Ruth
Behind the frosted glass of the door, the children’s green-blue silhouettes ring out, noisy and over-tired. Shoes tossed haphazardly in the hallway: fur-lined nylon boots, high-end sneakers—Em had pestered his way to a pair with air cushions in the sole and neon, designed by some grime star from London—she searches for them with exhaustion coursing in her temples.
Em’s school is in the western part of the city center, half an hour’s bus ride from home, but so close to the agency’s offices it makes sense for him to go there. She picks him up after work.
He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pile of new library books beside him, talking with a boy of the same age, giggling quietly. They slap each other’s hands. Boys’ games, halfway between friendship and conflict.
“Em.”
He pretends not to hear, and when she repeats his name, he whispers something to his friend before getting up with demonstrative slowness.
Just a month ago, when the autumn semester began, he would still run up and give her a clingy hug as soon as she came through the door. Now it’s as though he’s ashamed, either of her specifically, or of having a mother at all.
On the bus home he slumps in his seat, doodling on his French homework. A creature with a bat’s wings and a panther’s head, reading a spell from a manual.
“Is it a magician?” Em shakes his head without taking his eyes from the precise sketching movements of his pencil. The panther’s head, with its velvety fur and glittering eyes, looks almost real.
“A wise man,” he says. She smiles. Thinks of Mio.
A librarian.
*
The next day Ruth meets a client, a man who is sprightly in a way that makes her think he probably plays badminton or runs marathons in cities on other continents. He doesn’t want to come to the agency, so she has come to him. He holds out a hanger and she hangs up her black bomber jacket—a design with details borrowed from Japanese workwear: the course cotton fabric, the collar not ribbed but cut like a kimono. Just like all her other clothes, it exudes luxury, maybe precisely because of its anonymity.
The client says, “Lucien said they would send their best…what’s the word? What do they call you?”
“It says consultant on my paycheck.”
The client laughs, surprised. He shows her into the living room, where he stands by the window—she stays where she is on the polished stone floor, unsure whether she’s expected to take a seat or not.
“Consultant.” The client’s gaze is fixed on the fog drifting like smoke between the trees along Huizingastraat. “Explain what it is you’re offering me.”
Hasn’t Lucien told the man what she does? She realizes she’s holding her bag like a protective barrier in front of her.
“To put it simply,” she says, setting her bag on the table, “I help the client navigate a media landscape in which the person speaking is often as important as what they’re saying.”
“Which means, in simple terms?”
“I think that was my attempt at being simple,” she says. “I tend to explain it like this: history has left traces in the language we use. Ripples. I work with fiction in order to…smooth out these ripples, or in some cases, utilize them.”
“Ripples. That makes me think of beaches,” the client says without shifting his gaze. “The patterns the waves leave in the wet sand?”
“I guess that’s the right image. My job is to invent human beings, to create people who tell a particular story or stage certain events.”
Even though she can speak freely—she would never be sent to a meeting if there wasn’t already a contract with a draconian non-disclosure clause—the exact nature of her work is, as usual, hard to put into words. The client makes a trite attempt at filling in: “I say I want to ban fighting dogs and you hire an actor to go on the radio and pretend to be a mother who’s worried her children will get bitten?”
“It’s not quite as simple as that.”
“No? A white person saying something like that is a racist, but someone like you is just being candid.”
“Have you spoken to Lucien?” she says and smooths out a crease in her top. It could almost be something you’d wear to go for a run on an autumn evening, if it weren’t for the fact that the fabric it’s made from looks more like charred paper, or the very finest gray velvet.
She studies the client’s back and neck, the boyishly ruffled hair. If she were ever asked to train others to do what she does at the agency, her first lesson would address strategies to avoid that word being spoken in the room at any cost.
Racist.
The client glances over at her and smirks.
