Fresh Mint with Lemon

by Monika Zgustova

  Cameras aim at the tanks and click away. Film cameras purr. Sergei can’t hear them because of the roaring of the tank. He sees the eyes of the cameras and imagines the sounds they make. They’re filming him, Sergei. They’re making a film about him. He feels like the lord and master of the street. The master of this city of ancient stones. He feels like the master of these beautiful girls. And of the old people. He is strong, the strongest of them all. He feels like a conqueror. He is on a tank, high above everybody else. A conqueror. He, Sergei, age twenty-three. He, Sergei, a student. He feels a sweet dizziness. He closes his eyes.

  The tank roars like thunder through the streets. A whole column of tanks. People lean out of windows. They look at the tanks with hatred. Old people are weeping. Sergei sees that some people are spitting on the tanks. And on them. There are gobs of spit all over the place. Menacing fists. Menacing shouts. Menacing whistles. Noise and hubbub, uproar and clamor. Exclamations. Faces full of rancor. Of anger, of antagonism. Sergei understands the yells of “Go home!” and “Pigs!” They sound similar to Russian. But up until today he had never heard these words uttered by such high-pitched, hostility-sharpened voices. By pure hatred. There are stones. Children are throwing them, and adults too. With them, they also hurl their condemnation.

  Down below, on the street, he sees a child. He has a stone in his raised hand. He can throw it at any moment. At them? His protectors? He’s young. He’s a child, almost a toddler. He can’t understand why they’ve come. He doesn’t know that they’ve come here to protect them. He doesn’t understand anything. There is no hatred in his eyes. Just excitement. And tension. He has let himself be carried away by the general atmosphere. By the drunkenness of the moment. He is waiting for an adventure. Like him, Sergei. The child is holding a large stone in his hand. He is strong. He raises his hand even higher. In a flash, he will throw the stone.

  A hand with a stone. A gesture born of weakness. Only the weak kick out at everything around them. Although … the Russians at that time were expecting a welcome with flowers and hugs, songs and Soviet flags, kisses and shouts of hurrah. That’s what it was like in ’45, that’s what they were expecting. That’s what they deserved, they told themselves. So many miles in a tank! And there were stones waiting for them instead of songs, gobs of spit instead of kisses. Hatred. That hatred that the Czechs felt toward the Russians went through their skin like poisoned arrows. The hatred of the others ended up weakening the Russians’ pride in their great empire. It ended up weakening their self-confidence. The Russians, even though they were far stronger, even though they were armed from head to foot, even though they were protected by the tanks, became weak. That is why they started shooting. They entered Prague with the tanks—and Sergei believes that in other Czech and Slovak cities the same thing must have happened—and they started shooting against that hatred. Shooting like lunatics. In the air. At the buildings. Whole walls were marked by those shots, like a sick person with smallpox. Sergei knows perfectly well that many on his side wanted to shoot at the people. At that hatred. A soldier wants to fire his gun. But the order was: only in extreme situations. So they shot, at most, in the air and at the buildings. But they did shoot. Out of weakness. Only the weak strike out at everything around them. Like a child, like an old person.

  In one of the boulevards, as wide as the Nevsky Perspective, Sergei saw that people were bunching together. They were pressing up together under the monument of a horseman, much taller than the Bronze Horseman of his Petersburg. Leningrad, as it was then. The people were waving a flag with three colors, stained with blood. Later he saw the same flags covering things. He guessed that they must have been dead bodies. He didn’t understand anything. How was this possible? The officers had explained to them that they were going to free their Czech brothers from the jaws of the enemy. Why then were they, the Russians, shooting these brothers of theirs? And why were these brothers spitting on them and throwing stones at them, with eyes full of hatred? Full of desperation?

  Sergei comes to. He’s cold, he wraps himself in a blanket. Then he immediately pulls it to one side and boils some water for tea. He sits down again and takes a piece of hard bread with cheese from his wife’s hands. He puts the bread on the table. He doesn’t, in the end, bring the cheese to his lips, and leaves it on top of the bread. He puts out the oil lamp and stares into the darkness.

