I fantasised that the Jewish woman and I would investigate. She’d be cynical and wary of getting involved, but my belief in her would swing it: we would be a team. Would she accept that role, playing reluctant good guy to my blunt tomboy, Humphrey Bogart to my Bacall? I wished I could make it happen. Trouble is, you can give yourself the illusion of choice but you can’t really choose a new protector. They have to choose you.
I was just beginning to get melancholy when she came back to me. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said, with a smile that left her eyes pensive. ‘We can go now.’
‘What was going on?’
‘Oh, another girl has disappeared, Malga’s friend. The police think she’s dead.’
‘Oh wow, I heard about that, the killer. They didn’t find a body?’
She shook her head. Her frown said she didn’t want to dwell on the subject, so I laid off. This time she asked me where I was heading. I said Warsaw for the sake of argument. Her English was very good. We talked, neutral stuff about how I liked Poland and what other countries I’d visited. She knew damn well I wasn’t a tourist, but she’d obviously decided to ask no awkward questions and I was too proud to throw myself on her mercy. A song I liked came on the radio. I asked her what the words meant and she translated the catch for me-
‘If I could spend some time alone with you
In some place that’s hard to find, but easy to remember…’
I wanted it to be our song, the one that captures almost as an afterthought the whole fragile, bittersweet mood of the movie. I wanted to drive along with her all night. But we only got as far as the next roadside restaurant. This one was more like the Modern Grill in outward appearance, only without the petrol pumps. I wondered, just a little uneasily, what was going on now. Was she going to dump me?
‘You did well to eat at the other place,’ she said. ‘The food here is terrible.’
It was the same scene as before, except that the clientele was more mixed and the girls were more discreet. They wore coats. The same as before, she bought two coffees (granules from a Nescafe sachet, tasting of grease) and left me on my own. I watched her with the girls. You could see that the news about “Malga’s friend” had hit this place too. They were like little birds, huddling together in an invisible storm. And my friend was in the middle of it. This time I saw the deal. I saw some kind of pills in a clear plastic envelope, slipped from the pocket of the military-grey coat into a hungry teenage hand. You wish there’d be a little more variety, but it’s always either drugs or sex. Always.
‘What was that?’ I said, when she came back. I didn’t want her to think I was naive. ‘What are you selling? Maybe I want some.’
She shook her head. ‘I hope not.’
‘C’mon. What was it?’
‘AZT.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh…’ I felt gauche and confused. ‘Is…is that what you do? You ride up and down here handing out medical stuff? A kind of whores’ paramedic?’
‘Not exactly.’ She sat down, hands deep in the pocket of that excellent coat, gazed into space for a moment, then gave a nod towards the girl who needed the AIDS drugs—who was leaving, getting back to the job. ‘How old, do you think?’
‘Um, sixteen?’ I hazarded. Making her two years younger than me, and dying. Tough.
‘Perhaps, barely…Once upon a time, I was a teenage Jewish girl, engaged to an older man. I had no choice about the marriage. I mean, I was not forced: in my heart I had no choice. Our community, my community was important to me.’ I nodded. I imagined how she might have felt, growing up Jewish in Communist Poland.
‘I got pregnant. He knew the baby wasn’t his, but he kept my secret. He also knew that the other guy, the baby’s father, was still in my life. He married me anyway, and brought up my kid. At first I was simply grateful for the food and shelter. Then, when I was getting almost old enough to talk to him, to know him, the bastard ran out on me. Heart attack. They say the good die young. It isn’t true. The good die middle-aged, they live just long enough to work themselves to death…’
‘What about the other guy, the baby’s father?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, he’s still around. Always will be. I’m part of his operation. He’s a kind of monster, but even when I don’t like what goes down in his operation, which is most of the time, I understand him. As much as I wish I didn’t. You know, giving me a child, with all the grief that that entailed, was the smallest part of what he did to me. What was much worse, though I didn’t work this out until a long time afterwards, was that he made me his partner. That’s what really stitched me up. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that I volunteered. How could I have volunteered? How could I have known? But it is true that I’m implicated. I also have blood on my hands.’
