Part 11 (2/2)

Back home after the lesson, I found the Blue Mistress still there. What's more, she had put in place a number of the boxes that had been waiting to be opened since the day I moved in and had also straightened the place up. However, she told me she would soon leave to go cook for the olive oil merchant. I refrained from delving into that story it being no news to me that things were not going well between them lately.

'Tell me,' she cooed. 'What sort of food do you want?'

'Pasta,' I grumbled. Despite her initial frown, she found the idea practical. As I boiled the pasta, she set out to prepare a tomato and thyme sauce with the limited ingredients in the house. I guess that is why she loves me. Unlike the other men in her life, I demand from her far less than what she is willing to give. In return, I receive far more than what I had demanded initially.

The doorbell rang just when we had sat down at the table. Su was such an odd little girl. With her book in her hand, there she was, telling me I had forgotten to give her homework for the weekend. The Blue Mistress invited her to the table. She did not want to come. While they talked, I chose a number of exercises way above her level. If ruining her weekend with extra homework is what she pines for, so be it.

'Well, it turns out I am not the only neighbour to have fallen for that handsome face of yours, Mister,' snorted the Blue Mistress when we were able to sit down again to eat.

'Don't talk nonsense, she's just a child.'

'So what? Can't children fall in love? I swear to G.o.d, I know I could when I was about that age. Weren't you in love with anyone as a child?'

It suddenly felt so awkward. The Blue Mistress talked about her childhood as if referring to a distant past whereas she must be at most ten to twelve years past it. Come to think of it, there was only eleven years between Su and the Blue Mistress.

'You didn't answer! Have you ever been in love as a child or not?' she insisted, apparently annoyed with my silence.

I indeed had, except that it had never been a memory worth recording. There was a flighty, freckled, loud-mouthed girl I went to school with. I recall being attracted to her. To this day I have never met someone so naturally inclined to theft. All that mattered was that an item belonged to someone else, there was nothing on earth she would not enjoy stealing: fruit from the neighbouring gardens, slippers from the thresholds of homely homes, pencils and erasers of cla.s.smates...she would embezzle them all and share her loot with me each time... Every now and then she lurched into the foul-smelling store of a hideous, glue-addicted shoe repairman we pa.s.sed by on our way to school. While I chatted up the man, she would fill her pockets with handfuls of nails and soles. G.o.d knows why, we would then hammer these onto all the fences, benches, cases or doors we came across. After all we shared, however, my beloved played dirty for no good reason and ratted to my parents. My father was barely shaken upon receiving the news of his son's thefts but with my mother it was a completely different story. She blew her top, exaggerating her parental punishment out of proportion. Ten days later, however, my father died, thereby erasing off my mother's agenda the scandal of my offence forever.

'What was her name?' asked the Blue Mistress, shaking the salt-mill for the umpteenth time, as if determined to find its bottom.

Hard as I tried, I couldn't remember her name just as I can't remember what the majority of my childhood friends were called. I confessed to her how hard it usually was for me to remember people's names but I did not reveal how this habit of mine used to infuriate Ays.h.i.+n. The Blue Mistress asks little about my ex-marriage anyhow. Perhaps because she is sick of hearing about the marriage of the olive oil merchant or perhaps she is one of those people who are all ears when it comes to hearing about still enduring childhoods but not immediate pasts. I told her I was much better with nicknames those I don't easily forget.

'Then find me a nickname as well,' she said finally able to let go of the salt-mill and dizzy from all that shaking.

'You already have one,' I confirmed. 'You are ”The Blue Mistress.” '

She did not say anything but I could see it in her eyes all the same. She liked the name I had given her.

3:33 a.m.: I woke up, she was not by my side.

I found her on the balcony. She looked pale, as if she had woken up in the middle of a nightmare so daunting that it had robbed her off the longing to go back to sleep. I sank into the chair next to her and lit a cigarette. Under the coffee table in between us, there were armies of ants circ.u.mambulating a piece of melon that had started to rot where it had fallen. As they toiled we sat still, watching the empty street.

'I bet that girl didn't rat on you,' she murmured absentmindedly. 'It must have reached your mother through another route. Why would she do it? You two were accomplices.'

I went in and fetched two double rak for us. She took hers with a smile but only slightly sipped, evidently not a drinker. Yet she evidently didn't want to display this, probably because she had always run into men who drank like sponges. On second thoughts, I decided that I was perhaps wrong about this, after all she was not the type to fool others. Perhaps she herself was unaware of her dislike for alcohol in the first place.

'Maybe it is just the reverse,' I said. When I finish my rak, I will drink hers as well as long as she does not smear the gla.s.s with lipstick. 'Being accomplices might connect people to one another but that union is bound to be fleeting. In reality, if you are accomplices with someone, you will try to get rid of then at the first opportunity. If you don't, they will. A wrongdoer might indeed return to the scene of crime but not to the partner in crime.'

'Oh, blessings to you, my teacher, you sure know how to talk.' She placed on the table the gla.s.s she had been fiddling with. Good, no lipstick. 'Do your students enjoy listening to you?'

