Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

The barmaid — the same Franco-Turkish one I had seen there before — smiled as I entered. Without me asking, she poured me a beer, set it in front of me, and then turned and retrieved two glasses and a bottle and poured out two shots each of a clear liquid. Reaching for a pitcher, she added a drop of water to both drinks. As the liquid went murky, she raised a glass to me and said, ‘ Serefe .’

Turkish for ‘cheers’.

I raised my glass and clinked it against hers and, following her example, downed the shot in one go. As it traveled down my throat, all I could taste was its pastis-like flavor. But as soon as it hit my stomach, the alcoholic content kicked in: a one-hundred-and-ten-percent proof burn that made me grab the beer and drain it. The barmaid saw my discomfort and smiled.

‘Raki,’ she said, pouring us two more shots. ‘Dangerous.’

Her name was Yanna. She was the wife of the owner, Nedim, who was back in Turkey helping bury some uncle.

‘You marry a Turk, you find out they are always burying some fucking uncle, or sitting in a corner with a bunch of their friends, conspiring against someone who dared to make some pathetic slight against their family, or—’

‘You’re not Turkish?’ I asked.

‘Supposedly. Both my parents came from Samsun, but they emigrated in the seventies and I was born here. So yes, I am French — but if you are born into a Turkish family, you are never really allowed to escape its clutches. Which is why I ended up marrying Nedim — a second cousin and a fool.’

She clicked her glass against mine and threw back the raki. I followed suit and accepted the bottle of beer she handed me.

‘Raki is good for just one thing,’ she said. ‘Getting smashed.’

‘And every so often,’ I said, ‘we all need to get smashed.’

‘ Tout a fait, monsieur. But I have a question. Omar — le cochon — tells me you are American.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So why do you have to live in his proximity?’

‘Ever heard the expression, “a struggling artist”?’

‘I’ve never met an artist. In this work, the only people you meet are assholes.’

‘Artists can be assholes too.’

‘But they are probably interesting assholes.’

Then, over three rakis — interrupted by the final orders of the two drunks semi-passed out in a corner — she gave me a rambling version of her life. Raised in this ‘shitty arrondissement ‘ when it was still primarily Turkish, always getting crap in school for being the child of immigres , working in her father’s little epicerie when she was seventeen, very strict parents, pushed into this arranged marriage with Nedim three years ago (‘My twenty-first birthday present from my fucking parents’).

‘It could be worse,’ she said. ‘At least it’s a bar, and not a laverie .’

But Nedim was a slob who expected her to play the traditional wife when it came to picking up after him. ‘I am also duty-bound to spread my legs and fuck the idiot twice a week … a disgusting experience as the fool always burps just before coming …’

We kept throwing the rakis back, and she kept lighting up cigarettes and coughing. Finally she told the two drunks to beat it. When they had both staggered out, she looked at the mess around her — the dirty glasses, the brimming ashtrays, the tables and counters that needed wiping down, the floor to be swept and mopped — and shuddered.

‘ This ,’ she said, ‘is the sum total of my life.’

‘I should go,’ I said.

‘Not yet,’ she said, standing up. She walked to the front door, locked it, then pulled down an inside set of shutters. She returned to where I was sitting, flashing me a drunken smile, took my hand and pulled me up from the chair, then placed the same hand under her short skirt and inside her petite culotte. As my index finger touched her slit, it became wet and she uttered a small groan before grabbing my head and shoving her tongue down my throat. I might have been drunk, but I was also cognizant of the fact that I was engaged in an insane activity. But my finger pushed deeper inside her. And her smoky, raki-coated mouth tasted … well, smoky and raki-coated. And the rational side of my brain was being trumped by the intoxicated moron with a hard penis. Before I knew it we were staggering into a dingy back room where there was a cot bed and a sink with rust stains (the small shitty details one notices while locked in a drunken carnal embrace), and she was unbuckling my jeans and I pulled down her panties and she kicked off her shoes, and we collapsed half-clothed on the cot, and I smelled damp from the grungy blanket covering the mattress, and the cot creaked under our combined weight, and when I hesitated from entering her she whispered, ‘It is safe.’ As soon as I was deep within her, she started doing mad, violent stuff like pulling my hair and lacerating my buttock with her nails, and pushing her free hand between us and aggressively rubbing her clitoris as I thrust into her. She must have woken two neighboring arrondissements as she came, then bit down hard on my tongue and wouldn’t let go until I detonated inside of her.

Immediately she stood up and said, ‘I have to clean up now.’

A minute or so later, after I had pulled up my jeans and spat blood into the sink (she had really done a number on my tongue), she hustled me out on to the street without a goodbye — just a fast guilty glance in either direction along the rue de Paradis to make certain no one she knew was about. The shutters came down. I walked a few steps along the street, then leaned against a wall, trying to fathom if what had just happened in the last ten minutes had just happened. But my brain was still too addled from all the booze and the sheer madness of it all. The blood in my mouth was flowing freely now and my tongue suddenly hurt like hell. So I staggered home and went back to my room and ran the tap and gargled with salt water for around two minutes, and spat out the bloodied water, and stripped off my clothes, and took three extra-strength ibuprofen tablets and a Zopiclone. The chemicals did the trick, but when I jolted awake at two, I found that I couldn’t speak.

I discovered this because my wake-up call this morning wasn’t my clock-radio; rather, several loud knocks on my door. As I staggered out of bed, my tongue touched the roof of my parched mouth and immediately recoiled in agony. I went to the little mirror hanging by the kitchen sink and opened my mouth. I shuddered when I saw what was inside. My tongue had taken on a general blue-black appearance and was grotesquely distended. The banging on the door increased. I opened it. Outside stood Omar — in a dirty T-shirt and a pair of cotton drawstring pants with fresh urine stains around the crotch. The first words out of his mouth were, ‘You give me one thousand euros.’

‘What?’ I said, sounding as if my mouth was filled with dental cotton wool. That’s when I realized that speech was virtually impossible.

‘You give me one thousand euros today. Or else you are dead man.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, though the sentence came out all muffled and distorted. As in: jenecomprendpas .

‘Why you can’t speak?’

‘Bad cold.’

‘Liar. She bit you, yes?’

Now I was very awake and scared.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I see you this morning. Very early. Leave bar.’

‘I wasn’t in a bar …’

‘Bar closed. Shutters down. Shutters then open. She looks out, looks both ways. Coast clear. You come out. Shutters close. Got you.’

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘Bullshit. I am coming down street. I see her open bar. When she gives nervous look, I duck into doorway. Hidden. I see you. Now I tell Nedim — when he comes back next week — that you fucked his wife. How you like that, American? Nedim will cut off your balls. Unless you pay me to keep my mouth closed.’