Читать книгу Virtuoso - Yelena Valer'evna Moskovich - Страница 10

A little to the left, mon amour

It was an ambling humidity, as August exhaled and the ocean knocked itself against the coasts, beating out the fever. In Paris, the cars shuffled back with their passengers after the holidays, and the mugginess hovered at the tops of cars and the chests of pedestrians and the ground-floor windows.

*

I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis, was how Mr Doubek’s email began.

*

Jana’s armpits were once again damp, despite the deodorant she had reapplied in the train-station toilets. She was just coming back to Paris from her solo holiday to the South.

She had had the idea to go to Marseille in the first place when she was translating a brochure for import/export petroleum, which mentioned the city was France’s major center of oil refining, having extensive access to the French waterways up into the Rhône through the canal. She looked at the train prices and found them reasonable.

In Marseille, she took the ferry to the island of If and visited the dungeon from Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo; she ate swordfish with ratatouille and saffron rice; she looked at the Opéra de Marseille from the outside and saw that nothing was on; she sniffed the various local soaps; she eyed the flopped fish on the blue tarp with crushed ice at the fish market on the Quai des Belges at the end of the harbor; and then she went to the beach, took a seat in the shade, and tried to imagine how someone like Antonin Artaud, the misfit avant-garde theatre artist and Marseille native, could have grown up here. She pictured him with far-flung eyes, pacing around his home city, philosophically infuriated. As she watched the blot of his silhouette jerk along the sand, she realized it wasn’t him at all that she was envisioning, but a girl she used to know back in Prague, who everyone called the Malá Narcis, the Little Narcissus.

That evening, Jana meandered toward the city center and the so-called lesbian bars she had spotted, went into one, sipped on a gin and tonic at the bar, and then walked back to the hotel. Five nights of it was enough, she didn’t need seven, so she went to the train station and changed her ticket.

Back in Paris, in her studio apartment on the dead-end street stemming from Place Monge, just above the shop that only sells toolboxes in various assortments, on the sixth floor, she plugged in her phone and opened up her laptop and saw the strange email from a “Mr Roman Doubek.” He explained that he had requested her services from her agency for his upcoming trip to the Paris Medical Trade Show, where he would be representing Linet, the famous Czech hospital-bed supplier, but her agency had told him that she was unavailable during his requested dates. They must have hired their other Czech interpreter in her absence, Jana thought, the young, orb-eyed Alicia, who started as a discreet and thankful foreigner with visible panty lines, but had recently spurted into a self-assured, cat-eyed, thong-wearing young woman in part because of her new French boyfriend and how well things were going with him, and how far away the Czech Republic now felt, and how naïve she had been, and how glad she was to no longer be naïve like that.

Jana read the email and thought of Alicia, her taut breasts in her cheap, ecstatically patterned blouses, her stare somewhere between expectant, shy, and vengeful. The way she began to ask Jana if she was seeing anyone and footnoted their exchanges with anecdotes about her boyfriend and his funny French buddies. Once she wouldn’t let it go, insisting on confiding to Jana that she found her to be isolated, and it might do her good to open up a bit because she was actually an attractive woman at the end of the day, and she could, if she wanted to, go out with her and her boyfriend and his funny French buddies, and who knows. Jana folded the feelings into one straight line, which drew itself on her lips.

*

I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis, the first line read.

*

The next day, Jana got a pressing call from her agency coordinator who was thrilled to find her back in Paris early. They needed an urgent substitute for Alicia, who was supposed to have come back a couple of days ago from her holiday in Biarritz, but, while climbing some rocks at the beach to take a sunset photo in her new bikini, as her French boyfriend coaxed, “A little to the left, mon amour,” and his buddies and their girls drank beers, the Czech girl felt the sun setting on her back, watched the waves rolling toward her, and felt that she had finally found her place in their world, when the rock tilted and she slipped and her ankle cracked.

Jana agreed with the agency coordinator that she would take over Mr Doubek the following morning.

*

Jana put on one of her professional suits—a knee-length skirt and matching blazer in midnight blue, with a simple cream-colored V-neck blouse and dark-blue heels.

