TELLS

“Won’t you give me some loose change?” A tall, thin girl with short hair and a cigarette behind her ear stuck out her hand. Her narrow black jeans made her young body look long and arched, as if she had rickets. She darted here and there among the oncoming crowd, taking tiny steps, while  a sandy-brown Pekinese leaped behind her  in the same rhythm. People turned their heads away from the blue rings under her eyes. The crowd swept on, swallowed in the dark narrow exits to the street, or pouring down the stairways leading in all directions towards the metro.

            The palm used to the occasional small hard coin automatically puckered to grasp the banknote. She wasn’t certain, because the donor had come up from behind and the crowd had flowed on. The next day in the same place she again received  a whole day’s earnings, so she could sit beside the fountain, while Benny licked himself after half a hamburger. It was the same all week. She was now certain, she had seen the same man from behind: long grey hair,  cut and combed on the crown, spread out in wisps over his shoulders, a leather jacket on his thin, bony back, blue jeans which always looked as if  they had just been ironed.

            “Your feet fascinate me,”  a deep voice with a foreign, Russian accent came from above her. He was blocking out the sun, so when she looked up, she at last saw him for the first time from the front. A pointed, obstinate chin, deep-set blue eyes below  a high forehead, pronounced furrows around the eyes and running down the cheeks. She saw that his eyes really were resting on her tennis shoes and it seemed so ridiculous that she suddenly burst into loud laughter. Benny quickly lifted his nose, one eye open wide, the other lid drooping slightly, and he wagged his tail. He thought they were going to have  some fun and games.

            “My feet? It’s my soles you’re looking at,” the girl said, still laughing.

            “Exactly,” he replied, and his sharp, troubled gaze passed slowly from her tennis shoes to her smiling face. “I can’t understand how you can dance through the world on such small soles.”

            “Well, it could hardly be said I dance through the world,” the girl said with a sudden frown.

(...)

            Leo got up without a word, he sensed that she was retreating from him, he  once more felt his age and the dark places in the flat seemed gloomy. In contrast, when the lamps were lit, all the otherwise lifeless museum pieces seemed to Ester to come alive, as if they were linked by some strange kind of dynamism and excitement. She wondered what it was as they went from room to room.                                                                                                                                        

            Leo suddenly spoke very little. He was silent for the most part, because each of these objects had its own long history. Only when they came to the last door did he pause and, with a Stradivarius in his hands, not looking at Ester, he said, “Stay here, Ester, the flat is big enough and I won’t disturb you.” At the same time he realized the uselessness of this proposal, after all, only half an hour ago Ester was somewhere else in her thoughts, she was slipping away from him, she was like the wind, yet in spite of this he hadn’t felt so close to another person for a long time – in fact ever – as he did to her. He gazed at her tiny, scruffy little tennis shoes, he knew they would leave, they would not stay….

            He opened the door into the last room. There was a large, wooden double bed in the middle and a music stand and score near the window, together with a violin case. The one he actually played was here. Over the bed there hung a strange-looking clock. The small wooden frame of an old cottage window, in the middle, where the crossbars meet and there is usually a handle, there was the large, black sole of a shoe, and on it the hands of a clock, which clearly served their purpose.

            Ester held her breath when she realized the significance of the picture: “What’s that?”

            “My best friend gave me that. He said he would follow me to the end of the world, but… he never even got this far. Probably couldn’t. One of the few things I brought here from Russia.”

            “And… this?” Ester pointed timidly to the wall, where next to the picture of Time there hung a pair of incredibly tiny, already greying ballet shoes.

            “My mother was a ballet dancer….”

Translated by Heather Trebatická

(From the anthology In Search of Homo Sapiens, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc. Wauconda 2002)