ТЕАТР ТЕНЕЙ

"Мой психолог сказал мне...".

Я смотрю в окно. Кафе напротив закрылось полчаса назад, но официанты все еще продолжают складывать стулья и вытирать столики. Медленные, немного сказочные движения. Я не могу оторваться. Я не могу вспомнить вида умиротворенней этого.

"...но я не могла этого объяснить, понимаешь? Каждый день я говорила себе, что не смогу".

"Психолог?"

"Ты слушаешь меня? Я говорила про психолога десять минут назад".

Они немного напоминают привидений. Добрых, не тех, от которых когда-то я боялся заглянуть под кровать. Их движения выверены и точны. Я люблю их движения. Эта любовь ненастоящая, любовь на расстоянии. Самая преданная любовь. Я знаю, что если выйду на улицу и подойду к ним, попытаюсь заговорить или предложу закурить, то в ту же секунду умру от скуки. И еще вмешаюсь в какой-нибудь важный механизм, как чаплиновский персонаж из тридцатых годов, и все пойдет не так. Весь мир поперхнется. Так что я просто смотрю на них, через французские окна. Через монолог Тани, ради которого был здесь. Ее новая, бесконечная драма.

"...мы до трех часов ночи сидели на кухне, при тусклом свете электрического фонарика. Мы сходили с ума друг от друга. Мы пили кофе и читали Бродского. Я не могла даже представить себе, что через несколько месяцев буду перечитывать "Американскую трагедию" и пытаться понять, что именно испытывал тот парень".

"Какой парень?"

"Клайд".

Таня говорит много. Порой мне кажется, что я пропускаю целые части истории, путаясь в лабиринтах монолога и театральных паузах. Между тем, стулья выстраиваются в ровную стопку, которая все больше напоминает Вавилонскую башню. Скатерти виснут на руках, как пьяные, уставшие девушки, поникшие от приближения ночи. И они, медленные, молчаливые. Могильщики-полубоги.

"...в сети я искала информацию про самые быстрые яды и в очередной раз спрашивала себя, что же я делаю. Мой психолог отчаянно пытался помочь. И при этом ни ему, ни себе самой я не могла объяснить того, что испытывала. Потому что все случилось так резко, в одно утро. Ведь я любила его. По-прежнему любила, понимаешь?"

Я неопределенно киваю, причем скорее не в такт Таниной истории, но в такт трем молчаливым официантам, без которых ничто на свете не может существовать. Я даже думаю, что если завтра случится ядерная катастрофа, то ровно в полночь они все равно выйдут на эту улицу, чтобы совершить свой обряд. Странно, но отчего-то мне легче от этой мысли.  

"Мой психолог сказал, что идею он прочел в одной научной работе двадцать лет назад. Ее придумал один шведский психиатр, я где-то записала его имя..."

Нет, они физически не способны ошибиться. Они как тени, они идеальны. Я вдруг понимаю, что хочу быть среди них. Хочу знать этот молчаливый язык, хочу уметь на нем разговаривать. Они вползают в ночь и выплывают из нее так, словно были рождены в полной темноте на одной из этих улиц. Я медленно закуриваю и наблюдаю за тем, как они поднимают последний столик и вносят его в кафе. И так же молчаливо, так же размеренно выносят на улицу какой-то белый сверток и кладут его в открытый багажник стоящей рядом машины (поначалу я даже не заметил ее). В белом свертке, продолговатом и как будто еще живом, какое-то движение, но я не успеваю рассмотреть.

"...и я выталкиваю его из лодки. Так быстро, что он едва успевает вскрикнуть".

В кафе напротив все тихо. Уличное кафе разобрано, как детский конструктор. Все детали в коробке, и напротив нас, в огромных французских окнах, потухшее здание. Такое, как миллионы других в этом городе.

"...я ставлю точку. Невероятное облегчение. Я понимаю, что мой психолог был прав. Стоило только записать все это, облечь в слова Драйзера. И вот мы снова вместе. Снова читаем Бродского при электрическом фонарике. Я люблю его, ты знаешь".

"Знаю", зачем-то бормочу я. 

Таня закуривает и допивает последний бокал. Кафе закрывается через пятнадцать минут, и я прошу медлительного официанта рассчитать нас.

Story #10: THE IMMORTAL STORY

Slender frame, stooped shoulders, an old suit and a necktie dangling like an afterthought. Maybe a pair of shoes, frayed by style and age, but I could never see them in the dark. A book in his right hand, never left, a collection of stories or perhaps a short novel. Seize The Day. It could of course be The Heart Of Darkness or anything by Ian McEwan, but in my mind it was last century's most perfect novel. Even if there was no way to be certain.

He got out of the subway station, at some point around midnight, and ever since it first happened, which is ten years ago now, I wanted to put him in my book. This man had to be in my novel, whatever it took. He could be a hero and he could be a villain. Or else he could just be one of those fleeting characters without so much as one full sentence. And yet all I knew about him was that at some point around midnight he got out of the subway station in New York.