She arrived early at the medical trade show at the Paris Expo in Porte de Versailles, held in the largest pavilion of the seven-halled convention center, an enormous metal-beamed structure with lofting skylights over its grid-work of stands. She walked along the alleyways between the stands, familiarizing herself with the layout. She passed the Bs and Cs, checking her map so as not to miss the right turn at J14 toward the International Meetings Lounge, where she was to greet Mr Doubek and his French clients at 10 am.

The booths were already filled with people chattering in many languages, setting up their boards and medical apparatus. She passed by D32, where a wheelchair was on display, the cushion a tan and beige ying-yang design, the back of the seat lined with soft-ridged paneling. Behind the wheelchair, a banner listed the product’s assets: bedsore prevention cushions, a remote-controlled electric rise to stand-up position … Jana glanced at the right-hand armrest, a slide-out remote control with a rubber blue grip sticking out.

She walked on, then slowed at H40, gazing at a poster of a plump heart, veined with blue arrows in various directions. Two compact chest defibrillators were being taken out of their case and put on display on the foldout table.

*

“Excusez-moi”—the voice came from behind her. Then a hand touched her shoulder. Jana turned sharply, almost nicking the woman with her elbow.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” said the woman, stepping back as Jana pulled her hands to her gut.

The woman was also wearing a skirt suit, but hers looked completely different. The skirt a bit shorter and a little tighter, the color a little darker—a midnight between blue and black. The blazer cinched at her waist, with just a hint of an ivory blouse peering from between the crevice. She had a black silk scarf around her neck, but her collarbone was bare. Jana looked down at her feet: similar heels, but with a pointed toe.

“I didn’t mean to startle—” the woman said nervously.

Her blond hair was parted neatly in the middle and sleeked back into a tight ponytail that hung between her shoulder blades. Her cheekbones opened up on her face, making her eyes look thin, drawn back, mooning with a private embarrassment.

“Do I know you?” Jana asked flatly.

“Oh … Oh!” the woman was putting her hand up to her mouth. “I’m sorry, I thought you worked here,” she said through her fingers.

The woman’s eyes floated down to Jana’s badge on her lapel. She pronounced the letters in red out loud, “Liné …?”

“Linet,” Jana corrected her pronunciation. “Czech manufacturer. The top hospital-bed supplier worldwide. I do work here. I’m an interpreter.”

“Oh …” the woman continued uneasily, “well, maybe you can’t help me then, but I’m looking for the Dupont Medical Booth. Well actually, between them and a group with the oxygen generators. I’ve already made two circles through the pavilion, but … I can’t find it.”

“You’re in the internationals section,” Jana said.

“I am?” the woman replied.

Jana began unfolding her map. The woman quickly pulled out hers and showed it to Jana.

“I got one of those too, but I swear it’s as if the spot I’m looking for doesn’t exist!”

The two women put their maps side by side as if they could complete each other’s scope and traced their eyes up and down the grid of numbered letters.

“The doctor that’s speaking at the Global Plastics round table,” the woman began speaking aimlessly as she searched, “that’s my father. He’s a prosthetics specialist.”

“You work with your father?” Jana asked.

“I mean, I used to be his assistant, like a welcome-desk secretary, to be honest, but that was years back. No, now I work for a friend of his actually, a gynecologist. His clinic is right next to the Portuguese Embassy, above Parc Monceau, on the—”

“N39,” Jana pointed to a small square in the south-east corner of the hall.

“That’s funny,” the woman said. “I walked around N36, N37 over and over again and didn’t see it …”

The two women parted their maps and folded them into their respective blazer pockets.

“Do you think you could help me with one more thing?” the woman said shyly, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a badge with a safety pin glued onto the back. She extended the badge toward Jana.

Jana took the badge in her hand and turned it over. She undid the safety pin and looked up. “Where shall I pin it?”

The woman took out one finger, the nail painted in a creamy rose, and pointed to her lapel. “Here. Thank you.”

Jana leaned in toward the woman’s bare collarbone, pinched a bit of the coarse dark fabric and drew the needle point through, clipped it and then let go, careful not to touch the woman’s chest.

She stepped back and looked at the badge fixed on the woman’s lapel.

Aimée DE SAINT-PÉ, the badge spelled out. “Merci,” the woman said.

Just then, Jana had the idea to introduce herself, but the woman gave her a brisk smile, turned, and began walking toward N39.

Jana watched the woman walk away, her skirt shifting at the curve of her buttocks, then pulling over the slope toward her thighs.