Free The Beggar and the Hare by Tuomas Kyrö Page A

fixed on the floor.
    A beggar doesn’t achieve his goals.
    A beggar doesn’t get berries or football boots for his son.
    Change yourself.
    Vatanescu perceived himself as an outsider. He watched the other passengers in suits and shoes that clicked. The best of them wore their uniform in a relaxed but confident way. They demanded a treatment that fitted their status, and got it. They had laptop computers, touchscreen mobile phones and very thin wallets, just a few plastic cards. Thus the world changes. Nowadays a fat wallet was the mark of an obsessive collector of receipts, where once it meant having enough cash to buy the world. These men could buy the world and only needed two cards to manage their lives.
    Try to look like them, then you’ll gain entry to first class, you’ll be the owner of an iPad.
    Three teenagers were sitting at Vatanescu’s table. Children to his eyes, adults in theirs. One of them was Jonttu, a grammar-school graduate and former ice hockey prospect dressed in a casual style, who liked others to laugh at his jokes, though not at him. His father wanted him to carry on in his glazing business, which interested Jonttu even less than the course at a vocational training school which his mother hoped he would take.At Jonttu’s age the meaning of life was freedom, in all its forms. The price of this was an empty soul, empty words and an empty bank account. But today, like his travelling companions Ökö and Minttu, he had a clear goal: a job in an ore mine, and the hourly wage of more than twenty euros that was paid there.
    Vatanescu greeted the teens with a nod and took a sip of water.
    Try to look like a man in a suit.
    Talk like a man in a suit.
    Invent a life for yourself.
    Under his arm the rabbit nibbled some carrot.
    Having looked at the railway timetable and the list of fares, Vatanescu decided that his journey would have to end no later than the third stop unless he was able to find some more money. He checked the pockets of his jacket and trousers as though there ought to be something there which had now gone. For this, an expression of genuine surprise was needed, as it was even harder to lie with gestures than with words.
    Ökö, a first-year student of tourism and a consumer of cannabis products, surveyed the foreigner who sat opposite. The foreigner’s plastic bags smelled mouth-wateringly good – precisely the kind of Chinese food that tastes so delicious after one has smoked a couple of grams of hash.
    What does a man in a suit do if his wallet and phone have been stolen?
    Vatanescu twitched and shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands and waited for one of the teenagers to ask what the trouble was. The first to react was Minttu, Jonttu’s classmate and possibly his girlfriend. (It wasn’t clear, because Minttu wasn’t sure whether she liked Jonttu or Ökö, or even whether in general she preferred girls or boys. Why, in the course of the same year, didyou have to be able to decide on the colour of your hair, your sexual orientation, your field of study, your attitude to life and which political party to vote for? A year in an ore mine would help you make decisions about your life, things that right now you change your mind about three times a day.)
    ‘Something wrong?’
    Vatanescu cleared his throat, swallowed and was unable to tell a lie.
    Stay close to the truth. Vary it.
    Vatanescu said he had lost his bank card, relying on the memory of losing a postcard in Timisoara in 2002. He said that his mobile phone had also disappeared, and indeed it had, as he had sold it to Yegor in exchange for a pack of oat-flakes.
    Get into the swing of it, choose the right words, loads of conviction.
    Put in a twist at the end.
    Vatanescu asked when the ticket collector would be along. He couldn’t get off at an interim station to find out because he had business waiting for him in Lapland and there weren’t any more flights that day. Ökö said that the ticket collector usually came round before