It had been the same with the guys. If they chose to talk, they’d ramble away as if I was a dog or a cat or something, leaving out all the facts that would make sense of what they were saying. But with her I didn’t mind. My indignation had vanished the moment she started to explain. I wanted nothing better than to listen while she gave me glimpses of her complex and mysterious life. If she’d told me she was a straight-arrow charity worker I’d have been terribly disappointed. I wondered if she carried a gun, and should I call the police; and was I going to meet this monster, the Mr Big from whom she couldn’t escape, my dark lady with the chequered past.
‘Being a whore is like a drug addiction,’ she said, looking at the girls, not at me. ‘Everything contributes: friends, circumstances, the idleness; a certain fascination. Giving them medicine is something to gain their confidence, it doesn’t change anything. To get out, they have to vanish. I help them to do that, if they’ll let me. If it’s too late, then I help them any way I can.’
I felt uncomfortable. ‘If you want to save the girls, why don’t you go after the guys?’
‘Ah!’ She laughed, offered me a cigarette and lit one for herself. Her long fingers were stained with nicotine, and nervously beautiful. ‘And do what? Shoot them in the head? A person has to know he is sick, before he can be made well. The girls know they are sick, at least, by the time they come to me.’
She sipped her cold coffee for a while, preoccupied.
‘Would you mind coming back with me to Pod Las now?’
‘Huh?’
‘The first place we stopped. It means, “Under the Forest”.’
So we went back. It was dusk, and getting very cold. We’d hit a slack moment, the room was nearly empty. Yellowish electric light glistened on the wooden walls. My friend spoke to the woman at the counter: who scowled and answered, ‘Tak’. Which means ‘yes,’ but only if repeated about fifteen times in a swift staccato like a burst of machinegun fire. Tak, tak tak…she said. The raggedy blonde my friend had talked with earlier was almost the only girl in the place.
I got myself tea, this time, cheaper than coffee; and sat down, thinking about the dark lady with the chequered past. The blonde girl called Malga stood up. Her face was drawn and grey, her eyes blank. She headed for the door. I saw my friend straighten up sharply, as if someone had dropped ice down her back. She followed Malga.
As she passed, she said quietly, ‘Stay here. Don’t follow us!’
She went out. I sat for a few minutes. Then I started thinking, about the girl who had just walked by me: about the scene I’d witnessed here earlier, and my mystery friend. Who liked to hang out with whores, but who had told me that her mission was to rid the world of girls who sell sex for a living. Soon I had myself completely terrified. I decided that I’d been riding around with a psychopath. The Jewish woman was the predator! It had to be. Now I understood why she’d asked me no questions. She knew everything she needed to know. I was alone, I was vulnerable, and the way we’d met had left her in no doubt that I was her rightful prey.
The little diner was suddenly drained of romance. Everything changed shape and colour. My American, the one in Budapest, had two little daughters. He didn’t tell me that, I looked in his wallet on
ce while he was sleeping and found their pictures. I suppose when they grew up he wanted them to be dentists, or something. But when he met me, he thought it was okay that I should pay with sex for food and shelter. Was he right? I don’t know. He didn’t force me. But he didn’t march me to a telephone and stand over me while I called my terrified parents. He didn’t do anything to haul me back from the brink.
What went through his head? Am I an adult? Am I my brother’s keeper?
But it doesn’t matter how you got into the hole, when you’re in it…I was going hot and cold by turns. The withered faces of murdered girls stared at me from the wall. I was so frightened that I couldn’t see any way to resist. She would come back from whatever she did to Malga. She would come back and take me into the dark—
The woman behind the counter was giving me strange looks. Finally she came over with a short man in a pork pie hat, one of her more prosperous customers. ‘Are you wanting a lift?’ she asked. ‘This gentleman can help you.’
‘No thank you.’