  THE YELLOW CHRYSANTHEMUM

  On Monday, Vadim decided that if they didn’t receive him, he would leave them his card with the phone number of the boardinghouse and his e-mail address. And, in the end, there was nothing left to do but that, because all that happened was that he got to hear the irritated voice of the housekeeper over the intercom. Very carefully, he placed his business card in the mailbox next to the bell. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the lobby of the boardinghouse, waiting for them to call him.

  * * *

  Today is Tuesday, my birthday. Surely, she’ll call me today! This is your first thought when you wake up. You savor the contact of the sheets with your naked body, and that is the first phase of your own private party. You turn from one side of the bed to the other and you let your imagination run wild. Yes, today! And you jump out of bed. With a serious face you instruct the receptionist to let you know when there’s a call for you because you’re expecting a very important one. You have breakfast in a café that looks onto the sea. From the shade of your terrace, you have a splendid view of the beach and the path that follows the coast, along which vacationers take their morning walk, looking for a place on the beach to offer themselves up to the rough caresses of the sun. From here, the sea is all yours. You take in everything from where you are and maybe you can even see Majorca. You ask for a coffee and a croissant: for you that piece of dry pastry has the taste of a chocolate cake fresh from the oven at Sacher’s. The customers in the café, their eyes full of sleep, also seem to want to render homage to this summer morning with the languid movements with which they sip their coffee and take in the turquoise blue of the sky. Slowly, the sand of the beach is covered over by the colorful flowers of towels and Bali sarongs. Brown, almost nude, bodies refresh themselves in the calm sea of these morning hours, and shine like a turquoise fountain with orange-tinted water. You feel for your paper bag and take out the gifts you’ve given yourself for turning thirty-six years old today; you bought them this morning in a little bookshop near the beach. There are two books: a little treatise about the trees and bushes and plants of the Mediterranean, accompanied by some pen drawings; and an old paperback, covered in dust and faded by the sun: some haikus in English. You order another coffee, fill the black liquid with sugar, and read the first poem you come across:

  We daydream in the world,

  Here and there.

  Like a horse ploughing

  a field small as the palm of a hand.

  You savor the verses on your tongue, together with the sweet, bitter liquid. Here and there. We daydream in the world. From Petersburg to Barcelona. With two buses. From Sitges to the house beyond Olivella. On foot. A horse ploughing a field small as the palm of a hand.

  You leave a couple of coins on the table for the breakfast. Something compels you to go back to the boardinghouse. It is twelve noon.

  * * *

  “Has anybody called for me?” you ask the receptionist when you go inside.

  “For you? No!” answers the woman with a black moustache, as wispy as that of a samurai, as her neck sinks back down into the flesh of her body. She goes back to her magazine, full of the social scandals of Hollywood actors and blonde princesses.

  “No one?” You can’t believe your ears.

  The woman moves her neck, from which an enormous necklace is swinging, to and fro and back again, without taking her eyes off the pastel-pink dress that Prince Charles’s wife is wearing in the magazine.

  “No one,” you repeat.

  What did you expect? That because it’s your birthday, the world should revolve around you? You think that the world
is the kind of place where everyone gets what they want, right? That you were brought into the world to be happy? It’s your birthday, you’re a year older, so, get out a bit, open your eyes and take a good look around!

  You’d see plenty. But instead, you decide to enter the courtyard of the boardinghouse because from there you can hear the telephone ring. You sit on a step and look at the cement floor. You don’t even smell the stench of a rubbish bin. Without thinking, you look at the flowers of a bougainvillea, as red as a scream, which play on the ground with the sleepy breeze. Like kittens! Shouldn’t this be enough for you, this image of incessant, ever-changing movement? The red stars of the flowers against a grey background. No, it isn’t enough for you; you sigh and bite your lips restlessly. The telephone! You jump up … No, it isn’t for you. It’s the receptionist, taking note of another reservation. You walk up and down, you don’t even notice that you’ve been pacing like this for two hours, but you need more movement and you go out onto the street.

