Yelena Moskovich - The Natashas

“ Loov-rah ,” the Natashas repeat.

“And that’s where it goes, girls. It becomes a PAINting.”

I said, trees take my scream. I said, soil, take my scream. I said water, take my scream, a chorus of women chant.

One Natasha yawns. “My soul hurts…”

“Louv-rah.”

Béatrice walked down the streets unnoticed. She strolled down the canal, past the lingering picnickers, past the bars, past the closed shops.

She walked south, all the way down to Place de la Bastille, where the prison was stormed and the French Revolution took fire.

She turned west and walked away from the former prison, which now was a glimmering roundabout, enclosed by banks, various cinemas, sushi shops, candy stores, restaurant chains, gelato counters, bars, and the Bastille Opera House where Chagall painted so colourfully those biblical moments of anguish, intimacy, and surprise upon the ceiling.

She walked for a while on Rue de Rivoli, where some couples sat on the kerb arguing and others stood against the door kissing, and flocks of men regrouped around women, and people asked each other for cigarettes with slight slurs, smelling of sugar and rum.

She walked past the shop where she had found her dress. The windows were empty now and the door had a sign: PROPERTY FOR SALE.

Béatrice walked until there was no one else on the streets. Cars drove by. She felt each one approaching from behind, its headlights touching her heels. With each car, she thought, this is the one. This is the one which will pull up at my side. This is the car with the car door that will open for me. Inside will be the man who will extend his arm towards me. That arm will be for me, only me. That arm will grab my body and pull me in. This will be the car which will take me east, out of Paris, out of France—to that highway with the low metal barrier, behind which is the sparse forest with the wet soil, and the bent speed-limit sign, and the empty liquor bottles, and the chewed-up panties, and the broken nails…

(Hey, I know that highway… Go one way and you’re in Dresden… Go the other way and you’re in Prague…)

(The problem’s the in-between.)

The light touches Béatrice’s heels, then climbs her calves, thighs, and races up her back.

(Keep walking, Béatrice.)

Cars passed her one after the other. To her left, the wall of the Louvre, beige-grey stone. As she walked, she glanced up at the high, arched windows. They were covered with thin, white curtains, so one could not see inside. Behind them, hidden from the pedestrians, were marble-floored hallways. These hallways led to a series of square, windowless rooms, one opening into another. On the walls of these square rooms, paintings hung like military service ribbons.

From the street, though, as Béatrice was walking, all she could see was the row of tall and narrow arched windows covered in white gauze like recovering eyes, the lower row with bars across the windows. If she hadn’t known this was the Louvre, she might have thought it was a prison.

She drew her gaze away, back to the grandiose street stretching out before her and the burnt blue skyline framed by the Haussmann buildings, balconies laced with black bars, stonework ridges studded with medallions, mansard roofs, flat-faced and monumental.

(Keep walking, Béatrice.)

She could have turned at Pont-Neuf and gone to the Seine and jumped in it. That would have been something. But she didn’t. She kept on walking alongside the Louvre wall, one street lamp after the other, one barred window after another, until she reached the gate she needed to reach. Lucky for her it was open. The gate was tall with black spires, the top spikes painted gold. Béatrice passed under the archway, walked through the hallway to the second pair of gold-tipped gates, which were incidentally also open. She walked through them and into that noble courtyard.

The courtyard contained four glass pyramid structures. One large pyramid in the centre, which, during working hours served as the entrance for patrons, and three smaller ones on each side. The smaller glass pyramids were divided by dark marble pools where, after sundown, water ran like black silk.

The pyramids were surrounded like a barracks by ornate ledges, populated with various statues: mostly a lot of fools, foolish gods, foolish humans.

There was a sort of eternal laugh that seemed to be vibrating from all of them. It just barely tickled the scalp. That wasn’t the only thing that was emitting a vibration. Béatrice looked to the left and saw that one small glass pyramid was glowing.

As she approached it, she felt its glow. She reached out and touched the warm glass. She put both her palms on a glass panel and leaned forward to look inside.

The lights were on. There were two short escalators, both at a standstill. Across from them, a marble counter with a sign “audio guide”. At this hour, there was no one behind the counter. Against the wall were two racks where the audio-guide headsets hung like rows of shoelaces. In front, metal stands marked out a stretched lane for the waiting line, still trying to keep order in the emptiness.

Next to the corner of the counter, before the escalators, there was a wide marble bowl with a tree planted in it. Béatrice walked around the side of the glass pyramid, drawn to see more of this oddly placed tree, when something stopped her. She leaned into the glass until her nose touched the transparent surface. There, between the audio-guide station, the potted tree and the escalators, was a woman, completely naked, lying on the ground.

The naked woman’s skin was very similar to the floor, marbled in different shades. Béatrice might not have seen her if it hadn’t been for the meshes of brown hair that fell in waves from her head. The woman’s knees were up, leaning into each other. Her arms were crossed over her face. They rested upon her brow in the form of a clean X . Perhaps she was shielding herself, from the light, or from all that open space around her flesh. Despite her position, she was not resting. Something about her was quite alert. Her bellybutton peered out like an insomniac eye.

The woman arched her back and shifted her knees, then uncrossed her arms and looked up at Béatrice. Her eyebrows were dark strokes, her eyes wide and waiting.

“…Polina…” Béatrice called down.

Polina’s lips began to curl into a smile. As it rose, Béatrice’s mouth mirrored from above.

With the same inhale, both women’s lips parted. Together, they breathed out. One from inside the glass pyramid and one from outside. Their breath joined on the glass panel.

From the glass, their breath peeled off and floated freely upward. It reached the stone and marble of the Louvre, then passed into the courtyard, through the foolish statues, and up into the cavernous evening.

It continued higher and higher, passing by aeroplanes taking sleepy passengers back to France. It floated away from Europe, above the continents.

It left the stratosphere and was brushed by hurrying meteors. There it floated by orbiting traces of animals which had been sent into space out of human curiosity. It sifted through the particles of Laika the dog, and Albert I and II, the monkeys, and the garden spider Arabella, and the pair of Japanese tree frogs.