‘You should take the lift,’ said the proprietress of the Pod Las. I couldn’t ask about the Jewish-looking woman, because I couldn’t speak Polish. But from the way she spoke and the look in her eye I knew that she was warning me to get away. She was right. The guy looked okay. I would do him and get him to drop me in a town, somewhere away from this damned road, where I would call my parents. Tomorrow or the next day I would call them, I would call them real soon. As soon I had a story worked out.
We went out together. He slipped his arm around my waist. I was looking up and down for the raggedy blonde. I saw something big parked a few hundred metres along the road, no lights. I thought it was the jeep. Beside it, what looked like a struggle going on. I shouted ‘Stop that!’ and threw off the man’s arm. He yelled after me, something like it’s not our concern! I kept running, beside the stream of traffic, screaming ‘Leave her alone!’
I reached the spot in time to see three men’s pale faces, flashing angry guilty glances over their shoulders, as they stooped around what looked like a bundle of dirty clothes. They left the bundle lying, leapt into their big car, slammed the doors; and it roared away.
I stood there shaking.
The angel of death that stalks girls like my raggedy blonde isn’t one horrible serial-killer. The monster has many faces: disease, neglect, accident, overdose. It’s only sometimes murder, and bodies can easily vanish when no one cares. I didn’t know if the girl was dead. I was going to go to her: but then someone else was there. It was the Jewish woman, my mysterious friend. The body lay in her arms, like that statue called the Pieta, of Jesus Christ lying dead, and Mary holding him. And then, where this image had been, there seemed to be a human shape cut out of clear darkness. What did I see? I still tremble when I remember, though it was over in an instant, a terrifying glimpse. I think I saw her as she really is. She is not the Jewish woman. She is no gentle, docile Madonna. She, impersonal and absolute, is what lies within and beyond all images of the dark lady. I saw the gateway between creation and the uncreated. I saw the immaculate void of all our desire, opening into my world, in that cold April night, with the traffic roaring by, the air smelling of exhaust fumes, headlights splashing like shoreline waves on the forest eaves.
The man from the Pod Las came running up. He exclaimed and cried (I think) What a terrible thing! and that I mustn’t look! He led me back to the diner and the proprietress called the police. There were sirens and lights and they took the girl’s body away.
I discovered that no one else had seen a Jewish-looking woman with a scarred cheek. I’d come into the Pod Las alone, once in the afternoon and then again in the evening. As soon as I understood, I didn’t insist on my version. They’d have thought I was crazy. When the police had found me a hotel for the night, I looked in my purse to see how much money I had left and discovered a wad of notes tucked into the back pocket, with a scrap of paper on which someone had written, in looping old-fashioned European handwriting: go home. It was enough for my air fare. I suppose my Polish friend must have put the money in there, when he decided to dump me at the Modern Bar Grill. I told you he was a decent enough kind of guy. The rest, the whole dark lady encounter, was my vivid imagination.
So that was the end of my adventure. There were no terrible consequences, much as I deserved them. It was just a wild adolescent spree. But I kept the paper with the message I like to think she sent me (directly or indirectly); and I keep the picture of her I bought up on my wall. I think of her often, the impossible She. I wonder, is she still driving up and down, between Czestochowa and Piotrkow Tryb, saving souls?
And I think about going home.
LA CENERENTOLA
Act I: The Scholar Gypsies
My first thought, when I saw the sisters, was that they were simply too perfect. They had to be identical twins: about sixteen years old; tall but not too tall, sun-kissed golden skin; rounded and slender limbs, long golden hair, blue eyes. They were walking in step, arm in arm, whispering together; identical even in their graceful movements. One pushed back her hair, the other brushed an insect from her immaculate white shorts. Each gesture seemed a mirror image of the other. Impossibly perfect! Then I saw the mother, strolling along behind (she had to be their mother, the likeness was too close for any other relationship), and I thought perhaps I understood. The older model—or should one say, the original—was a very good-looking woman; a blonde with long legs, regular features and lightly tanned skin. Her eyes behind her sunglasses were no doubt just as blue. But there were details—lips that were a little narrow, a square jaw, a figure not so exactly proportioned- that added up to something less than flawless beauty.
