Yelena Moskovich - The Natashas

Béatrice stood at the top of the stairs, with her father, mother, sister and Jean-Luc all gathered together to look at her. From below, she was a wartime ghost or the mistress to a politician.

“Oh la la la!” the father said.

Jean-Luc inserted a bravo and let his chin nod.

Emmanuelle and her mother remained quiet, giving the first round of words to the men. The women took their time to listen and observe, using their silence strategically.

“Come on down, Marilyn!” the father burst out joyfully.

The mother glanced over at her husband’s grin.

Béatrice lifted one side of the dress which parted at the slit, her white knee emerging from the partition. Emmanuelle looked at her boyfriend, then at her father, then back at Béatrice. She came up to Béatrice and stroked her forearm, feeling the ripples of lace.

“It’s really — very — nice — the dress,” Emmanuelle said, her fingertips running over the weave-work of the lace.

Her mother reached over, sliding a set of three fingers down the lace.

“Not too itchy?” the mother asked.

Béatrice shook her head. Jean-Luc reached out his hand hesitantly and touched the black lace on Béatrice’s collarbone.

“It is — very nice,” he pronounced.

Emmanuelle’s eyes dropped straight to where Jean-Luc’s fingertips were placed on her sister’s collarbone. The father shot a look at Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc pulled back his hand and stepped closer to Emmanuelle. The father took a large step toward Béatrice and reached out his hand, confident, bold, as he too wanted to tell his daughter that the dress was very nice. He placed his hand on Béatrice’s shoulder and squeezed it mildly.

“Very nice,” he affirmed.

The mother glanced at the father. Emmanuelle glanced up at Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc tried to meet Emmanuelle’s gaze. But as his eyes descended they tripped and fell on to Béatrice’s throat. As soon as they realised where they were, they scrambled back, trying to correct the error, but stumbled again and landed straight on the father’s back. Upon feeling the ocular attention of someone behind him, the father glanced back and spotted Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc quickly pulled his eyes back, hovering them vaguely in space, suspicious of their destination. The mother turned her head towards Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle now peered at her father, who was peering at Jean-Luc, whose eyes were swarming around Béatrice’s feet, in search of discretion.

Emmanuelle looked up at Béatrice. Their mother looked at her husband. He did not see as he was watching Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc looked up at the ceiling, then down at an oriental rug in front of the couch, then finally at a glimmer of light shining off a ceramic vase on the coffee table.

Béatrice’s eyes followed the movement of everyone else’s eyes, jumping from one another like children playing in a minefield. Her sister moved in to Jean-Luc and nudged her head on to his shoulder. Jean-Luc drew his eyes off Béatrice and put his arm around Emmanuelle, who in return said under her breath: meow, meow .

Outside Marcel’s building stood a tall, young black man, Nigerian maybe. He held a cell phone in his hand and was rolling his eyes from left to right, as if reading the street. César stepped into the doorway and the man peeled his back off the building wall and walked into the text of bodies he had just been reading.

On the right-hand side of the doorway was a flat steel-coloured plate with rows of buttons, 1 to 9 and 0, and the options A and B. This was the building security system. No matter how shabby the residence or neighbourhood, every building in Paris has one of these door-codes. Type in the secret code, and voilà the door beeps or the lock clicks and just push to open. However, there is a more impressive option. Type in the code, beep, click, and just as you lift your hands to push the door open, it cuts away from its frame and opens all by itself before you. Automatic. To César, this was indeed quite impressive, so impressive that every time he visited Marcel he completely forgot that the world had advanced to this level of innovation and would raise his hands up and push in every time, nearly falling through the automatically opening door.

This time it was no different. César typed in the code and raised his hands to push just as the door clicked and moved open. He grabbed the side of the door frame and his elbow scraped against the wall’s side as he tripped his way inside. He heard someone calling out to him and turned, seeing the Nigerian man across the street pointing at him and saying something like “ Kana a’ya ka fito. ” César liked the way it sounded. Kana-aiyeka-fee-too, he almost wanted to call back in solidarity. But then the automatic door hit him on the side of his head as it closed.

César hit the button for Marcel’s apartment. After a moment, the door to the stairway buzzed. His excitement began to rise, and his legs found their bounce. He hopped up the first stairway, up the red-velvet slap of carpeting that was matted down over the stairs. One floor, turn up, another floor, turn up, he skipped up the stairs with long strides. On the fourth floor, he took a right and went down the hallway, passing a door with a scratched-up lock. Marcel had told César that someone had broken into his neighbour’s place in early August and in Marcel’s words, “picked the crumbs off the floor”. This made César imagine the burglars as a line of organised ants.

Marcel’s door was the one next to it. No one had broken into his apartment in the twelve years he had lived there, Marcel made it known proudly. His door was painted a deep forest-green. Towards the top was a small metal ring holding what seemed to be a glass marble. This was the eye-hole. Just below the eye-hole, etched into the wood was an X , scratched in two crossing slivers of light brown wood. Below this X was another, similar in shape and size, also etched in with a blade of some sort. Below that X was another. And another. The X s descended in a totem line down Marcel’s door, with the last X just above César’s knee.

Marcel was not religious, nor spiritual, nor particularly sensitive to nature or human beings for that matter, but he believed strongly in the power of confusion.

“The more you don’t get it, the closer you are to it. As soon as you start understanding , making sense of things, well César, that’s where the real idiocy begins…”

Marcel had told César that he had etched each X himself with a kitchen knife. The first one when he moved into the place after his wife and daughter moved to Germany to make a family with another man and his teenage son.

After he had carved his first X just below the eye-hole, Marcel would sometimes spend a good amount of time standing outside his door, admiring the new etching as if it was his very first tattoo. One day, his neighbour happened to come home during one of these moments of contemplation. Marcel’s focus on the X afforded the neighbour a level of anonymity as he discreetly approached his own door, but just as the neighbour was turning the key in his door, Marcel looked over, transferring the intensity of his eyes on to him. The neighbour felt obliged to say something.

“ Bonjour ,” he said politely.

His neighbour waited patiently, leaving space for Marcel to say Bonjour back, but after the momentum of his own Hello waned, the neighbour began to turn back to his doorway. Suddenly, Marcel spoke up.