Yelena Moskovich: The Natashas

In the box-shaped room, there are no windows, there is no furniture. On the floor, blankets are spread one next to another like beach towels. Some are neatly arranged into rectangles. Others stay bunched like spat-out gum. One girl is sitting on her blanket in a T-shirt and underwear with her arms crossed over her knees. Natasha is her name. She is fifteen.

Another girl is standing against the wall and smoking. She exhales then blows the smoke into the wall as if there were an open window. The smoke crashes like watercolour, then floats back into her face. It seeps into her chopped blonde hair and settles down into her scalp. A fog hovers near her eyes. She is smoking and squinting. Natasha is her name. What a coincidence. She’s older than the other girl though. Almost twenty. Maybe.

Next to her, two girls are chit-chatting. This and that. The shorter one has a flat face. Her age, hard to say—either too young or too old. Some girls just turn out like that—in the evening glow she’s your angel , but in a bathroom glare, you’d ask her where her daughter went. Their names? What do you know: Natasha and Natasha.

The one who is sitting in her underwear has tenantless eyes. A redhead walks past and flicks her shoulder. “Perk up,” she says.

The redhead’s hair is dry as twine, but she’s got big lips and a milk-drop nose. This is very pleasing, especially for people who want to look at a woman and see a girl. How old are you, sweetheart? “Oh you know, candy-wrappers, hair-bows, goo-goo-gaga.” Is that a good age for you? What’s your name, sweetheart? The girl’s eyes dart up. “Natasha,” she says as if reading an ingredient off a pill box. Is that a good name for you?

The sitting Natasha does not perk up as suggested by the redhead. The redhead Natasha says, “Flowers that don’t go for the sun get trampled on,” and pushes past the sitting Natasha. She hasn’t gone three steps forward when a lanky girl pops up in her path.

“I’m a sunflower.” Her hair is greasy. Her neck is long.

“Move it, sunflower,” the redhead spits and just as quickly as she’d popped up, the sunflower bends back against the wall.

The sunflower is twenty-six years old. At first she insisted that she was from Moldova, but we all know girls that tall don’t grow in Moldova. That was back when the against-the-wall-Natasha had long blonde hair instead of that cropped mess and kept talking about the white rose. Same old story: the foggy town, the stranger with manners, the bus stop, white teeth, white car… and the white rose . He picked her out of all the other girls at her school, made her feel like she was the only one. That was years ago. Now she sticks to her wall and smokes and keeps quiet. She doesn’t try to bring up the white rose any more. Well, with her cut-up hair and ashen face, no use in making a fuss. Good thing too, ’cause there’s nothing worse than a Natasha who makes a fuss.

By the way, Sunflower isn’t actually Sunflower’s name. It’s Natasha. Life’s a one-key piano sometimes…

On the other side of the room, a girl is blowing on her hand, one nail at a time. She’s got baby-blue eye-shadow layered on her eyelids like dust on antique furniture. She blows across her fingertips. She blinks. Baby-blue dust flies from her eyes.

Another Natasha pats her blanket looking for her journal. So many ways to feel ugly… I should make a list!

She takes the plastic pen into her mouth and bites down.

“Find a bump on your skin,” she mumbles.

Carefully pick it open , she scribbles.

“Now let all the voices in,” she concludes.

She looks up from her journal and chews on her pen as if she’s teething. A flash crosses her eyes. She takes the pen out of her mouth and pulls the open journal closer to her face.

Listen, listen, listen … she notes secretly.

She lifts her gaze and circles it around her, keeping the journal close to her chin. Her pen moves across the paper while her head nods at her surroundings.

She writes in a succession of strokes, as if sketching a landscape: You’re not worth a thing .

The other girl blows on her nails in rhythm to the moving pen. Mercedes Red is the glossy colour on each fingernail. We all know why it’s the only nail-polish she uses. It’s the colour of the car, that one day, when the door opened and she felt that in the whole world there was no one, no one, no one else like her. The man at the wheel had such a straight smile. She did not have a TV, but was sure he was on it, smiling just like that. She wanted to be on this TV too. He could kiss her on the cheek. He could kiss her on the hand. All his kisses would make her lips and nails flush to match his car. When she told her mother of the stranger and his proposition, her mother lifted her hand high and shook it. Head in the clouds, this one! No way a man like that would let you step inside such a beautiful vehicle!

The day she left with him, she asked if he could roll the top down as they drove through the town. He smiled in geometric perfection and said, Anything for you . Her small zip-up bag was in the back seat. Together, they drove through her childhood streets as everyone she had grown up with hurried out of their houses and pointed and giggled and tugged at each other’s clothes. If anyone owned a camera in this stupid town, someone would be taking my picture now! she thought to herself and smiled and waved with her fingertips and ran her fingers through her hair like a movie star.

When she drove past her own house, her mother stepped out with her younger sister and brothers. They all stared with open mouths. The wheels of the car rolled delicately over the layer of gravel on the dirt road. She caught her mother’s eye. With the most refined hand gesture she could think of, she flipped a piece of hair over her shoulder.

She had never, in her whole life, seen such glowing pride in her mother’s face. She was so touched that she forgot all about her plan to yell out, Told you so… !

Mercedes Red is her colour now. Perhaps it always was. What is her name?

Listen, listen… Listen to this girl’s breath falling out of her mouth and on to those glossy-tipped fingers.

“ Stare at a hair on your thigh ,” she mumbles.

“ Try to get out through your eye ,” she scribbles.

Her teeth dig into the pen until the plastic starts to dent.

In this box-shaped windowless room, all the girls are named Natasha.

Béatrice’s room was separate from the rest of the house. It protruded from the roof, giving the troubling perspective to the birds that Béatrice was trapped in an over-sized aviary.

At the age of twenty-nine, Béatrice still lived with her family, just outside Paris, on the southeast border of the city. Her sister Emmanuelle, who was one year younger, lived there too. Emmanuelle had a steady boyfriend and was just finishing her residency as a nurse. Béatrice had no boyfriend and sang jazz in small bars. Both sisters lived in their separate ways, waiting for life to break off and become their own.