From the Diaries of Witold Kazmirsky, Book 11, page 103
How often I stared with placid imagination at buildings, hundreds
and thousands of windows and the goings on going on behind them.
Have you ever wondered, I asked her, stopping for a second in
mid-pace to stare up and down a building of flats, admiring the dull
brick, the identical windows located in identical places one floor
above another above another, ever wonder what goes on behind each
window? Ever think about the scenes of domesticity or violence or
love or boredom playing out, the undusted corners of lifetimes
playing out to silence without recognition?
Yea, she said, her voice trailing. But what about the prying eyes
outside? What if I step from the bath, fully naked and wander just
for a moment, lingering, not with the idea of exposing myself to
some pervert just standing there in front of a lit, uncovered window
with his dick in his hand just waiting for my appearance, but with a
sense of freedom, a sense that there aren't thousands of gawkers and
perverts and psychopaths, just people minding their own business,
walking by without a glance…just for a moment so I could stand naked
in the light of the window and watch them going by.
You'd see much better with the lights turned off, I offered. You
can't see much of anything coming from the vantage point of light,
peering into to darkness. Haven't you noticed that before? Stand in
a room some night, well lit. Stand there and try to make out the
darkness outside - ok, it can't really be done in a city where light
outside is everywhere - but the next time you are in the countryside or even a suburb, try it. You can't see anything but then when you turn off the light,
poof! You and the darkness are one. Once your eyes adjust you can
see with clarity.
We were having a drink at the Café Vachette on the corner of Blvd St
Michel and rue des Ecoles, far enough from the entrance of the
cinema to digest a somewhat forgettable film we'd just seen
(forgettable of course, the name has already left my memory and yet
what if for her it was a significant, transitional moment? What if
for her it was a night never to be forgotten?) without the
predictable palaver of pedestrians ejaculated from the same cinema,
discussing the same film with the same stunted background of a
crippled culture to carry them or the same pompous yet false erudity
clinging to their words like a stinking sweat to the underarms.
What I meant, I start in again as if the conversation about the
humanity behind the windows we'd had prior to entering the cinema
had never ended and instead had been carrying on continuously
throughout the film in the back of our minds, was about those lives
and what fascinates me about them - not the collectiveness of their
existence but the individuality.
She frowned, having perhaps been thinking of something else or else
digesting some forgotten fragment of dialogue from the film turning
it over and over in her mind only to be intruded upon again with
this talk about what goes on in buildings, behind windows.
Individuality? Whatever do you mean? The lives of identical
people with identical cultures, identical thoughts, who watch the
same television shows laughing at the same time behind the canned
laughter, or crying on cue with the crescendo of the music? Or do you
mean those flipping through the same magazines and photographs of
celebrities, those same dull minds covered in some undulating film
of repetition, watching the news broadcast the same story or slight
variations thereof over and over? What is so individual about them?
This collective humanity? This mindless beast in a mindless herd?
She has worked herself up into a minor froth. I place my hand gently
on her wrist and then run the tip of my index finger from her wrist,
tracing the outline of each finger.
Of course I didn't mean those people, I scoff with a palatable
albeit feigned contempt because it was her hand, not the collective hand of humanity that I was touching. I meant the woman stood in the kitchen
worried about whether or not the man who she thinks she is falling
in love with is thinking about her at that same moment as she's
stirring a couscous mix into boiling water on the hob.
I meant the undersexed 20-something still suffering the remnants of
a devastating case of acne, awkward and skinny, silent and shy
amongst his colleagues in some office building stuffed full with attractive,
available women, almost unfathonably sexy in tight skirts and opened
suggestive blouses, anonymous but for the jokes others snicker about him around him, just out of earshot, who comes home at night to some flat
alone and surfs the internet sated with photographs and movie samples of
pornography, maybe even violent pornography and indulges himself in
fantasies about what it would be to be noticed and recognised, to
have any one of those women talking about him sotto voce to each
other adjoined with half phrases about getting him into bed or doing
him in the elevator, atop the copy machine…
I meant the man and the woman, one visiting the other's flat for the
first time, the gentle music in the background, the studio filled
with 50 or 60 candles, the pullout bed, the silk or satin sheets,
the meal that will be cooked but go uneaten, the inaugural sex, the
romancing, the beginning - the things that happen between two people
at the start of something, all going on behind those windows
somewhere as we walk past a building oblivious.
And then we were talking louder, both to ourselves and to others, an
impromptu performance art of sorts, ordering another litre of red
wine from the waiter with recklessness observing even his eyes, the
flicker of something; amusement, disgust, befuddlement, we aren't
sure and we'd never ask to find out but the second litre arrives
and Anastasia has now found the syncopation of the idea, delighted
with a little game of imagination, thinking in the back of her mind
perhaps that the others sat around us might have abandoned their own
dull conversations and are now eavesdropping or listening
clandestinely whilst still formulating the sentences they are
speaking half in and half out of the game…
Do you mean also the heartbroken teenage girl who cries herself to
sleep at night, hidden under the covers waiting for her stepfather
to make some excuse to come in?
Or perhaps the single mother of three, scratching out an existence
without pleasure, the joy of these three once-beautiful children now
deformed by the insistence of realistic choices; new dresses for
that one, a new flow of teenage tears for that one, worried to
death the third is hanging out with the wrong crowd and any night
there will be that call from the police…all the while squeezing
meals out of such a tight budget like a fat woman into a dress two
sizes too small, worrying whether she will have enough to last the
week and wow, never once contemplating her old fantasies of life
sitting there in the kitchen with a glass of wine and a cigarette,
feet up, children asleep or away, suddenly discovering she is now
too old, her stretch marks too wide, the lines beneath her eyes to
deep, the jowls sagging too far gone to ever return to youth before
she was ever a mother and dreams were a possibility not some city
she’d just departed from an aeroplane she knows she will never
return to again?
I nod my head, pouring us both generous cups of wine in reward,
indeed. There are all sorts behind those windows…a man whose wife
has recently died who must now sit in the flat they shared an entire
life in, suffocated by memories and waiting out each day like a
lifetime prison sentence waiting for his own execution, the release
by death from misery, having long ago forgotten what life had been
capable of without her and not caring anymore as he had moored his
boat of adventure to her so long ago for so many years there never
was another lifetime to have contemplated.
