Fresh Mint with Lemon Page 3

  Patricia was sitting back in a soft armchair, the kind that Vadim would have liked to spend a couple of months in with a good book on his lap and a glass of cool lemonade in one hand.

  The shadows made by the blinds had converted Patricia into a figure covered by horizontal lines, a character out of a surrealist dream, a prisoner whose uniform stripes had spread up onto her face.

  “Is that you? You? Here?”

  He wasn’t expecting that. Had she forgotten him once again? Hadn’t she invited him personally, and not very long ago?

  “The day before yesterday, when I called you …,” Vadim could barely articulate the words. He spoke in a feeble voice; but he knew better than to mention that he had called not once, but seven times, at the very least. “The day before yesterday, when I called you, I took your advice, I introduced myself to the lady who picked up the phone and told her I was Japanese. After having had a word with you, the lady replied that I should come today at five. It’s five thirty. I’m sorry I’m late.”

  What a joke! What was he doing there? Why had he come?

  As soon as she saw his unhappy expression, Patricia remembered her manners and introduced him to the man who was sitting in front of her. Up until now, Vadim hadn’t noticed him: he was the artistic director of a Danish gallery who had come to talk about an exhibition.

  Patricia began to laugh. The Dane, a bald man with an athletic build, smiled in the way people do when they don’t know how to react, and soon said goodbye. When he was at the door, he saw that his shoelace had come undone and started to bend down to tie it, but then looked at the faces of the two women and—almost imperceptibly—made a gesture of impatience with his shoulders, and left quickly. Vadim noticed, but didn’t pay particular attention to it. He already had a little farewell speech on the tip of his tongue. The Dane’s taxi stopped in front of the door. Vadim watched the car, wanting to get in … and then he noticed a strange presence that confirmed his impression that the whole thing was nothing more than a dream. Something, or someone, was hanging from the bookshelf, its legs dangling; it was moving backward and forward using its hands. Like a monkey, Vadim thought.

  “Meena!” The head of the Dane reappeared through the half-open door. “Come on Meena, we’re off! Let’s go!” the Dane shouted at a brown monkey not much bigger than a small child.

  “Is the monkey yours?” Vadim asked, with the expression of someone who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. An unnecessary question, he corrected himself mentally.

  The Dane smiled at Vadim’s surprise. “In Bombay, he followed me everywhere: if I went into a bar, the monkey did too, and climbed straight onto the bar. If I went to have supper in a restaurant, the monkey made itself comfortable in the seat in front of me. If I was walking by the docks, the monkey ran along the railing on four legs. If I went back to the hotel, the monkey tried to slip past the door of my bedroom. So I ended up taking her with me to Europe.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never …”

  “You’ve never seen someone with a monkey?” The Dane laughed with a mouth like an open drawer. “Why a monkey? Everyone asks me that question, as if it wasn’t logical to have one. On the contrary, it’s perfectly logical. Look at man’s handiwork over the last hundred years: wars, dictatorships, gulags, and genocides; all of that was done by people. They invented it all, they encouraged it all, and they took it all to the logical extremes. Monkeys have never done anything like that. I don’t want to have anything to do with people! Maybe we still haven’t reached the evolutionary stage that monkeys have. I have my monkey and that’s it. Meena, come on, we’re off!”

  Meanwhile, the monkey had leapt from the bookshelf to the table. It flew over a few chairs and ended up sitting comfortably on its master’s shoulder. The Dane turned round, waved goodbye, and made a noisy exit. His shoelace was still undone.

  When he closed the door, a heavy silence reigned in the shady room. Little by little, Vadim’s guts felt the pressure of an ever-increasing anguish.

  The doorbell sounded. A moment later, in the entrance, an Asian man was making little bowing gestures in all directions.

  “Kenzo Sato,” he introduced himself and continued bending forward like a puppet dressed in black, hanging from strings.

  “You understand now, why I laughed?” Patricia murmured to Vadim in Russian, as she got up to welcome the Japanese man.