I could never do a proper character study as it was too late and I had no intention of disturbing him with my questions that would have been so inappropriate. There was of course a possibility of following him into the tiny alley which he slipped into on his way home, but I despised the indignity of doing so. And imagined myself in the first film by Christopher Nolan, which seemed to be the perfect warning.

We only shared the way for about two hundred meters, and then he turned left and I had to go straight ahead to the room I was renting at the time. I watched the slim silhouette, Beckettian in the extreme, gnawed by the trees growing alongside his way, and I thought of my latest story. He could be the hotel keeper in Rome. He could be the drug dealer in Bogota. Or, come to think of it, he could appear as a forgotten painter dying of consumption in Tanzania. The possibilities were killing me.

I mostly saw him on Wednesday, which was the day I went to Nitecap, and after two cocktails I felt refreshed and a little apprehensive of the sort of ideas that were coming my way. I only thought of the man's existence when I got out at Fulton Street and saw him just ahead of me, darkened by the dimmest of lights of Manhattan, with that small book of his.

Every evening that it happened (and overall there must have been more than a dozen of such evenings), he was inside my head and I could not imagine him being anywhere else. There were times when I was close to breaking the silence and the unspoken arrangement that no doubt existed between the two of us. There were times when my feet almost took me to his tiny apartment on the fifth floor or wherever it was. And there were times, too, when I got home and thought of a poem with him hovering over each line that I wrote.

But none of it ever happened, and it took me ten years to realise that I loved him as he was. He deserved the real life, not fictional. So that one evening I let him be. I will never forget how he turned left for the last time, so that next Wednesday, when I got out at Fulton Street after another outing at Nitecap, he was no more. For all that night and for all eternity, the man was no more. 

The man was free.

     THE END

Story #9: NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED

A cold day in late January. A good writer could start with that. But I'm not a good writer, I'm only a bad father. And one look into Sophie's eyes tells me that I should never have taken her to this place.

We are scratching a thin layer of snow that has no texture and no smell. It’s so quiet in here, a black glove on a white mouth. 'Tragic tourism' is the perfect term for what we are doing, and my daughter is only fourteen. I know fourteen is the age when girls start having sex these days, and a boyfriend is on his way (please, God, let it not be Mark), and she was the one who insisted on the trip, but I still feel this is wrong.

'The cat', says Sophie, 'it's the cat again. Why would it not go away?'

I have read Primo Levi and I have seen Night and Fog, but nothing could prepare me for what I was to see. Fifteen minutes ago, there was a young woman bursting into tears while watching an American documentary. And then there were pictures, millions of black and white pictures, that you wanted to burn to pieces before any of these German schoolchildren could even enter the museum.

There was a point early in the day when Sophie put something down in her notebook, something to be used in her school paper on Nazism that this trip was all about. But now she is just walking around blindly, looking for the cat like the only vestige of something normal, and thinking about roll calls and perhaps even imagining herself as one of those naked girls running to the fence to be shot dead from the watchtower. She hasn't opened her notebook in four hours, and we are soon to leave. An old Polish couple whom we first met before the American documentary is telling us about how peaceful it all seems, and yet I know that the four of us are wondering if it really is.

We are looking at the holes in the ceiling, and I know the story. I just wish that Sophie could think of those holes as of showers. Like they did once, thousands of years ago. And then suddenly there is something smooth and warm touching my legs, circling me, purring silently, and I recognise that purring from the moment we entered the infamous gate when something small and as yet unrecognizable sneaked past us like a ghost.

The rooms make no sense, it’s as simple as that, and I feel like a couple of times Sophie wants to say something but chooses not to. I know someone (surely not this Mark guy?) brought her a copy of Son Of Saul three weeks ago, and she wouldn't stop talking about the film over dinner. But the wooden floor is different. The beds are different. The pictures on the walls are different, and I just wish they didn't put it quite so bluntly on the myriads of posters devoted to the most perverted medical experiments.

Outside, we are like small fishes gaping for water. Except fresh air is good for us. It's been five hours, and by the small Russian church we again see the cat, perhaps for the last time, clawing at the bird that had no time to fly away. We are just looking at the scene, transfixed and completely bewildered.

'Is the cat wicked?' Sophie asks me.

She asks this question like she is a little girl, not like a fourteen-year old teenager who is about to have her first boyfriend (and that's as long as me and her mother know anything). There's a part of me that wants to tell my daughter that it isn't, that it's just the way it is. Call of nature: being hungry, running around, killing birds. But in the end, I say something else. I tell her, in a voice that is perhaps too quiet even for a place like this, and also because I might never have a second chance:

'It is wicked, Sophie. The cat is wicked'. 

I look around. The snow makes it all look so horribly, so ridiculously quiet. And white. So deceptively white.

