The Beggar Richer Than Me

It’s easier to ignore the beggar in the metro station than the beggar outside of the church.

You can’t ask God for favors and then act inconvenienced at the first sign of someone asking you for one. If you can, you’re one cold bastard.

I, for one, am not a cold bastard. Now the beggars in the metro station might say otherwise, but this story isn’t about them. This is a story about the beggar outside of the church. The beggar who was richer than me, and perhaps you too.

The clink of coins in my pocket shook her out of her daze. I was still ten paces away when our eyes met.

The eyes of beggars have always captivated me. When I was young, they scared me. When I was less young, they intrigued me. Now I am not so young, and I often get the eerie feeling that they know something I don’t. 

This was the case with the beggar outside the church. She had the eyes of a mother and a monk, with that certain twinkle reserved for those who’ve suffered the most. 

The coins fell from my hand into the plastic cup, but as I turned to walk away, she grabbed my sleeve. I had accidentally included a foreign coin in the mix, and she wanted nothing to do with it. 

It’s a strange thing to take money from a beggar. It was the first time in my life that’s happened, and I imagine it will be the last. Things like that are worth remembering, which is why I sat down to write this story. 

Now, you know there isn’t enough there for a good story, but I only realized that after I sat down to try to write. A paragraph in, the tank was dry.

Fortunately and unfortunately, this is not a novel experience for me. My solution is simple: do nothing. I stare out the window of my toaster-oven apartment and do absolutely nothing. 

There’s usually a fat black cat lurking around who’s amusing to watch because he loves catching grasshoppers. It’s not the catching of grasshoppers that’s fun to watch, but the fact that the fat black cat is cross-eyed. He spreads his body low, belly touching the cement, sways his puffy tail, pauses, and then leaps an entire meter away from wherever the target is. 

The only reason he’s able to survive is because one of my neighbors feeds him. Who this benevolent neighbor might be remained a mystery to me for the first week after I moved in. 

It was only on this day, the day I sat to write about the beggar who gave me money, that I finally caught a glimpse of my neighbor: the beggar who gave me money.

It was her, no doubt. White hair, blacker-than-black shawl, and mole on her chin with more hairs sticking out of it than what I have on my own head.

After she fed the cross-eyed cat, she came to feed me. A real gourmet spread, complete with warm bread, hot stew, and a small bunch of red radishes.

I couldn’t figure out if this gesture was meant to welcome me into the building or to thank me for the money. It didn’t matter. Her actions turned this faraway country into something resembling a home.

After cleaning the dishes, I returned them full of dark chocolate slabs and sliced apples. 

Sveta, the beggar, doesn’t live alone. She lives in a house full of women, five total. There’s her, her sister, her daughter, and two young granddaughters.

They all thanked me for the chocolate and fruit, and we exchanged the usual backstory via Google Translate (where are you from, how old are you, do you have a girlfriend, why not).

The next morning, I woke to a knock at the door. It was the young granddaughters, giggling as they brought me breakfast: spinach omelet and toast. Behind them, Sveta was waving good morning.

Once again, I returned the plates full with fruit and chocolate. 

This back-and-forth became a daily ritual: they would give me lunch or dinner, I would give them dessert. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. It got to the point that whenever I went shopping, I shopped with them in mind: ice cream bars, cakes, sweet breads, fresh berries. 

When a friend stayed with me for a week, the meals got tastier and the rations got bigger. 

When I did a three-day fast, I made sure to tell her because I didn’t want any delicious food sitting in my home. They respected my request, and instead delivered this:

It was hard for the girls to pronounce my name, so they called me by my middle name, Michael. This was eventually shortened to Mike, and every time I dropped off treats, Sveta would say, 'super!' This is how Super Boy Mike became my neighborhood nickname. And since Sveta only used my nickname when introducing me to her friends (other beggars), it became normal to hear "Super Boy Mike!” yelled as I passed certain corners and metro staions.

I must admit, that felt pretty good. But I am not the hero here. I’m more like the cat in the tree that the hero comes to rescue. Actually, now that I think of it, Sveta might have viewed me in the same way she viewed the stray, cross-eyed cat.

I once hung my laundry outside without clips. Later in the day, I caught her securing everything for me. Another time, the girls came over not to drop off food, but a hair brush. Sveta then waved me over and insisted on teaching me how to use it. She thrashed my head to and fro as she combed through my knots, not minding the chunks of hair that she pulled out on every swipe. This was her way of telling me to spend less time in my cave and more time socializing. There was a short window where I fell ill, and without me telling them, they recognized I was sick and brought me medicine and tea. The granddaughters always jumped squeled with excitement when I brought back ice cream, so one day I asked the matriarch if I could take them to the dessert parlor down the street. The answer was, "Of course," as long as I brought back a couple of scoops for her.

There were never men in their apartment. Sveta’s daughter didn’t work, and her granddaughters were too young to work. It seemed that, somehow, Sveta was supporting all the women on her begging wages.

I continued to see her in the streets begging. She went out every other day and never missed a Sunday service. If she wasn’t out working, she was at home peeling vegetables, feeding her family, feeding the cat, or feeding me.

Her granddaughters didn’t have phones. One passed time by tracing designs into the picnic table while swinging her feet back and forth. The younger liked to tie the end of her jump rope to her pink skateboard and drag it around. She must have been imagining it was a dog. Their mom was always either helping Sveta cook or sitting in her chair smoking.

These scenes transformed my window into a portal. I would look out and see a world that should’ve gone extinct decades ago. A world we all used to know, or perhaps never knew, but still maintain some strange sense of nostalgia for.

Can you list the metrics used to determine how developed a society is? You probably can, but let me save you some time. The primary ones are:

• High GDP

• Advanced infrastructure

• Life span

• Low unemployment

I think that’s silly. I think that’s like judging a tree from a distance without tasting its fruit. If we want to understand society, we should understand people.

How do people treat their neighbor? Do they cook for them when they are sick? Rehang their laundry? Brush their hair and tell them to go find a wife? If we’re forced to quantify anything, let’s quantify something like the number of coversations residents have in their neighborhood per week. That’d be a truer metric to determine progress within a society.

But we will never do that.

The rich hate being reminded how poor they are.

It is strange to take money from a beggar. It's even stranger to be fed by a beggar. But the strangest thing of all is to realize that there are beggars in the world richer than you.