Last summer, at a suburban intersection, I got out of the queue to help a man who was lying on the sidewalk. Next to him was a chair, dirty and old, and he was so drunk that he was shaking before my eyes. I tried to lift him up and I almost succeeded if he hadn't been holding on to the chair and falling over it once he stood up.
Leave her the devil! I exclaimed.
It took me a few minutes to untangle the knot and realize that the man had a crazy idea in his head to sit on the side of the road, who knows why.
Let me take you home, uncle! Where do you live?
I signaled to the woman to wait for me in the car, took the damn chair and pushed the drunk forward. At any moment, he could collapse and kiss the concrete with his forehead. He was heavy as if he had been drinking lead, not the beer his sigh smelled of.
Where's your bed, bad luck?
He pointed to a row of houses along the street and yards obscured by a thicket of wild vegetation. I held him by the hand, at the same time pulling that chair, pushing us to the finish line in the shadow of the pajasen, those toxic palm trees of the Zeta plain.
We arrived at an abandoned stable. An old mattress was waiting inside. The host sat down and almost threw up while I took off his sneakers. The laces were nylon, who knows what purpose, they cut my palms as I pulled them. I was trying not to stink in that Bible shop.
That's the kind of man I am, a benefactor of dubious capacity - I take off my sneaker and hold it by the heel, thinking at the same time what a good deed I am doing. In that thought, I am thoroughly disgusted with myself. Why am I taking off his sneakers? Because he persistently refused to lie down with his shoes on, which I find hard to believe when I remember how the bed looked when it was covered in rags.
I finally rolled him onto his side, he moaned, I put my sneakers on the entrance and left the stable.
I got back in the car and was silent for ten minutes, after which the conversation resumed its normal course. I think the topic was that the Sozina tunnel should be free for Barane, at least once a week. I didn't think anything deeper, I didn't deal with the forager any more, my conscience calmly grazed on the phantasm that I had helped someone in need. I even felt that I could be satisfied with my sentimental gesture. A one-time help is not a small thing. I lifted the drunk off the concrete and laid him in the pigpen. I wedged him like a living tetris into the concrete tomb and left only after making sure he was breathing in it.
There are those workers who live in feedlots, an expert on local conditions told me. I found meaning in that comment. There are those workers who live in feedlots. Pronounced like coffee, naturally and expectedly. That's how it is in our area, some people snore in abandoned pig bunkers. It's their life. Just as every man has a kind of life, they have their own shepherd's dream. Even the writer in me awoke, the one who tries to find in every piece of crap a structure for a narrative and a moral drive to shine a light on some of his own abomination.
The man in the piggery certainly looks like fiction to you, it is a hero without a name and no further significance for society. He is a living being, we know that much, but for us he is primarily the subject of an ordinary column. And it is possible that it is no longer even a living being. He could choke on vomit, he could strangle himself with a nylon string, but not hang himself, because the ceiling of the pigsty is too low and does not allow for a lofty end. One can kneel in the pigpen with a noose around his neck and that is the only image that comes to mind at this moment, like a kind of final prayer of a man who surrendered long ago.
If there is no sublime ending, I invite the reader not to end the story with emotional self-delusion. Pity is no help or comfort. The misery of this world grows because it seems like a foggy fairy tale and a tangle of unrelated circumstances that concern someone else. Apart from polishing my superficial conscience, I usually take no action. That is the only fair conclusion of this story, just like many others about which it is so persistently silent.
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