Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

“Take a bite, Mr D.”

Now I’m chewing and the kids are giggling around me.

“I have a friend in Paris…” the girl is explaining, “…all you have to say is… I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis … got it?”

I start to nod, but I can feel the apple chunks tickling my throat from the inside. I’m inhaling through my nostrils, trying to cough. The girl is reaching out her hand for me again, holding a sky-blue handkerchief, silky and limp in her fingers.

“Here you go, Mr D, mind that cough…”

Jana lay face down, her trousers bunched right below the curve of her bare buttocks, her blouse pulled up on her back. White flesh in the darkness.

Although her body was still, her two butt-cheeks began to pull apart. From the crevice, a chatter came. The kids began crawling out, first as voices, then as bodies.

Back on the street, pigeon-toed and shy, low noses and hunched shoulders, they shuffled against each other in front of the Blue Angel bar, then began to draw up their chins, looking around.

They spotted Babička on her sewer grid, walked over to her and crouched at the blankets, rummaging inside to curl in closer.

Then the pile on the sewer grid settled and lay calm. The lump as a whole squeezed together even tighter and tighter, their bodies condensing into each other, until the limbs and blankets began to dissolve into a blue tint, thinning into the evening air.

Janka… it’s me!

For the past two years, Aimée had had the sensation that she was being followed. Not by a person, but by a colour. She dropped several cobalt-rimmed dishes, then cut her index finger on the fish-scale-blue knife blade she’d got for her birthday years ago. She’d thrown away her dark blue bathrobe, painted over the brine-tinted hallway of her apartment with an objective grey, and stopped smoking Lucky Strike Blues, then Camel Blues, then Gauloises Bleues, then all cigarettes, as tobacco began to taste blue to her. She began staring at her own bruises, suspicious of their shape and movement within her skin.

But all of this, as her father suggested when she confided in him, could be explained by her own desire to draw meaning from the world around her, reveal structure and repetition to hone her sensation of chaos. She could not disagree. She wavered between apathy and panic. At its excruciating pace, time vexed even the dust. So maybe she did want the company of connotation. But it wasn’t just her eye picking up like-coloured objects, nor was her mind giving her patterns to soothe its agitation. She was definitely being followed by a bright blue cloud.

The first time she saw it was on the plane back from Portugal. Her head kept toppling over between sleep and wakefulness, then she leaned back against the seat and pulled up the window blind. There, among the white clouds was a solid blue one, thicker than the others, almost furry in its colour. She leaned into the window, her nose against the fat glass panel. The blue cloud leaned towards her.

At home, she got in the habit of mulling around her apartment, checking the street from the living room window by the bookshelf, pacing between the couch and the TV, going to the door and squinting at the corridor through the peephole.

It was a couple of weeks after the plane ride. She had taken time off work. The doorbell rang. The man at the door stood with his Interflora vest, holding a bouquet in dusty lavender paper. He handed her the flowers and she said thank you and he went back down the stairs. There, among the thick wax-green leaves were four stalks of ink-blue hyacinths. Inside the bouquet, the card was a wall-white with an indigo trim, and the writing, a rehearsed cursive. Our thoughts are with you . Signed, Olivier & Angelo. Friends of Dominique’s.

She went to the window and when she looked down, there on the street, the blue cloud was hovering by the lamp post, looking up.

Meu Deus.

Time passed, and her father made frequent visits. He told her she could take a longer leave from her job, she could even move in with him if she needed to. But she went back to work, and even began looking forward to those administrative tasks that filled eight hours of her day with purpose.

The evenings and weekends remained difficult. She felt both too exhausted to take up any activities, and too anxious to have nothing to do. She kept the TV on, the volume low, crime shows and talk shows and American re-runs dubbed in French, culinary tips, politics, history revisited.

There were months when she was getting the knack of it, work-time: filing, typing, scheduling, welcoming patients during the day. Having dinner with her father twice a week. Ruminating around the rooms to the sound of her washing machine spinning, looking out the window at the lamp post, glazing over at the TV images, glimpsing at their smiles and shrieks, hugs, chases, couples having coffee face to face, old people patting each other on the knee, a silhouette walking out the door…

Night-time, the TV is laughing. Aimée’s brushing her teeth, she spits and looks up at the mirror. Her eyes trace a bulging blue vein down her neck.

Why did you bring lemons, Miss?

She got up from the couch and walked unintentionally to the peephole peering through into the empty corridor to the neighbour’s front door, then towards the right to the edge of the wooden stairway.

At the railing, the thick blue cloud was rolling upwards. She watched it crawl to the top and there it turned and began feeling its mass towards her door.

“Hello?” her father responded.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Aimée said. “I know it’s late…”

“Aimée? Aimée. It’s going to be alright,” he said drowsily. “You’re just having a tough day.”

She was nodding her head to the phone. Two tears streamed down at the same time.

“Why don’t you go to sleep and tomorrow it’ll be better.”

She continued nodding. The tears rolled over her chin and down her neck with a cold consistency. She whisked her hand at her throat and looked at her fingertips, expecting to see a blue liquid. But it was just the smear of a transparent tear.

“…Aimée…?”

“I’m here.”

“You can take one and a half of the white ones tonight if you want.”

“I’m fine, Dad. I have to go… I work early tomorrow.”

“Everything’s going to be alright.”

There was a pause on both ends, then her father spoke.

“Goodnight, Aimée,” he said. “I love you.”

The phrase tilted itself against the moon and fell over the edge.

Aimée made a decision. She stopped paying attention to the blue cloud, she stopped seeing her friends, and she stopped remembering. That’s how the year passed.

Where shall I pin it?

The Monday after the medical trade show at Porte de Versailles, Aimée was walking to work down the wide street, dark suit in hand. Her father had told her he could do it himself, but she insisted, saying the dry cleaners near her work was better. Above Monceau Park, men with pinned ties and Italian socks, pre-teens precociously groomed and styled, signature backpacks, rosy cheeks and runway sneakers, pedalling themselves with one foot on their slick metal scooters to school. Aimée passed the Portuguese Embassy and fished out her ring of keys with the white plastic badge. At the sliding doors of the clinic, she scanned her badge on the black box and walked inside. Youssouf the guard was already poised at his post. She said, “Good morning, Youssouf,” and went to the welcome desk, putting down her purse by the ergonomic footstool below. She reached over and turned on her computer, then went to the sliding closet in the carpeted hallway. She hung up her coat and her father’s suit, took the lab coat off its hanger and fit it over her blouse and buttoned it up. She bent down and took out a pair of heels, took off her loafers and put the heels on, then walked back to the welcome desk.