The Nguyen family refers to Miss Riley as “the cowboy girl on top.” They are convinced that she is a bit simple and treat her kindly.
Katrina’s one-bedroom apartment is located on the tenth floor of the high-rise on Brock. It is a monochrome world up there, dimly lit. The walls are white. One wall in her bedroom is decorated with hats, all with brims, most of them floppy. They are a bit dusty, because although she plans to wear one any day now, to date she never has, apart from the most expensive one that she recklessly bought on her one and only holiday abroad.
The hats are either black or grey. Soft grey, dove grey, lead grey, rainy day grey, plain grey, mouldy grey, smoky grey, leaden grey, tedium grey. It’s hard to imagine that many shades of grey all at once, but there they are. When they get dusty enough they will all turn the same colour. Necklaces hang from little black hooks in between the hats. A white pearl necklace here, a silver medallion there, that kind of thing. When the sun spotlights the wall in the early morning, the hats and necklaces create a pattern of lines and circles, strange shadows that look like a coded message. Sometimes she pretends to decipher it.
In her living room a row of tall white bookcases holds an impressive collection of videos and books about film. Publicity photos from old European movies line the other walls in a symmetrical row. The room is a study in black and white tempered only by the dove grey sofa pillows and smoky grey carpet that looks as if feet have never touched it. As if Katrina, when she is at home, floats through the air, in and out of time, like a spectre. The thick curtains, as white as the walls, are always drawn, in case the bright lights of the twentieth century fade the nonexistent colours.
Katrina’s decor — like Doreen’s — is a tribute to wishful thinking, but Katrina’s domain is far more forbidding, much harder to reach. Real life does not stand a chance in Katrina’s private chambers. She never invites company for that very reason. She, too, prefers to daydream.
She is not about to confide this to Doreen. How could Doreen, so down-to-earth, so well grounded, possibly understand the fragile nature of a non-existent dimension?
Doing laundry together on Sunday afternoons continued in an unplanned fashion after their first chance meeting. Somehow they sensed it would be so. Two o’clock, laundry time, and there they were. Only later did it occur to them that they had created a tradition. The idea pleased them both. Traditions have a past and a future. And Sundays are sometimes void of meaning.
Yet despite these weekly meetings on which they both depend a great deal more than they let on, they have to date never got together during the week, never gone to a movie or a concert, never met for a drink after work. Katrina has never set foot in the Wild West. Doreen has never been invited back to the monochrome forties.
Only on Sundays, while their dirty laundry gets clean again, do they go for coffee at the diner a block down from the Laundromat. There, in the Sunday lull when traffic is light, they sit by the window at a scratched Formica table and talk like old friends about work and fashion, films and music, this and that, and how was your week? They agree on everything during these conversations, giving the impression that they have a lot in common, making it appear as if they live ordinary lives. Behave as if they have nothing to hide. Comfortable in their Sunday personas they get along splendidly.
Sometimes, if the day stretches too long from where they are sitting, they say, what the hell, let’s have something to eat, and they order grilled cheese sandwiches and fries, always the same, food they never eat at any other time, dipping each oily fry in plenty of ketchup, taking their time.
It is of some importance that these personas not lose face. And that is the reason on this particular Sunday that Katrina pretends not to notice the hat and the luscious shiver of its brim, the reason Doreen tries to stop herself from beholding for too long the saucy boots, as The Perfect Beauty enters their stage and renders meaningless their carefully crafted scripts.
The Perfect Beauty, having counted her change, issues an order to the yokel, not bothering with so much as a glance at either him or the two young women: “Dump it all in one, ’kay?”
Katrina has always dreamed of being the kind of beauty that graced the silver screen in the thirties and the forties, a heroine of black-and-white movies, presenting to the world a Dietrich or Garbo-like profile under a hat’s sculptured brim. Wavy hair with a polished metal sheen, black glossy lips, endless legs in high-heeled shoes, unwavering seams down the back of silk stockings. Striding in those high heels (long legs always stride) down city streets where gaslights refract into scattered gems on rain-soaked pavements, her slender silhouette crossing a bridge as church bells toll midnight.
