Yelena Moskovich - The Natashas

Then Béatrice heard the shopkeeper say the one word that couldn’t have been clearer.

“Polina.”

…There was her cheek.

…There was her eye.

“ ¿Por qué me estás siguiendo? ”

“Why are you following me?” the woman asked César in perfect Spanish.

Her black hair crawled loose from behind her ear and dropped down over her cheek. At the edge of each of her almost-violet eyes the skin was pinched, as if holding the remains up, over a cliff, of something which had long fallen sharply at the indent of her cheekbones.

César didn’t know what to say. He stared at her. There was an eye, curved like a drying leaf. There was the nose, sloping towards her mouth. The mouth. Lips crisscrossed with minuscule lines, like baked bread. Her mouth must be very dry , he thought. As he took in her whole face, he saw that there was something very odd about it. He couldn’t say she was deformed, or even unattractive, but her features gave the troubling feeling that something was not in its proper place.

The woman held César’s gaze, waiting for an answer. Her stare was blunt. She seemed to be willing him to speak.

“Me… te… mo…” César started. Me temo que lo iba a matar.

“I’m afraid I was going to kill you,” César said, though he could barely believe such words could come out of his mouth.

The woman pursed her lips together, then released them.

Demasiado tarde para eso ahora. “Too late for that now,” she said.

Es una pena, Julio César. “Too bad, Julio César.”

César’s heart strained at the sound of his full name. The woman raised her long fingers and drew them through the dark fluidity of her hair. Not a single tangle.

“I go by César now. Just César.”

The woman smiled heavily. “Very refined, very European … Please excuse me, César . As for me, I still have my old, brutish name: Rosa.”

César’s gut clenched.

“What happened to you… Rosa ?”

Rosa looked deeply at César. Her eyes seemed to be giving off steam. She took his hand and guided his fingers through her hair as if they were slipping through water. César’s fingertips felt wet. But then he realised it was his eyes which were wet. His tears fell through the years, and landed at the feet of a girl standing at the window, watching a car drive away.

There seemed to be no connection between the questions César was asking and the answers Rosa was giving. César wondered if she could hear him.

“After you left,” Rosa began, “I moved north to another village to work as a receptionist at a small hotel. My manager, who was exactly my father’s age, took notice of me. He gave me the best shifts, sneaked fresh cakes from the kitchen into my locker… Part of me was terrified of him. He greased his hair back and shaved his face every day. We got married.”

“Did you love him?” César asked.

“…He didn’t ask me to sing for him. He didn’t know I had a good voice. Did you know I had a good voice, César?”

César paused. “That’s what they used to say… But I never heard it either…”

“Well… maybe you should have listened closer…” Rosa replied. “He didn’t listen very closely either, my man . I was his young, ugly bride. For some, this is enough… We got married. After our wedding ceremony, we went to stay in the hotel suite, because he was the manager. He asked me if I wanted to take a bath, and ran the water for me carefully, making sure it wasn’t too hot. He tested the temperature on his wrist, like for a baby. He told me to put my wedding dress back on. He told me to take my hair down. He told me to get into the tub.

“I picked one foot up and pierced the bath water with my toe. I dropped one foot into the water. Then the other. I was standing in the tub and he was crouched near the edge, like a little boy. He dipped his right hand into the water, then drew it around my ankle, then moved it up my calf. He continued upwards, over the back of my knee. Then around my thigh. He let his fingertips slide beneath my underwear. The underwear was a coarse white lace. He hooked his fingers underneath the lace and pulled down. The underwear stuttered. He tugged again, but it wouldn’t slide completely off. He brought his other hand up and pulled both sides down so that the underwear came off and floated in the bath water around my ankles.

“He told me to pull the skirt of my wedding dress up higher so that he could see. I pulled it up to my waistband and held it there. He dipped his other hand into the warm water, cupping some, bringing it towards him and turning his cupped palm over his head. The water trickled down his temples. He closed his eyes as the water ran over his face. Then he must have opened them. He brought the hand back into the water, then drew it upward, inside my thigh.

“I couldn’t see him any more because I was holding the bulky white lace skirt at my waist, trying to keep it from falling. Suddenly his fingers were inside me. I almost fell into the tub. He caught me and laid me down. My skirt floated in the water, my white lace underwear around my ankles still, like a wet spider web. My black hair soaked into the water and wavered around my breasts. He stepped into the tub over me. I could see his erection bulging above me in his trousers. He lowered himself to his knees. The ends of his trousers got wet and stuck to his calves. My hands lifted out of the water and moved towards his body. I caught something falling from his chest. His gold chain with a cross on it. Droplets of water rolled down my arm and fell on to my cheek.

“He caught my hands and clasped them together, then folded them into my throat, right under my chin. My fingers were crumbled into each other, illegible. He pushed and pushed my balled-up hands into my own throat. My breath pulled in and was immediately pushed out. He pressed in with his full weight.

“My knees twitched up. My tongue began to flail inside my mouth. He squeezed all my breath out of me.”

“He never heard me sing. Like you. I left this world his young, ugly bride.”

“The story was in the papers and on the television, you know. With a photo of me that my mother had picked out, a flattering photo actually—my mother always knew how to make the best of a bad situation. The light in the photo smoothed out my features. I looked tragically erotic like one of those American child stars. I think you would have liked this photo of me, César …

“…He was sent to prison, my one-day husband. Not because he took the life out of me. But because he did it in such a special way, you know. With my own hands. He was sent to a special prison for that. On those islands, in the archipelago off the coast of Nayarit: Islas Marias, named after the Three Marys in the Bible. On the main island, the Mother Maria Island, there’s the Federal Penal Colony. No fences or gates or electric wires. The island is its own vigil. The inmates live in a version of freedom, one could say, no chains or locks. They walk around the chapped walkways with heavy footsteps beneath the oily sun. The guards have faces that resemble the inmates. One thing that separates them is the uniform. The criminals wear beige pants and shirts. To the left of their hearts is their inmate number, printed on their shirts. The guards wear dark pants and a white shirt. They have no printed number. The guards have names and guns.”

She smiled briefly, then let her mouth close in like a wound. She trailed off for a bit and walked in silence. The air smelled of a peeled fruit, a ripe familiar smell he couldn’t quite place. Rosa started nodding as she walked, perhaps to music in her head. Her eyes drifted close, yet she continued walking, nodding gently, with her long black hair undulating behind her. She began to recite: