Читать книгу Wild Woman - Marina Sur Puhlovski - Страница 11

His parents will leave the apartment so that what has to be done can be done, he has seen to that. I don’t ask him anything, I’ve got my own problems, my own fears of all sorts of things, I wish I could call the whole thing off. But it’s too late now.

We arrive at the flat while they’re still packing, searching for this and that, and everybody feels awkward. Except, maybe, him. He’s irritated that they’re still there, scowling as he sits in father’s armchair and lights a cigarette. His father is asthmatic, so smoking is confined to the balcony, but not now, now he’s the boss. He’s pretending to browse through the newspaper. I’m sitting on the sofa with the green slipcovers that still haven’t lost their shape. I’m sitting there all tense, my legs pressed together under the maxi that had sealed my fate. At least this part of it. I hear them moving around the apartment, in the hall, the bedroom, the bathroom, talking softly, whispering, I can sense a growing fear, but I don’t understand it because they’re in their own house.

They never go anywhere, as if they were stranded in this flat, on some kind of rock, up on the third floor with no elevator, his father can barely gasp his way up, he wheezes so loudly that you know he’s coming even before he reaches the door. And when he walks in, he coughs for a long time, in the cramped hall. Everything in the place is cramped, all the rooms, even the balcony, where you can’t even fit a chair. The bedroom would be spacious if it weren’t stuffed with furniture, a huge double bed with an ottoman at the end where they sit to put on their shoes, along with walnut wardrobes, heavy and dark, as if designed to make life difficult, to cast a pall over it, even in your own flat. As if life outside weren’t hard enough, with all its demands, shakeups indignities, political pressures and constant evil. In nice weather even this dark room would be brighter if you could open the window, but you can’t. Nearby is a leather factory and it stinks of carcasses, of skinned animals, the smell is enough to make you faint. The two of them sleep here at night as if they were in a prison, and the son sleeps here during the day, when he takes an afternoon nap. I will not let myself be led into that room, the execution will take place in the living room, on the sofa.

His mother, looking distraught, bursts into the room, saying she’s looking for her brooch, she left it somewhere, and slowly she moves around on her square legs. She’s one of those women with broad hips but narrow, drooping shoulders, and she’s still pretty, although in a doll-like way, and although she’s old, she’s already in her forties. I draw that kind of heart-shaped face on scrap paper when I’m on the phone and the conversation is boring. It’s always faces, in profile or en face, with the eyes, nose, mouth and hair, finishing with the neck. I rarely draw bodies, and if I do they are slim, like a model’s. Her nose is exactly like the ones I draw – small and straight. And her mouth is like what I draw, too – full, the lip-line heart-shaped, not too big. She’s got high cheek bones, which is what makes for her regular features. Her eyes are big and blue, the deep blue of a summer sky, which her son has inherited, and with their dark lashes they look fabulous, they don’t need any make-up. Her dark hair contrasts with her milky white skin, skin like her son’s. It really is milky white, like in books, but I don’t really like that. For instance, I’m blond and olive-skinned – that’s a better combination. She looks surprised, like a three-year-old who doesn’t understand why everybody is searching for him. That surprised look is heightened by the freckles on her nose and cheeks; her son has them, too. But his nose is bigger than hers, he’s bigger in every way, a head taller than she is, scrawny, angular, built like his father.

She’s all red from searching for the misplaced brooch, she’s looked on the bookshelf, in the tin box of threads, in the shell-studded box on the television stand, in the kitchen, where on earth did I put it, she asks herself, her eyes flitting like a bouncing table-tennis ball from the kitchen to her son in the armchair and back again. I offer to help her look, but she decides to stop, I can do without the brooch, she says, though I see that she needs it to close the brown woollen jacket she’s wearing over a light blue blouse. Maybe it’s in your room, I say, but she waves away the idea with her white, freckled, plump hand, saying she’s already looked there, and smiles at me dolefully as she walks out, as if paying her condolences.

She was supposed to live in a villa in a leafy suburb, as the wife of an officer, but instead of a life of good fortune and plenty, the war came, changing everybody’s plans, mostly for the worse, which was her case because the officer died of typhoid at the very outset of the war, although some fared better, like those who lazed around the villas confiscated after the war. She didn’t tell me the story of the officer, her son did, and according to him he was the one who lost out, who was short-changed, as if he’d have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth if she’d married the officer, as if he’d been created in that never-achieved marriage, and then mistakenly wound up with this poor excuse of a father, who wouldn’t even let him smoke in his presence. And whose coughing pierced his ears all night long. He didn’t say it as crudely as that, but I got the point, that he’d been robbed of the wealth that should have been his. And in which he had revelled in advance. And so now, though he couldn’t even afford a little Zastava 500 car, he saw himself sitting behind the wheel of a silver Lincoln Continental, wearing a custom-made suit, with a Rolex on his wrist, in New York, of course. These stories of his made me explode with laughter, I dubbed him Lincoln Continental, but he just nodded, swinging his crossed leg – it was never still – saying, you’ll see. And he’d light another cigarette on the ember of the old one. But when I asked him when he was going to earn all that money for a life that would give him a Lincoln Continental and a Rolex, he’d just repeat that I’d see, and nod at the wealthy future he already saw as his. Then his father came into the room with his shiny bald head, his hat in his hand, his dark green loden coat dancing around him, saying that he would be back in two or three hours and we should take care. The son jumped up and almost pushed him out of the room, closing the door behind them, and they began arguing in the hallway. I heard their voices but not the words, and I didn’t feel like listening. There was the sound of the front door finally closing and he came back into the room.

It was nothing like what Steve – the forty-year-old I had chosen to deflower me – had promised: tender and painless and afterwards lovely, no, it was painful and bloody and anything but lovely, but at least it was over and done with.