Katrina is unsure if church bells ever toll at midnight, but that is really beside the point. This being her fantasy, cathedral bells will toll whenever she needs them to, to warn of danger, or simply to reassure, softly but with resonance, for the audible effect is as essential as the visual. She is convinced that sounds were gentler in those days, less imposing. Full of foreboding when foreboding was in order, the ominous echo of the staccato of her heels along deserted pavements is equally foreboding.
If there is background music, it’s distant and discreet, at times a hesitant violin or muted alto sax, nothing else.
At other times she pictures herself in a bar or café, sitting alone at a marble-topped table, absentmindedly twirling a glass of red wine or cloudy Pernod. It’s an elegant hand doing the twirling, long and thin and pale, her nails as black as her lips in this world without colour. She never drinks the wine or the Pernod. The drink is a prop.
Her face does not reveal that she is waiting for a man in a trench coat. He will arrive late. Without a word of greeting he will slide silently onto the chair opposite hers, his hair and shoulders wet from the drizzle. It’s always autumn at times like this, the melancholy season; it rains every evening. Greeting each other with a hint of a smile they will after a moment’s silence begin an enigmatic conversation, their voices low, while mist begins to roll in from the sea, or the river, depending on the location. Soon a thick fog will dim the lights out in the street where enemies lurk.
It’s important that they keep their voices down, Katrina and this nameless man who is her lover, or would-be-lover, but either way, a spy, a secret agent, a hero on the run. Somebody is after him. He is in grave danger, but brave and unafraid to die. The fact that he is being chased is important. For whatever the details of the setting, their affair is doomed, as all the best ones are.
This tableau is Katrina’s favourite, this noir wartime brand of realism where hope feels out of place and lovers remain stoical. Le Quai des brumes meets Casablanca meets The Blue Angel meets . . . the choices are endless. It may be old-fashioned and vague, but it’s the kind of vagueness in which lie innumerable possibilities, depending on Katrina’s mood. Apart from the romantic aspect, doomed though it is, it makes thoughts of the future superfluous.
Katrina’s mother, Eva, fled Hungary with her family when the Soviet army invaded Budapest in 1956. Eva Fenyvesy was ten at the time. Eventually the family left Europe for the safety of the big, unknown faraway country called Canada where tall blond Eva came of age in the sixties, the decade when narrow-minded thinking gave way to free love and miniskirts. And yet despite these temptations Eva managed to retain the old-fashioned way of dressing that favoured the red lips, string of pearls, clip-on earrings and the cloche hats that her mimicking daughter would later grow up to fancy herself weaving webs of feminine allure in. Eva’s elegant prewar style had been determined by what her mother had worn as a chic woman sweeping in and out of the fashionable cafés of Budapest, a bright-eyed fox stole slung like fresh kill over her shoulder.
Katrina has never set foot in a Budapest café, has never set foot in Budapest period, but has eagerly adopted the legacy of a faded elegance she can ill afford and has nowhere to flaunt.
Once when Katrina was little, she and Eva watched a documentary on TV about the Hungarian revolution. Eva had in
sisted Katrina become acquainted with the tragedy of her family history, the continuing bloodshed of Eastern Europe, so easy to forget in comfortable North America where everybody lives in a nice house and has a good job and a car.
When the camera focused on three young men helping a bishop out of a manhole from the sewers where he had been tucked for safety, Katrina’s mother let out a piercing yelp. “My God! That’s cousin Joska helping the bishop out of the sewers!” A few days later, Joska had been shot by the Russians, she told Katrina, shot down like a dog, just like his brother, Árpad, a week earlier. “Such brave young rebels they were, those two!” Eva, distraught, remembered a photo of the three of them, taken on Árpad’s fifteenth birthday, and ran to get the album to reconfirm her past.
After the program Eva wept for the rest of the evening, turning pages plastered with photos of what was no more, pointing to faces Katrina would never meet. For Katrina the event was a watershed, a confirmation that she truly was meant for a dangerous life, truly was meant to wear high heels and a hat, a fox stole, frequenting cafés with an inscrutable clientele. It was in her blood, just as she had always suspected. Here was the proof.
She hugged her mother and kissed her wet cheeks.
