Bunker Hill. Jaargang 4 (nrs. 12a-15)

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Claire Taylor
Kiken Louster (Giant Dutch Assholes)

Mary Pearl lay in bed and watched her breath curl in the chill of yet another dreary February day in a country far away from everything she had once considered home. Her papery apartment was impossible to heat, and this time of year she couldn't tell if it was morning or evening, not with constant clouds blanketing the skies and her mind into numb hibernation.

The clock glowed 11:00. Mid-morning she called it, the time of day when most of the unemployed woke in the backest section of the poorest neighborhood in the country's capital city. Her street was due for renovation they said, but until they got around to it, things remained as they were when she moved in five years ago, a mildewing war zone of tumbling brick and torn-down blocks of rubble.

Mary rolled out of bed bundled in the same clothes she wore the night before - a warm blue sweat suit her mom had sent her for lounging around during the holidays and thick wool socks on her permafrost feet. Not long after she moved, she got a job, but never learned the language because everyone always spoke hers. So she never bothered to try and never met anyone, and every day in the office drove her heart to racing until she'd passed out in line in the cafeteria in front of everyone hunched over at their tables eating lunch.

The welfare doctor down the street said she was overspannen, over worked, though it was more from a lack of action than from too much trying her system. And even though she knew she was probably dying of brain cancer eating her alive, he said take a week or two, relax, then try again, and we'll see.

That was six months ago. Her boss called once, but never bothered again, and although she didn't do a thing, every month she got her salary

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paid straight into her bank account and automatically received the company newsletter. As if they cared. And she couldn't blame them, because who could smile at that face drooping so long her jowls brushed her shoulders with their sorrowful scowl digging lines deep into her forehead and along the sides of a sourpuss mouth.

Day after day the sky was a gray blanket wet with rain that didn't fall, but misted fine droplets that bore through the weave of jackets and into her very pores, boring chills to the bone. When she grew paler, it didn't matter, not like it would at home, not in this country where everyone suffered from absolute absence of sun. No wonder they drank coffee all the time, no wonder they huddled in smokey bars with steamed windows sealed shut against drafts.

After a while Mary only left her apartment to buy groceries, and then she only bought multinational brands she recognized, and she avoided small shops where the owners chatted gibberish as if they were trying to help, because the last time Mary freaked out and started mumbling, ‘No, no, go away, leave me alone, I can't help you, I can't speak...’ as her face flushed and her mind roiled and she rushed out of the shop, nervously swaying under wavy walls threatening to collapse.

From then on she only sought the anonymous comfort of large chain stores and fluorescent lights and long aisles filled with recognizable logos of brands that appeared as friends, the same stuff they had back home, thank goodness for back home. And thank God for tv.

Television was the one thing that kept her in touch with the pulse of America and the amazing hypes she could no longer experience and the burning gossip she couldn't follow. Unless she watched David and Sally and the Today Show. And Oprah, the mother of the usa. Today was her annual Christmas extravaganza. Two months too late, but still, Mary was eager for her brand of comfort and some homey nostalgia and merry carols sung with glee.

Warm food and drink softened the edges of her exile from home, where she never could return without losing face for getting too fat to keep her tall blond boy and failing to maintain a job. So she sliced herself a thick slab of ginger cake - their baking was ok - and poured herself a cup of coffee, strong with hot milk like the Dutch served in their cafes.

She closed the living room door to let the heat swell so she could relax on the sofa and watch tv all day long without shivering. Applause thundered

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as Oprah walked out on stage and the dreary world faded into brightness. Oprah welcomed Santa, she laughed, and the audience laughed too. They were joyous at the season to be jolly. Mary smiled in spite of her misery and being alone.

The door buzzed, and she figured it was maybe the mailman bringing a package from home, from her sister who always sent her Christmas presents cheap by boat, too late to reach her on time. Wouldn't she laugh when she heard that Mary was watching a Christmas show when her Christmas presents arrived! Such synchronicity! And that between sisters who, though separated by continents, understood each other still.

She reached out into the musty hallway and pulled a rope that wound down the stairwell and yanked the front door open.

‘Kiken louster!’ a man shouted up.

‘What?’

‘Kiken louster!’ he said again, and each of the narrow steps cracked as he climbed from dusty landing to dusty landing until he reached her floor.

He was tall and skinny, wore a poorly fitting acrylic suit, and carried a fake leather binder. ‘Mevrouw Parel?’

She looked through the sliver of her open door and smoothed down her sleepyhead hair. Then he started talking. Blah blah blah kiken louster, kiken louster, blah, and she heard Oprah's audience cheering at something she was missing, and said, ‘I'm busy. What do you want?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘English. I am from the kiken louster. You have a tv?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I see?’

‘Why?’

‘I need to see. I am from the kiken louster, to control the tv.’

‘What for?’

‘Those are the rules.’

He walked straight to her cramped living room and stood beside the cluttered coffee table and stared at Tom Cruise handing Oprah a present in a baby blue box. Oprah squealed delight.

‘I see,’ he said, and jotted on his clipboard. ‘And a radio. You did not pay for these, Missus Parel.’

‘Pearl,’ she said.

‘Missus Purel. You did not pay.’

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‘Yes I did. I bought them downstairs.’

‘No,’ he said and shook his head at the foreigner who didn't understand. ‘I mean, you did not pay the tv and radio taxes. The kiken louster money. Look and hear.’

