Virtuoso Read online

  VIRTUOSO

  Yelena Moskovich was born in the former USSR and emigrated to Wisconsin with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991. She studied theatre at Emerson College, Boston, and in France at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre and Université Paris 8. Her plays and performances have been produced in the US, Canada, France and Sweden. She has also written for New Statesman, Paris Review and 3:AM Magazine, and in French for Mixt(e) Magazine, won the 2017 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize and was a curator and exhibiting artist for the 108 Los Angeles Queer Biennial. Her first novel, The Natashas was published by Serpent's Tail in 2016. She lives in Paris.

  Author portrait © Ida Skovmand

  ALSO BY YELENA MOSKOVICH

  The Natashas

  VIRTUOSO

  Yelena Moskovich

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Yelena Moskovich

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Cover image © Marianne Katser

  Cover design: Peter Dyer

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781788160254

  eISBN: 9781782834342

  When I dream it’s of you

  My love, my friend

  When I sing it’s for you

  My love, my friend

  (Marie Laforêt, “Mon amour, mon ami”)

  . . . and huge stars,

  above the feverish head, and hands,

  reaching out to the one,

  who hasn’t for ages existed – and won’t exist –

  who cannot exist – and must exist.

  (Marina Tsvetaeva, “Nights without the beloved . . .”)

  Contents

  Part One

  Soliloquy

  A little to the left, mon amour

  Jana

  The new girl

  Like I said, I knew your friend

  Zorka

  Girls only

  Global Plastics

  Well it happened

  I’m glad we r alone now

  Tears and saints

  Home

  Part Two

  Gejza and Tammie

  Are u there?

  Get ur freak on

  I told you not to be weird

  It’s a secret

  Fight the dyke

  Malá Narcis

  The street named Prague

  Part Three

  Aimée

  The Blue Angel bar

  The bloodstream

  U there?

  Someone is going to come

  Part Four

  The forest

  Directions

  The sky

  The dress

  Party time

  Amy

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Soliloquy

  Face down on the hotel linen, the body. Just one hand drooping off the side of the bed, resting on the bristles of the rose-coloured carpet, fingers spread, glossy nails, raw cuticles, wedding ring in white gold like an eye frozen mid-wink.

  The rest of her is emptied flesh, breasts smothered into the bedsheet, pillows crushed against the headboard. Her contorted shoulders a grimace, the back of the knee a gasp, skin already dimming.

  This woman is alone.

  *

  Her wife has set the bag of lemons down on the coffee table of the hotel suite. She is approaching the closed bedroom door. Hand on the knob, turning. The metal spring jumps and the door is sliding over the flush carpet fibres.

  *

  When her wife sees the body – how alone it is – she pounces on top of it.

  *

  Outside, the whirling sound of the ambulance. Closer and closer to the hotel. In the bedroom, on the nightstand, the phone hangs off its tight-curl cord, beeping hysterics. The wife is scavenging the body for breath, hair in her mouth, she’s pulling it out. She’s dragging the body down, thump. Millions of rose-coloured bristles. Her hands clam at the sternum. The phone is beeping and she’s thumping the ribcage, and rubber-soled footsteps are nearing. The hotel clerk is young and lean, he steps forward then back, then forward then back, he wants to look, he doesn’t want to look. A heavier pacing behind him, the manager is here now, he says, “Volte agora para baixo” to the kid, Go downstairs now. As the kid is fumbling away, a man and a woman in forest green medical uniforms brush past him. “Go!”, the manager repeats. The kid is going but he keeps looking back. The wife is screaming now: “Por favor! She’s going to die!”

  The defibrillator is unpacked. The man in uniform has a patch on his breast pocket, a medical emblem with a thin red snake. The woman in uniform, same patch, nudges the thumping wife, pulls her aside, pulls her aside again. “I don’t speak Portuguese! We’re on holiday!” The woman in uniform is touching her shoulder and making eye contact. The wife is yelling in French like chewing, and the woman in uniform is holding her back and nodding. The wife is sloshing her blonde hair away from her eyes, trying to gawk back towards the body. Her tongue is fidgeting with words, she’s thinking, I just want to touch her, as if touching the body were all it would take. The woman in uniform is pulling her into the adjacent room. “I understand,” the woman in uniform is repeating in her nasally English, “I understand, Madame . . .”

  “Clear,” the man in uniform pronounces in Portuguese and sends the body a shock, its chest curves up, the wife jumps towards the woman in uniform, the woman in uniform catches the wife, something like a hug, the body falls back down to the carpet. The wife’s tears split like hairs. “Clear,” the man pronounces again, the woman in uniform is squeezing the wife’s forearms. The wife shuts herself up with her own gasp and peers. The current races through the flesh to the heart and pulls the body up, chest bowing, ribs splintering beneath her skin, and for a moment, the wife thinks she’s getting up this time. But the body cinches in and collapses, thump, back down into the millions of rose-coloured bristles. Her shoulder blades hit the floor and spread, and the head winces then stops. The mouth inert. From her slack, parted lips, a viscous blue foam is seeping out.

