by Olga Grushin
“Well, my sweet, this was too easy, I never even made it to the outskirts,” he said, his tone velvet. “The others, they were such good girls, tormented by their curiosity for days before they dared to disobey me—but you, you had to know about my work, didn’t you? Simply dying to know about it.”
He laughed an easy, leisurely laugh, took a step over the threshold.
“So be it. Now is when you get to find out. I am searching for a woman’s soul—no more, no less. You see, for centuries, serious people claimed that women had no souls, no souls at all. Men had souls, of course, no one debated that—but not women, they said, for women were more like beasts of burden, good for some things, rather useful, in fact, but not endowed with higher sensibilities. Nowadays, though, many argue otherwise, but nobody knows for sure, for nobody has ever found any definitive proof, one way or the other. A mystery, you see, just ready for a superior intellect such as mine to apply itself to the solution—and what a magnificent scientific discovery it would be, to prove the existence of the woman’s soul once and for all. And so many additional questions to ponder!” He picked up a pair of thin black gloves, began to snap them on with the same slow deliberation with which he used to disrobe her, to fondle her, to impale her during their nights of passion. “What physical form would a soul take—a butterfly, perhaps, as some of the ancients believed, or a ghostly reflection of the body, or an electric discharge of sorts, a beam of light? And would it be brought to the surface more easily by joy or by sorrow? Or, say, by terror?” Lightly, lovingly, he ran his gloved fingers over an array of shining instruments, as if over the keys of a piano, lifted one long, long blade, turned it over thoughtfully, set it down again. “And would the soul swell larger if it belonged to a young girl in the bloom of first love?” He met her eyes, smiled; obliviously, she knew, he had mistaken her for a timid virgin during their initial encounter and had thought himself an irresistible seducer, and she had never disabused him of the notion. “Well. I must say, I kept an open mind at the beginning, but now, I have cut up a dozen, two dozen women and have found nothing, nothing at all, so I’m almost inclined to believe that you have no souls after all. Still, a thoroughly dedicated scientist must persevere. Perhaps a soul is simply very small and tucked away, out of sight, hunkering down in some organ, for me to uncover. Now, you, let me see—” He looked her over with care. “Yes, I think I will take your brain. No offense, my sweet, but you just don’t have too many other parts to recommend you.” He strolled toward her, humming a line from La Traviata. “Are you not going to plead? The others did.”
She had expected something like this, of course, for, during their last few nights together, she had glimpsed undisguised murder in his eyes. She stayed silent and still, her eyelids lowered, lulling him with her immobility that he mistook for paralyzing fear, letting him come close, closer still. When he was so near that she could smell his tastefully understated sandalwood cologne, could see the wingtips of his immaculately polished leather shoes, she moved with all the speed and certainty of the countless generations of peasants whose blood flowed earth-bound and thick in her veins. With one heavily booted, perfectly aimed kick, she knocked him to his knees.
When she looked at him from above, as he writhed in agony, clutching at his groin, she thought of letting him go—but then she saw the cringing look in his eyes, and understood that she owed him the answer to the riddle that had so consumed him. Back in her village, she had watched the butcher’s boy, the one who had taken her unneeded maidenhood, slit the throat of many a pig. She was still holding the great iron key in her hand; now, swiftly, she bent down and dragged its sharp, jagged edge with all her considerable strength against his exposed throat. The blood that welled up from the ragged wound was blacker than the black of his surgical gloves, blacker than the black of his luxurious velvet, blacker than the black of his noble beard masking a weak, ignoble chin. And as he lay dying on the cold floor before her, his life leaking out yet no tangible soul making a scheduled appearance, she knew that, along with the relief of his death, she had given him a more precious gift still—had given him precisely what he needed. For, all along, unbeknownst to himself, he needed to find a woman like her. A woman bold enough to kill a cowardly man—a woman strong in spirit, rich in soul.
Gwendolyn falls silent. The eggs on my plate have congealed into a soggy yellow mess, and her pipe has gone out. The dragon is asleep, snoring cozily, in her lap.