I tried not to stare, though of course those girls must be used to open-mouthed admiration. Then I realised, with pleasure, that this amazing trio was actually approaching us. The older woman was about to speak. I sat up, with a welcoming smile.
Suze and Bobbi and I were in Europe for the summer. This had become the pattern of our lives in the last few years. We spent our winters in New Mexico, where I taught philosophy and Suze worked as a software engineer. Every summer we crossed the Atlantic. As yet we had no fixed abode over here, but we were looking. We saw our travels as a series of auditions. This year we were considering the Mediterranean for the role of our summer home. But we had fled from an overcrowded villa-party on the Cote d’Azur. Trop du monde on the French Riviera; so here we were in mid-August, our comfortable trailer planted on a sun-punished hillside under the brilliant, mythic sky of Haut Provence, at the simple but very spruce and attractive ‘Camping International St Mauro’.
‘Wow,’ murmured my wife, Suze. She was lying beside my lounger on a blanket, there under the cork oaks. She propped herself on one elbow to gaze at this glorious vision. Our daughter Bobbi continued to pursue her new hobby of plaguing the little red ants that infested our terrace. She had scattered a handful of breadcrumbs for them, and as they staggered home with the goods she was blocking their trail with impossible obstacles and pitfalls.
‘Hello,’ said the woman, at once announcing herself as English, and probably upper-class (but many English accents, I admit, sound absurdly aristocratic to American speakers) ‘I couldn’t help noticing, I saw you in St Mauro earlier: you are Americans aren’t you?’
‘We’re from New Mexico,’ agreed Suze, grinning. ‘I’m Suze Bonner. This is my wife, Thea Lalande. That’s Bobbi, but she won’t talk to you, she’s an uncouth little kid. Isn’t this place great. We just picked it off the road map.’
Suze thought any place where there was heat and a minimum of human activity ‘great’. The fact that St Mauro possessed no culture I could drag her around was a further advantage. I sometimes wondered why she allowed me to uproot her from her native desert at all.
‘Absolutely ravishing,’ said our new acquaintance. ‘And so peaceful. I’m Laura Brown. This is Celine, and this is Carmen. We’re staying outside the village.’ The twins smiled, perfectly. Laura Brown took o
ff her sunglasses and gazed at Bobbi. ‘Actually, I was wondering if we would see you at the fete tonight.’
‘Fete?’ Bobbi’s head came up as if bouncing on a spring. ‘Will there be fireworks?’
Laura Brown laughed. ‘I’m afraid not!’
‘Unnh.’ With a shrug, my charming little daughter returned to her evil deeds.
Our new friend, still watching Bobbi with curious attention, went on, ‘It’s a small affair. Flamenco Guitar and- ‘ She consulted a piece of paper taken from her shoulder bag. ‘A couscous. At the bar called The Squirrel, L’Ecureuil. But there’s only one bar, you can’t miss it. Well, I hope you three will be there. It could be fun. A bientot, enfin.’
‘Au’voir,’ chimed Celine and Carmen.
The heavenly twins passed on by. Trailing behind them came a skinny girl of about Bobbi’s age, or maybe a little older: ten or twelve. She was wearing grubby blue shorts and a candy striped tee-shirt that had seen better days. Her rough brown head was hanging sulkily, her eyes fixed on the dust she kicked up with her dirty espadrilles. As she came level with us she looked up, and shot Bobbi a baleful glance…I wouldn’t have thought she had anything to do with the other three, except that Laura Brown turned and called: ‘Marianina, please keep up. And don’t scuff your shoes like that! My youngest daughter,’ she explained, as if to excuse the sudden sharpness in her tone. ‘Such a little ragamuffin. There’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘I wonder what went wrong there,’ murmured Suze, when the family was out of sight. ‘You think the other two, the twins are—?’
‘Of course. What else could they be, looking like that?’
Bobbi, naturally, pounced. Children have an infallible ear for their parents’ indiscreet remarks. ‘What? What are they? What do you think they are?’
‘Sssh. Nothing.’
‘They look like a pair of Barbie dolls,’ muttered Bobbi.
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