Watching the old movies Eva was addicted to helped put the icing on the cake. Thus the fog. It came from Le Quai des brumes, their favourite. It was the movie that made them heave the most sighs. The living room echoed like a haunted house when they went at it, according to Katrina’s father, Albert. As soon as he heard the movie soundtrack he fled to the safety of the garage to tidy his workbench and clean his tools.
Though born and bred in Canada, Albert is of hardy Yorkshire stock and thoroughly proud of it. Quiet and humourless, there has never been anything vaguely romantic about Albert (though he adores his wife) except for one vital fact: he bears a remarkable resemblance to Jean Gabin, star of Le Quai des brumes. This is not a source of pride. The way he sees it, looking like a dead Frenchman is nothing to write home about.
Katrina is as humourless as her father, but takes after her mother in appearance. Attractive, tall and blond, she identifies only with the fascinating part of her family history — the Hungarian one. Those hardy Yorkshire folk never did anything but work, eat, sleep, and toast the queen on her birthday.
Having chosen the appropriate identity gives Katrina licence to walk down deceivingly deserted streets, alert to the danger that always lies in wait. Licence to spend time in nonexistent cafés, tapping restless black nails on quartz tables while waiting for a man in a trench coat, a haunted, hunted man whose eyes reveal the knowledge of the tragic fate that awaits him.
Katrina has not told Doreen any of this. Doreen is far too realistic to appreciate a dream life inspired by a largely forgotten movie made in 1938 in grainy black and white.
Doreen is entrenched in dreams of her own, dreams as intense as Katrina’s, but of a different genre. She is given to roaming the Wild West under a sky far more immense than the one back home, surrounded by a landscape that never quits, arid and empty and merciless, an unyielding land inhabited only by coyotes and rattlesnakes and wild-riding buckaroos in black boots and Stetsons. Their horses are palominos, their saddles handmade. Doreen has such a keen eye for detail, if she closes her eyes she can smell that soft leather, the sweat of both the horses and their photogenic riders.
Sitting firm in such a saddle, she races across grasslands, painted deserts, up buttes, into valleys, lighter than tumbleweed. She is one with the horse, a steed so fast its hooves barely touch the ground. In such a landscape Doreen is as feisty and fearless as they come.
This is a West that is Wild yet aesthetic, made with only the finest ingredients.
The most handsome cowboy, the one with the whitest teeth in the most sunburned face, invariably falls in love with her, the kind of manly love that does not demand a lot of verbal input. A man made of quiet, jaw-clenched potency, stereotypical yet ruggedly individual. He tends to be called Chuck or Buck or Wild Bill, but never Adrian or Sebastian. Sometimes her hero has brown eyes, sometimes blue, but whatever their colour, he plays the guitar and yodels cowboy tunes that send shivers up Doreen’s spine, always starting with her favourite, The Old Chisholm Trail. When he comes to the line Goin’ back home to see my honey his gaze lands on Doreen with profound longing. In his eyes, be they brown or blue, shines the firm promise of a ranch nestled in hills teeming with antelope and mule deer.
At night they lie stark naked (apart from their Stetsons, somehow) in a sleeping bag made for two under a million stars, while the campfire crackles and dies and the leftover beans form a crust in the pot. Coyotes howl in the hills, horses snort in their sleep. The moon, once so distant, perches like a giant Day-Glo orange atop the silhouette of a jagged butte. Soon the only sound heard on the planet is the wind sighing in the tall prairie grass.
This is Doreen’s idea of heaven.
Doreen’s mother, Lydia, was born and bred in New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Bay of Fundy, “where we never once locked our doors.” A bustling person with a fierce need to nurture, she knits sweaters and crochets more doilies than the planet has any use for. When not busy with balls of yarn, she bakes bread, cakes and cookies, humming as she does so, for she was born exuding contentment. Whatever has caused Doreen’s western bent, it has not sprung from her maternal seaside genes.
Possibly it originated in her paternal chromosomes. Doreen’s father, Bernie, is a big burly Irishman whose parents hailed from County Cork. He is an ex-steelworker, having recently retired. These days he spends most of his time watching TV in his doily-infested recliner, eating more baked goods than is good for any man.
