Enfant Fatale / Femme Terrible

a short story by

Josefina

September 2010

[Foreword by the Author:

Dear readers: the author of this short story recognizes it as her duty to inform you that she is in no way affiliated with the new infectious movement of the so-called “second sex”; a representative of which is portrayed artistically below. The author alienates herself from females considering themselves “having the luxury not to marry”; ultimately they will achieve nothing save a grotesque illustration to the consequences of last century’s emancipation of our sex. These “elitist” women are intended on refraining from lending their healthy vessels to natural procreation, and yet they search for any pretext so as to devour masculine energy, thus keeping fine examples of the opposite sex from breeding freely in stable relationships with simple women – confirmed as being normal and necessary by the institution of matrimony – luring men, capturing men only to later leave them broken, lonely, contaminated as these women move onto the next adventure. They are the true malady of our modern society. They have sneaked up on us, slipped into our institutions of higher education only to taint our children with their immoral teachings and infect our science with their radical manners. The author is alarmed to hear two of them conducting a course called “Introduction to Inconvenience for Women” in the Institute of Gender Studies at Charles University in Prague. The author has even been reached by the disquieting rumor that these two female professors often attend conferences in different parts of the world not to further their academic interests, but to see if they both can seduce two men belonging to the same ethnic group (according to the rumor the most recent men were both Jewish, resulting in these women later on reading “Parts of Speech” out loud to each other before going to bed so as to stimulate dreams involving Joseph Brodsky; the author thinks it hardly necessary for her to say that this is an outrageously indecent behavior toward a highly esteemed Nobel Prize winner). Reunited in Czech Republic afterwards, they will compare experiences and draw conclusions later embedded into their scholarly research (the best-selling study “Yekaterinburg-Tashkent” being an exceptional instance of such scholastic psychosis – our time’s veiled illness). These women may be enjoying themselves at present, being as now coincides with the height of their blossoming youth, but eventually they will wake up to find themselves old, alone, and destitute; vulnerable victims of that “room of one’s own”.

The author can prove she does not belong to their sick kind: she married her high school sweetheart at the age of eighteen after he impregnated her at seventeen. Subsequently they have been blessed with two more children and are happy together and living in a house in the suburb of a smaller town. She only admits to having one thing in common with the fickle female, the hazy heroine of her short story: taking pleasure in the same type of men. The author’s husband may be without a high school diploma but he is almost 2 meters tall.]

*

She remembers snow.

It was late on a February evening and early in her adult life. Her feet were freezing as she was standing; taking a walk around at times, trying to get warm, to keep warm, while waiting for the bus and expecting an answer to the text she just sent him. Even after getting on the yellow marshrutka she doesn’t take off her hat – as well as letting the knitted scarf remain covering her lips, cheeks, nose – it was still cold and green, red neon signs were passing by on the frosted window’s other side. He doesn’t leave her waiting (he never will, but this she had yet to find out): “Sweet dreams to you too. But I never have any dreams after getting high…” She looks out the rear window. Electric lights around were becoming scarce. She looks down and then follows the broken asphalt beneath with her eyes as the little bus travels out of a Siberian city, heading further into suburban darkness…

If you were to tell her – many, many years later, of course – that this was her youth, she wouldn’t agree. Many, many years later the man behind the text message will say he was already in love with her then. That earlier on that same evening when she stood alone watching pale snowflakes dancing around a grey high-rise building in a suburb without a name, that only hours prior to this he had fallen for her. And as the wind grew stronger, it takes a hold of her scarf, unraveling it from around her neck; to also dance in a white flurry against the black night all around her. And she doesn’t know that every man she meets from now on can and will be used against her – by him…

She remembers the horse.

If you were to ask her – though she might not explain why – she would say this horse was her youth. It was a warm day with clear-blue skies in May when together they found a horse living in one of the rooms of an abandoned hotel, in a ruin of concrete and steel on an empty shore of a Greek island. Citizens of one country, inhabitants of different cities, they met in Greece. He was tall, built like an athlete and had skin marked by many days spent under the sun. She was small, light like a dancer and had colors reminding of honey in vanilla yogurt. One morning he asked her to come walking with him. The season was still early; tourists were scarce. The streets around were empty, the air hot and everywhere an intense scent of thyme prevailed. He asked her age; their whole week together she wouldn’t say.

She was fifteen.

Eventually she told him she was fourteen.

Either way, he was much older.

She remembers how they’re walking past small white-wash houses – for hours she tells him stories from a lived she hasn’t lived yet – passing by tiny fruit trees from which he picks an orange and gives it to her. She starts peeling it after they sit down on the white sand on a secluded beach. His right hand searches underneath her tank-top, the left one is tracing the skin beneath the cross around her neck – all the while she’s peeling the orange, feeding him one piece with every piece she places in her own mouth. He likes to listen. She will grow accustomed to talking. Together they enter the abandoned hotel. She runs ahead of him down the bare corridor and he follows her – his legs are much longer, he is naturally faster, he doesn’t have to run to catch her – then he grabbed her by the waist, lifted her up, pressed her back against the wall, held her firmly as he kissed her. She laughs. He lets go and allows for her to lead him further in, deeper into the echoing building…

The horse was standing in the middle of what should’ve been a bedroom. It was tied up against what should have been part of the balcony. The cement ground which should’ve had wooden floors and maybe even a carpet was covered with hay and water’s dripping from the roof, pouring down along one wall, gathering in the bathtub. The horse is white and she approached it holding out her sugary sweet hands – from the orange she just peeled – for it to lick. The horse is kind – despite having a coarse tongue – and she pets it, patting along its mane, softly touching its nose with her lips. He walks up from behind, lifting her up, placing her on the horse. Then he led them through the corridor, out of the ruin, down to the ocean. He walks beside the horse as she rides along the water. And when the sun set the horse made its way back home quietly and on its own, leaving the two of them alone on the beach; her head on his chest, his left hand underneath her cotton panties…

Not a thing she told this man was true. Except when confessing to still being a child. And all he ever said was: “You looked like a queen riding on that horse – your golden locks glittering in the sun just like a crown…”

This was the first time she slept underneath the stars.

Several years later – and the fifteen year old she once was who swam naked in the Mediterranean Sea with a grown man (beard and everything), would’ve have thought herself impossibly old by now – she will learn to stop telling stories from the life she has already lived. It is one thing to tell of people never seen, scenes not lived, places not been and quite something else to share the truth.

She remembers snow. She remembers the horse. And one day she will also remember now.