And we carried on in this vein for some time, sipping our wine,
trying to out-imagine one another, forgetting there were others
around us at all, at ease that none of the lives we described or
imagined were ours at the moment, no prisons, no death sentences,
no slow crawl of endurance.
We were free!
And we left the café laughing, leaving money behind which could have
fed the poor or given another drink to the homeless man who was
always sat on a cardboard box around the corner with his head bowed
and a little can in front of him wearing a sign that might have
proclaimed he didn't drink or do drugs but needed money for food.
*****
Do you believe in fate, she asked me a few afternoons later when we were
sprawled out on the mattress which had been taken off the bed frame and dragged out into the main room where the lighting was better, or at least
more interesting, limb in limb, tracing the outline of each other's skin, watching the shadows lengthen through the windows.
Why do you ask – do you have us in mind? I stood up then to have a
cigarette and pace but she pulled me back down again, nonono, she
whispered, I just mean in the sense of where any of us are heading, the direction you choose, the direction I choose, why certain strangers walk
past you on certain days but never again, why some are born in one
country where there is poverty and starvation yet others in a market
economy perfectly adept at handling the possibility of that
individual's economic potential, you know – in a vague yet not too
general way…she laughed, perhaps amused by herself or her silliness.
I could quote Emerson, for example, I said, growing more
uncomfortable and making another, more successful effort at
releasing myself from the floor and the mattress and getting up to
the table to roll a cigarette. Emerson said that fate was just deeds
committed in a prior existence.
That doesn't answer the question of whether you do or don't believe
in fate, Witold. What made you choose to leave New York? And once you
left, why Utrecht and once in Utrecht why did you leave your friend
behind to come here and once here, why did you decide on entering the
club I was going to be singing in and even then, why were we placed in
the same place at the same time? Something gave you the nerve, the verve,
the desire to approach me and even though you couldn’t know I was or
Wouldn’t be the most receptive target, just calculatedly mysterious, you
were eager to see the possibilities through without worrying what disappointment might lie ahead. Was it fate, partially fate, partially choice,
or just stubbornness, confidence and dumb luck?
There's no such thing as dumb luck, I wanted to set the record straight.
Only good and bad luck. In the instance of meeting you, I think it was more
a matter of chance than of fate or choice. Is chance considered fate when chance is created in part at least, by your own choices? I’ve often heard
them say to athletes that you create your own luck; hard work and
persistence are in essence, the main factors of luck, of chance. I think
believing in fate by itself implies a belief that it’s absolutely, utterly out
of our hands – like the weather, perhaps. You can dress up for the cold
or for rain, let’s say, but you cannot control if it rains or becomes cold. I cannot control that I met you however, the circumstances were in part,
created by my own actions – unknowingly at first, let's say up to the
point when I'd first moved next to you in the club – but even then, it
took your initiative, your unlit cigarette and let’s face it, both of us were
perhaps engineering this fate, if you were to call it fate, both of us had
An equal hand in deciding. Thereafter, it is less a matter of chance or
of fate than of two people with somewhat similar goals, even as broad
and simple as getting to know each other.
Well let’s just say, for argument’s sake, humour me please Witold,
that it is a matter of fate or for destiny, she said as her hand ran along
her left shin bone and stopped at her knee.
Let’s think of it in the sense that fate would have been determined by something beyond our control, I mean after all, it takes a steady series
of coincidental circumstances to bring one anonymous human being from
a neighbourhood in New York City all the way to another neighbourhood
in Paris, I mean, one out of millions and millions finding another among
millions and millions and not even in the same city, not even in the same
country for that matter, as though some higher power brought them
together for a reason.
Don’t look at me like I’m mad, Witold, please. It’s just that I wonder,
not just in this case of you and I, but in the case of everyone, could it be
the fate of souls perhaps, souls which are destined, in the course of living
one life and then another, to meet again and again through various stages
of existence perhaps.
You know, like perhaps in another life, if you believe such things
of course, we knew each other very dearly and even though the lives
that were the vessels of our souls had long expired, once new
vessels were found, like this life we are living now, our souls were
bound to be reunited.
Smoke tapered upwards from her cigarette left burning in the ashtray
as she sipped at her wine. Fate, on the other hand, might be much
similar in that those souls are still meant to be reunited but we
too are participating. Perhaps we are doing so knowingly or
unknowingly. You coming to Paris, my being on the street I was on
when you first started following me.
I rubbed my eyes, as if to avoid hers. If we did not follow this destiny,
it would have been fate. One way or the other. A choice. You could
have ignored me. I could have ignored you. We ignore so many others
in life.
But if it’s not fate, we ignore, don’t you see? It isn’t our actions that
decide it, it’s fate that decides our actions, no?
So what if I could imagine an entire lifetime before her, however meaningless to this point. There is the pre-period and the post-period.
I was no longer in the pre-period of my life. I was definitely somewhere
else. The strange sensation of a female’s presence. A old panoply against
this very moment worn thin leaving the wearer vulnerable.
Then I exhaled and stared out the window of her flat overlooking Rue Mont
Saint Genevieve. She stood as well, changing the disc from a sombre yet unknown jazz pianist to a wild and incomprehensible Ornette Coleman as though the cacophony might release us both out of the cocoon of the fledgling comfort of roads still on the horizon, yet untaken.
Well, most of the photographs I keep are of people I don't even know, she
belaboured, reminding me of that first night of meeting, the hundreds of photographs of strangers, postcards of places she’d never been. She was
back up again, returning only after she’d retrieved a new set of photos as though they somehow held an answer. A key to knowing her, these photos?
A recurrent theme which might become predictable, boring, stale in the coming months? Who knew? But Ornette Coleman’s rattling lent an
almost surreal edge to the discussion and when she’d returned with a
handful of photographs again, stood in her panties in a brazen display of
either self confidence or apathy, I was not with her.
Her words, as I focused unflinchingly on the bulb of her buttocks the
fabric of the panties couldn't quite cover and then downward to the arc
of her calves into her ankles, as much as those words were to have been cherished, were somehow lost in that moment, as though they weren't
being spoken at all, merely forming a background symphony to a visual presentation.
But as suddenly as I’d faded off I faded back in time to catch her continuing: Sometimes, she elaborated as though I'd been paying attention all along
yet somehow sensed the impossibility of my concentration and hence her stance there in the twilight of the flat standing in only her panties, lighting
a new cigarette of her own, it's more interesting trying to interpret the lives
of others through the memories represented by their photographs than it is reliving your own…
And without an introductory preamble she suddenly changed discs
again and the Chet Baker River was flowing between the walls,
carrying us on a fool's errand.
