar of Nescafe, a bottle of French wine, aluminium window frames, and the centrally heated apartment that contains all these things.
‘Is this what we all work for?’ the professional writer asks out loud. ‘What we go to university for, make friends for? Tell me, is it worth all the pain?’
‘What pain?’ The blood donor stubs his cigarette out. He has become almost as fond of asking questions as the writer.
‘What I mean is — all literature has its cost. Writers must suffer for their art.’ The professional writer doesn’t want to pursue his previous train of thought.
‘Everything has its cost. If you work hard enough, you can buy anything you want. Except time, of course,’ the blood donor says, triumphantly.
‘Yes, except time.’ The writer knows that his fling with the female novelist was meaningless, there were no feelings involved. He admits that when she was a young woman, her writing had shown great promise, but it never lived up to expectations. All she produced in the end was a stream of inconsequential words. The professional writer smiles complacently, convincing himself that the reason he is unable to finish his novel is because he is practising self-control. However, in his heart he knows that he is even more worthless than the female novelist. He lacks the courage to commit himself to one thing entirely, or to jump into the thick of things. He wants to be a bystander, an objective witness, but in order to keep himself fed, he is forced to rely on others and submit himself to their needs. He is lazy by nature, and self-obsessed, and is destined to eke out the rest of his life on the poverty-stricken margins of society. He will never settle down to any serious work. There is always some obscure detail to research or mundane duty to perform, and while these provide a welcome distraction, they also give him excuses to delay what he needs to do. However, these diversions pull him back to the real world. Without them, he would spend his entire life suspended in mid-air.
The lights have gone out once more, and the room is pitch black. For a moment, the professional writer feels like a plastic bag caught in the high wind. It occurs to him that although the plastic bag is worthless, it is able to rise above the mundane world and change directions. When the wind blows against it, it fills with air and glides through space — things the earth-bound can never do.
The Street Writer or The Plastic Bag in the Air
In his mind, the professional writer sees the street writer squatting on a pavement in the new part of town, which a few years ago was open fields. It is a brand new district by the sea, built of concrete and cement. The local peasants who were evicted from their land and rehoused in the new three-storey concrete blocks are not yet accustomed to their new way of life. They still keep their timber and mouldy raincoats outside their front doors, even though they will never again have to burn wood or labour in the fields. The women continue to tie black scarves around their heads, although they no longer need to shield themselves from the sun. The men wear Western suits now, but still smoke their water pipes every afternoon. They always stand at an angle, as though they were leaning on their hoes in the fields. The children continue to shit in the streets rather than use the new toilets in their bathrooms. The flat roofs are pierced by a clutter of television aerials. Farmers from the hinterland who have found work in town but have failed to secure a residency permit, flock to this new district to rent private rooms. The local peasants have become wealthy landlords overnight, and the residents of the old town have been forced to take notice of the ‘cabbage-faced bumpkins’ they have previously preferred to ignore.