“And . . . then?” I whisper, my throat dry.
“And then I went back to my village. I was quite cured of my desire to strip nature, to take her apart—I saw that there had to be a different, better, way of acquiring knowledge. I was twenty-one years old. I had helped myself to some of the professor’s most treasured possessions, and inspired by my new prosperity, the butcher’s son was quick to ask for my hand in marriage. They told me that I should say yes, that it was a proper thing to do, especially for a fallen girl like me. I laughed in their faces. With the money I had, I built this little cabin, rented the cave, and set up shop helping women who were not as bold as the girl in my story. Of course, this was all a long time ago, and it may or may not be entirely true. Well, the details may not be entirely true, but the essence is true enough. Most good stories are like that.” She starts to empty the pipe, her short-fingered, masculine hands steady, her motions methodical. “Do you want to talk about your divorce now?”
I am staring at her wide-eyed.
“Your husband has many advantages over you, girl. You left the palace of your own volition, you know, so, technically, you are now a derelict mother who abandoned her children. You are unemployed, too, unable to provide a solid home for them, or so it would appear. We need to discuss strategy, but first things first—you must find another job. Since you seem to have a natural aptitude for cleaning, what do you think of starting your own cleaning company? Cinderella Maid Services, how does that sound? It just so happens that I have some clients who are looking for a domestic, I will jot down the information for you.”
She is writing names, dates, arranging for our next meeting, at which future steps will be discussed, but I am barely listening, the horrible story she told me weighing down upon my spirit. When, at last, she sees me outside, I am startled to discover that the woods have grown dim, that evening has fallen. The witch—Gwendolyn—has given me a lantern, and, swinging it before me, I quickly follow the path toward the village, toward the sounds of dogs barking and the smells of meats being grilled for the villagers’ suppers, all so familiar, all so reassuringly normal. I pause, just once, to glance back at the house in the trees. The cabin itself is almost lost to the darkness of the forest, but its solitary window is blazing bright, and in its cheerful yellow light it seems to me that the whole house is bouncing ever so slightly, dancing from chicken foot to chicken foot.
At the Seaside
In the rosy light of dawn, Melissa is taking down the laundry, stiff with morning frost; winter is nearly upon us. Four of her seven children are in school, two are playing with the dog in the yard, and the baby is napping inside. Pigeons are cooing on the thatched roof. How funny, I think, as I glance over at my sister’s cozy yellow house between the billowing white sheets—from some angles, it looks almost like a shoe, the way it juts out on one side and rises on the other.
I am about to point it out to her, then decide against it.
“Good luck,” she calls after me. “I hope they work out better than Miss Rosa.”
My new employers, I have been given to understand, are a group of twelve prosperous, unmarried, somewhat unconventional young women who are living in a large rented house by the water. To get there, I walk through a sparse birch grove to a rural station, take an hourlong train ride, then, along with a few other domestics of indeterminate ages, clad in sensible, ankle-length skirts and dark, shapeless blouses, board a trolley out to the shore, and traverse the remaining distance on foot, along the seaside promenade. All tints
are pale here, bleached by the eternal labor of the waves and the wind, the white sky immense, the ocean rolling in with soothing murmurs, the air so bracing that each breath feels like a gulp of cold water. The house, when I reach it, turns out to be a rambling, airy, many-storied structure with balconies and verandas and a widow’s watch tower, its light gray colors perfectly suited to the broad, tranquil perspectives of the sea and the sand; when I climb to the door, the porch steps creak like the deck of a ship. I have a fleeting thought that I will be happy working here. Then, after several knocks that go unanswered, I step inside—and gasp.
