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6.1.03
revision to Diaries of Witold Kazersamski as the light of day scrapes across these stuttering eyelids and Witold recalls the first meeting with Anastasia:
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly curvy cobblestones streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a candelit club, seated myself and spotted what I immediately mistook for Edith Piaf, a temptuous little street singer dressed in a black, hand knitted dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a missing sleeve and waited patiently for her set. She'd just come in from outside the cafe, lighting a cigarette in the light rain, I'd followed her in. I'd followed her from walking through the red light district in full swing and with everything, the sex shows, sex shops and prostitutes clamouring for my attention, all the way from Place Blanche I'd followed her and I wasn't quite sure why other than something to do to pull myself out a nocturnal lagoon of listlessness than neither the drugs nor the drinking were able to overshadow.
I stood back up from the seat after I'd had a pull on a Kronenbourg and walked directly up to address her, considering as my opening , a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had a long history having being named after Howard Staunton who played it against Horwitz in 1847. Basically, it is a bold attempt to demonstrate that by giving away the central pawn White can show that Black’s first move is misguided because it exposes the king. In practical experience it scores well at club level where an accurate defence is awkward to play when White has a rampaging attack. Still, as I approached, I debated the merits of establishing early pawn control of the center, before quickly blurting out a breathless and disconnected dictum about "Le Bel Indifferent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith, perhaps still thinking it was her after all but being uncertain. She regarded me with a look of amusement, a carnival in her eyes, engaged, then disengaged, considering the rapid development of her own pieces.
"I will be going on shortly" she explained, nodding towards the tiny stage where currently sat an experimentational jazz trio who were still, it appeared to me anyway, tuning up their instruments. In all likelihood, what I mistook for tuning was the actual performance. I feigned interest for a moment but immediately extinguished any look of interest in the trio when it appeared she was inhaling again, preparing to finish a thought, it was difficult to discern. "Perhaps you would like to speak with me at a more opportune time, for example, when my set is finished? Perhaps in one hour's time or so?" The suggestion seemed reasonable. Through this second line of conversation I was able to discern an accent of sorts, one I most certainly could not pin down but an unmistakable butchering of grammatics which could only have come from a non-native speaker. I indicated my agreement, looking at my watch as though to synchronize the meeting with our current time zone and making a wordless gesture meant to convey that I grasped her idea and just after I'd Fred Astaire'd my way back to the table I'd left my Kronenbourg upon, I'd return to her to sit and wait. But she shook her head quickly.
"Please, not here. I cannot bear anyone but complete strangers witnessing my performances and since we have spoken and will be speaking later, I ask that you wait somewhere else...perhaps the Lily La Tigresse? I can meet you inside or just outside the entryway between one and one and a half hours from now...my name is Anastasia" her eyes were hopeful yet even within them, I could sense how immediate their clamp down would be should I dare ignore her request and seat myself at her table anyway. I looked at the watch again before realizing helplessly that it was still set on daylight savings time. Instead of embarassing myself by clarifying the time or making note of the fact that other than the fact it was still dark out, I had no idea how close dawn was approaching, I decided to let fate play itself out further, recalling the dream I'd had only the night before on the train from Utrecht, of the discharge of the undigested remains of problems which had already been worked through spiritually.
"I'll wait until you get there." I noted, suddenly enthusiastic. The experimental jazz trio had morphed into one tune together, at the same time, something vaguely familiar before it hit me: The "West End Blues" 1928 recording performed by Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Fred Robinson, Jimmy Strong, Mancy Cara and Zutty Singleton. Or perhaps it was the jukebox. The room was far too smokey to discern the stage any longer. Anastasia was smiling at me blankly as though she knew I was already supposed to have turned around and left but in seeing me still standing there she had no idea what sort of smile to leave me with and had decided, at the last minute, to remain neutral. Had I remained standing there, I imagined there was quite a good chance her smile would melt, her eyes would hiss and a few strong-arms would grab me and dump me outside the door without further notice, back out into the spattering rain and the cold and the strangers.
"See you then..." I waved, turned on my heel, walked back to the table and grabbed the beer bottle, finishing it down in several slugs as I headed for the exit. Fate indeed. Whether or conversation went any further or not was entirely her decision.