  “Well, no, the truth is that I can’t say I do understand why,” Vadim answered, offended. He couldn’t stop feeling like a piece of firewood. Not even a wooden doll would put up with such cruel scorn! he thought, feeling sorry for himself.

  And only then did he realize what Patricia was laughing at. When he, Vadim, had told the housekeeper on the phone that he was Japanese, she thought he meant this gallery owner from Kyoto! That’s why she didn’t want to let him through, because she was expecting a real Japanese man!

  Patricia winked at Vadim and he replied in kind; then she introduced him to the gallery owner. “Vadim is Russian, he’s a poet: he writes poems inspired by traditional Japanese poetry, by haikus,” Patricia said, trembling from a laughter she could barely control. Out of courtesy to her, Vadim tried to humor her and spoke with the new guest about different kinds of haiku, and even recited one to him. He wasn’t sure if his memory had retained it properly from his days as a student, or if he’d just made it up on the spot.

  The circle of the sun set

  behind the garden.

  A new shining appeared.

  What pleasure.

  He recited it timidly, as if he didn’t really want to, laughing, and pointing to Patricia’s hair.

  And she applauded like a little girl in a village festival. The Japanese man with a face like a mask joined in.

  “I’ve prepared some tea,” the whip of a nasal voice cut through the smooth air. Radhika. She had changed: now she was wearing a white dress. Clanging about noisily, she placed several cups on the table. She looked like Aries, the god of war.

  “Cup of tea?”

  Vadim didn’t feel like having hot tea, he would have preferred something more refreshing.

  “What’s wrong, Radhi?” asked Patricia, always like a girl at a village festival: without wanting to, she had let go of a sky-blue balloon, and that big ball of hot air was flying, unstoppable, up toward the sky.

  “You people and your poems! What nonsense!”

  “No, they’re not nonsense, Radhi. Tell us another, please.” Patricia addressed this last request to Vadim.

  Flowers everywhere,

  flowers and birds.

  Swallow,

  come,

  and we’ll fly together!

  Vadim recited it very slowly. He meant to say bat, but he couldn’t remember how to say bat in English, or any other similar flying beast, so he substituted it for swallow. The swallow made the image too sugary, but there was nothing he could do!

  “They’re nonsense! Don’t tell me you haven’t got anything more useful to think about?”

  Radhika didn’t consider anyone worth looking at and her expression was that of someone who had mistakenly trodden on the little ball of manure that the beetle had left on the white tablecloth.

  “Now, in the summer,” Patricia said, “we like drinking fresh mint tea. We usually have it cold, with ice and a slice of lemon. My father taught me to make it like that; he brought this recipe from the Balkans, from Turkey or Greece. Radhika prepares this tea with Indian spices.”

  Patricia was trying to make up for her friend’s bad mood with this mass of words.

  “A beautiful haiku, that one you just recited; I’d say it must be a poem by Basho, right?” warbled the smiling Japanese mask in a friendly way.

  “What should we be thinking about?” Vadim asked, and he appeared to be observing the beetle’s little ball, which had been crushed on the white tablecloth.

  Yes, Vadim wasn’t at all looking forward to having to swallow a mint tea with lemon and ice. He liked his tea stron
g, black, with three spoonfuls of sugar, sometimes with cream, but never with lemon. And at that moment he could have killed someone for a beer.

  “We live in a period full of injustice,” Radhika went on, singing her song with her nasal whine, “nobody does anything except worry about their material interests. Everybody thinks only about their profits. Even when the world is literally stuffed full of injustice and evil! Just think of the little girls in China, of how many they kill or let die!”

  Vadim remembered a television documentary he’d seen; for a time the report had horrified the world; it was about the little girls who the Chinese allowed to die. But Vadim quickly replaced this memory with the image of the woman’s cocoa-colored belly of the woman. He couldn’t really understand this transformation of an exotic, sensual woman into a militant activist.

  “At the university, Radhika gives a seminar on women’s studies, and she works for an organization that fights to prevent cruelty against children,” Patricia said, by way of explanation. “Maybe you’ve heard of the organization, it’s called OFBTCH. She’s sponsored several children herself.”