Inside, all is chaos. Overturned glasses, overflowing ashtrays, tables sticky with pooling liquors, a cracked mirror, a few lamps on their sides, one bulky lampshade beached nearby like a belly-up whale. A woman’s solitary slipper is perched daintily atop cascading cushions, as though poised for flight; when I pick it up, I find its heel broken off and its satin-lined cavity filled to the brim with some sour-smelling liquid, so I drop it in terror and watch the pale yellow stain slowly eat into the filthy white rug. Crumpled papers—letters, photographs, shopping lists, invitations to parties—spill out of a bureau dragged into the middle of the living room and abandoned underneath the chandelier, where wilting heads of lilies stick out of the empty bulb sockets. The grand piano’s lid is sprung open, and I see, rotting amidst the springs, a brown bunch of bananas. All the doors between all the rooms are gaping wide, as are half the windows; wintry seaside light pours through the curtains splashed with many-colored splotches, making the devastation I witness all the more shocking. As I follow the trail of destruction through the house, my heart pounds and my knees quiver. I imagine armed robbers still lurking with their loot behind keeled-over armchairs, ready to spring at me, and I finish my inspection at a run, bursting into the upstairs loft as though being chased.
And here, I freeze. Scantily clad bodies of women are strewn at wild angles on beds, draped over settees, crumpled in chairs. I notice a dangling foot in a torn stocking, a nerveless arm tossed off loosely across a table, an apple of a breast fallen out of a soiled negligee, mangled shoes without mates littering the floor—and immediately I think of Gwendolyn’s story, of death, of murder.
I realize that my mouth is open, and only then hear myself screaming.
One of the bodies stirs, faintly, and a tousled head appears over the back of a sofa.
“Not very polite of you to shout like that,” the head says in a sulky voice, and squints at me through caked, furry eyelashes. “Who are you, anyway?”
The other bodies are now moving, too, shifting, stretching, moaning. I close my mouth with a snap, then open it again to reply. I feel rather shaken.
“Your new maid, miss. I believe you’ve been robbed.”
“Robbed?” Bleary dark eyes blink at me.
“The downstairs.” I gesture, weakly. “It’s all torn apart, pillows, papers—”
“Well, of course it is,” the head interrupts with an irritable yawn. “That’s why you are here, now, isn’t it? I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when you’ve finished, and do be thorough, make sure the vomit is off the curtains, we have some fresh blood coming tonight.”
And with that, the head vanishes behind the sofa.
Unsettled, I descend the three flights of stairs and set about the slow, laborious, ungrateful business of straightening the living room, the dining room, the parlor, all equally in pieces. As I move scraping and scrubbing and washing well into the afternoon hours, the hush above my head continues complete, and I am just beginning to worry that I merely imagined the stirring limbs, the spoken reassurances, when a barefoot, barelegged young woman plods soundlessly through the door, a short and none-too-fresh yellow kimono thrown over her shoulders.
“Aren’t you an absolute peach,” she declares as she opens her arms wide and twirls about the parlor. I recognize the tousled hair, the once-bleary dark eyes, grown vivid and alert. “I fear we’ve lived in a bit of a pigsty, but young men nowadays, they are just so fast, you know, one needs to keep up, one simply has no time for domestic niceties. I’m Edna. Is there anything for breakfast around here?”
It is nearing four o’clock. Without comment, I go to the kitchen to fry the bananas I retrieved from the piano, make some toast, brew some coffee—the icebox is jammed with haphazardly piled provisions. Just as the smells of morning start to rise through the early-evening air, the kitchen begins to get crowded: more and more barefoot women in slatternly robes and camisoles with the oily shine of tired satin file inside, yawning, running their cocktail-ringed fingers through their messy bobbed hair, rubbing their mascara-smeared eyes.
Edna, who is now sitting on the bar, dangling her strikingly shapely, shockingly exposed legs and biting into her third piece of toast, rattles off introductions in a rapid staccato between zesty mouthfuls: “Greta. Clara. Ginevra. Zelda. Theda. Rita. Barbara, but she prefers Bebe, and rightly so. Anita. Gilda. And, last but not least, the other Barbara, but do call her Bean—we do.”
The names all sound like the same name, sharp and fresh, and the women all seem to be the same woman, short-haired, rosebud-mouthed, pretty, indecently young, scarcely into her twenties. I count, to protect myself from being overwhelmed.
“Eleven,” I say as I distribute more toast. “That’s eleven. But I thought there were twelve of you.”
