Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

“And you – you’re doing what you want with Claire…? Is that it?”

There was a pause between the women.

“So, are we going to play who’s more pathetic now?” Dominique said.

Aimée’s teeth clenched into each other as her eyes grew humid.

“Dominique, I swear to God… if I’m asking you questions and you’re lying to me, I swear to God Dominique!”

Aimée stayed in the spare bedroom at her father’s. After a week, Dominique called and said, “Please”. When Aimée came back to the apartment, Dominique was lying on the couch on her stomach, with her face in her hands. She picked up her head and looked up at Aimée. Her face was pale and bloated, and her hair greasy at the roots.

Dominique sat up and said in a half–voice, “You are the love of my life.”

They stopped mentioning names and decided to take a trip to Switzerland. The mountains were breathtaking. The whole train-ride Dominique was flirty, teasing, joking, nudging. Everything was so beautiful, so unbearably beautiful.

From Grindelwald station, they took the cog-wheel train towards the glacier, through a carved mountain, to a town called Lauterbrunnen.

Those mountains, chiselled grey stone, with the white powder waterfall flowing from the top, making the edges shine like granite. With the clouds sitting on the peaks, Aimée and Dominique talked about Olympus and all the gods, somewhere up there, trying to one up each other.

The train passed steadily through its landscape: the pines with their thin-haired needles and the stub-whitish-green firs and the bright spruces, prickling against the slow-moving fog. The churches with their narrow cone hats and rigid metal crosses on top. The clocks on the towers in golden roman numerals. The white cottages with the brown triangle roofs. There were pastures of cows, some brown horses in the fields, white puffs of sheep, thinner puffs of goats, calls in the distance, a sudden “moo”, a donkey haw, a jaw-dropped “bah!”

The air was almost liquid with its freshness and chill, and as they approached Lauterbrunnen, there was a perpetual sound of running water, the birds calling to each other in the distance, and the vast mountains one behind the other, seeming so close you could reach your hand out of the train and touch the moss.

Hotel Staubbach, on the Hauptstrasse, was a family-run lodge, pale-yellow exterior with brownish-red shutters framing each window, and the hotel letters spelled out in the same colour on the side of the building.

“ Die schönen Berge …” the receptionist was pointing outside the window and nodding for agreement.

“The beautiful mountains…” Dominique translated for Aimée.

Dominique had retained an elementary speaking German from her mother’s home-schooling days, whereas Aimée, who had taken it for years in school, still stumbled over completing a full sentence.

Both women nodded at the thin man in a burgundy vest, with the name tag “Klaus”.

In their room, the duvet, the walls, the floor, all soft colours and meek designs, pastel green, blushing coral, pale plum, skittish teal and weaving lines of cream. Dominique opened the large window to the panoramic view of the Staubbach Falls and the Lauterbrunnen valley.

Downstairs, Klaus explained that there were seventy-two waterfalls in the area and gave them a hiking map with dotted red paths like threads of blood lines through the mountainous earth.

If they wanted to see the shops, they were a fifteen-minute walk downhill.

Klaus advised them to visit the cheesemaker at the bottom of the hill and then to turn left, off the long road, to the cabinetmaker, in case they were looking to purchase some regionally crafted furniture, and then to continue down the road, where they could get to what Klaus proudly described as “a graceful cemetery”.

They popped into the cheese shop, passed by the cabinetmaker and headed down the road. The cemetery at the end was pristine, framed by short-trimmed grass so green it could almost tingle. The graves were arranged in neat rows with red flowers planted in between like berries. The stones stood in lines, white and grey and brown, crosses with carvings, every stone corner looked wiped and shined.

Aimée walked ahead of Dominique on the entrance path. Dominique thought of a monologue from Faust , in that Polish production she saw last season, where Faust sang to the devil, suspended from his bungee cord on stage:

There was a petite woman, with a white bun pinned neatly above her thin neck, crouching down beside a dark blue bucket and a pale rag. At her feet, an alert brown and grey German Shepherd stood tall. She dipped the rag into the bucket, pulled it out dripping, and wiped the tombstones, one by one.

Aimée noted from the dates that most of the people buried here lived well into their nineties. The petite woman herself seemed to be in her late eighties.

“I guess the Swiss Alps hold the key to immortality,” Aimée nudged Dominique. “All that hiking, fresh cheese, hand-crafted cabinets…”

Dominique stared at the dog and thought of the hiking trails on the map like blood sewn into paper.

As the days passed, Dominique silently measured her own dissatisfaction against the contrast of the beautiful landscape.

Upon my couch of sleep I lay me:

There, also, comes no rest to me,

But some wild dream is sent to fray me.

Dominique was standing in front of the window, looking out absently. Aimée came up to her and put her arms around her waist from behind. She didn’t move. She stared straight into the glass, as if her eyes were just windows, unaffected by the sight that passed through them.

Someone is going to come…

Aimée was no longer the sixteen-year-old girl following in step with her older girlfriend to make sure she doesn’t find her too naïve. She was thirty-one now, but her role as the naïve partner had merely taken on new forms of maturity. After fifteen years together, she was well familiar with the cloudy sadness that would take over her wife. It would leave for years, then reappear. But every time it came, Aimée played her role, not daring to enquire more than Dominique was willing to share, timidly on hand and devoted as if Dominique required more blind faith than informed understanding.

Dominique left the window, went to the bed and lay down in her clothes. Aimée followed her and sat on the edge of the pale floral comforter. She put her hand on Dominique’s back, then slid down to her, placing her face loyally into the crux of her neck.

“Get off me,” Dominique said.

There wasn’t much reception in their room, so Dominique was pacing around in the lobby, near the brown-leather sofas and the burgundy armchairs, walking around the corners of the wine-toned carpet, beneath the dew-drop chandelier. She was nodding and biting the skin around her nails.

When she came back up to the room, she pinched her lips and squeezed her fists.

“They want me for the part!”

Dominique’s eyes radiated such a warm colour that Aimée thought she could see her blood coursing through. Just below, her lips were parted and her teeth, left so unguarded in her smile that Aimée jumped up and ran to her.