*****
Nothing of grave significance happened, other than our meeting.
I’d stayed for two weeks in that flat with her and on the second morning
I stole the keys, crept out in secret although secretly she was likely not such
a heavy sleeper and listened wordlessly as I was heading out wondering
silently to herself where I was going, what I was intending but trusting
that it was no deviant purpose and allowed herself to fall back asleep.
She wouldn’t know why and I didn’t either but I was heading out, and
got out into the streets of morning Paris.
Regardless of the last day and twelve hours, I'd had a yet
unperformed desire to walk the streets alone. Especially at this
particular moment when you need the space to reflect on all that was
taking place inside the walls of Anastasia's flat in that time frame
from which we hadn't left since entering.
Without wanting to break the yolk, the rhythm, the syncopation of
bonding, I still felt compelled to get out - the air, the smells,
the foreign language until now had consisted primarily of everything
inside her flat and little of the world outside. Not that I minded,
but it was getting unnerving as though without a backdrop of some
sort of reality to add dimension, the entire encounter might well
have been some sort of dream, a prolonged stare out the window in a
moving train letting my idle thoughts wander into the woods, flat
farmlands of Holland, the Belgium on to the mystery of arriving in Paris.
I wasn't gone long, mind you. I wanted to stretch my mind, like my
legs, to ascertain what I was thinking – my thoughts had not been my
own for the last day and a half. It was as though I had been sitting
for a painting and now wanted to see what it looked like.
At first, it was just a roll up and a coffee in the first café I came across.
But there was no real concentrating. Every fabric in my skin breathed her.
I could smell her perfume, her hair conditioner, her bed sheets, her voice lingered in my ears, a new and beautiful sound – everything that had been
in that flat had come with me in scented form and it was after all,
impossible to escape.
And there was no real walking. Yes, the movements were similar but
inside, I was floating – as though watching myself walk without
having to actually perform the act, or incapable of it. This is what
it must be like in the last milliseconds of life, I thought – the
experience often recounted of rising above the body, above the room,
the earth beneath you eventually growing so distant it is but a
speck as you are drawn to a greater light. This was infatuation in
action.
The barman was saying something to me – no idea what – I had been
speaking aloud to myself, muttering as though completely alone and
now, caught in mid speech, I stamped out my cigarette, shrugged to
the barman and headed back out of the café into the street again.
I was able to accumulate a few provisions before returning to the
flat. Some eggs, several different cheeses, none of which were
familiar and so like gambling, just as with the wine, placing bets
based on the colour of a label or the way the words were assembled.
Bread was easy enough and ham I was well familiar with, as were the
smoked sausages and fruit.
When I returned to the flat it was as though we'd been living together
for years. There was an air of familiarity which only a short period
of time had woven yet a familiarity untinged by boredom or fatigue.
These two lives were affixed, however provisionally, to one another,
slapped together like a sandwich constructed from the remnants of the
fridge until one of us would allow a larger hunger to gnaw at us and it
would all be consumed. Was it prophetic or merely inevitable that one
or the other would eventually wear this relationship like a stringy sinew snapped and twisted, a meniscus tear or rotator cuff gone off its wheels.
Already she had assembled herself prior to my return, fatigued with
dreaming, too excited to lie still in contemplation, fidgety with
the temporality of my disappearance. This is how it was at first –
those first few drinks were just settling into the bloodstream and
you could feel the effect of the alcohol in the head yet the vision
was still clear, the speech, unslurred.
There was a hot bath running whilst she went about picking up the
clutter of accumulation the last few days had assembled.
What did you bring me, she asked impatiently, reflexively leaving
the sink and the dishes to greet me at the door as though we'd been
doing this already for years. Proudly, I emptied the contents of the
sacks – feasts for lovers, enough wine to set us into days of
oblivion – on to the table for approval. The contents said all I
cared to say: let us not leave this flat, not now, not ever, let us
maintain this clean oblivion and nest herein forever.
Her reaction was mixed.
It wasn't as though she didn't necessarily share the enthusiasm but
perhaps the enthusiasm, in hindsight, was tempered by reality – the
reality of knowing her own life rather than flinging herself
recklessly into this ritual as I was willing to do.
That's a lot of cheese and wine, she noted, picking through the
selection with expertise, rubbing labels with her thumb and
forefinger as though hoping to peel away a more sublime quality.
Starving artists, she shrugged to herself without further comment.
But it did not escape her that this appeared to be a survival kit
assembled to last for days, rather than hours. She wasn't yet sure
how that felt.
We shared meals although eventually, as though realising a hidden
crime in spending the entirety of my time in Paris in her flat,
Anastasia was able to lure me outside when the sun was brightest and
the flat was growing stale.
Out we went for walks on clichéd tours of the bookstalls of the
Quay, sifting through paperbacks and manuscripts, art histories,
bartering prices when one struck either of us. We spent hours in
museum cafés yet visited no museums, walked along the Seine, one
bank to another, crisscrossing bridges with reckless abandon and
spent token gestures sitting for hours in cafés, before eventually
touring bars and allowing a different form of intoxication to
overcome us.
Other days we would simply stay in doors if the weather was crap. We’d
lie out together on the rugs of the living room floor perhaps because it was
less suggestive than lying out together in bed. She’d recite poetry in French
to me in the afternoons, pieces she’d been made to memorise as a school girl which had stuck there in her mind year after year. Sometimes she’d recite
the lyrics of a song and if she let her guard down ever so slightly, I’d catch a snatch or two of her humming a tune.
Or she’d read books to me in French. I began to get the funny idea that if I stayed there in that flat long enough with her I’d learn French through simple osmosis. I’d never take a class, never pick up a book, just listen to her voice purring softly in that language, luring me in.
And so it went most days and nights. Mornings, incapable of sleep
once the repetition of traffic began outside the windows like the
breaking of waves on the beach and before long I'd be standing,
already accustomed to the reality that Anastasia would sleep well
beyond the stirrings of civilisation outside the flat and there
would be long hours alone for myself, these sort of moments I once
longed for until I began waking up in her flat. Then it was simply a matter
of killing time.
I killed time by walking as though boredom were a bomb waiting to go
off once the motion stopped.