The barefoot women, who have come alive with the imbibing of coffee and are chattering to one another like an exaltation of larks, fall into an uneasy silence, dart sideways glances at Edna.
“There is also Nora,” Edna admits with visible reluctance. She looks just like the rest of them, but from the oddly mature, hesitant note in her voice, I understand that she must be the oldest. “Nora is not here right now.”
“She might come by later, though,” pipes up one of the others, Ginevra or Zelda. “Hey, you know what, you should stay, too. We’re expecting some divine fellows tonight, aren’t we, girls? We’ll be doing Chinese lanterns, and the music is ever so swell—aren’t you just gone on jazz?”
“Yes, stay, stay!” all the others cry, perking up. “We will lend you a dress, and Bean is marvelous with a pair of scissors, she can get your hair looking like it belongs to this century in no time at all. You will have such fun!”
But something about their abruptly restored jauntiness, the artful geometry of their curls, the terrible youthfulness of their eagerly smiling lips, the restlessness in their naked eyes, frightens me. Mumbling excuses and apologies, I gather my cleaning supplies and slip away, just as the child-women start trooping up the stairs to get ready for the coming night, their shrill, excited voices carrying snippets of fashion advice mixed in with misplaced confidences and heartfelt confessions, their dulcet laughter chasing me out into the twilight. As I trudge down the promenade, I feel every single one of my three dozen years weighing on my shoulders, my back aches, and the trolley stop is so much farther away than it was in the morning.
When I arrive the next day, the house is in shambles once again, chairs lying with legs up in the air like so many expired rats, two or three vases smashed, scratched gramophone records hung in an undulating garland on nails freshly hammered all along the living room walls, something pink and sticky gumming up the piano keys, another silken shoe with a broken-off heel filled with sour champagne, the young women out of sight, clearly asleep, strewn all over the loft in exhausted abandon. Prepared this time, I attack the destruction with grim efficiency and manage to escape just as I hear the first creaking footsteps on the stairs above—a cowardly strategy I will follow without fail in the coming days, in the coming weeks, until one Monday in mid-December, at the uncommonly early hour of three in the afternoon, I am intercepted in the foyer by a droopy creature with spiky hair and vivid shadows under her swollen eyes, whom, after a stretch of impolite gaping, I recognize as Edna.
“Rough night,” she says with a shrug. “Well, you saw what happened to
the potted plants. Shame, really. Tonight will be different, though, we will be meeting some absolutely lovely people. Do stay for the party, it’s so much merrier with an even dozen! Did you know they used to call us the Twelve Dancing Princesses? Oh, we were famous, we were! Only now Nora never comes, and it’s just not the same . . . Please? Pretty please?”
And whether because her dark, imploring eyes are beginning to glisten, or because, in the last week or two, my sister’s sunny bungalow has grown truly unbearable, her six happy children constant reminders of my own shortcomings and failures, I feel my resistance fading.
I hesitate, briefly, then exhale—and nod.
“Oh, will you, will you, really?” She claps, she jumps, she pirouettes; she looks all of twelve years old. “But that’s marvelous, marvelous! Come upstairs, we’ll get you fixed up right away. No, leave the broom, it doesn’t matter, really, it will only be trashed again in a couple of hours . . . Girls, guess who’s coming with us tonight! Bean, will you be a dear and grab the scissors, and you, Theda, bring the silver eye shadow, quick!” They crowd around me, talking all at once, peppering me with questions. “What size are you? Do you like pearls or onyx? Say, do you have a beau? But that’s perfect, we’ll match you up with an awfully nice sweetheart. Don’t be silly, now, everyone wants one, and it’s just for the night anyway, we always like to keep things moving, don’t we, girls?”
And just as I am starting to regret my moment of weakness, they push me into a chair before a three-legged vanity and fall upon me, twittering, giggling, fussing, like a flock of overexcited, maddened children—fall upon me with scissors, tweezers, curling irons, with brushes, perfumes, jars of pomade, with combs, lipsticks, powder puffs—and when, a full hour later, it seems, the frenzy is over and they draw back, spent, I look into the mirror before me and find someone else looking back.