“I know,” he says. “You work with more subtle categories. Concepts that others don’t yet have names for. You’re mapping the sociological landscape of the future.” So he has been speaking to Lucien about this. “You create characters and voices that give the client’s stories a route into the media and cultural world’s little…crevices.” He smiles privately, fleetingly at this last word. Sexually? On one level, that’s what their work is all about. Seduction. Power games. She would like to be able to say that the work is even more complicated, that it’s about constructing a game with language that writes the client’s needs into the story of time itself—time understood as a measure of our species’ progress: cave paintings followed by penicillin, followed by human rights—time as resistance to the sucking, dark ebb of entropy. But Lucien hates it when she starts getting philosophical with the clients, so she just nods—in any case, she welcomes the return to a more professional language, to codes and jargon.
“You represent a clothing brand?” she says.
“My brother’s the visionary. I just handle some financial aspects. The company was passed down from our parents. Our father was a tailor.”
He leaves his spot by the window, sits down on the sofa, and motions that she is welcome to join him, which she does.
The apartment is decorated in a minimalist style she recognizes from other clients’ homes: rosewood and walnut, luxury furnishings in steel and glass—all of it a little outmoded to her eyes. As though the class that makes up the agency’s clients simply go to auctions and bid on objects from their childhood homes. Perhaps they want to let others know that they come from a world they long to return to. That they are not refugees from their own past. Not like her.
He shows her a few images on a tablet. A menswear collection.
“It’s luxury clothing at the intersection of haute couture and urban exploration.” He pronounces the former in a casual French accent and the latter in casual American English—a rapid slicing between worlds. “How shall I put this? When the autumn collection was launched, a bunch of Brussels teenagers realized that the company’s initials were the same three letters they use for their territory. Is territory the word?”
Ruth nods dismissively. She’s taken out a ballpoint and a little black notepad, and is making notes—it gives her something to do with her hands.
“You don’t want your jackets and caps to be used as gang symbols?”
“Quite simply, we want to avoid being associated with a certain type of milieu, since—”
“Say no more.”
The client smiles, but the smile is understanding in the wrong way, apologetic.
“I’ve been led to believe you yourself have a background in these milieux?”
Her ears start buzzing. But she gives him a professional smile.
She has asked Lucien to stop using her life as a selling point for the agency. She wants to be like anyone else, a figure who passes and is gone, without a trace.
*
The bus carries her and Em slowly homeward, toward the sea. The yellow glow of the streetlights flashes across his face. She sees Mio in him. Eyelashes so long they look painted. The sinewy neck, cupid’s bow and brows that almost meet in the middle.
So much time has passed that Mio is close to becoming a child to her: the memories made obscene by death.
“Em? How was school?”
“Good.”
“What did you learn?”
“Nothing.”
“You must have learned something.”
“I told you. Nothing. Nothing is something.”
*
If you sit in the right spot in the agency’s conference room, you can glimpse the North Sea: a glittering polygon carved out by the harbor cranes and the office blocks of the shipping companies and banks.
The new client, who is sitting next to her press secretary, is a female politician from Brussels. She is dressed like the director of a medium-sized company.
The agency’s offices are in the northeast harbor, in the ruins of countless waves of globalization and a few urban regeneration attempts, in the kind of area where the same building houses a crack den and a restaurant offering tasting menus at 500 euros, complete with “experiences”: alongside dessert, you open a black paper swallow, and a smoky perfume hits you—the chef’s mother used to wear it to film premieres when he was a child.
Ruth rubs her temples while they wait for Lucien. They haven’t seen each other since she met the last client, and she wonders exactly how Lucien will go about pretending nothing happened. She finds a knot in the fishbone-thin muscles around her hairline and opens her mouth discreetly to spread the pain, releasing it across her neck and back. She notices the press secretary watching her. She wonders whether the massage looks like irritation over Lucien’s lateness, and takes a deep breath, trying to make the whole thing look like a focus exercise—something rooted in the yoga that middle managers are told to learn to stop themselves from burning out.
*
Lucien is in no hurry when he finally does turn up. He shakes the client’s and the press secretary’s hands, sits down alongside Ruth, opens his laptop, and hits the space bar half a dozen times to make it look as though he’s entering a password—in actual fact he never leaves the welcome page, where you can choose between a guest account and an account that belongs to someone called Hassan_2, who she guesses must also work for the agency—it’s the nature of the organization that employees meet only when absolutely necessary.
