by Nina Allan
“I don’t know,” I said. There was a kind of harsh ringing in my ears, the sound of an electrical device that won’t switch off. “She’s not really my friend. I know her to say hello to, that’s all.”
We hung around my room for a little while longer then Edwin said he should go, that he was supposed to be home in time for supper. Then he went. That was the last time we were together, just the two of us. I felt empty inside, an empty vessel. People use that phrase to describe someone who turns out to be less than they seem, but I can still remember how I felt at that moment and in the hours and days that followed, as if I really had become a china doll, a painted surface with nothing inside, so fragile I had to move carefully in case I smashed apart. I became afraid of loud noises, of traffic, of the casual collisions and glancing contacts that are experienced daily with people in the street. The world felt too noisy, cartoonish, and I wondered how I’d managed it before, how I had moved through it without thinking.
I remember how I felt, but not the feeling. Perhaps I don’t want to. I do sometimes wonder where Edwin is now, how he ended up, even though I don’t want to speak to him and never could. He is in his world and I am in mine – parallel universes. Does that make sense?
In Ewa Chaplin’s story – not the one about the carnival, the one about the duchess – the street where the actress lives with her husband has the same name – Golovinsky Street – as the street where Ewa’s parents were living when she was born.
With love always,
Bramber
HAPPENSTANCE
by Ewa Chaplin
translated from the Polish by Erwin Blacher 2008
I was scared of Aunt Lola at first, because she only had one eye. I was about five when she first came to stay. I’m sure she must have stayed with us before that, when I was a baby, but I’m talking about the first time I remember. Aunt Lola was my father’s sister. No one had warned me about the eye beforehand – perhaps everyone assumed I would remember – and that was why I was scared.
When I say she only had one eye, I don’t mean she lost one in an accident or anything, I mean she was born like that. Her left eye was perfectly normal. On the right side of her face, where the other eye should have been, there was just a pinkish, wrinkled hollow, like a thumbprint in Plasticine.
Other than that, I thought she was pretty. She had delicate, birdlike hands and a sweet, soft smile. Her chestnut-colored hair was like a perfumed cloud. I stared at the monstrous concavity on the right side of her face and wondered what it might feel like to touch it: whether it would be soft, like her cheek, or whether I would be able to feel a phantom eye moving about beneath the skin, slimy and gelatinous and cold.
The eye she did have was long-lashed and golden, just like my father’s. She wore a strand of beads that matched the color exactly and when Aunt Lola bent down to kiss me I grabbed them. They felt warm and glistening in my hand, like pieces of toffee. When Aunt Lola tried to straighten up, the string broke. Beads flew in all directions. Everyone was suddenly on their knees.
“You could try to help, Sonia,” said my mother. “Seeing as this is all your fault.”
“Don’t worry, Dorrie, it was an accident,” said Aunt Lola. “I think we’ve got them all now anyway, haven’t we, Chimp?”
My father’s name was Charles, but Aunt Lola called him Chimp, a private nickname from their childhood that made my father sigh in a resigned way and that annoyed my mother. Aunt Lola smiled at me, her cupped hands brimming with golden beads. An elf queen, I remember thinking, hoarding her treasure.
Once the adults had had coffee, Aunt Lola came to my room and gave me one of the beads as a souvenir. It was large and oval and shiny, like a boiled sweet. When I held it up to the light I could see there was something trapped inside it, some type of insect. It seemed to be missing one of its legs. Aunt Lola told me the bead was made from the blood of trees, which was called amber.
“That little fly must have got its feet stuck in the amber and then died there,” she said. “It’s millions of years old. As old as the dinosaurs.”
I held the bead tight in my fist. “Did it hurt when they took out your eye?” I said.
She laughed. I knew my mother would have told me off severely for mentioning the eye, but Aunt Lola didn’t seem to mind at all. “Sometimes things go wrong with a baby when she’s in the womb,” she said. “The building instructions get mixed up. That’s what happened to me, and so I have a missing eye.”
“Could that happen to any baby?” I said. “Could it have happened to Daddy?”
“It could have done. But it didn’t.”
I rested my head on her shoulder and stroked her hair. I felt safe with her, for some reason, as if she really were an elf queen and I her trusted subject. I felt different about the missing eye from that time on. I held a secret belief, that it was my mission to protect Aunt Lola from the pointing fingers of other people – stupid people, who did not understand about missing instructions for making babies, and dinosaur-flies caught trespassing, like naughty schoolboys, in the blood of trees.
* * *
—
My mother disliked Aunt Lola, but it had nothing to do with the eye.
My mother disapproved of her husband’s sister because she wrote detective stories.
“There’s something very unhealthy about a woman going on about murder all the time,” she said. “It’s as if she’s obsessed with death. I know Lola has been disadvantaged, but really, I can’t see what good it does her to be so morbid.”
Disadvantaged meant the missing eye. Although my mother never spoke about the eye directly, she always managed to bring it into the conversation by other means. My mother sold cosmetics, and she was good at her job. She organized makeup parties at other women’s homes, for which there was always a long waiting list. I was forbidden to touch her samples, but every now and then she would give me some she had left over, sachets and tubes that had already been opened and partially used. I would steal my father’s shaving mirror out of the bathroom, lay out the cosmetics on top of my chest of drawers and pretend I was in a beauty parlor.
