Rachel Kushner - The Strange Case of Rachel K

The blue lights flipped on. Smoky haze drifted above the tables.

“Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

The marquee said Rachel K, French Variety Dancer , but the French Nazi had known immediately she wasn’t French. Whatever she was or wasn’t, she looked like a liar and he liked liars. He imagined there was someone for whom honesty was a potent seduction, but the French Nazi was not that sentimental someone. Seduction, he knew, was a slew of projections, disguises, denials. What could you claim to accurately know about anyone, much less a stranger to whom you were attracted? And yet you could claim, accurately, that a person was evasive, and that their evasions interested you.

He’d watched her show several nights in the Cabaret Tokio’s Pam-Pam Room, when he finally decided to break the wax seal on their silent conversation of glances. He stared coolly, continuously, wearing a colonial dictator’s eyeglasses, with heavy tortoiseshell frames and aubergine-tinted lenses. In her cycle of periodically eyeing him, Rachel K was eventually forced to meet his gaze. He nodded almost imperceptibly. She came toward him and plopped onto his lap like a child.

“Are you an ambassador or something?” she asked. She thought his suit looked expensive. His crisp, white shirt cuffs seemed somehow dignitary-quality.

The French Nazi said yes, exactly, an ambassador, but they both knew it was a lie. That ambassador was a code for something complex and possibly unspeakable, a word they both saw with quotes around it. Rachel K was wearing black fishnet stockings. He could see their pattern, even in the dim blue light. He liked the diaphanous allure of fishnets. They were an enticement in the guise of a barrier, like a beaded curtain hung over a doorway says “come in,” not “stay out,” its beads telegraphing that what’s inside is enchanted and special. He put his hand on her knee. Her skin felt slightly cool, bare and smooth. He ran his finger up the inside of her thigh carefully, as though drawing a line on dew-frosted glass, leaving a skin-toned smear in the cross-hook pattern of her fishnets.

“An illusion, a painting,” he said, and looked at her with a bemused smile.

He had a vague memory of Parisian women wearing paint-on stockings during the war. But that was all over. This was 1952. The girl had made her own perverse style out of scarcity, and he was impressed. And what was supposed to be an enticement, a fine membrane of netting that begged not just “’remove me” but “rip me to shreds” could not be ripped to shreds. It could be removed, of course, with water and soap, but such a ritual without the purpose of gaining sexual access, would have no meaning. Why bother, when he could have her as she was? Her stockings were as material as the sun-shadow of chain-link on a prison wall. He thought of Inge, the German girl with whom he’d toured the Rhineland before enlisting in the Charlemagne Division. Little Inge who insisted he tear through her intricate cat’s cradle of garters and stays, girdle, corset and underwear. He would burst through snaps and panels, and tug tight-fitting elasticized garments down around the German girl’s knees, dismantling underwear fortifications in order to penetrate the frontier of her pretend-virginity. Sometimes he became impatient, pried his hand into her underwear and simply jerked the crotch panel to the inside of her thigh, to clear the way. The tearing sound of unforgiving fabric would cause Inge to let out a little moan, as if the fabric itself were the delicate folds of her innocence. With paint-on stockings, there was nothing to burst through. No garters, stays, or snaps. Only flesh.

Rachel K nodded yes, that she’d painted them on. “They were perfect too — until you marked me.” She extended her legs to survey her work. “They took me all day to finish.” She’d used a sable cosmetic brush and a pot of liquid mascara, drawing lines that crossed at angles to make diamonds, her foot lodged on the windowsill of her kitchenette. Like prayer, it was a quiet, obliterative meditation that opened up an empty space in her thoughts, a not-her. But it wasn’t prayer, and she wanted the space of not-her to remain empty, rather than fill with the presence of god.

“You spent an entire day painting your legs?” he asked.

“Some girls spend hours plucking their eyebrows,” she said. “Burning sugar cubes and dropping them in absinthe.”

He nodded. “And you do this instead.”

“I do lots of things.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “It does say ‘variety’ dancer, after all. French variety dancer, no less.” It was a style of flirting, exposing her fabrications to provoke her into new ones.

“Maybe my dance is French- style ,” she said. “But it’s more than that. My grandfather, Ferdinand K, was French. He came to Cuba to film the Spanish-American war.” Her grandfather, Ferdinand K, had gone east to film not the war but the hardwood fires. Forests of campeachy, purpleheart and mahogany that had been burned to make way for sugar cane, fires so magnificent and hot they cracked his camera lens. He’d decided it was safer to stay in Havana and construct dioramic magic tricks. And so he blew up the USS Maine in a hotel sink with Chinese firecrackers and then sold the reels as war footage.

The French Nazi examined her in the dim blue light. She had a narrow face, dark eyes, the full lips and large teeth of a Manouche gypsy or German Jew. “K could be a number of things, mademoiselle,” he said, stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. “But K is not French.”

“They said he was French.”

“They?”

“Actually, my mother.”

“And she was—”

“A nothing. A stranger who left me here when I was thirteen.” She and her mother had ducked into the Tokio from the blinding sun of midday Havana. It was so dark inside the club that Rachel K could barely see. They waited at the Pam-Pam Room bar until a manager appeared from a back office, trailing Cigar smoke. He breathed audibly and in his labored breath she understood that he’d taken her on. That was ten years ago. She’d been at the Tokio so long now that it was a kind of mother. It gave her life a shape. Other girls passed through, regarded cabaret dancing as momentary and sordid, always hoping for some politician or businessman to rescue them. Because the Tokio gave her life a shape and never sent her fretting over imagined alternatives, Rachel K was free in a way the other girls weren’t. She had longings as well, but they weren’t an illness to be cured. They were part of who she was, and it was these very longings that reinforced the deeper reconciliation to her situation.

The French Nazi said thirteen seemed rather young for a debut in her line of work. Not in the tropics, Rachel K replied, where girls reach puberty at ten. She told him how the Tokio dressing room attendants had draped her in spangles, pompoms, and gold sartouche trim. They were kind, middle-aged women with smoky voices and thick masks of makeup. They’d crimped her locks and painted her mouth in lipstick imported from Paris, a reddish-black like blood gone dark from asphyxiation. Covered her breasts with tasseled pasties and put her onstage in the Pam-Pam Room. Voilà. Here she was.

Sometimes it seemed that her entire adolescence had been lived in the dressing room mirrors of the Cabaret Tokio. She’d spent hours gazing into them, locked out and wanting to get inside, where the world was the same, but silvery and greenish, doubled and reversed. The same, but different. When she was alone in the dressing room she’d sidle up and press her cheek to the silver and look sidelong into the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse — of what? — whatever its invisible secret was. She had faith that there was some secret at the heart of the invisibility, even if faith meant allowing for the possibility that there was no secret, that invisibility had no heart. If she knew the mirror’s secret, she’d know how to pass through to the other side. To a greenish-silver province that was her world, but reversed.