  *

  Later, the sun has set. The wife fills out the forms, empty stare, stiff wrist, runny nose. The body’s name and age and social security number. Her own name she writes haltingly, having to look away and then back down at the paper several times. When her pen finishes the last letter, she picks up the paper and stares at her full name: Aimée de Saint-Pé.

  It is then that she feels an extra presence in the room. Something like a colour where there was no colour. She looks around her: the doctor’s a brunette in starched white, sitting in her chair; behind her, light-grey window panes; below, a floor of pale freckled tiles. And yet, there is an extra weight within the room, like a movement finishing itself.

  The nurse puts a hand on Aimée’s shoulder. “Are you alright, Madame? Do you need another glass of water maybe?” Aimée looks up at the nurse. Her lips are oily in the crevices, her skin is darker after sunset, and her eyes – Aimée’s stare is gliding past the nurse, behind her head, t
owards the wall of the office. Something is there.

  The nurse is waiting. “Do you need . . . ?” she starts again, but then lets the phrase go. It is behind her, yes. The weight, the movement, the colour.

  The doctor looks up and then back down at the paperwork. The nurse is speaking to Aimée again. But it – it is untucking itself from the air, groping its way along, moving towards her like flesh.

  A click pinches metal and Aimée’s chair fills with a wet heat. The doctor has stapled the forms, and urine drips onto the floor.

  A little to the left, mon amour

  It was an ambling humidity, as August exhaled and the ocean knocked itself against the coasts, beating out the fever. In Paris, the cars shuffled back with their passengers after the holidays, and the mugginess hovered at the tops of cars and the chests of pedestrians and the ground-floor windows.

  *

  I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis, was how Mr Doubek’s email began.

  *

  Jana’s armpits were once again damp, despite the deodorant she had reapplied in the train-station toilets. She was just coming back to Paris from her solo holiday to the South.

  She had had the idea to go to Marseille in the first place when she was translating a brochure for import/export petroleum, which mentioned the city was France’s major centre of oil refining, having extensive access to the French waterways up into the Rhône through the canal. She looked at the train prices and found them reasonable.

  In Marseille, she took the ferry to the island of If and visited the dungeon from Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo; she ate swordfish with ratatouille and saffron rice; she looked at the Opéra de Marseille from the outside and saw that nothing was on; she sniffed the various local soaps; she eyed the flopped fish on the blue tarp with crushed ice at the fish market on the Quai des Belges at the end of the harbour; and then she went to the beach, took a seat in the shade and tried to imagine how someone like Antonin Artaud, the misfit avant-garde theatre artist and Marseille native, could have grown up here. She pictured him with far-flung eyes, pacing around his home city, philosophically infuriated. As she watched the blot of his silhouette jerk along the sand, she realised it wasn’t him at all that she was envisioning, but a girl she used to know back in Prague, who everyone called the Malá Narcis, the Little Narcissus.

  That evening, Jana meandered towards the city centre and the so-called lesbian bars she had spotted, went into one, sipped on a gin and tonic at the bar, and then walked back to the hotel. Five nights of it was enough, she didn’t need seven, so she went to the train station and changed her ticket.

  Back in Paris, in her studio apartment on the dead-end street stemming from Place Monge, just above the shop that only sells toolboxes in various assortments, on the sixth floor, she plugged in her phone and opened up her laptop and saw the strange email from a “Mr Roman Doubek”. He explained that he had requested her services from her agency for his upcoming trip to the Paris Medical Trade Show where he would be representing Linet, the famous Czech hospital-bed supplier, but her agency had told him that she was unavailable during his requested dates. They must have hired their other Czech interpreter in her absence, Jana thought, the young, orb-eyed Alicia, who started as a discreet and thankful foreigner with visible panty lines, but had recently spurted into a self-assured, cat-eyed, thong-wearing young woman in part because of her new French boyfriend and how well things were going with him, and how far away the Czech Republic now felt, and how naïve she had been, and how glad she was to no longer be naïve like that.

  Jana read the email and thought of Alicia, her taut breasts in her cheap, ecstatically patterned blouses, her stare somewhere between expectant, shy and vengeful. The way she began to ask Jana if she was seeing anyone and footnoted their exchanges with anecdotes about her boyfriend and his funny French buddies. Once she wouldn’t let it go, insisting on confiding to Jana that she found her to be isolated, and it might do her good to open up a bit, because she was actually an attractive woman at the end of the day, and she could, if she wanted to, go out with her and her boyfriend and his funny French buddies, and who knows. Jana folded the feelings into one straight line, which drew itself on her lips.

  *

  I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis, the first line read.