“Shall we start?” Lucien leans back in his chair. “Ruth?”
She would like to let him know how angry she is, but of course, this is not the moment to do it. She gives a curt nod, looks across the table, and brings her hands together and then up to her lips: professional, ascetic gestures.
“I understand the matter is urgent?”
The press secretary nods. He is her age, with the hair of a model and glasses with insectoid brass frames. Ruth always feels a certain mutual understanding, on a professional level, with PR people, publicists and others who share a certain—neither liberatingly large nor painfully small—distance from the client’s sticky, private catastrophe.
She turns to the politician and assumes a thoughtful, pouting expression that signals neither judgment nor sympathy—think of me as a doctor examining a growth on your scalp.
She takes out two folders, tastefully marbled in gray, handing one to the client and one to the press secretary. As they open them, Lucien adds, “We must insist that all documents are returned to us at the end of the meeting, for reasons of confidentiality. Apologies.”
The press secretary nods absently, adjusts his glasses, looks through the material. The client puts her folder down without turning the page.
“These documents concern a certain Emma Maes,” Ruth explains. “Do you know her?”
“Should I?”
“Not really. She’s a social worker who has been working in Molenbeek for many years.” Short pause. Molenbeek, Brussels. Bags of trash in the middle of the street and bearded men who sit behind lowered blinds and say the martyr reaches paradise before his blood reaches the ground.
The press secretary stops leafing through the luxurious, fine-grained pages.
“She’s an opinion maker on gang activity and migration issues?”
“Among other things. She lost her job two years ago, because she made the error of speaking out about some of the problems she was witnessing. Since then she’s had a pretty big following on social media. As you’ll see from the document, the funding she was receiving from various private stakeholders was revoked just last week.”
The press secretary puts down his folder, adjusts his hexagonal glasses once again.
“You want us to suggest,” he said, “that the French-speaking authorities go in and make up the funding shortfall?”
The politician mumbles something about why would she want to, that this isn’t her area, but the press secretary interrupts.
“If you support someone brave enough to state their opinions on the very subjects the party is pussy-footing around, and they go on to remove you from your post, it will look like it has something to do with Maes. Anything else—any extra-marital relations you may have had, for instance—will look like an excuse the party is using to get rid of you.”
Clients never smile when they realize what’s going on. Instead, they appear to feel disgust and disappointment.
Ruth looks out across the sea. The silver light far in the distance. She feels the fatigue again, this never-ending fatigue she’s felt since Em was born, or since Mio died. It’s been several weeks since she last slept through the night. Em wakes her up with shrill cries, and when she runs into his room, he’s swatting and clawing at the air around him. It took her twenty minutes to conceal the previous night’s scratch marks.
She would like to ask Lucien why he doesn’t just lie about himself, about his own life, rather than using her.
The client is still protesting: “Sorry, but won’t it seem rather transparent if I suddenly start backing someone I’ve never met? Won’t people see it for what it is?”
“What’s to say you’ve never met?” Ruth’s gaze doesn’t shift from the sea—her obstinate little act of revenge against Lucien. “You grew up in Hembeek, right? Let’s say she did too, and that you were at school together. One of you chose party politics, the other social justice, but you’ve always supported each other. And so on.”
“But—will Emma Maes go along with this? Are you sure we can trust her?”
“One hundred percent,” Lucien says.
“How?”
Before Ruth replies, she gathers the gray folders, not actually for reasons of confidentiality, but to end the meeting with an act that underlines the exquisite conspiracy of what has taken place in the room, a gesture that also complements the last thing she says:
“Because Emma Maes does not exist.”
She stands and leaves the room without looking at Lucien.
__________________________________
From Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru, translated by Nichola Smalley. Used with permission of the publisher, Two Lines Press. Copyright © 2024 by Johannes Anyuru. Translation copyright © 2024 by Nichola Smalley.
