Yelena Moskovich - The Natashas

“Goodbye then… Miss Monroe .”

“You smell like a car engine!” a round-faced Natasha says to the nail-painting Natasha.

She has been trying to sleep. She’s got white crust in the creases of her lips. It looks like dried milk, but she hasn’t had milk for a long time. Not since her grandma asked her to go out and buy a bottle.

“Would you paint your paws in the other corner, Bozhé moy !”

Just as the Mercedes Red Natasha tries to find a sufficient path of foot-holes to move to the other side of the room, a metal rummaging is heard. It’s coming from the keyhole of the only door in the room. Click and clang and a chain drops like a brass necklace. The door opens and a woman enters.

Her age no one knows. They say she is twice-over a long life in this room.

This is why she is the Head Natasha of the Natashas.

The Head Natasha of the Natashas says, “Ok girls, who here has ever had a papaya?”

All the Natashas perk up, even the wilting one on the floor.

“I’ve had… a baby…” the sunflower Natasha says unsteadily.

Another Natasha closes her journal and says, “Oh yeah, I remember. What a shit-hole situation that was.”

For a while afterward, anytime a breeze would blow underneath Sunflower Natasha’s loose T-shirt, she would shout, “Baby’s coming back!!” Now she knows better than to make such a scene. Although, in private, when the rest of the girls are asleep, and she feels a coolness float across her skin, she’ll tuck her chin and say very quietly to herself, “Hello, baby…”

The redhead budges forth.

“None of you know what a pa-pa-ya is,” she says.

“I do,” Baby-blue jumps in. “It’s like…a German guy who has the thing where he insists you play along. Like he’s your father.”

“ Papa —ya?”

“ Ich bin dein kleines Mädchen… ”

“ I’m your little girl ,” the Natashas chatter in repetition.

The redhead swipes the air with her stiff hands, “You wish. Blood’s thicker than water.”

“Ha ha!”

“Huh?”

“I mean the Papa-yas all got their own daughters, they don’t need you .”

“She can be his blood daughter and I’ll be his water daughter… ”

“No, no, no, that’s not it.” A Natasha from the corner walks forth as if carrying the complete truth in her cheeks. “A PAPAYA is when you make a FUSS and you get your eye PAAP’D.”

“You mean popped.”

(This Natasha is just showing off her English accent. She makes her r’s into wide a’s, so it looks like she’s about to yawn every time she says a word with an r in it. Otherwise, her cheekbones are sharp and her eyes deep-set like a post-war country.)

As you can see, the Natashas get easily excited. The Head Natasha has to raise her hand and jingle the set of heavy keys on the chain for the girls to quieten down.

“Now, now, ladies, PA-PA-YA is a fruit.”

The Natashas freeze where there are. They try as hard as they can to understand what the Head Natasha has just said.

“It’s smooth and creamy like a mango. But a different shape. Like this.” The Head Natasha forms an oval in the air in front of all the other Natashas. “See…” Then she takes the invisible oval with both hands and pries it open in front of the girls. “And inside the seeds are black, like caviar.” The Natashas all stare at the empty space between her hands.

The Head Natasha explains to them what a papaya tastes like. It turns out that none of the Natashas have ever tasted a papaya. They listen with great interest. When she’s done, the girl with the freshly-painted nails taps the Head Natasha on the ankle.

“ Pa-pa-ya? ” she whispers.

The Head Natasha gently smoothes back the girl’s hair.

All the Natashas repeat in unison.

“Pa… Pa… Ya…”

“PA… PA… YA.”

“PA PA YA.”

Their chanting grows and grows as the Head Natasha places her hand on the doorknob, squeezing the handle and turning. The door opens. In the darkness of the frame is a figure of a waiting man.

At first it is hard to tell that it is a man and not just pure darkness. This is because the man is wearing all black, black gloves, black shoes, and a black woollen mask on his head. There are two holes cut out from which his eyes peer. This is how we know it is a man.

The Head Natasha moves to the side, letting the man in. She closes her fingers over the keys she is holding in her palm. The other Natashas are all suddenly upright, facing forward, mutely attentive.

All the girls’ shoulders rise as their hands graze up their waists, catching the hems of their shirts and trailing them upward. They peel off the top layer of what they are wearing, and let the garments fall to the floor.

Next, their hands twist behind them. These hands slide up their backs to the clasp of their bras. With a drowsy ease the clasps are undone and the bras flinch and fall off. Their breasts stare out at the man.

Next, the girls’ hands drool down to their hip bones. Their fingertips dig under the elastic of their underwear. They push at their waistbands until they are nudged off the hips, down, also to the floor.

The girls stand naked now in front of the man. Their skin tones are all faded and blend in with the cement of the walls. Just their nipples stand out like floating eyes, and their pubic hair like illegibly scribbled notes.

The woollen mask on the man’s head stretches between the chin and the nose. He is trying to smile. A hot breath exits where his smile is forming.

Listen, listen, listen…

César hadn’t heard this song since he had left Mexico. It was his mother’s favourite. She couldn’t help but sing along whenever it was playing. Usually, she restrained her desire to sing. She was well aware that her own voice had the eerie passion of an epileptic. Let the singers do the singing, that’s God’s order. But on the rare occasions that she heard this song, she would let herself go, and César and his brothers would squirm with embarrassment at the strange, desperate sounds coming out of their mother. Their father would turn to his boys and say calmly, Some songs pull the sound right out of you, make your voice twist in pain…

The song was about gratitude, actually. “ Gracias a la vida… ” It belonged to Violeta Parra, a Chilean folk singer, a legend of the melancholic melody. She lived and sang as many female legends before her. The type of women who survive famine, and violence, and humiliation, who push themselves forward when abandoned by justice. To all those listening across the radios of Latin America, she was their unbreakable grandmother. And, as such a woman, she sang to their weak spirits, to their thin hope, to their desperate scepticism. Slowly and generously, she testified to the grace of living things.

“Gracias a la vida…

…you have given me so much

You gave me two eyes, which when I open them,

I can distinguish perfectly between black and white,

And the starry depths of the sky above,

And amongst the masses, the man that I love.”

And so you can imagine it was quite a shock to her fan base that, less than a year after she wrote it, Violeta shot herself in the head. Not everybody had known that she composed the song at the end of her turbulent relationship with the famous Swiss flautist Gilbert Favre.