Yelena Moskovich - The Natashas

“I marked my door,” Marcel said proudly.

The neighbour pulled his neck out of his doorway and peeked at the X carved on Marcel’s door. “Oh, I see,” he said.

Marcel’s grin held solid. The neighbour felt obliged to compliment Marcel’s effort. “Very nice,” his neighbour said, then stepped into his apartment and closed the door.

About eight months later, the neighbour saw that the door had two X s on it.

One evening when both Marcel and his neighbour came home at the same time, the neighbour’s eye lingered on the second X .

“The landlord…” Marcel inserted.

“Pardon?” the neighbour asked, caught off guard.

“Yeah, I know, the landlord insisted I carve another one in… ’cause he heard that the first one was so nice .”

Marcel’s sentence went into the neighbour’s head like a piece of bread into water. He couldn’t help but feel the obligation to compliment the second X , as he had complimented the first.

“ Very nice ,” the neighbour said.

During the weeks that followed, whenever Marcel passed his neighbour, the neighbour avoided eye contact. Then the third X appeared. Not long after, the two bumped into each other on the stairs. It was just before Christmas, and the wooden stairway seemed to be charged with a silent childhood.

“Hey there,” Marcel said.

His neighbour almost tripped over his step, his hand caught the railing.

“Oh, hello.”

“Crazy, right?”

“Sorry?”

“My door, I mean. You’ve seen it.”

The neighbour looked at Marcel silently.

“…I mean, you leave two nice -looking X s alone for one minute and what do you know, you come home to a third!”

His neighbour stood still. His mouth opened, then closed, bewildered.

“Happy holidays,” Marcel said and jumped down the stairs robustly.

After five years, there were five X s in a line down Marcel’s door. The sixth X was considerably lower than the rest.

“My daughter did that one!” Marcel boasted to his neighbour, who at this point did his best to avoid engaging in any conversation with Marcel.

His neighbour had never seen a little girl coming in or out of Marcel’s place. And the thought of giving a young child a sharp object to carve into a door with did not seem like good parenting. But above all, his neighbour did not want to get himself tangled in whatever was going on with Marcel and that door. So he said the thing that to him seemed to close the conversation the quickest.

“Very, very nice …” the neighbour replied and slipped into his own apartment, quickly shutting the door behind him.

Not too long after that, someone broke into his neighbour’s place, and, like Marcel described, picked the crumbs off the floor . They even took the pens on the counter. Oddly enough, they left the objects of true value, the furniture, the electronics, the marble chess set untouched. In the end, Marcel was not sure why his neighbour even complained. It just looked like someone came in, cleaned the place thoroughly and left.

“If they would have just taken something…” Marcel had overheard his neighbour saying on the phone in the stairway, “…if only they would have taken something valuable, well maybe then I could sleep at night!”

Marcel’s neighbour filed a complaint concerning what he was calling a robbery. Although the list of missing items included: four pens, two to four various-sized scraps of paper containing notes, one teabag wrapping, a couple of stale sugar cubes, one beer-can cap, the broken end of a key-ring, two to three business cards lying around. From subsequent phone calls that Marcel overheard, he understood that the neighbour had gone to file a second complaint, concerning a young man he thought was loitering outside the building.

“I’ve no idea who this skinny kid thinks he is, standing like that against the tree, just looking at me with his creepy eyes… Yeah, I’m sure as hell he’s looking at me , looking so hard I can see the exact colour of those damned eyes of his…. They’re… these peering eyes, like slivers, like dark marbles… !”

Now there were seventeen X s on Marcel’s door. His neighbour no longer complimented them. In fact, Marcel didn’t see much of his neighbour these days. But he knew he was still there. In the evenings, especially if Marcel stood quietly in his shower, he could hear his neighbour talking to someone on the phone through the wall. Sometimes his neighbour yelled into the receiver, which made it easier to listen in. But sometimes he just whispered sloppily.

There were nights when Marcel was sure his neighbour was talking to an ex-wife, as he spoke with out-dated love like a telescope trying to find that rare star in the constellation.

“…The hell with it… Now at least we can say Remember me … Good thing you left me… otherwise I would’ve killed you. Haha…”

Other nights, maybe he was talking to someone else.

“Yeah, no, I’m okay. No, yeah, I’m okay…”

César knew Marcel’s doorbell was long broken (maybe it never had worked). He rolled his fingers into his palm and brought his knuckles up to the space below the eye-hole. Before he could touch the wood, the door clicked and pulled open.

“Just in time for fish!” Marcel said.

For a man in his sixties, Marcel was in very good shape. Not just physically either, although he did have a pull-up bar bolted in the doorway from the kitchen to the living room. His eyes had a sheen of perpetual delight. The look of a boy who’s hiding a beetle behind his back.

They walked through the hallway and went into the office room.

“Take a seat!” Marcel said to César, and hopped over to the other side of the desk.

On the bookcase behind Marcel sat two framed photos of two girls. The younger girl was on the top shelf, with a thin, smart-aleck smile. Her eyes were forceful, certain. The older girl was on the shelf below, with her lips held together, not smiling. Her eyes now used their strength to push something away. César had always assumed these were Marcel’s daughters, as both strongly resembled each other.

Marcel had the frames turned outward, so that they faced whoever was sitting in the chair in front of him. This gave the impression that no matter what he said, the two girls agreed with him.

Marcel drum-rolled with two fingers on the side of his desk. “ Manuel Rodriguez! ” he announced. “The role of a lifetime!”

“ Manuel Rodriguez, ” César repeated shyly.

“Big fish material, kid! Latino psycho type. You know better than I do, right?” Marcel gave a wink.

“…Latino psycho like…”

“Pepe Psicapato! Loco Nacho! Twisted in the head beneath his sombrero, you know…”

“…Twisted… like… how?”

“Come on, buddy. He’s tracking down young women, some of them girls, innocent girls, pretty girls… He’s tracking them down and…you know.”

“What’s he doing to them?” César was suddenly concerned.

“Oh, awful things. Disgusting things. Areeeeba areeeba , right…”

César looked at Marcel, trying his best to understand. He glanced up and caught the two faces of the girls, one smiling and the other frowning. He was starting to feel uneasy. Marcel sniffed loudly, interrupting.

“The audition is tomorrow morning, so you gotta sink into this quick.”

“Tomorrow? Really?”

“You think you can handle a macho muchacho like that? You know, a man who would do that… to young, innocent, pretty girls…”