During her formative years, Doreen often watched Westerns with her father in the hope of getting to know him. Bernie, although purebred Irish, was never big on words in mixed company. On the other hand, he was — still is — a devoted admirer of John Wayne and has always extracted deep meaning from movies where men are men and women are women, the way the good Lord intended them to be.
This is the reason Doreen grew up learning how (but never why) women who knew their worth adhered to a code of beguiling helplessness, trapped in cumbersome dresses that any normal female would perish in under that burning western sun. Some of those non-sweating women, albeit virtuous, were uppity, but only until someone like John Wayne straightened them out. The impossibly uppity ones rode horses (despite their dresses) and were harder to tame. Even Mr. Wayne had to struggle, though he always succeeded in the end, breaking them the way he would a wild horse, with the reluctant respect a hero feels for a lesser creature.
Such ladies were labelled feisty. Sometimes they even sweated.
For as long as Doreen can remember, she has wanted to be feisty. She is willing to sweat. She has the right build and does not own a dress.
But, as Bernie initially took pains to point out, movies where men are men were not for little girls. Doreen, a stubborn child, watched the movies all the same — for educational purposes — and her father never made more than a halfhearted attempt to stop her. He was proud of his taste in cinematographic art and deep down it pleased him that his daughter had inherited his discerning eye.
Doreen has not dared reveal to Katrina her dreams of sitting tall in a handcrafted saddle, a Chuck, Buck or Wild Bill wooing her by the campfire. Katrina is far too serious, far too sensible, to appreciate Technicolor illusions set in rattlesnake country.
A year ago Katrina spent a couple of weeks in Paris with three colleagues from work. The trio had approached her when a friend of theirs was forced to cancel and they needed a fourth person in order to keep the two double rooms they had booked. Katrina made a spur of the moment decision to join them. She had always longed to see Paris. To see herself in Paris. In Paris she would fit in.
She did her utmost to look the part while she was there. Tall, blond and elegant, she donned high-heeled shoes that were murder to walk in, bought an expensive hat and perched it on her head at fetching angle. A
nd still those damn Frenchmen appeared oblivious to the significance of her presence among them. She became increasingly desperate and decided something had to be done. Precious days were slipping by.
Finally, one afternoon — they were heading for the métro to return to the hotel in the 18th Arrondissement to rest before an evening of possibilities — she worked up the courage to cut loose. She told the others she needed time to shop for presents for her family and that she would meet them back at the hotel.
Kisha, Lorraine and Melanie encouraged her independence. They were tired of Katrina, had been since day two when, not knowing any better, they had consented to be dragged halfway across Paris to some bone yard Katrina claimed was world famous. Had wasted more than half a day in order to pay tribute to some dead old bag named Colette who didn’t even have a last name. One of France’s greatest writers, according to Miss Know-it-all Ferguson who made them take several pictures of her standing by this Colette-person’s grave wearing the stupid hat she had bought earlier that morning.
Visiting Colette was what Katrina had promised Eva, who never got to travel. Katrina’s father abhorred the idea of foreign places.
There stood Katrina, trying to look French — at least semi Hungarian — beside a black gravestone reading Ici repose Colette 1913-1981. The red stone beneath stated Fille de Henry de Jouvenel des Ursins et de Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, so she knew it was the right place. There was another Colette in the adjoining grave.
Jean Gabin was not buried at Père-Lachaise. She had no idea where to find him. Then again, Jean Gabin was not his real name — that much she knew — but she had forgotten his original one. His remains could be anywhere.
The other girls were not interested in hanging out with dead people. Apart from Jim Morrison, of course. It gave them a cheap thrill to see his grave with its graffiti, empty bottles and reverently toking hippies. A quick thrill, but no more. Famous or not, hot or not, the guy was dead. What Kisha, Lorraine and Melanie loved best was to sit at sidewalk cafés and laugh and flirt with real live men, then hope for the best. Like Lorraine pointed out, “It’s what you’re supposed to do in Paris, for fuck’s sake!” Most evenings after dinner and a few bar stops, the girls would hit yet another auspicious nightspot with very loud music and an undulating mass of sweaty, fashionable people.
Leaving Berlin Page 9