I began with short forays, circles around neighbourhoods with the
spirals outward growing gradually. You could be utterly ignorant of
history and still wander through timeless unfamiliarity, overcome by
the senses – Albert would've had to page through a myriad of history
books and start each jaunt knowing precisely where he planned on
ending up simply because that's how he went about travelling. But I
was content to move in a dreamlike sequence, imagining history
without the facts, piecing it together in from the stories I
imagined overhearing in conversations I couldn't understand in
family-run cafés, butchers, cheese mongers and tobacconist shops.
Infatuation has a way of weaving its way into every moment, every
sight and sound, every impression and no matter how far I walked, I was always dreaming in this web of a future with Anastasia spent here – that I barely knew her or her habits made little difference as I tiled together
a mosaic of future moments walking those same streets; the moments
and sights and experiences conjured up from an imaginary future with
no basis in reality.
I tried to rationalise that this was simply a temporary experience,
following temptation, morsels of Anastasia left like crumbs
throughout the day to nibble on. I knew at the bottom of the barrel
there would nothing left eventually – how did I know this? I don’t know.
Some things you know instinctively. Good things ending bad, for
example. I had no contextual precedents, no history of good relationships
gone bad, no history of relationships at all to speak of. But that didn’t
matter. Innately I knew something so good would have to end badly.
Isn’t that what everyone else was always whining about?
Regardless, there was no stemming this benevolent rush of water overwhelming the emotional levy built in time to prevent precisely this
sort of infatuation from drowning me. There was only the walking and
the dreaming and once noon had come and gone I knew it would be time
to head back to her flat, that she'd already be awake, drawn gradually back
to consciousness, a dream kissed to life by coffee with a tiny shot of anisette.
And when I returned, there was no cause for further dreaming because
there I was, living the very dream I'd been walking through – a
punctual kiss and back to the business of waking because already I was
learning that nothing could be forced upon her and it was better
still to leave the hints and suggestions to her lest those dreams
start leaking from my head out of my mouth and into her ears and the
entire hideous charade was exposed.
In the first few days after we’d agreed silently but mutually, unspoken that
I would continue staying with her, by early afternoon, on my return from
those daily day dreaming walks we’d go back out in the streets for a small meal followed by another walk through one of many parks she so seemed
attached to, a history of places of refuge and solitude she shared that had
been accumulated over a lifetime. It was by no means solitude but there
was still a unique intimacy that must surely have been apparent to
strangers who might happen to have watched us from a distance.
I wanted to convince myself that we were like other couples we came
across but there was little evidence – you sensed that those people
around us had already had lengthy histories, had gone up and down a
hundred different times, had loved and spat bile at one another on occasion
to wound. My parents‘ relationship was my own real barometer. I
could not have known, didn’t ask, how she measured us against others.
We were neophytes, tentative, hardly ourselves but the best impressions
of ourselves.
And always it was me poking and prodding into her past getting
desultory answers which made the piecing together all the more
impossible. She showed occasional interest in my own background but
she appeared to prefer finding out it via tactical philosophical questions,
the kind of questions you might encounter on computer programmes
designed to evaluate your answers into a psychological profile.
She didn't like talking much about the past. Not that I did either but
if I delved into hers with a seemingly innocent question she'd quiet
immediately and between us it would seem as though a storm had
suddenly blown in on what had moments before been perfect weather –
sometimes she'd just change the subject abruptly, other times refuse
outright to delve any deeper – in either case, I didn't get much out
of her save for observations of things going on around us or little
historical miscellanea prompted by a turn around a corner, a
building's face, a street sign where a resistance member had fallen
in the liberation of Paris, impassive histories.
In so many ways it was an odd experience that I should have either
just broken away and returned to Utrecht before I'd become any more
pathetic with a lack of emotional control like a premature
ejaculator or should have somehow managed not to allow the emotion
to pervade me, to deflect it one moment after another like swatting
gnats around the head on a late summer afternoon.
And thus I was in the position of being in a constantly fluctuating
state between joy and melancholy, my nerves jumbled by too many
quirky stops and starts, too much caffeine or wine, emotion on the
fingertips like a match held too long and in some ways, when she
would make her inevitable departure for a gig at night, I'd be in some
ways, relieved to be alone again.
On the frequent nights she had gigs, she always demurred my
self-invitations to come along in audience. You would be too distracting,
she'd deflect. I would forget the lyrics of songs and lose a note or two.
This is my profession, Witold. Can you imagine me hanging
around with you in that law firm you worked in or staring you down
at a gig you and Albert were playing? Of course not, she answered
herself before I could interject with the truth, and so it is with me in
my work place, that’s what these places are, even if it is just a dingy
nightclub, just a work place, a job.
Of course I never bothered contradicting her. I’d have loved the
Distraction of her presence when Albert and I were on stage. I think
I’d even have enjoyed having her sitting next to me in that law firm.
But that, I rationalised, was the difference between an amateur and professional performer. The difference between someone who was
becoming hopelessly infatuated and someone who was merely with
someone for the company, for the change of pace.
The enigmas of Anastasia were partly woven by odd phrases which I
could never quite decipher were meant to portray a deeper meaning
than a twisted phrase in English, or were merely grammatical errors
or nuances with no hidden agenda. How can you tell with a
woman around whose every corner another unsettling inability to
pinpoint lurked?
One afternoon we were walking and as we walked she started telling
me a story about this Parisian girl named Amélie Hélie, a singer who had
lived sometime around the beginning of the 1900s. Anastasia told me
she’d been given the nickname the Casque d'Or for her lengthy, golden hair.
She told me how the leaders of two rival bands or gangs in the
neighbourhood we were at that moment walking through, a Corsican by
the name of Leca and his rival, Manda, had both fallen in love with Amelie, madly, brutally.
Their competition for her eventually grew into a big battle that one day
on this very street, rue de Haies, blew up into a confrontation with knives
and guns. Both leaders were arrested and later had to appear before the
Magistrate to answer the charges against them.
The magistrate keeps badgering Manda about why the battle had broken
out in the first place, refusing to believe their original confessions,
that it hadn’t been over neighbourhood territory, but a girl. Manda said
something to the magistrate like, we fought each other, the Corsican
and me, because we love the same girl. We're crazy about her. Don't
you know what it is to love a girl?
So what happened I asked, thinking the magistrate must have seen the
logic of love and jealousy drawing two men to battle and, realising their
noble purposes, had let them free to fight some knightly battle for
the girl's hand.
