The Natashas
Page 19
(The problem’s the in-between.)
The light touches Béatrice’s heels, then climbs her calves, thighs, and races up her back.
(Keep walking, Béatrice.)
3
Cars passed her one after the other. To her left, the wall of the Louvre, beige-grey stone. As she walked, she glanced up at the high, arched windows. They were covered with thin, white curtains, so one could not see inside. Behind them, hidden from the pedestrians, were marble-floored hallways. These hallways led to a series of square, windowless rooms, one opening into another. On the walls of these square rooms, paintings hung like military service ribbons.
From the street, though, as Béatrice was walking, all she could see was the row of tall and narrow arched windows covered in white gauze like recovering eyes, the lower row with bars across the windows. If she hadn’t known this was the Louvre, she might have thought it was a prison.
She drew her gaze away, back to the grandiose street stretching out before her and the burnt blue skyline framed by the Haussmann buildings, balconies laced with black bars, stonework ridges studded with medallions, mansard roofs, flat-faced and monumental.
(Keep walking, Béatrice.)
4
She could have turned at Pont-Neuf and gone to the Seine and jumped in it. That would have been something. But she didn’t. She kept on walking alongside the Louvre wall, one street lamp after the other, one barred window after another, until she reached the gate she needed to reach. Lucky for her it was open. The gate was tall with black spires, the top spikes painted gold. Béatrice passed under the archway, walked through the hallway to the second pair of gold-tipped gates, which were incidentally also open. She walked through them and into that noble courtyard.
5
The courtyard contained four glass pyramid structures. One large pyramid in the centre, which, during working hours served as the entrance for patrons, and three smaller ones on each side. The smaller glass pyramids were divided by dark marble pools where, after sundown, water ran like black silk.
The pyramids were surrounded like a barracks by ornate ledges, populated with various statues: mostly a lot of fools, foolish gods, foolish humans.
There was a sort of eternal laugh that seemed to be vibrating from all of them. It just barely tickled the scalp. That wasn’t the only thing that was emitting a vibration. Béatrice looked to the left and saw that one small glass pyramid was glowing.
6
As she approached it, she felt its glow. She reached out and touched the warm glass. She put both her palms on a glass panel and leaned forward to look inside.
7
The lights were on. There were two short escalators, both at a standstill. Across from them, a marble counter with a sign “audio guide”. At this hour, there was no one behind the counter. Against the wall were two racks where the audio-guide headsets hung like rows of shoelaces. In front, metal stands marked out a stretched lane for the waiting line, still trying to keep order in the emptiness.
Next to the corner of the counter, before the escalators, there was a wide marble bowl with a tree planted in it. Béatrice walked around the side of the glass pyramid, drawn to see more of this oddly placed tree, when something stopped her. She leaned into the glass until her nose touched the transparent surface. There, between the audio-guide station, the potted tree and the escalators, was a woman, completely naked, lying on the ground.
8
The naked woman’s skin was very similar to the floor, marbled in different shades. Béatrice might not have seen her if it hadn’t been for the meshes of brown hair that fell in waves from her head. The woman’s knees were up, leaning into each other. Her arms were crossed over her face. They rested upon her brow in the form of a clean X. Perhaps she was shielding herself, from the light, or from all that open space around her flesh. Despite her position, she was not resting. Something about her was quite alert. Her bellybutton peered out like an insomniac eye.
9
The woman arched her back and shifted her knees, then uncrossed her arms and looked up at Béatrice. Her eyebrows were dark strokes, her eyes wide and waiting.
10
“… Polina …” Béatrice called down.
11
Polina’s lips began to curl into a smile. As it rose, Béatrice’s mouth mirrored from above.
With the same inhale, both women’s lips parted. Together, they breathed out. One from inside the glass pyramid and one from outside. Their breath joined on the glass panel.
12
From the glass, their breath peeled off and floated freely upward. It reached the stone and marble of the Louvre, then passed into the courtyard, through the foolish statues, and up into the cavernous evening.
It continued higher and higher, passing by aeroplanes taking sleepy passengers back to France. It floated away from Europe, above the continents.
It left the stratosphere and was brushed by hurrying meteors. There it floated by orbiting traces of animals which had been sent into space out of human curiosity. It sifted through the particles of Laika the dog, and Albert I and II, the monkeys, and the garden spider Arabella, and the pair of Japanese tree frogs.
Now Polina’s and Béatrice’s breath was made up of all these things. Stone dust, avalanches, Arabella’s legs. It joined a certain low humming of billions of voices. It took its place among all of these voices, and was at home everywhere.
13
Do-bee do-bee-doo … all the voices hummed. A pair of legs began to spread and the room filled with applause.
Acknowledgements
Dear family, thank you. The Kantolinskys and the Moskovichs. Valentin, Valeriy, Irina, Lev, Isabella, Alexandra Burlet … From your roots, my hands do write.
To my extended family, Rick Kinner, his library, his big heart, Kaisa Kinnunen, my first reader and sister-seeker, Tessa Hays-Nordin, for our questions, Jethro Massey, co-detective of the troubling narrative, Linda Lämmle, who always made me feel like a revolutionary, Laura Woody, our Mama Stein, Maria Mocerino, fellow scavenger, Nicholas-Alexander Miloš Mestas, my Slavic-Mexican bratik, Sara Franceschi, for always receiving my writing with such care, Scott Cooper, for giving me your painting of the two-handed dream.
Thank you for kindness, your support, Vanja Hedberg, Spela Kasal, Nadja Spiegelman, Erin Plunkett, Emer O’Carroll, Jayne Batzofin, Jeanne Gradowski, Rik Haber, Olga Tsiporkina, the Divinskys, the Davidsons. To my theatre days, and all those luminaries, mes cousins, Misha Arias de la Cantolla, Zoumana Méïté. Jesse Posner, our lifetimes in Sarajevo. To my playwriting mentor in Boston, Andrew Clarke. You believed, you encouraged. It was no small thing.
Thank you to my healers, Claire Finney, Silke Schroeder.
Hannah, thank you, for your skilled eye, for your dedication to authenticity, and to everyone at Serpent’s Tail who had a hand in this, Nick, Sarah, Ruthie, Pete.
Jane, thank you for being at my side at every step, with resource and compassion.
And thank you, whoever you are, who came with me in the plane from the Ukraine to America, then again from America to Paris, and remains generous and ready.
ALSO FROM SERPENT’S TAIL
Eat My Heart Out
Zoe Pilger
ISBN 978 1 84668 963 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 971 2
After Me Comes the Flood
Sarah Perry
ISBN 978 1 78125 364 9
eISBN 978 1 84668 946 8
Indigo
Clemens J. Setz
ISBN 978 1 84668 953 6
eISBN 978 1 84765 992 7
Familiar
J. Robert Lennon
ISBN 978 1 84668 957 4
eISBN 978 1 78283 009 2
The Winter War
Philip Teir
ISBN 978 1 78125 489 9
eISBN 978 1 78283 070 2
Leonora
Elena Poniatowska
ISBN 978 1 84668 855 3
eISBN 978 1 84765 827 2
/>
Yelena Moskovich, The Natashas