Uls Nisson lives on the streets of Brussels. He's 20 years old. I met him coming out of a gay sauna at midnight. I bought him a durum, which is basically a Moroccan burrito. He ate that and told me it was his first meal in two days, that he had gotten the highest grades in his university in Novosibirsk at the age of 15 and been the pride of his businessman father and telejournalist mother, gone to Paris to be a rock star and made loads of great friends, then been informed of his parents' sudden death, been abandoned by said friends when his money ran out, and knowing his avaricious uncles and aunts had stolen all the inheritance, and nothing to do but sleep in shelters and do black-market construction jobs and spare-change in the streets. Interestingly, no-one in the street he bummed a cigarette from refused him, so he was able to ruin his lungs even while he was starving.
I eventually also bought him a beer, because he explained he needed to keep out the bad dreams of the sky crushing him. He recited a slam poem describing himself. His English was very good, and of course he spoke French and Russian as well. I left him discussing civics with a Moroccan man with three fingers on one hand. It was only when I turned the corner that I realised he was a figure from a Chinese folktale I had always loved, of the eighth immortal, Lan Caihe, the precocious and sexless youth who was orphaned and thrown out by his stepmother and earned a living selling songs on the street. Uls had done that too, but his guitar had been ruined when he was going home with a girl and a gang fo Arab youths had sprung him. He could have waited to get enough money to get it fixed, but the sound of a broken guitar broke his heart so much that he just pawned it for enough money for a night in a hotel. I told him that he could sleep in the gay sauna for cheaper. I wonder if I've started him on the path of gay prostitution. I doubt it, though. He probably won't be able to remember the address of the place.
Siberia. God love it.
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