Anastasia and I had stopped walking and were simply standing off to the
side of the street as passers-by dodged us.
After a pause, she answered; I think Manda got a life sentence and Leca got 20 years or something and they were both deported off to hard labour.
Hmmm. The magistrate wasn't swayed toward violent demonstrations of
love? Romanticism thrown to the wolves of justice?
Something like that, Anastasia answered, suddenly distracted.
But worse still, she continued before pausing again, waiting dramatically for me to light her cigarette. A friend of Leca, seeking revenge for his comrade, found Amélie one night in the club where she sang and stabbed her. She
didn't die, but she could no longer perform as a singer. Never again.
She's buried at Bagnolet now. Sometimes, Witold, it isn't sufficient in
life not to let yourself fall in love because letting someone else
fall in love with you instead can have equally damning consequences.
*****
Instead of ripping my fingers into her soil and digging further, the
foreboding facial expressions, the slight change in pitch of vocal
chords, which she must in any case, as a singer been a master of,
all conspired to convince me to be satisfied with not knowing
more, about her, about these stories, about her own history, to accept
without further innuendo, whatever was presented.
*****
So tell me a weakness of yours, she purred as we shuffled along the
perimeter of the Bois du Boulogne one afternoon. We’d been walking
silently for a distance when she asked this and then, as to give me encouragement or strength, she took hold of my hand, the first real
gesture she’d ever made of affection in public to me.
I didn’t say anything at first; in part out of surprise at the question itself
and in part because caught off guard, I was a little stumped for an answer.
You mean other than drinking or alcoholism, I asked, trying to laugh.
No, I mean something I wouldn’t know without knowing you.
How about not being able to be close to anyone, not having feelings
sufficient to register, I dunno, emotion?
Don’t be silly, she laughed again, cavalier yet not malicious. I can tell
you have feelings. You have feelings for this friend you travelled with,
Albert, and…she stopped walking and tried to stare up at me on her
tip toes, a favourite endearing gesture of hers. You have feelings for me,
don’t you Witold?
I suppose it was meant to be cute, maybe even coy, but her comment immediately terrified me. The idea of despite having done my best to
remain what I thought was sort of casual and natural in the matter, she’d
seen clear through me without the slightest hesitation or doubt.
I’m joking, she immediately amended, seeing the look in my face and
deciding to take my hand again. Don’t take it the wrong way, Witold.
It’s just that you’ve said you have no feelings and I just find that very
hard to believe. I think you are just trying to hide behind some tough
façade of disillusionment, you don’t seem as cold to me as you seem
to try and portray, that’s all.
I laughed aloud, a laugh whose force was meant to convey a mutual understanding of the hilarity, of the absurdity of the joke, my joke,
her joke, the contemplation of feelings at all or for each other, but
which perhaps left to its own devices, had sounded sarcastic and bitter.
I know that, I muttered finally as we recommenced our walk. It’s you
who fell for the act, not me, I corrected.
*****
The days continued to roll by in something that verged on being a
pattern, becoming a habit.
And that pattern, which I maintained religiously in the fear that not doing
so would somehow upset the delicate cosmic balance we’d attained, was
that I always the first up, that I would leave the flat to venture out for a
walk, stop at the bakery for fresh bread and pastries, the fruit stall for grapes and berries or sometimes a pineapple and whilst I was gone she would rouse herself, make some coffee and wait for my return.
Although historically such an arrangement, even a relationship, was
something I was entirely unaccustomed to, it was clearly something at least
I could grow to want to be accustomed to.
Yet lurking in the back ground, always, was the innate certainty that
eventually the penny would drop. In part because it seemed only natural
to me that something of this nature; peaceful, contented, fulfilling, would eventually run its course and be replaced by the usual course of events so
that life could return to its predictable roots of apathy, it’s regularly
scheduled pattern of casual indifference.
And also in part because in a sense, she could have only let me in, and
perhaps even I could have only allowed myself to be let in, because of
the transient nature of our bond to begin with.
Oh, I certainly allowed myself the luxury, even after only a few days, of believing, even if only in a crippled way of believing; knowing the belief would be rewarded with pain eventually. But that luxury was enjoyed only
to the limits pessimism and reality would allow. I could even convince myself to a point that I could sense a slight, though tangible shift in her attitude toward me; begrudged affection grown in a soil of initial laissez
faire indifference.
Nonetheless, the day was coming, would come and half of my experiences with her were tormented by the knowledge that down the road, I’d pay for
my pleasure. Over the years you begin to believe you could only
realistically allow yourself to open up to a certain degree and begin slowly
to let your guard down. That’s how it works, in my opinion. The longer something goes well the more chance there is you’ll let your guard down
and then Bam! the consequences of that carelessness would be revealed.
In any event, as part of our established routine, once we were ready to
depart the flat for the afternoon, Anastasia would ask me only to give
her a number which she would embellish as an arrondisement, a
neighbourhood, a destination, and from that we would set out on our
walks, stopping after a few hours for a pichet of wine in a café, sometimes just sitting in the grass or on benches in various parks, riding the Metro. We’d then continue walking until there was little energy left and then
we’d buy bread with sausage or cheese and consume them in torn hunks, washed down by wine or water and if the weather was agreeable, followed
by a nap in the park.
The common theme in our time together, regardless of what we did,
was that we would talk about anything but our pasts. I’d always
imagined that you’d need to know everything about someone, their
histories, their amusements and tragedies, likes and dislikes, the litany
of former loves gone bad, childhoods, all that, before you could sense
any kind of growing attachment to someone. It’d always seemed to me
in New York like such an impossible proposition, having to spend years,
or at least months, digging the trenches for the foundation of a relationship that I never even tried to enter into it. It seemed such a
formidable undertaking that I didn’t think it were possible, that couples
I’d see before me would have endured years of painful formulation
before reaching any remote state of comfort and content.
You know, like when you reach a moment when two of you might be
together and start reminiscing about first meeting because after a few
months or years together you have a shared past and the past you don’t
share; that which you’d lived individually in the orbits of others before
ever having known the person you were with, and that past was shared
through telling stories about your past so that your past wasn’t just an
empty space from then to the present but that there’d be a bridge between
the two like “your” past and “our” present.
But that wasn’t how it worked with the two of us. It was sufficient for me
that she appeared to be fond of me, for whatever reason. I didn’t have to
know her past to feel close to her. Maybe because I wasn’t really close to
her, didn’t even really feel a desire to be, or at least a desire to be that wasn’t tinged with reluctance. What if her past held horrible secrets or revealed
things about her that would ruin the illusion we’d built together? What
if my past bored her to tears and turned her away from me? No, I only
wanted that sense of feeling wanted, that was all I could stomach and that
was as close as I needed to get to her, at least as the hours slid by.
By late afternoon those days, or early evening, it would eventually become
time for her to go back, prepare for work, for singing. Although each
day I did my best to ignore time there would be that inevitable point in the
day when Anastasia, for whom time still mattered because she had places
to be, would pull up softly, holding me at arms length and looking me up
and down as if it was going to be the last time she’d see me.
She didn’t have to say anything, I’d already knew that shortly she’d be
on her way, leaving me to my own neurotic and predictable devices
wherever we happened to be because we never gently eased our way
back towards her flat, we simply walked until a certain time and then
she’d be gone. As though I’d dreamt her up all on my own.
And so left on my own by the time rush hour traffic was hitting
its peak as though the timing of it were meant not to leave me alone
but united with the thousands of souls racing around the boulevards
and traffic circles to keep me company in her absence.
It was then the thirst would overtake me. I needed conversations in
a city whose language I didn't speak.
Instead I walked from wherever we had been, wherever she’d left me to
attend to her own affaires, with the scent of her perfume still in my
Nostrils, and headed for the Panthéon, the beginning of a long, winding
journey through a bastion of student life forward to the Place de la Contrescarpe and then behind there, a few streets of misdirection later and
I'd find myself at Le Teddy's, a bar I’d come across quite by chance one
late afternoon the first few days after she’d started leaving me and a place
which I’d felt a simple affinity for straight away, the ground through
which I'd slammed my pole and flag of discovery as my local, my oasis
and new-found reality of solitude again all at once.
*****
Walking worked well in the mornings but once the dark of day's
business end drew a curtain across the sky and the paths were more
uncertain, the markings less clear, it was time to head indoors and
as most places before and since I would discover, with time and
persistence, a predictable presence, eventually humanity would
return to me. Perhaps it was equally me returning to humanity once a
few beers had registered their effect, oiling my jaw and mouth enough to
dare speak to strangers without knowing the language of strangers and intimated through facial movements and hand gestures until inevitably, someone would show up or make their presence known and the roadblock
to communication would disappear through translation.
There were delineated stages of the evening defined by the coming
and going of customers and regulars whilst I remained planted at a
key position in the middle of the bar, wandering through one
conversation after another until the hours had filled up as simply
as empty beer mugs and before I knew it, time to return to Anastasia's
flat for a midnight snack and a shower.
Yet even within the course of several nights haunting this same
place I was able to discover revocable bonds with some of the
locals, Didier, the young artist, full of rancour and venom, a caustic
burning being who drank and spoke in staccato bursts both confusing
and enlightening, and Alan, an expat musician whose free time was
spent, whose passion was marked by, retracing the steps of Gypsy
guitarist Django Reinhard.
Inside Teddy's, after time we’d be roaring to life beyond happy hour.
Didier, with Alan in his garish shadow, chattered away to anyone and everyone around him, fuelled by passion and drink, known to everyone reluctantly as he sifted through the flotsam of the bar tide, his comrades
often fallen away, one after another until only Alan and myself would
be remaining from the original crowd and the old guard had been
replaced by a new one, the later night shift of drinkers and sometimes
strange conversationalists.
Didier and Alan had met in a bistro somewhere on St Andre des Arts.
Alan had been busking as he walked with a tin can attached to a neck
brace by a flexible metal arm, the kind you might see on a freely
bendable lamp, so as to allow the passers-by to, if inclined and
sufficiently entertained, to reach into their pockets for spare change
and drop it in as he passed. So the theory went, anyway. He said he
often thought it was more the strange invention that caught peoples’
attention than his playing but for whatever reason, Didier, who had been brooding over a coffee and a copy of Valery Larbaud’s Journal d’A, immediately leapt from his table, grabbing Alan by the arm in mid
guitar stroke and pulled him back to his own table. He wanted him as
his own discovery, even if Alan wasn’t his own invention.
Thereafter, Alan, who was staying in a run down hostel in the 11th at
the end of Canal St Martin, took Didier up on the invitation to stay with
him at his studio flat on rue Saint-sauveur where they would work on
a jazz musical based roughly on Django’s biography. Although Didier couldn’t play an instrument, his scattershot creativity flowed sufficiently
that he’d written lyrics for seven songs and had a loose script put together before Alan had even finished his second composition.
I’ll tell you about one night, just as an example, because it was like so
many others; as I get us all a round in, Didier immediately switches from
Alan, who is already feeling sleepy enough to seriously consider curling
up in a corner on the floor in the back of the bar because Didier refuses to
lend him the flat key, to me. Didier has other fish to fry. He wanted Alan there, keeping the conversation warm until someone else, namely me,
turned up. He was worked up in a particular froth and needed to spit it
out. Apparently, earlier in the afternoon, a butcher insulted his sensitivity
by refusing to accept a poem as barter for a shoulder of lamb and since then, he’d been on an apoplectic edge.
Do you feel as though you've been especially summoned, that there is
a special calling for you as an artist? Are you particularly alienated with a pronounced sense of being misunderstood by conventional wisdoms, bourgeois moralities?
He was asking me these questions, he the unemployed poet, the aspiring
artist, the man who couldn't simply allowing himself to drown in his drink
and keep quiet about it.
What's the point anyway, I ask pointedly as Alan takes the opportunity to
slip off to the toilets. He‘s heard it all already that afternoon. Hours of it.
Isn't this all some crutch you use to get through your daily misgivings your dissatisfaction with yourself in comparison to the accomplishments of the others? What purpose does your art serve other than a selfish mechanism of
petty, egotistical indulgences?
What purpose does my art serve? He asked with incredulity. What
purpose do you serve if we are speaking about purposes. What is your
utility, he spat bitterly? Is there some very special yet hidden trait woven
into your genomes that will come to fruition and blossom in the
righteousness of your purpose?
Calm down, Didier, I caution, licking my lips nervously as other
patrons are looking at us out of the corners of their eyes. What I
mean to ask is what purpose do you propose your creativity to be
used for other than yourself?
