It is interesting how easy it is for one to learn from the methods of Big Politics and from the results achieved through such methods, and to practise balancing them with own methods.
On the 26th of April, my neighbour was in a hurry to have her plumbers cut and mend the central heating pipe that had allegedly rotten between floors, but ever since she has been applying a Big Politics strategy with going round to say how reluctant I am to have the hole between floors cemented, while telling me how reluctant the plumbers are to bring over their equipment to mend their own work.
In the meantime, I have been going round saying how much I preferred to have the leakage which the plumber left behind stopped before another master comes over to cement the hole between the floors and do some innovation in my neighbour’s flat, and have been wondering at the cheekishness of such combinations to make me pay half of all costs.
Big Politics has its peripheral men, and they are the best guardians of its policy. These peripheral men both guard the structures that employ them and give them a free hand at making some additional money on people unprotected by any structure, and exercise their natural antipathy for the poor, the powerless, and the ones selected by a former Big Politics line to establish former rules.
Today, May 11th, after waiting in vain for my neighbour’s plumbers to come, I took the liberty to bother her with a question.
‘I have just spoken to them’, she said, ‘They said they came and went back.’
‘Where to, I didn’t see them come.’
‘One said the other one came to him and went home.’
‘From his cottage like you went to yours and left me here to wait for them?’
‘You can’t tell me when to go to my cottage,’ my neighbour said.
‘You seem to be lying to me,’ I said.
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
‘Almost, you are making a monkey of me.’
She said nothing but banged her door.
Some minutes later she rang at my door and said, ‘They will be coming on Sunday.’
‘But it is Sunday today, and last time you said they would be coming on Sunday.’
‘This time they will come.’
Some time later she rang the bell again and said, ‘Please excuse me, they will be coming on Saturday, not Sunday.’
‘All is clear,’ I said, and went out to buy a loaf of bread.
The family that used to work abroad, representing the socialist side of Big Politics, now working for the capitalist side of Big Politics at home, passed by me on their way out, silent and indignant at their failure to drive me out of my flat and introduce, through foreign lodgers or owners, a new line of Big Politics which to screen their past and to support their present.
In the small marketplace, the woman who always went like a shadow from shop to shop, neither begging, nor buying, turned her back on me and my bread. She seemed like an experiment on the endurance of a human type. That is when I saw the other side of Big Politics to tempt me to give her my loaf, or to compare myself with her. Comparison was more killing to Big Politics than charity, and I thought:
Again, again, I’m walking anxious, hungry
Again I’ll have to hold onto my future day
Tomorrow I’ll wake up for new clutching
And every day will take me on my way
Don’t give me anything, I’m living on my future
For it I’ll live until I slowly die
Don’t tell me what I’m missing in life gruesome
As long as my life lasts, I’ll see another day
V.P.Toucheva 11.05.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria
