It had a map of a city on it and “Greetings from New York.”
“Dear Ma,” it read on the other side. “How are you? I am sorry I could not make it for your birthday. Busy, busy, you know how it is. Please write me back, Ma. Everyone sends you their best. Glenn.”
Glenn was Mrs. Blue’s son. She had seen his picture in her apartment. He was bald, Glenn, but his face looked friendly. There was a return envelope attached to the card with Glenn’s address on it and a stamp. The secretary held it up in the air. The sun shone on the paper. It wasn’t raining anymore. She filled a glass with water, drank it, washed and dried the glass and placed it back in the cupboard. Then she returned to the table and crossed out “Ma” in the postcard.
“‘Dear Laura,’” she read out loud. “‘How are you? I am sorry I could not make it for your birthday. Busy, busy, you know how it is. Please write me back, Laura. Everyone sends you their best.’” She repeated the sentence “please write me back, Laura” a few times. It had been a long time since she heard someone say her name. The last one had been the manager, during her job interview.
“Laura Zimmerman can come in,” he said in a bored voice, the same voice her doctor used when he called her from the waiting room. She’d written her name on a contract that day, a contract that said, “Laura Zimmerman, hereon referred to as the secretary.”
She remembered the manager taking the contract, putting it in a drawer and locking it. Since then, he called her “secretary.” Or “my dearest secretary,” when he needed his dry cleaning picked up. The secretary thought about her name, lying locked away in that drawer. It was as though it had been taken out of the air that day.
“Which is a good thing,” she reassured herself, “a necessary thing. This will lead to things, soon things will start, like they start for everybody.” She paused for a little bit. Any moment now, she thought, any moment now.
She wanted to continue thinking about those things that would start any moment now, but she wasn’t really sure anymore what she meant. There was a silence in her head and she sat quietly, looking at the unpacked boxes and the white walls. Then she took the sheet of paper from her diary and wrote “Dear Glenn. Thank you for your beautiful card. The birthday was wonderful. All is well—I have a job as a secretary and a spacious apartment. How are you?”
THE TAX BILL
Rus was pacing down the street from the post office to his house, his gaze fixed on the letter from the tax office, nervously repeating specific words or sentences that upset him.
“Dear Mr. Rus. Recently, the existence of your ‘accommodation’ at Low Street 1 came to our attention. The construction of this ‘apartment’ was never reported to the Department of Planning and Building, and it is not mentioned anywhere in the City Plans of ’85 or ’08 (see Book 2. Appendix 5. City Plans).”
“Accommodation,” Rus repeated as he walked down the market square, past the passersby, who kept their distance. “City Plans!”
“We hereby inform you that your ‘apartment’ was illegally built. It is the only fourth-floor apartment in the entire three-story housing block. It was presumably hand-built during the war from scrap materials (see Book 2, Section 3. Unauthorized Constructions and Illegal Habitats).”
“Scrap materials,” Rus said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Unfortunately, under the Housing Entitlement Law as installed in the ’70s—and you know what kind of hippie mentality they had back then—we cannot demolish a home where the occupant has lived for over seven years. Not even in your case: a construction that was never even intended for living, but most likely used only to shoot enemy carrier pigeons out of the air (see Book 2. Appendix 1. War Constructions: A City Catalog).”
Rus snorted. The thing about the pigeons was obviously something they had made up to make him feel even more under attack. The wind was cutting through the thin fabric of his tracksuit, but he did not notice it. He clenched the paper in his hand.
“However,” the letter read, “since we cannot demolish it, the apartment has now been registered retroactively, which means community taxes will have to be paid going back to your eighteenth birthday—to be paid today, before 5 o’clock (see Book 1. Taxes).”
That sentence was followed by that horrible amount and all kinds of threats about what would happen if he didn’t pay, even talking of things like “eviction” and “auction.”
“But why should I pay this?” Rus shook his head anxiously as he zigzagged among the fish stalls, the carpet stalls, the cheese and nut stalls, and the tram rails. “Two thousand six hundred fifteen for using the water and some kind of road maintenance! I never even use the roads! Why do they think I have that kind of money?”
“Since you have recently declared that you have a substantial income as a controller, we believe you will have no problem meeting the payment deadline.”
“Declared!” Rus shouted as he entered his street. “I have never declared anything, I.” With these words, Rus came to a sudden halt. A memory had catapulted itself from the back of his brain right in between his thoughts and now started playing in his mind like a slow-motion movie.
“Good afternoon,” the memory started. “Would you like to participate in a City Survey?”
It was a boy who’d asked him this, just last winter, when Rus’s doorbell had rung. The boy who rang the doorbell was standing in Rus’s doorway, holding a pen and a paper. He smiled. Rus did not know what to answer. His doorbell never rang.
“Everybody who completes the survey form gets a little gadget.” The boy held a small, shiny object in the air. “It’s a mini calculator. You can add and subtract with it, multiply and divide.”
“Yes,” Rus said, “I’d like to participate.” He stretched out his hand to take the calculator, but the boy put it back in his pocket.
“My name is Ashraf,” he said. “I work for City Statistics.” He handed Rus a plastic card with a photo on it.
Rus looked at the card. It said “City Statistics Identification.” Rus squinted at the card. It was unclear what he was supposed to do with it.
“That’s me,” the boy said, pointing at the picture.
Rus held the card up to the light. He did not know exactly why he did that, but he had to participate in order to get the calculator. He had to calculate a lot every day.
“It really is me,” the boy said. “It is my picture.” The boy took the card from his hands and held it up against the light too. “Right?” he said. He wiped the card with his sleeve and looked confused. “They’re strange things, pictures. But I’m sure it’s me.”
“Of course,” Rus said. He tried to sound reassuring.
“The thing is,” the boy said, “normally, a face is in movement, but when you take a picture, it gets frozen. It is not me, Ashraf, who is represented in this photo, but just one of my many faces.” The boy squinted at the picture. “That’s why a picture can show a very different face than the way you see yourself for instance.”
“Yes,” Rus said. He’d never had his picture taken by someone, not that he could remember. “When will I get the calculator?”
The boy gave Rus the paper and the pen. Rus had never filled out a form before, but this seemed very easy. Name? Age? How long he had been living there, any family? Did he have dogs?
“RUS, 25, Since I Was Born, They Left Me,” Rus penned. “No Dog!”
“Have you been unemployed in the past ten years? If no, go to question 7.”
“No,” Rus checkmarked. He knew exactly whom the unemployed were, always hanging around outside the supermarket in their mobility scooters or sitting on a bench in the