Why should my creativity serve any purpose other than for myself, he
asked, clearing his throat of Gitanes phlegm like a plumber snakes a
clogged toilet. I suffer enough from my choices, they make sure I do
suffer indeed for not being one of their productive members of
society…I could never calculate the psychological damage brought
upon me by seeing the contempt in their eyes. And why then do you
think I drink? Who wouldn't under these circumstances? What are you
saying, simply because I cannot subordinate my art into acceptable
consumerist values like writing commercial jingles about disposable
diapers or creating new superlatives for the unique comfort and
absorption of a particular brand name tampon, I should crawl into my
preternatural cave to wallow in my own isolation, fed on disgust,
shat into neat little pellets that can be easily swept up and
disposed of as if I never existed?
The monologue was spat forth with great intensity, with barely a
breath drawn. And just why are we suffocated with this doomed sense
of having to justify ourselves and our utility to others? Do you
think the pimply teenage bagging groceries in the Carrefour
hypermarché is pissing himself over his lack of purpose? A
paper-shuffler, lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth of spread sheets
and interoffice memos is scratching his head wondering why he hasn't
yet soared to the heights of his corporate manager, fluent in
corporate techno speak gibberish?
This silly question of yours, questioning the purpose of my
forsaking the chain gang of subordinates, pacified by television
soma, beaten into submission by the overwhelming nature of keeping
up, this is nothing to me. I laugh at it. I am proud of being a poet,
a craftsman. Proud of not being nothing, beautiful for it, in fact.
Look, Gautier once wrote that only things that are altogether
useless can truly be beautiful; anything that is useful is ugly
because it is the expression of some need and the needs of man are
base and disgusting as his nature is weak and poor. -
And furthermore, he added, warming to his subject like a university
professor unwittingly lured from the patina of his daily monologue
in front of an unfocused group of students, you will remember that
Frank Zappa, your own countryman, simplified art into being the act
of making something from nothing and selling it. There’s your utility.
And that is what the purpose of my art is. Not to cultivate myself
out of egoism, not simply to avoid the plague of working for some
other fat pig who will make profit from my sweat and leave me
scratchings in return. The purpose of my art is to elevate me out of
this slavery of civilisation…to free me to be myself, not just the
self in front of you in physical disarray, but the self I am beneath
all the surfaces, the subconscious, the bones, the gristle and
blood, the ineptitude of years, deep down below all of this, like an
object buried in a landfill which will never be dug out, lies
myself, the self I am trying to discover, my only reason for living
here, now drinking this beer with you, walking home – all of it
seems entirely without purpose unless it is in the name of this
search.
I heard Didier's voice ringing in my ears all the way home, having
finally extracted myself politely, excused myself, my existence,
wondering whether I was beautiful or ugly, useless, or useful…the
world was upside down and I was rapidly becoming a slave to the
schedule of Anastasia. This was my sense of purpose.
*****
And sometime before dawn I would hear the key in the door as I lie
attempting to sleep despite the racing of an adrenaline heart and
the anticipation like a dog of his master coming home and I would
hear her footsteps creeping quietly across the front room floor and
after giving her time to pour a glass of wine and have a seat, I
would rise as well, feigning as though I'd been sleeping all along
and we would go through a predictable round of apologies for waking
me as though I hadn't been waiting like a predator all evening for
this particular moment to arrive and my subsequent dismals of the
apologies for wanting her company and pouring a glass of wine
myself she would unwind her evening to me in great detail, each song
that she sung, the reaction of the crowd at particular moments, whom
she spoke with, whom she met, what she had to drink in between sets
until every detail had been scratched into my imagination deeply
enough that I could almost convince myself I'd been there as well.
She was often exhausted by the effort, the reliving and recounting
but would relax more deeply asking me about the conversations I
managed to remember from the evening, which characters I could
myself recall through the hazy evening. I’d recount pieces of Didier’s
daily diatribes and half the stories I made up from conversations I'd
had before with Albert because the truth was, a great deal of the
conversations I'd had, mired as they were in a lack of common
language and the tilting back of glasses invariably meant that I'd
spend most of those conversations determining the dialogue myself as
though I were writing it now free from the slowing tactics of alcohol
and translations.
Don't you get bored of that place, those people, the same beers, the
same faces?
No, they are like a human glue holding me together some nights. I
suppose I could have found better uses of my time but the truth is,
coming home to your empty flat with so much time to kill is like
sitting on death row awaiting a stay of execution. I need these
people, like I've needed all the people before them – if I am a
juggler, their faces are the balls I am juggling and concentrating
on those faces I am able to juggle.
Through the candlelight of the flat, I could see her staring at me –
Oh, you're just a drunk, Witold; you don't have to make excuses just
for me. I can't judge you any more than myself – it isn't the faces
as often it is the drink you are juggling and instead of helping the
concentration it is merely distracting it. I know, I've done in for
many years here and alone.
But we don't have to be alone, I would protest as though arguing
with a republican about the merits of the royal family. We've worn
paths through ourselves in that pattern, being alone and just as
easily, with time, we can wind paths through each other…
And the moat would be drawn back in and her feet would curl and her
knees hugged closer to her chest. Not now, she would murmur. Not yet
and maybe never but still always possible. There are a lot of years
on that same path with too many false steps in wrong directions.
That's why I need this time alone even if the one thing I seem to
want most is to be with you.
The value of life can be calculated only by the itemisation of the
sum and intensity of experiences, she said.
One of the reasons I keep all these photographs of strangers, she
was explaining early that morning after undressing and pouring a
glass of cognac from a bottle purloined from the club, is because I
try to abstract the particulars from the universal, the parts from
this composite. I wonder all the time what it is that makes one or
two men, say, out of a collection of them in one photograph, here,
she gestured, handing over a photograph of black-faced miners
standing below the photographer looking up as if from the bowels of
hell, regarding God. Look at this photograph. Notice how one or two
of the faces particularly grab you – why? Is it the angle of the
light, the photographer's vision, or some internal aura that the
captured soul demonstrates for that one split second?
She calmed after this sales pitch of the individual over the
collective and visibly decided that I could be trusted with her next
line of reasoning. When I regard men I wonder what qualities about
them I might admire, what characteristics might I absorb through
being in their presence – of course, the obvious – the only
qualities which are not intentionally hidden or cannot be hidden in
our venal society, are the easiest, yet least accurate measure of
judging. I cannot tell from looking at this photograph, any history
of the strangers below. I cannot decided who would be the more
caring lover, who would make the better father, who would be the
drunkard simply from the wild spirit yet in their eyes, those little
white circles peering out from the soot of their faces, but I can tell
somehow who among them wass a decent man…
The candour was overwhelming when it came spilling out of her like
that so unexpectedly that I'd almost want to ask her to repeat it
again to make sure it hadn't been just another imagined bit of
dialogue in my head on a morning walk of dreaming.