  “Nooooo!” Radhika howled, giving Vadim a look of growing aversion. “You shouldn’t have added sugar to the mint tea with lemon, I’ve already put sugar in, and plenty of it.”

  * * *

  Radhika sits down next to you. Absurdly, it occurs to you that … were she your wife, every evening you would sit like this, next to each other, watching the television and sipping fresh mint tea with lemon, full of ice cubes. And spices.

  You would put your hand around her waist, then around her shoulder, you would make her sit on your lap …

  Patricia is looking at you with eyes framed by the pistils of a tulip, she is fifty-three years old and has a dense network of wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, yet she has the face of a little girl who has just lost a sky-blue balloon. That is what she looks like in the presence of the darker woman … and now you know that you have travelled all this way only for her, for the little girl who has just lost a sky-blue balloon, and that you would travel the same distance again if she gave you permission to do so, and that you would do so again and again. The black pistils come unstuck from the tanned face, framed by the fire-colored hair, now they are floating across the room … yes, you will make this journey again, on foot if necessary.

  * * *

  Radhika moved a little bit closer to Vadim, and then a bit closer again, so that now she was sitting on top of his hand.

  “You like watching television?” she asked, guessing his thoughts.

  “It depends,” he murmured.

  His hand was hurting.

  “You like watching television, observing human suffering? Having supper while seeing children suffer?”

  No, they wouldn’t have a TV set. They would sit together on the sofa, certainly, like now—his hand was itching, but he wouldn’t have moved it for anything in the world—but they would listen to Schubert and Shostakovich. Automatically, he raised the cup to his lips to take a sip. The fresh mint tea with lemon was delicious.

  “I like the drink you’ve prepared, what exotic spices,” he said, instead of answering her question.

  “Radhika is Indian,” Patricia interrupted quickly. “Well, in fact she’s American, but her family comes from India and Radhika goes there often.”

  “I go there because I’m writing a book about the fate of Indian women.”

  “What is their fate?” asked Vadim, without showing much interest.

  Radhika shook her head violently as if she had never seen such an idiot before. “Cruel, terrible!”

  “Is this the first time you’ve prepared something for publication?” Vadim asked out of politeness.

  “No way! I’ve published an essay in book form about the history of feminism in India. But you didn’t answer my question: Do you like watching human suffering on TV? Eating your supper while seeing children suffer, the way most people do?” Radhika asked, and gently pressed his hand, caught between her buttocks; by then his hand was really hurting.

  “Do you know any more haikus?” The Japanese face, whose smile never left it, was taking a bite out of a cookie.

  “No, the truth is I don’t like seeing people suffer, be they women or children,” Vadim said thoughtfully, but with emphasis and a slight note of protest.

  “You live comfortably in your Russia,” Radhika went on provoking him, “you only think about your country, and the rest of the world doesn’t matter to you. And that’s probably what your father did, and your uncle, and your grandfather … I can see it all!”

  Vadim remained lost in thought. Had he heard her?

  “My father,” he said, as if he were talking to himself, in a low voice, “suffered a great deal in August of ’68, in Prague, when he realized that the Soviet invasion had put an end to a process of liberation in Czechoslovakia, and that he was one of the people responsible. He suffered all his life because of that. And, twenty years earlier, my grandmother suffered more than I can say when, every day, summer and winter, she waited in line, in front of the prison, after they arrested my grandfather, who was accused of being an enemy of the Soviet Union.”

  “For what reason?” asked Radhika, holding her head up.

  “For what reason?” Vadim took a sip from his cup and glanced sideways at Radhika, “It’s a long story. Who knows why they arrested people in the second half of the 1930s, during the time of the Stalinist purges. My grandmother was pregnant at the time. And when my father’s brother was born, my grandfather had already been sentenced and sent to the gulag. And then the war came and the siege of Leningrad, in which two million people died. My grandmother didn’t have any milk left to give, there was nothing to eat, of course, so they gave the child a piece of wood from the floor instead of milk. All over the city, there was no bark left on the trees, so that possibility was ruled out.”