  You see that, in the meantime, the sky has clouded over and it looks as if there’s going to be quite a downpour; people have started to run to get to shelter in time … but you see none of this, the only thing you want is to keep on wandering, and you tell yourself it doesn’t make any sense to spend any more time here, this evening you’ll pack your bags and tomorrow you’ll leave, you’ll catch the first train to Barcelona and there you’ll sit on a bus heading northeast and you’ll travel a long, long way, until you reach home.

  On the streets, everybody is running up and down, the beach bags and the folding chairs and the umbrellas they are carrying under their arms get in the way, while you run in the opposite direction, aimlessly, you just want to flee from that damn grey telephone. You reach the sea; with long strides you go along the edge of the beach, and the first drops are already falling, but you don’t even notice; you walk like a robot, now the rain is coming down in thick cords that whip your face … Finally you turn round; when you get to the boardinghouse, you look like a water nymph, and at that moment the first hailstones start to hit the roofs. There is nothing you can do: the woman at reception shakes her head back and forth as if trying to get rid of a stiff neck … No, nobody’s called. No, absolutely no one …

  In your room, you wash, comb your hair, and put on some dry clothes, and then you lie down on the bed with your eyes fixed on the phone, which is hanging on the wall; but you can’t stand it and you run down to reception. There is a TV set there that is always on; maybe you can entertain yourself for a while. On the screen you see women with platinum hair, fat as piglets, stuffed into dresses that are too tight, like meat in a pork sausage, but your head is ten miles away. You would like to go back to the path that goes through the vineyards and the olive trees, but your stupidity has closed all doors to you.

  “Mister Vadim, Mister Vadim,” the receptionist announces in a colorless voice.

  Patricia! You think as you run. No one else has your phone number!

  “Good morning, we got your card,” Patricia says in her curious Russian.

  You don’t say anything. Finally, it occurs to you to say, “How are you?”

  “Now I’m a little better, thanks.”

  Patricia’s voice sounds happy.

  “What happened?”

  “I sprained my ankle, but now I’m walking again, slowly. And I haven’t been wasting my time.” She laughs.

  “I don’t doubt it. What have you been doing?”

  “Some new drawings. Inspired by those Japanese miniatures, you know? Do you want to come and see them?”

  She arranges the meeting for the next afternoon, between six and six thirty.

  You hang up, you open your laptop, and you write a quick e-mail to your friend in Petersburg:

  Dear Boris,

  Just now there’s been a tremendous downpour and I’m going out for a walk. I want to walk, to run, because I’m so happy that here in the bedroom I would probably explode. I need air, space for my energy!

  Best wishes,

  Vadim

  * * *

  The next day, you open your book about the trees and plants of the Mediterranean and you learn that olive trees have silvery grey leaves. But, how could that be? When you walked to the white house they looked green to you, a dark, healthy, fresh green. At the table next to yours, there’s a woman who is a little bit older than you … why, it’s Radhika! She is sipping coffee from her cup. You ask her for her opinion regarding this mystery. I never notice details like that, she says with a smile. She comes over to your table, and flicks though the book. She is wearing a yellow dress that clings to her figure. She prefers the town of Sitges to the surroundings of Patricia’s house. You have a chat … about how parents don’t understand, about how friends do … the usual stuff. She looks at you with tenderness. She is wearing a bright yellow dress that clings to her figure, to her incomparable body. During the two hours that you sit together, her eyes sometimes turn into the black pistils of tulips, they separate from her face and float in the air, far from her face. You catch them with your gaze and plant them on the copper-colored tray of the sea: it doesn’t bother you that they float there. That they let you concentrate on that bright yellow dress that clings to the figure of another woman, to her incomparable body that the dress allows one to imagine to a certain extent. Now you dedicate yourself fully to Radhika, only from time to time you look at the sea to make sure: Are they still there? Yes. They float on the copper tray. The pistils.