I liked strong contrasts: deep vermilion lips, sooty lashes, heavylidded lavender eyes. Aunt Lola wore no makeup at all, or if she did it looked so natural you didn’t notice it. My mother wouldn’t have her books in the house but when I was fourteen I took some of my Christmas money and went into town, where I found a whole shelf of Aunt Lola’s novels on display in the Crime section of our local bookshop.
The book I chose was called Happenstance, and was about a film director who discovers that her actor husband has committed a murder.
It wasn’t long before my mother found out what I’d been reading. “Fancy wasting your money on that rubbish,” she said. She was furious, I could tell, though she didn’t try to confiscate the book – I had reached an age where such a sanction would have seemed unreasonable. I read the book through to the end, but I didn’t enjoy it much. From the way my mother harped on, I had imagined the story would be exciting, bursting with bloody weapons and murdered corpses. As it was, I found the plot difficult to follow and you didn’t even get to witness the actual murder, which had already been committed before the book started.
I didn’t bother buying any more.
* * *
—
When I told my parents I was going to art college, their reaction was not positive, to say the least. My father did his best to stay out of it, but my mother wouldn’t let the subject rest. She had her heart set on me going to university to study law, of all things. That sounded like hell to me and I said so. Neither of us realized it at the time, but what I really wanted to do was follow in her footsteps. By the end of my first year in college, I knew I had no interest in painting pictures or, as the tutors insisted on calling it, “making art.” I wanted to work in the theater as a makeup artist.
I had always been amazed at w
hat makeup could do. From an early age, I had watched, fascinated, as my mother turned dull women into beauties, shy women into vamps. There was something of the miraculous in such alterations, a craft that skirted close to alchemy. I longed to discover its secrets for myself.
In the end I dropped out of college and started looking for work. So far as my mother was concerned, I made that situation even worse by moving in with Aunt Lola. Her place was more than big enough for the both of us, Lola insisted, and the rent she was asking was so low for the city, no more than a token, so I thought why not?
I had never visited Aunt Lola in her flat, and it wasn’t until I turned up there with all my junk in tow that I understood how successful she was as a writer. Her apartment was on the Merkelgasse, and very spacious. The room she had picked out for me was twice the size of my old study bedroom in college, and it had its own bathroom. The ceilings of the apartment were high and the windows were large, though all the rooms seemed dark. I thought at first this was because Lola’s apartment building faced northeast, but the longer I lived there the more I became convinced that the dim, almost turgid atmosphere of the place was down to the sheer accumulation of dark things Lola kept there: the varnished mahogany furniture, the brown velvet curtains, the heavy, block-printed papers that covered the walls.
“You look tired,” Lola said, when I arrived. She put out a tiny hand for one of my bags. “You should have let me book you a taxi.”
It sounds silly, I know, but seeing Lola there in her own private kingdom made me feel shy of her, almost afraid. Throughout my childhood she had been a beloved figure, someone I always looked forward to seeing and missed when she went abroad or just wasn’t around. Once I started college she figured less – perhaps inevitably – and we fell out of touch. As she welcomed me into the hallway of her very serious, almost impossibly large apartment I found myself staring at her face – at the pinkish, wrinkled dent where her eye should have been – and wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake.
I needn’t have worried. Lola turned out to be easygoing – she never interrogated me about where I was or who I was with the way my mother would have done – and for a while at least we seemed closer than ever. She didn’t go out much herself but that seemed to be mainly because of her work. And she was always taking phone calls – some of them went on literally for hours. She laughed a lot during the calls, a low, sweet chuckle, her one eye smiling and flashing like a bead of polished amber. On the other side of her face you could see the two little dents her teeth made where they met her lower lip. When you caught sight of her suddenly and from a certain angle, it was difficult to understand what you were looking at.
When I finally plucked up the courage to ask her why she wrote about murder, she laughed at that, too.
“You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that question,” she said. “All crime writers get asked it, I think, but women crime writers especially. People tend to think we share an unhealthy interest in violence, but it’s not that at all. Not for me, anyway.”
She said it wasn’t the act of murder itself that fascinated her, but the circumstances that led up to it and what happened next.
“Murderers are a minority group. I’m interested in what drives them. If you ask a roomful of people if they think they might be capable of murder they’ll mostly answer no. Some will cross that line, though. Even the most unassuming person can turn out to be a killer, given the right circumstances. What pushes them over the edge – that’s what I want to know.”
I was interested by what she said – interested enough to give her fiction another try. I began reading her most recent novel, which was set in a Hong Kong law firm and concerned a kidnapping. The blurb on the flyleaf said that Lola Danilow had traveled extensively in Southeast Asia and had twice been the recipient of the Beata Stasinska Award for Detective Fiction. Both snippets of information were new to me.
There was nothing about her eye, no photograph, either, which didn’t surprise me. I wondered how many of her readers even knew.