Mary's mind stumbled over the concept as she listened to this strange lanky man from the government with his cynical accent insisting that there was something like a tax for tvs and radios. As if she didn't know that broadcast was free in a free country. It was in the constitution. The inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The right to watch tv.

But not in a socialist country. Her mother had warned her. Move over there and you lose your rights. We are the land of the free, the home of the brave. The world's biggest power and the highest standard of living. They are insignificant countries suffering under creeping communism and government control, the old world of Kafka and 1984 and city registers filled with every detail of every person who lived and breathed. So they could keep track and maintain order and stomp down anyone who was different. They even wrote down Mary's mother's name and where she was born and what church she had attended. And when she told her on the phone, her mother had said what could you expect and no wonder you got stuck with an unheated apartment with a drawstring water closet and walls so thin you could hear the neighbors fart. That's centralized government control for you, hun.

‘You have lived here for five years, and never have you paid,’ the man said. ‘Everyone must pay. Those are the rules.’

Then he reached behind the tv set and pulled the plug and the apartment was suddenly silent.

‘What are you doing!’ she shouted.

At first he didn't respond and kept fiddling in the back of the tv like he was adjusting some dials, then he whipped around and said, ‘Missus Purel, U moet betalen. Begrijpt U? Kijk- en luistergeld, mevrouw, U moet betalen als U een tv in huis hebt. Do you understand?’

‘No! I do not. Plug my tv back in!’ she said, and when she darted towards the tv, he moved in between and for a moment she stood with her nose in his chest and hyperventilated herself dizzy.

‘Normally spoken,’ he said stepping back, ‘we must take the tv with us. But I am going to leave it here this time. But if you do not pay then we will take it away.’ He handed her a paper filled with harsh words and rows of

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endless numbers that he declared added up to five years of dues plus a fat penalty as her just punishment. Then he snarled at Mary's sloppy housekeeping and her messy head of hair and her contempt of the national social system that was purely in place for her own well-being, and slammed the door and left.

An entire world imploded and Mary Pearl's sedentary lifestyle flashed before her eyes and she shuddered at the memory of her first days in the country, the ones without a tv, then the time before cable, when she sat in her dark apartment while her boyfriend was away and switched back and forth between channels Een and Twee and nothing more. Suddenly it all changed. Her boyfriend left and Mary grew addicted to the bbc and mtv and made friends with sweet old Elsa Klensch with her dyed black hair and relied on cnn's entertainment news for everything they were saying back home - about situation comedies she'd never seen, stars she'd never heard of, and movies that so slowly crossed the ocean she'd forget the excitement of the hype by the time she actually saw them.

Now she was reduced to never, no more, and forever no fun again.

‘What an asshole!’ she yelled with the grim delight of knowing that her neighbors overheard.

‘Why won't they just leave me alone! I can't stand this country!’ she shouted loud, then spoke softly, coaxing herself closer and closer to the tv set.

‘I'm just going to plug it back in, just like that, I don't give a fuck what that man says. Fuck him, fuck them all, right? They're just giant Dutch assholes. Right?’

‘Right!’

Reaching around the back of the tv, Mary pulled at the plug dangling down into the dusty darkness, and firmly grasping the plastic circle, she pushed the prongs snug into their holes in the wall. But they wouldn't go in.

‘Shit!’ Mary examined the plug. The two round prongs were blocked by a seal - a real seal, with a little tiny lead pressed into the wire thread so she couldn't cheat the country out of any more tax dollars.

How did he do that so fast? Didn't he trust her? Didn't he believe she would pay up? She would, she'd pay, little bits at a time. They allowed that, didn't they, these compassionate people? She'd seen them on their telethons, giving away millions to Africa and victims of natural catastro-

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phes. So why would they take away a lonely woman's only means of entertainment, her only contact with the outside world and her faraway home that she missed so much, it ached her soul?

‘Fuck them,’ she sniffled almost crying. This country had taken her in, full of hope, and when she didn't work out, it spit her in a corner. Now they robbed her of Oprah's Christmas and of all her broadcast friends.

That damned government man! Mister Kiken Louster. Who did he think he was? She'd rip the seal off and watch anyway! Except for, maybe, who knew in a land like this, maybe they had their ways, like a system in the plug that rings a bell in an office downtown when the tv plug is stuck in. Maybe he was waiting outside, a tv-junkie police. He probably knew exactly how much she watched, which programs, and for how long.

Mary burst through the living room door into the icy hall and her freezing kitchen, shuffling quickly over the sticky linoleum to her drawer rattling full of accumulated junk. She pulled out a pair of orange plastic scissors, the European kind that looked so silly at first. They were sharp and dangerous and would do the job of clipping through metal and lead and the rules of the world that were created to annoy.

Nothing happened when she plugged in the tv, and no one knocked when the sound returned. Oprah waved goodbye and the coffee was cold, but still tasted darned good with a piece of cake. Mary switched to a gardening show on the bbc. How she loved to watch the good man hoe. Then she flipped to cnn until she'd gotten all the news, then landed on an old sitcom with subtitles she didn't have to follow. There was mtv when nothing else was on. And nbc and Discovery.

By evening she'd forgotten morning. By night she'd forgotten the day. When she went to bed she tossed his note on her pile of unpaid bills and slowly it was covered by layer-upon-layer of reminders received that she hoped to ignore the rest of her life or at least until all those people forgot her.