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The Lily La Tigresse was a respectably seedy bar in the heart of the red light district. I'd quickly learned my way around the seedier aspects of rue Blanche so finding it wasn't difficult. Toulouse-Lautrec had once painted the surrounding area into a district of cabarets, circus freaks, and prostitutes and at this hour, with the remaining stragglers lurking and leering and salivating a dazed sort of enthusiasm as they passed and bumped into me and threw up in the alleyways, I could see his vision. I felt like I'd stepped into a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
While I waited, I thought about the things I'd lost forever due to my own carelessness or apathy, or by virtue of someone else's fuck up. I began to sketch a list of them, a dispassionate list because you had to become dispassionate about such losses in order not to let them gradually destroy you like the slow leak of air from the pinprick of a rubber inner tube. In the end, it is about denial and the acts and losses which deny you are like angry, self-loathing little people who derive great pleasure from denying you over and over again. The list grew impossibly longer as I thought about it further and stared past people seated around me as though they were ethereal, temporary visions. As I choked down an Anise aperitif served with water that I'd ordered solely to appear as though I knew what I was doing, I began to feel sickened at the losses and resolved to make up for the losses with gains. Monumental gains that dwarfed the world. Explosions of personal insights and epiphanies. The list I'd begun to sketch had become a doodle, an incomprehenible, unhinged triptych growing darker and darker with each subsequent swoop of my recollection: childhood toys destroyed in fits of rage, writings and drawings ripped to shreds in frustration, musical instruments bent and dented beyond repair at the most subtle, corrective hints from strangers when I played on street corners, friends discarded because of distance or because they'd grown intolerant of appeasing me, lovers, dead in the heart, wilted, ashed and forgotten. An entire gawking collective of memories and strangers mocking me. My blood pressure was rising, I was sure of it. The Anise tasted terrible and the water was as warm as piss. However intrigued by Anastasia, I didn't know if I could bear it even another minute...
"So there, you've found your spot and look, you've even begun to sketch the customers!" Anastasia seemed delighted to see me, far more delighted than a stranger would be meeting another stranger after a few seconds of introduction and a completely blank history of conversation. But the cloud which had stuffed my head and my ears and was adumbrating everything around me passed suddenly and quickly as Anastasia removed an imitation velvet cloth coat with a fake fur collar and shook the rain from it before setting it down along the back of her chair. "May I have a look?" She attempted to remove the sketch from beneath my hands as she seated herself across from me but I kept my palms flat on the table, the paper snug inside.
"I cannot let anyone see my work until a piece is complete." I explained in an effort to imitate her need to perform only in front of strangers at the club.
"I suppose I should come to your "studio" to see some examples of finished products?" Her eyebrows were raised curiously, the habitual, beaten path lines of comers-on etched in the cynicism of her expectations.
"I don't have a studio here. I don't have an apartment or even a room for the night in fact. I just came down to wander. My plan was to return on an afternoon train to Amsterdam."
Thwarted by the miscalculation of her assumption she was slightly taken back, her cheeks pinkened, her pupils dialated slightly, perhaps as a reaction to the stress of having only recently performed. Strands of sweat still lightly tinged her eyebrows and even the nape of her neck was damp. I wondered what her voice had sounded like. I wondered what those other dark and anonymous faces had registered as she sang.
"You're leaving Paris already? My. I thought I'd be interesting enough at least for an afternoon..." she teased, smirking, took a cigarette from the pack she'd tossed down next to the ashtray and lit it quickly before the act registered in my brain and my hands could reach for my own lighter. Thwarted. She exhaled quickly, tracing an absent circle with her index finger in a small pile of salt that had spilled several diners before. I knew she wanted to witness me squirm from the discomfort of having been misinterpreted. I knew it was a little game she was playing with herself, but I wasn't feeling generous any more. Verbalizing the train ride had disemboweled a section of the dream yet again, reality had crept back. She was little more than a desperate urchin. She'd take me back to her apartment, finish me off with a bottle of Absinthe back in her rent-by-the-week apartment in some still seedier section of town, take off enough clothes for the later dream sequence to appear as though we'd actually fucked, then allow me to pass out before stealing my wallet, grabbing what few personal belongings she had in the room that she wanted to keep and then disappearing forever into the buxom night of Paris. I felt sick and lonely all at once, a wave of self-pitying nausea. I stood quickly, clearing my throat.
"Yes, yes, it all reminds me, it's coming back to me now...I need to get the tickets this morning to make sure the train isn't sold out."
"I'll go with you." She volunteered, dropping the cigarette to the floor and grinding it out with the toe of her shoe before standing. The top of her head barely reached my stomach. Suddenly she seemed harmless. "Besides, what do you know of the city? How will you find the station? Do you even know that you are to depart from the Gare du Nord and where you will find it?" Her questions ran along with her trying to keep up with me as I pushed out into the night air which I gulped with great relief and satisfaction, the dispeptic dread finally departing as though I'd already showered and changed and was seated on a living room sofa with my feet up on the coffee table, a pipe in my mouth and the evening paper beside me.
"You were magnificent" I said suddenly, taking her by her tiny shoulders and looking down at her.
"How? What do you mean? Did you spy on me this evening?"
"Nothing of the kind. I meant to say, you are magnificent. I feel better already. Maybe I won't even bother with the train back to Amsterdam after all. What would you say if I told you that? What would you say if I said I wanted to stay a few days, or a week even? Would you let me hear you sing?" I began walking again without waiting for her reply. The night air had suddenly filled me with an unassailable buoyancy. I kicked myself inwardly nevertheless for having made the decision to leave the horn behind. Now would have been the most appropriate time! I could have latched onto the banks of the Seine just as the dawn began and lent my own dissonant blaring to bounce off the hours and airs of Paris. All the while Anastasia followed behind, or as closely to my side as possible, double timing her half steps to my determined yet absent-minded strides as we went in no particular direction, street corner after street corner until she finally begged, in exhaustion, that we stop, that the incessant marching cease..."We are here." she seemed to notice aloud, pointing up at a smog smeared building. "My apartment."
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11:48 AM
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