stoned, she does yoga on an oriental rug dominating a huge, nearly a century old room. next to the window, I sit on a purple arm chair which in the mid-seventies decorated a penthouse suite of a hotel long ago bankrupted. my eyes follow the slowly floating, myrrh scented smoke rising from an incense placed behind chiffon curtains shielding the candle lit room from the strange eyes inhabiting the apartments sharing the same inside courtyard. I couldn't care less. I am invisible even to her.
it has been decades since anyone who I would deem “interesting” lived here. back then I was a young man, and this room had a russian 19th century chandelier hanging from the three meter high ceiling, and a dining table long enough to serve thirty-two. this was a house for parties, parties which were an utter necessity for the man of the house back then. he was a tailor with a firm will to become the best in the business in the only way he knew how to - he made one ladder of the societal hierarchy of this city be his dining room table.
I remember one of the nights around that table in a way which carries me back to my seat, back to my young and tender body, back to the distressful thoughts pounding the back of my traitor mind. a spook for the late kgb, I had swum my way into the vests made by the tailor in order to get drunk with his prestigious clientele. the things I had found out from the oblivious merchants, artists, politicians and their foreign guests, were almost as priceless for the cccp as they were a burden for me.
in time I've come to realize that the cognitive carriage I dragged behind me as a shadow was something which tricked me into experiencing what I, from my very subjective stance, did on that night. earlier on that hot summer day the only daughter of the tailor had been accepted into the university of helsinki, situated a few blocks away. as a sign of the wealth of the family, she had been able to choose a humanistic field. she was to become an archeologist.
I had seen her but briefly in the past when she brought in more food or beverages from the kitchen, or during the early morning hours when she helped carry the passed out guests from the dining room to one of the only elevators in the capital city of a young country. due to my position, I had only on some vague level of my mind made a mark of her beauty.
her proud father had asked her to join the feast of his clientele on the evening of her admittance, and there she was, sitting across the table from me. she wore a dress cut so as to appear to be melting off of her, a dress made by her father of thin purple fabric embroidered with pearly circles around her sculptural shoulders. I could not say a thing to her in addition to few words of congratulations, because her pale blue eyes appeared to pierce through every living thing and I did not want to draw them to me more than was necessary.
she was seated in between two right wing politicians, who kept on pouring vodka for each others while pulling out more or less imaginary stories of relic hunts from their intoxicated minds. the effort to impress and amuse the young lady squeezed out of air by their cockiness was breathtaking. as I watched the trembling of their bloated, saliva filled cheeks, I decided to have her. she was to be mine for a moment which was made beautiful by my moral impurity demanding a clean canvas to be born anew.
the cognitive burden on my shoulders must have had an effect on that decision. it must have pushed me towards putting an end to the lie I had come to know my life as, and the only way my deeper being knew how to trick myself out of it was by selecting carefully a target for the most irrational emotion possible, a target which would sing the final song of me from foolish lips to the ears of elders. pity me not. the only time I had her was an equally grand exchange of the primary forces of life as was the beating which left my skull crushed on the ground by the piers not far from this room.
she, who is now resting her face on her soles in front of me is deserving of similar force directed into her. in the past few days she has proved to the silent witnesses, the walls and me, that she has more control over her physical being than the men in tailored suits ever had of anything around the dining table.
and so, I descend from the armchair to sit next to her twisted body on the floor, and blow the ice cold wind of my transcendental lungs to her right ear. calmly, she lifts her head to see if the window is open.