  Patricia and the Japanese man from Kyoto were silent. Faced with that kind of suffering, they had nothing to say.

  But Radhika was not about to let her challenging attitude get side-tracked. “These are old events that belong to history, let’s not mix things up, please. I’m talking about true, palpable horror, about Ethiopia and Chechnya, about the little girls who the peasants in China allow to die, if they don’t actually kill them.”

  “I’ll tell you a haiku, if you want,” the gallery owner suggested to Vadim, “I see you like them. I was watching the expression on your face as you recited the last one. I know what you are: a sensitive man. Very sensitive, as much so as a woman.”

  “You guys from the Far East always talk like oracles,” Radhika said with a grimace.

  “I don’t think women are more sensitive than men,” Vadim said, smiling. “Read Russian literature and you’ll find that out!”

  The gallery owner stared him straight in the eyes:

  “The cuffs of the sleeves

  dark grey

  and dirty.

  Cold

  as

  a wall.”

  “I imagine that image in the same way as I would a picture,” said Patricia in a low voice. “But it wouldn’t be cold, this painting. I see a warm grey.”

  “Sleeves with dark grey, dirty cuffs. … Would that describe your grandmother’s dress as she stood on line?”

  The Japanese man was addressing Vadim, but now he looked at the floor. He went on, “Cold as a wall … of the jail in which your grandfather was imprisoned.”

  “Grey as the color of the workers when they go off to the factory, at five in the morning.”

  That was Radhika’s voice, cold and nasally.

  “Workers don’t wear grey anymore.” Vadim decided he’d had enough. He took his hand from under her buttocks. “Do you know anything, about the workers? Well, I do. When I had to stop studying, I went to work in a light bulb factory. Workers, nowadays, wear different colored clothes, especially female workers!”

  “What did you study?” asked Patricia, in an interested voice.
>
  “Japanese culture,” Vadim answered.

  She looked at him, her eyes wide open; they had an absent air, as if she was trying to put two and two together.

  As if he wasn’t worthy of an answer, Radhika moved away from Vadim and began to show immense tenderness toward her friend. She pressed her breasts against Patricia’s back and parted her hair so as to kiss her on the neck. A fickle cat. Patricia closed her eyes, smiled at the gallery owner to excuse herself, with a touch of pride, and gave herself up voluptuously to the pleasure of her friend’s closeness. The little girl has won a teddy bear at the fair and now she’s taking it back home as a trophy, thought Vadim.

  The gallery owner bent forward slightly and took a few lithographs out of a folder.

  “Shall we talk about your work?” he asked Patricia.

  Unexpectedly, Radhika stood up straight.

  “Where are you going?” Patricia asked her in a worried voice.

  “Where am I going? To work, of course!” and she left, slamming the door behind her.

  Patricia shrugged her shoulders to express her perplexity, and to apologize to her guests, and chose four lithographs.

  “Will you show me your most recent work?”

  “Of course. The ones that are finished. Let’s go to my studio.”

  She got up, and with a nod invited the Japanese man to follow her.

  * * *

  They haven’t invited you. You sit down and stir the mint tea with lemon, although there is nothing to stir; the sugar dissolved a while ago. You let your eyes wander over the walls; you let yourself be absorbed by the portraits of flowers. Psychological portraits of flowers, said one art critic. That’s not true. Flowers don’t have a psychology. Fortunately, they don’t. They only have sensuality, fortunately. What have you written, about her paintings? Who knows. Something about Japanese concepts in the work of Patricia Pavloff. Something inadequate, very inadequate, when compared to the work itself. Criticism and essays are always inadequate before a work of art. Extremely so. They gave you an award for your words and your sentences. You were very pleased, although normally that sort of thing leaves you cold. Why were you so pleased by that, a few months ago? Why? Well, because that gave you an opportunity, so you thought, to show off the award to her. Like that, you would be somebody in her eyes, and not just a shadow. Like that, you thought, she would welcome you to her white palace, time and again, and yet again. Now you can see that that’s a load of nonsense. The only valid thing is what is hanging here, on these walls. The rest is dirty, wasted, useless paper.