I wanted to believe her but I wondered instead, with a vague jealous
passion, what she was doing. I wondered about friends which she
Must have had whom she didn't introduce me to. I wondered if there
was someone else allowed to attend her gigs, wondered how many
lovers amongst the musicians she had taken or still took. I wondered
who stared at her dreamily as she sang, who invited her for drinks
between sets, who she shared jokes with and if of any of them, she
explained my sudden appearance.
Her minute descriptions of her evening always pointedly ignored what
was probably the reality of most of her evenings, whether it was
merely in my imagination or not.
I have to admit, my heart was fairly limping along with me those
nights. It was a rather unfamiliar feeling; queasiness, excitement,
uncertainty. The hours we spent together seemed like part of the
same stitched together during sleep and the moment we parted,
reality loomed ahead again. I didn't think about Utrecht or Albert
or any other moment in my life. I was living solely for the moment
when we would meet up again.
*****
I have something to tell you Witold, she mentioned casually as we
sat in Jardin du Luxembourg tearing off hunks of bread from a loaf
and stuffing it with cheese whilst washing the meal down with wine.
I sat up, alarmed. Finally the penny would drop.
I've had a month-long gig scheduled for some time, a gig that I
can't really break or postpone and it's not here in Paris.
No problem, I shrugged, I'll come along.
No….she drew her words out carefully, shaking her head. We can't
really do that you see…first of all, the place that booked me allows
me free room and board which isn't to share…
I could find a place wherever it is and stay back, in the
shadows-like, I smiled playfully, unable to mask the fear in my
voice.
Well, you know how I feel about having you see my gigs…there just
isn't much point. Besides, I want to have some time alone. To digest
all of this, she explained calmly, waving her hand somewhere in the
vicinity between her and I.
Aha, I knew there was a catch to all this sudden happiness, I lamely
attempted to joke. Boyfriend stashed away somewhere else?
She smiled patiently. She must have known all along in the back of her mind, with more certainty than I because she knew, I could only suspect this day would come. She must have thought long and hard about this to herself, what to say, how to say it, what my possible reactions would be, the inherent dangers in one reply or another. She would have allowed, or even cultivated my continued presence in her life on a daily basis, she must have felt, if not her own then at least my own growing reliance on her presence. And yet surely, even for her it could not have been easy, as we bonded, knowing this secret of the gig lurking in the future. Perhaps there’d been no reason to tell me after all, any of these days we’d shared could have been the last just as easily as it could have flown into the following day. There had been no need to tell me, we had no ties together in the future. We were simply thriving in the present.
No, no boyfriend stashed elsewhere in a secret cupboard in another town, she laughed ironically. It's just like I said, time alone to reflect. Besides, isn’t your friend Albert going to start worrying about you? You haven’t called or written to him in nearly a fortnight. Won’t he get tired of waiting?
Albert? I nearly laughed. Albert will be getting drunk every night, will chain smoke his way through each day, will play or listen to music. The thought of what had happened to me might cross his mind, sure. But Albert is not going anywhere. Not yet anyway. And what if I rang the café he frequents and left a message for him? Not back for another month. Chasing paradise.
She laughed but still shook her head. You don’t mean to tell me that this comrade of yours who you’ve come all the way over from New York with to play jazz together in Europe with, he’ll barely notice you’re gone and worse still, won’t even care that you are?
No, Albert is not a man who worries about anything but where his next beer
is coming from. So it isn’t necessary to try to deflect this into something
about Albert and me. This is something about me and you.
I felt instantly and regrettably bitter.
She smiled with discomfort, touching my head gently.
When I return, I will come up to Utrecht to visit you…
*****
There were, of course, untold questions I wanted to ask but I wasn't
sure I really wanted to know the answers. There were nights of
unflinching truths I'd often heard my father express about things I
could only imagine, truths which were usually better left unspoken,
as he often impressed upon me about my mother.
Deep down the desire to pout and pull in as though doing so would
alter the reality of the situation was overwhelming at times. Any
inducement out of pain, any remedy for the imagination of incessant
infidelities or worse still, apathy. I wanted to insist on coming
along, verifying myself things were as innocent as they were being
portrayed but I wasn't certain I wanted to be around to find out
they weren't.
I wanted to say fuck the whole thing, sorry I'd come along for the
ride, wanted to roll in a slough of my own bile, my own greed for
more, my own in fatigable paranoias and distrust. But I didn't want
to feel this new limb severed, didn't care for the idea of feeling
the numbness set in, the futile blankness of knowing something that
was once full with promise had been emptied, deflated, punctured. I
knew better somehow, innately, not to want either extreme for
neither extreme instinctively, was the answer, merely an impatient
conclusion.
Play it cool, coldly and calmly and play it warm, supple and with
feeling, I told myself deciding to ignore all but the simple reality that
we’d be parting, for however long.
*****
So the next morning, bitterest of mornings, reeking fear and regret,
I was seen off. Anastasia seemed genuinely disturbed by the looming
departure but I, as the entire time I'd been trying to piece her
together, hour by hour, sleeping or awake, through gestures, facial
expressions, hidden meanings in seemingly innocuous utterances,
remained as confused as ever about whether there was any difference
between what she appeared and sounded and felt and what she really
was – what did I knew even after all these days and hours
accumulated like rain water in a bucket left outside in a draught,
was that I didn't know her at all. I didn't trust her, I didn't
understand her yet somehow I was able to convince myself there was
something growing in me which she was unquestionably a part of – as
though the root of an indigestion can be pinpointed through a
specific meal, oh, it was the chilli dogs and sauerkraut, no doubt.
So departure was drawn out with a breadcrumb trail of promises and
yet still somehow, even though I was apprehensive about it, relieved
and heavily medicated from our farewell night that drew out into the
early first train of the morning in the direction of Amsterdam, I
wanted to leave the thread of this emotion at the station and let it
unravel all the way to the end of the journey so that at any time,
if either of us had been so inclined, we could merely follow the
strand of thread all the way back to the origin, crawling through a
tiny hole in the universe that had begun with a stilted conversation
in a night club.
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