  *

  The next day, Jana got a pressing call from her agency coordinator who was thrilled to find her back in Paris early. They needed an urgent substitute for Alicia, who was supposed to have come back a couple of days ago from her holiday in Biarritz, but, while climbing some rocks at the beach to take a sunset photo in her new bikini, as her French boyfriend coaxed “A little to the left, mon amour”, and his buddies and their girls drank beers, the Czech girl felt the sun setting on her back, watched the waves rolling towards her and felt that she had finally found her place in their world, when the rock tilted and she slipped and her ankle cracked.

  Jana agreed with the agency coordinator that she would take over Mr Doubek tomorrow morning.

  *

  Jana put on one of her professional suits – a knee-length skirt and matching blazer in midnight blue, with a simple cream-coloured v-neck blouse and dark-blue heels.

  She arrived early at the medical trade show at the Paris Expo in Porte de Versailles, held in the largest pavilion of the seven-halled convention centre, an enormous metal-beamed structure with lofting skylights over its grid-work of stands. She walked along the alleyways between the stands, familiarising herself with the layout. She passed the Bs and Cs, checking her map so as not to miss the right turn at J14 towards the International Meetings Lounge, where she was to greet Mr Doubek and his French clients at 10am.

  The booths were already filled with people chattering in many languages, setting up their boards and medical apparatus. She passed by D32, where a wheelchair was on display, the cushion a tan and beige ying-yang design, the back of the seat lined with soft-ridged panelling. Behind the wheelchair, a banner listed the product’s assets: bedsore prevention cushions, a remote-controlled electric rise to stand-up position . . . Jana glanced at the right-hand armrest, a slide-out remote control with a rubber blue grip sticking out.

  She walked on, then slowed at H40, gazing at a poster of a plump heart, veined with blue arrows in various directions. Two compact chest defibrillators were being taken out of their case and put on display on the foldout table.

  *

  “Excusez-moi” – the voice came from behind her. Then a hand touched her shoulder. Jana turned sharply, almost nicking the woman with her elbow.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” said the woman, stepping back and Jana pulled her hands to her gut.

  The woman was also wearing a skirt suit, but hers looked completely different. The skirt a bit shorter and a little tighter, the colour a little darker – a midnight between blue and black. The blazer cinched at her waist, with just a hint of an ivory blouse peering from between the crevice. She had a black silk scarf around her neck, but her collarbone was bare. Jana looked down at her feet: similar heels, but with a pointed toe.

  “I didn’t mean to startle—” the woman said nervously.

  Her blonde hair was parted neatly in the middle and sleeked back into a tight ponytail that hung between her shoulder blades. Her cheekbones opened up on her face, making her eyes look thin, drawn back, mooning with a private embarrassment.

  “Do I know you?” Jana asked flatly.

  “Oh . . . Oh!” the woman was putting her hand up to her mouth. “I’m sorry, I thought you worked here,” she said through her fingers.

  The woman’s eyes floated down to Jana’s badge on her lapel, she pronounced the letters in red out loud “Liné . . . ?”

  “Linet,” Jana corrected her pronunciation. “Czech manufacturer. The top hospital-bed supplier worldwide. I do work here. I’m an interpreter.”

  “Oh . . .” the woman continued uneasily, “well, maybe you can’t help me then, but I’m looking for the Dupont Medical Booth. Well actually, between them
and a group with the oxygen generators. I’ve already made two circles through the pavilion, but . . . I can’t find it.”

  “You’re in the internationals section,” Jana said.

  “I am?” the woman replied.

  Jana began unfolding her map. The woman quickly pulled out hers and showed it to Jana.

  “I got one of those too, but I swear it’s as if the spot I’m looking for doesn’t exist!”

  The two women put their maps side by side as if they could complete each other’s scope and traced their eyes up and down the grid of numbered letters.

  “The doctor that’s speaking at the Global Plastics round table,” the woman began speaking aimlessly as she searched, “that’s my father. He’s a prosthetics specialist.”

  “You work with your father?” Jana asked.

  “I mean I used to be his assistant, like a welcome desk secretary to be honest, but that was years back. No, now I work for a friend of his actually, a gynaecologist, his clinic is right next to the Portuguese Embassy, above Parc Monceau, on the—”

  “N39,” Jana pointed to a small square in the south-east corner of the hall.

  “That’s funny,” the woman said. “I walked around N36, N37 over and over again and didn’t see it . . .”

  The two women parted their maps and folded them into their respective blazer pockets.

  “Do you think you could help me with one more thing?” the woman said shyly, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a badge with a safety pin glued onto the back. She extended the badge towards Jana.

  Jana took the badge in her hand and turned it over. She undid the safety pin and looked up.

  “Where shall I pin it?”

  The woman took out one finger, the nail painted in a creamy rose and pointed to her lapel.

  “Here. Thank you.”

  Jana leaned in towards the woman’s bare collarbone, pinched a bit of the coarse dark fabric and drew the needle point through, clipped it and then let go, careful not to touch the woman’s chest.