'Come to a cla.s.s with me one day, sit among the students and decide for yourself.'

'What if someone asks, ”Who is this person?” What'll you say?'

'You'll be a student from somewhere else coming to listen to the lecture. You're so young, they'd buy it,' I muttered while caressing her face. The scar on her left cheek is not at all visible in this dim light. 'But I can, if you want, tell them instead that you're a friend of mine.'

'That would be blatant lie!' she frowned, suddenly riled. 'How could I ever be regarded as your friend? It would take them only a minute's chat with me to fathom the lie. I haven't the foggiest idea about many of the things you talk about. I didn't go to college. It's too evident that I'm not going to do so at this age.'

What age? At times I doubt if she is really aware how young she is.

'Friends.h.i.+p is based on compatibility,' she volleyed upon realizing I was about to object. 'One can fall in love with someone incompatible but one can't be friends with them. For one thing, when you talk the other has to get it in an instant. To do so one has to be at the same cultural level. You and I can't ever be friends. We can't be married either or be lovers. We tried to be neighbours but made a mess of that as well.'

'And why on earth can't we be lovers?'

Instead of answering my question, my little lover with no lipstick and no serenity, took a large sip from the drink I thought she had long abandoned. Her face soured right away. Why does she force herself to drink when she does not like alcohol at all?

'I think if we ever could be anything together, we'd be accomplices,' she blurted out all of a sudden, the harshness of her words incongruent with the indolence of her moves as she reached for the stale nuts to get rid of the taste in her mouth.

A white car with black windows ploughed through Cabal Street, its ca.s.sette tape turned on full blast. The Blue Mistress jerked her head over the railing and swore without any reservations whatsoever. I gently pulled her towards me, kissed her. The piercing music of the car decreased bit by bit. In that stillness, a hurried mosquito slyly made a dive, buzzing. The wind came to a standstill, filling the air with the sour garbage smell. The Blue Mistress finished the pistachios in the bowl and I the rak in my gla.s.s, continuing on to hers. In the next attack of the mosquito, my applause echoed in the air. I opened my hands hoping to see it dead. They were empty.

Flat Number 10: Madam Auntie.

'Are you upset about something Su?'

'I'm fine,' Su grunted a jagged response, constantly squeezing the English exercise book she had rolled up.

'Why don't I make us a nice cup of coffee with milk and you go choose two coffee cups from the gla.s.s cupboard honey,' Madam Auntie said, trying not to fret over the child's bitterness. Despite having solemnly pledged to herself to send the girl away with an appropriate excuse if and when she appeared at her door again, seeing her in such a sullen state today, she had not been able to keep her word.

Su heaved a pompous sigh as she followed the old woman inside. In this warm weather coffee with milk was the last thing she wanted to drink but what difference would it make, things were 'c.r.a.ppy' anyway 'c.r.a.ppy' being in fas.h.i.+on in their circles nowadays instead of 'awesome'. What difference would it make if she had a c.r.a.ppy c.o.ke or a c.r.a.ppy coffee with milk? Scratching her scrawny legs, droopily and indolently, she walked into the living room, opened the gla.s.s cupboard at the corner and peered inside in deep wonder. There were so many things in here! Lined up on the shelves were inverted porcelain cups, liquor cups, champagne flutes, crystal pitchers, embroidered frames and all kinds of tiny carved boxes the function of which she could not fathom. After a quick survey, she honed in on two amethyst cups with intertwined ivy handles. Right behind them was a round, glazed, ill.u.s.trated tray: a robust man with a moustache and raven-black hat was carrying a woman down a ladder in his lap, her tulle dress flowing to her heels. The woman had put her head on the man's shoulder, dreamily gazing into the horizon, as if she were not on top of a ladder from which they could topple down any minute but on an idyllic hill with a magnificent panorama. It was as if they were fleeing the fairy tale to which they belonged. One could distinguish a few houses and behind them a forest in shades of green. Su turned the back of the tray as if hoping to see there the fate awaiting this dignified couple, but there was no other ill.u.s.tration at the back, only an inscription at one corner: 'Vishniakov'.

Placing the amethyst cups on the tray, she closed the cupboard door shut with her foot. Just as she was about to go back, her eyes caught a spot further down. The living room door leading to the hall was partly open and the interior...the interior looked somewhat uncanny...

Without really thinking she approached the door, opened it all the way and stood almost petrified. As if lured, she started to advance step by step down the hall of Madam Auntie's house. With every step, her uneasiness gave way to utmost incredulity.

'How much sugar would you like?' Madam Auntie called out from the kitchen but when there came no response, she turned down the heat under the milk and went back to retrieve her guest. Finding the living room empty she first suspected the child had left, but then she noticed the wide open hallway door. In escalating panic, she involuntarily brought her hand up to her neck. It was not there. Her bluish-grey eyes fretfully scanned the living room until she spotted the velvet beribboned key sitting guiltily on the coffee table at the corner. Colour drained from her face. Her heart pummelling hard, she dashed into the hall after the girl.

Flat Number 5: Hadji Hadji and his Daughter-in-Law and Grandchildren.

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