Igor Eliseev - One-Two

Once upon a time she wandered into our room by chance, sat on the floor and scrutinized us for a long time very carefully and unabashedly. Then she took a sheet of paper, put it on the chair standing nearby and got down to drawing. We were sitting on our bed, afraid to make a movement, not understanding what was going on and absolutely at a loss for what to say. After finishing her work, Lizzie glanced at us with such genuine surprise as if she had just found out we were there. “Hi. I’m Lizzie. Would you like me to do more drawings of you?” after which she left us, not even waiting for an answer.

We were intrigued by this extraordinary episode and for several days thereafter we looked out for a chance to meet her again, anywhere, but we had no luck. However, after a week precisely, she sneaked into our room through the open window and appeared before us herself. Our door was never locked but Lizzie said she found window-climbing much easier and more exciting. She acted open-heartedly, at ease, as if she had known us forever. Sitting on a spare bed, Lizzie took out her sketchbooks and notebooks and started demonstrating her skill in drawing. At first she was silent and simply handed us her papers like a child playing with its speechless reflection, then she went on to explain. “Look, it’s so clear that the two of you, on some level, belong together, as lovers, or as friends, but in this picture, there’s me standing between you. What happens to other people will happen to you.” Her collection contained a surprisingly large number of pictures of conjoined girls although she was fond of drawing many different people: house-parents, passersby, doctors. One of the drawings showed you being nearly twice as tall and big as me, another represented a portrait of us having colored faces; mine was pink and yours was blue. In some pictures we were portrayed uglier than we actually were: I had a ludicrous beard and moustache and you demonstrated a beaming smile on your square face; we were crossing and stretching, thickening and expanding. She stuck our backs together in such a way that we would never be able to see each other, or joined our shoulders weirdly leaving me only with the left arm and you only with the right. In fact, each of us has two arms and two legs and we are conjoined at the hip, but Lizzie saw us in her own way and depicted us totally different from reality. I really liked that picture where we were picking flowers in pretty dresses; we had large, beautiful eyes and our hair was down, touching the ground. But the last picture, to me, was very embarrassing: without turning an eyelash, Lizzie portrayed us naked, with our breasts, which we haven’t got, legs and bellies, and our entire bodies totally exposed. You, on the contrary, were delighted with the drawing; I remember you studying it for a long while, after which you asked, “Could you draw us separately?” Lizzie burst out laughing, then took a cigarette and lit it. “Silly, young girls, you don’t understand a thing. The point is that you are not like everyone else; you’re the real tawpies . Just think how great it is to be you!”

I remember she confessed to us one day, “Staying here is more than any artist could dream of. You can lead a rackety life to your heart’s content, as long as it doesn’t confuse people around you. Actually, even if they do get confused, what’s so bad about that?” Then we asked her why she chose to involve herself in drawing. “Why do I draw? What do you mean why?” she repeated trying to sense the taste of the words. “This is how I respond to reality. Words are insufficient to express all my feelings. Few adults whose thoughts and acts are always perfectly correct listen to me unless I wear a white robe . Convinced of their ultimate rightness, they never get tired of hurting me, keeping up appearances. They never get the point: it doesn’t matter whether you are right or wrong; the only thing that matters is whether people around you are happy about your way of doing things. My images might be unreal, not corresponding to forms, contours, colors, and through them I obviously “lie” to people, but they are the only truth for me. I only wish my parents, who are supposed to be the dearest people on earth to me, could understand me. They are the only ones I wouldn’t be able to portray, not because I bear a grudge against them, but because I am not interested in them. Their life is similar to the eternal late fall when all the shades have faded away and become gray. From people, they turned into living codes of rules, laws and prejudices — lifeless shadows in an ordinary dining room where they seem to be quite happy with served food and drinks. So why do I draw? Personally to me, it gives me the possibility of feeling the world and people, of perceiving their pain and pleasure, of admiring the surrounding beauty; my drawings are confessions of my love for the world.”

I believed, sooner or later, adults would listen to her words if only Lizzie didn’t get drunk so often. She spent the allowance from her parents on alcohol, which was delivered right to her room. Let’s say, she never suffered a shortage of booze. All the medical personnel pretended to be unaware of this, but, to hand it to Lizzie, she was really good at drinking. She could fuddle all night long and wake up fresh as a daisy the next morning. But there were days when her spirits were terribly down; she often burst into tears and behaved completely intolerably. On those days she swallowed handfuls of pills and washed them down with alcohol trying to hide her frustration and anxiety, to escape from reality for evermore. At times she seemed to hear a baby crying somewhere; she intermittently ran up to the window and to the door and then came back to her place again. First we attentively listened to all indistinct sounds trying to discern something, but in vain; our hearts always used to leap when she had such seizures. By the way, it was Lizzie who introduced us to alcohol. The first time we tasted “the Gift of the Magi”, as she called it, was a few weeks after we met her. I remember that after the first glass we got really dizzy, fell on to a bed and were unable to get up for a long time; Lizzie teased us and couldn’t stop laughing loudly, then got tired and proceeded to do some drawing. We were tossing on a bed with our feet trailing on the floor; all that resembled some sort of drunken madness. Hardly had we sat up on our bed, still groggy, with blurred eyes, when she jumped up right next to us and asked, “Do you happen to know that many people take kissing in public as a personal insult?” I doubt she cared the slightest about what we thought. “Believe it or not, guys hate it when girls slobber in their mouths; they prefer experienced women. However, I think I can teach you a good lesson.”

So she did. Firmly squeezing her mouth up against our lips and almost chewing them off, she kept repeating incessantly, “Like this, got it? There you go!” But when we became a little better at it, she suddenly jerked back and shouted, “Whatever do you think you’re doing? Have you gone bonkers?”

We were stupefied. We stared at her.

Meanwhile, Lizzie went up to a window, sat on the sill, lowered her feet down and uttered, staring somewhere into the woods, “This whole world is a huge mental home where miserable people are all involved in a contest to make the greatest nonsense or go mad first.” Then she turned to us and added, “My congratulations, you would win a prize, no doubt about it!” After that her face acquired a wistful and melancholic expression, except for her bold eyes; a little later she started running back and forth and shouting gibberish. I tried to help and grabbed her by the hand, but Lizzie got very frightened, stared at me, and yelled desperately, “Leave me alone! You don’t understand anything, silly girls! It is all meaningless! What’s the use of looking for anything, what’s the use of trusting, loving, if all of us are going to decay in a wooden box anyway?!” Nurses heard the sounds of her yelling, came running and tried to tie her up and tranquilize her, but Lizzie resisted and kicked her feet like a wild mare when they grasped her by the hands. The impression was that her strength would suffice for ten people. Only after a good few doctors had gathered in our room did they manage to pacify her by giving her a sedative shot. A minute later she went limp and fell asleep. Right afterwards, we found her drawing on our bed, distorted stuff, as if you were looking at the world from under water.