  Meanwhile she has ordered some olives; they have been brought on a little dish: black, shiny, wrinkled. Radhika takes one with her fingers and carefully, very slowly, she puts it into your mouth; with her fingers she touches your lips, your gums, your tongue.

  After two hours, you invite Radhika to come with you to your boardinghouse; she gets up, laughing, and follows you. She laughs when she sees the picture of the ballerina that hangs over your bed: What is she dancing, flamenco or the can-can? You caress her gently through the fine yellow fabric. Slowly you take off her dress, revealing her brown body with four little white triangles, spaced out on the front and back of her body. You kiss every inch of the skin inside the triangles, of the skin between them and around them. She undoes the buttons of your pants and your shirt, she places her lips on the places she has uncovered, slowly, very slowly … and …

  Why have you done it? Why, my God, have you looked at your watch? Now you know, because you have just checked, that it is five o’clock. Five in the afternoon. You stop concentrating on the woman who is kissing your body and you say to yourself: Five, will I get there in time? There’s an hour to go, an hour and a half tops, before the meeting, and I still have to shower, dress, get to Olivella on the five-fifteen bus … And, moreover, finish things off with this woman … You tell yourself all this as the woman leans against you, kneels … but you already know you will disappoint her, all you can think about is the fact that you won’t have enough time to catch the bus.

  Is the time the only thing that really matters to you? The fact of arriving late? Be honest with yourself! No, deep down you have the feeling that you have betrayed Patricia. Or almost. Quickly, you dismiss this thought before it can take root in your brain.

  And, at the same time, you give your body strict orders to satisfy your desires. Desires? No, in fact they’re not there anymore. What is there, rather, is the aim, the duty that you have suggested to yourself and to your body. But your body isn’t obeying orders. You fake passion, hoping you might be able to convince your disobedient body to feel what you are only pretending to feel … in vain. On Radhika’s face, you can see her disenchantment, although she is calm and trying to smile. What fault is it of hers? Explain it to her! You make an effort to clarify your situation. You’re writing a book about … you hear yourself pronounce these words. It sounds improbable, unlikely, false. False. She says she understands and comes with you to the bus stop, but your bus has already left. Of course. It’s five thirty. You don’t even ask how much a taxi to
Olivella is going to cost you. You know what’s going to happen: that this caprice that you never wanted (who did want it, then?) will ruin your budget for the rest of the summer.

  The taxi sets off, Radhika watches you from the pavement, the yellow dress hangs on her sadly. No, she doesn’t want to go back to Olivella with you. You watch her: her breasts and her arms and her legs no longer give off a sweet summer melody, they only hang on her, unhealthily, like her dress. The woman is smiling, but only with her mouth. “We’ll see each other in the evening, here, in this café.” You lean your head out of the car window and point to the pavement in front of you. Has she heard you? Her eyes still look disappointed. She is waving goodbye as if to say: Don’t go, stay with me!

  Is it true that her arms are hanging slackly by her side, that her eyes are disappointed? Have you lost your powers of observation? If you stopped thinking a lot of nonsense, which you refer to as “my betrayal,” you would see that Radhika’s eyes are not disappointed but cold, that her arms are not hanging, and certainly not in a sad way, because her muscles are tensed, her smile is twisted because she is clenching her teeth, and that she has closed her eyes, concentrating hard on a plan of war.

  When you have lost sight of her, you fidget restlessly in the taxi, as if wanting to say: I’ll go and look for her, tomorrow! For sure I’ll find her in the same café in the morning! Because you know that she won’t show up for the appointment you just suggested, that in the evening you will search for her yellow dress in vain. And you repeat the verse that has come to you from a few days earlier:

  Look at

  the chrysanthemum,

  yellow,

  without a drop

  of dust.

  You thought that haikus, in your mind, were linked to Patricia and her world. How is it, then, that … you repeat it when you get out of the taxi at Olivella and you pay a sum of money that, for you, is enormous. The yellow chrysanthemum without a drop of … you repeat these words, this song, for half an hour, while you walk up to Patricia’s house along a dusty path that the taxi driver has refused to take you along because he doesn’t want to get the car dirty.