* * *
—
My first real job was with an independent film company and paid so badly that if it hadn’t been for Aunt Lola and her peppercorn rent I would have barely got by. I loved it, though, because I knew I was finally doing what I was born to do. I imagined this was how Aunt Lola must feel about her detective stories, and when I received my first miserable paycheck I decided to blow the lot on taking her out for a meal, a thank you and celebration all in one.
I agonized for a long time over where we should go. I didn’t fancy heading to any of the bars and restaurants I knew near the center and although I told myself that this was because I thought Lola would prefer somewhere quieter, away from the tourist crowds and noise, if I’m honest it was because I didn’t want to risk running into any of my colleagues from the studio. I didn’t like to think of how they might look at Lola, of how they might look at me for being with her. I always answered questions about where I was living with some noncommittal statement about lodging with family. I didn’t want to have to explain things in any more detail.
In the end we went to a small Italian place, just around the corner from the flat. As we arrived, a woman and a young boy were coming out. The boy stared up at Aunt Lola, tipping his head back and clinging fast to the door handle. His upper lip was crusted with sugar. His mother glanced at us briefly then tugged on the boy’s arm, forcing him to let go of the door.
Aunt Lola turned to me and made a remark about never having been to this restaurant before and how pleasant the place seemed. She seemed unconcerned by the boy’s behavior and I felt relieved. There is something almost superstitious in most people’s attitude towards disfigurement – it is as if they believe deformity might be contagious, or spread bad luck. I found such ignorance appalling, but at the same time I had begun to resent Aunt Lola also, for provoking such a reaction.
She cramped my style, in other words. I had my own life now, my own friends. Aunt Lola was a problem I had not signed up for and had no idea how to solve. It didn’t help that those friends of hers who did come to the flat bored me rigid. Other writers and literary critics mostly, drunk on success or failure and forever banging on about subjects so terminally dull they could send you to sleep just by being in the same room.
I kept thinking I should move out, but I couldn’t afford to, not if I wanted to keep living close to the city center. I gave myself a deadline: another twelve months at the most and I would be out of there.
* * *
—
The first two productions I worked on – a romantic comedy and a prison-break drama written by an ex-convict who had become something of a national celebrity – were not technically challenging, but I put in a lot of overtime, nonetheless. I wanted to show I was serious. Also, I enjoyed the buzz of being around a film set. I used my time off to increase my repertoire, practicing on myself as I had always done until I perfected the particular effect I wanted to achieve. I gave myself bullet wounds and acid burns. I aged myself forty years. Once I gave myself a black eye, then popped out to the local mini-mart to pick up some groceries. Judging by the weird looks and concerned glances, the results were convincing.
It was on the evening I recounted this anecdote – I was with a group of tech support in the Maraschino bar – that I first happened to exchange words with Wilson Krajewski. Wil was a screenwriter and editor, though I didn’t know that then. He was often around on set and I had an idea he was one of the lighting crew.
I was intrigued by him, I suppose. He wore black jeans and a plain T-shirt like everyone else but it was difficult to tell how old he was. If you had asked me if I thought he was good looking, I would probably have said yes, but I would have found it difficult to say exactly why.
Instead of laughing at my fake black eye anecdote like everyone else, he responded with a disapproving stare, and that intrigued me, too.
St
uck-up smart-arse, I thought. I didn’t even know what his name was. When Karl from sound told me it was Wilson I thought I’d misheard.
“My mother is American,” Wil explained, once we were better acquainted. “It’s a family name.”
I’d had a couple of flings since I’d come to the city – guys I’d known from college – but nothing serious. On paper, Wil was the last person I’d have imagined ending up with. The first time he took me out on a date, he spent the entire evening talking about his work. I listened carefully, trying not to say anything that would have him mark me down as an idiot, feeling vaguely bored but, as I say, intrigued. After dinner we went back to his place – a loft apartment in a converted factory five metro stops away – and fucked. I hadn’t intended for us to end the evening in that manner but something about the way he rolled his cigarettes really turned me on and anyway, it was more interesting than listening to him going on about Verfremdungseffekt.
We started seeing each other regularly after that. It turned out Wil was in his forties, with two highly rated commercial successes under his belt and another half-dozen independent projects in the works that wouldn’t make him any money but would win him a serious number of brownie points with the critics.
He was intense and self-obsessed but he didn’t flirt with other women when he was with me and he was good in bed. He could also, when he was in relaxed mode, be great fun to be with.
A friend of mine from wardrobe told me she’d always fancied him rotten, which was the icing on the cake, really. There were no hard feelings.
I was drunk the evening I took him back to Lola’s. I don’t think I’d have done that otherwise, and then how very different all our lives might have been. It was the night we wrapped the prison-break drama and we were all high on relief, not least Wil. He had spent six months working alongside the celebrity criminal, who still got to take most of the scripting credit in spite of – and these are Wil’s words, not mine – not being able to string a sentence together that did not include the word “cunt.” It was close to midnight when we left the Maraschino, and I suddenly got it into my head that Wil might get a kick out of seeing where I lived, the Merkelgasse and all that. I’d told him I lived with my aunt, but not who she was. I didn’t want to spend my time with Wil talking about Lola, and I had no intention of introducing them. Not yet, anyway.