Story #8: LANGUAGE PROBLEM

The lips of Spanish prostitutes are so red and so bright that you can see them even if you close your eyes. The lips of Spanish prostitutes are grotesquely, phenomenally vulgar. And in the whole of the carriage taking him from Santo Domingo to Sevilla (a short way, but a challenging way), and without once turning his head, he could see just them: the lips of two Spanish prostitutes.

They entered at Opera, and they saw him straight away. It was like currently this middle-aged Irish gentleman was the sole reason for their existence. 

The two Spanish prostitutes sat on both sides of him. One pretended that she was reading his book, a short story collection by Brendan Behan, while the other was looking at him, quite intensely, without saying a word. He felt helpless, like he was mugged in bright daylight, with half a dozen sleepy Spaniards scattered about the carriage.

It was his last day in Madrid, the business trip was a relative success (a complete success was not on the cards in the current crisis), and he had spent the evening at O'Brien’s, an Irish pub not far from Noviciado. It had all been going beautifully right until the moment the two Spanish prostitutes fluttered into the carriage and perched on both sides of him.

He tried not to react. He knew what they wanted, oh perfectly, but there was no point in telling them about his wife in Dublin or that it simply wouldn't work after four pints of San Miguel (for the love of God, he couldn't get it up). They were hot, these girls, with skirts that defied imagination, but he was determined to ignore them until they realised that he was either a good family man (which he was) or a wanker (which he wasn’t).

It didn't work. Brendan Behan's "After The Wake" was a wild jungle of words, he blushed like a girl, and they stayed with him until his station. At Sevilla, he swiftly stood up and walked out without ever looking back. In fact, he only realised they were following him when he was already in Carrera de San Jerónimo, clicking their high heels ten metres behind. Silently, without saying a word.

He walked faster, and they walked faster. He slowed down, and they did just that. So that he changed the strategy and ran to his hotel, bumping into the smiling guy at the door who had always looked like a pimp but who compounded that suspicion now by asking him if those two 'beautiful ladies' behind his back were with him. Which was the point where he gave up.

To wake up the next morning with a hangover the size of a Raymond Chandler novel and no money in his wallet. In fact, the wallet itself was also missing.

'So the birds have flown’, concluded Sam, studying his face in the glass of Guinness that offered zero reflection.

‘Was the sex good?' asked Kevin.

This was Wednesday, our night at the Temple (fuck the tourists).

'I only remember the beginning', said Jim, evasively. 'They were doing things women had never done to me before'.

Poor old Jim, I thought, he had only slept with Margaret all his life.

'Soon they discovered the mini-bar, and we opened whisky'.

'Were they pretty?' asked Kevin. Clearly he was thinking of going to Madrid himself.

'I never even saw their faces. The legs were pretty. And please, don’t tell Margaret'.

'Jim', I said, trying to imagine who else could have called those legs ‘pretty’, 'did they really not say a word throughout the whole thing?'

And then it was like a small lightbulb that suddenly lit up inside his head.

'You know what – they did. They did! Now that you mention it. I remember waking up early in the morning and them standing over my bed, trying to talk to me'.

'Yeah? And what did they say?'

'It was Spanish, and they may as well have been speaking in tongues. Besides, I was basically unconscious. But I think they were telling me that they were not taking the credit cards'.

'So why did they?' asked Sam, quite reasonably. ‘Why did they, Jim?’

'Because I couldn't answer them, I guess. I do not know a word in Spanish'. 

We all loved Jim, everyone did, and the next round was on me. 

Story #7: IT'S THE TRUTH

'It's the truth', she said.

'I just want to remind you that within these walls you can speak the truth and nothing but the truth. Look around, think it over, and say it again'.

'It's the truth', she repeated.

'Okay, then, we've listened to both sides now, and what I feel is that your husband never tried to rape you'.

She felt the blood in her body turn white in an instant.

'But what about Mary, the girl from the house across the street?'

'What about her?'

'She heard my screams'.

'Mary is your friend and therefore cannot be considered a credible source'.

'But what more can I do?'

'Besides, medical examination…’.

‘The doctor did not care!’ she protested. ‘The doctor did not care because I’m a woman!’

‘Please, don’t interrupt me’.

‘I’m sorry’.  

‘Medical examination showed no signs of rape'.

'But there was no rape! I did not let him rape me. He was coming towards me, and that’s where I stopped him'.

‘You mean you killed him?’

‘I didn’t. I just threw a vase at the bastard’.

'That kind of language is not permitted here'.

'I'm sorry'.

'That's an aggravating factor'.

'I'm truly sorry. But who knew his head was made of glass? And what were my options anyway? Was I supposed to let him rape me?'

'The evidence is devastating. We've seen the vase with your DNA and we haven't seen any signs of rape'.

'But that's because...'.

'Ah. That's enough. We've been going over this again and again. Enough! You're acquitted. Forgiven, that is'.

'Thank you, father'.

'Be gone, my child'. 

At which point she walked out of the confession box and out into the busy pavement of Dublin. With a restless feeling that every man in O’Connell street had the face of her dead husband.