The air was glowing with the setting sun, birds rustled in the surrounding treetops, paled by the sunlight, the water in the fountain sputtered in short comic spurts. Everything seemed to have been numbed by the heat which was slowly settling into the ground; there was not a breath of wind, the leaves of the plane trees hung as though turned to stone. But nevertheless, the young man seemed to feel a vague current of air. At a certain moment the girl raised her eyes and looked straight at him. Her slanted, light-green eyes met the young man’s. A little blob of ice cream was melting on the girl’s lip. The young man felt a sudden longing to be that little blob.
* ‘Put this lady’s massage on my account.’
* ‘Wow, mamma, tits like a hippopotamus!’
* Ruslan and Ludmila, transl. by Jenni Blackwood (www.sunbirds.com/lacquer/readings/1015)
* ‘He flattered me, seducer fashion! / And I succumbed to reckless passion… Deceiver, profligate! Oh shame! / But tremble, heartless libertine!’
Day Three
1.
Kukla was nearly six foot three, slim, with an exceptionally straight back and an easy gait, all of which made her seem younger than she was. What stood out on her regularly featured face were her strong cheekbones, slanting eyes of indeterminate colour, usually called ‘almond’, and her shy smile. That smile was also unusual for her age. She had broad, bony shoulders, as though she had done a lot of swimming in her youth, although she despised every sport apart from walking. Her ‘uniform’ contributed to the refinement of her appearance. That was what Kukla called her simple outfit: a dark straight skirt, light silk blouse, usually white, and a fine woollen cardigan, usually grey. She always wore a small necklace of real pearls. Her hair was dark, well streaked with grey, secured at her nape with an ordinary little comb. The only unharmonious parts of her body were her feet. She wore men’s size shoes, forty-four. When she was younger it had been hard to find anything in her size, so she had simply begun to buy men’s. But she successfully disguised her handicap through the lightness of her stride. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Kukla was not afraid of death. However, she had the feeling that she would live a long time: all the women in her family had been centenarians. And there was something else: those who came near her were inclined to think they could feel a vague current of air, something like a gentle breeze.
‘Please explain to him,’ Mr Shaker was saying, ‘that I am prepared to take on all the financial obligations, that is travel costs, hotel accommodation while he is in Los Angeles and a rapid course of English. Dr Topolanek assures me that he would give Mr Mevličko unpaid leave, if, that is, the gentleman decided not to remain in America.’
Kukla translated all of that for Mevludin.
‘Ask him what he wants me there for,’ said Mevlo.
Mr Shaker began by explaining at length the purpose and importance of his industry of potions and powders, and then said that Mr Mevličko’s job would be to advertise his products. He, Mr Shaker, had a whole team of experts in marketing. They would see to it that Mr Mevličko became a great star of promotional videos, posters, websites and other advertising material.
‘Tell him I won’t have my picture taken, not at any price,’ said Mevlo, but Kukla interrupted him.
‘And what would Mr Mevličko’s salary be?’ she asked Mr Shaker.
‘A thousand dollars for an hour of filming,’ said Mr Shaker, and added: ‘that’s a very high rate, I hope you realise.’
Kukla translated all that for Mevludin.
‘Tell him to forget it,’ said Mevlo.
‘Three thousand!’ said Mr Shaker.
‘I’m not interested, what good are dollars to me? Just look at it, it’s stuck and it won’t go down,’ said Mevlo, directing his message to no one in particular.
‘Five thousand.’
‘Are you deaf or do you just need your ears cleaned!? I’m not interested; that’s all there is to it!’
Now Mevlo was addressing Mr Shaker, who was looking to Kukla for help. Kukla, of course, did not translate what Mevludin had said.
‘He says he’s a bit nervous about the offer,’ she said.
‘Seven thousand!’ said Mr Shaker, adding, almost angrily: ‘tell Mr Mevličko that one job leads to another. I have connections in Hollywood. I’m sure that a man of his appearance will easily make a career in film as well.’
‘A career! In your dreams! I won’t have my picture taken, I won’t have folk in Bosnia seeing me like this and taking the piss,’ Mevlo dug his heels in.
‘Ten thousand!’ said Mr Shaker angrily. ‘For God’s sake, not even Naomi gets more!’
‘Naomi who?’ asked Mevlo.
‘Naomi Campbell, the model,’ explained Kukla.
‘Oh yeah, Naomi wouldn’t get out of bed for less than twenty thousand,’ said Mevludin impassively.
‘How the hell do you know, if I may ask?’ said Mr Shaker, who was quite furious by now.
‘Whoopi told me.’
‘Whoopi who?’ asked Kukla.
‘Whoopi Goldberg.’
It sounded unlikely, but in fact the name of Whoopi Goldberg had caught Mr Shaker’s eye when he was examin ing the list of famous guests at the Grand Hotel.
At that moment a young girl in a flowery summer dress, with clogs on her bare feet, approached the table. She had a pale round face scatteredown and, parting her legs a little, began rubbing her right ankle with her left foot.
‘My daughter Rosie,’ said Mr Shaker testily. His face showed the inner fleet of his hopes slowly sinking.
The girl, staring more at the ice cream dripping down the sides of her cornet than at those present, shifted the cone from her right to her left hand and offered her right hand to Kukla, then to Mevludin. A drop of ice cream slipped out of the cornet and fell onto Mevludin’s hand. Mevlo gave a start, gazing at the little drop like a gold coin that had fallen from the heavens straight onto his hand, and then he licked it attentively and smiled.
‘Tell him,’ he said quietly, ‘that I accept…’
And then he came right up to Mr Shaker’s face and repeated:
‘I em in!’
Mr Shaker hastily took out his chequebook, wrote a cheque for a considerable advance and handed it to Mevludin. Admittedly, he did this more to impress Kukla than the stubborn young Bosnian.
And what about us? We push on. Life may linger, lurking for the attack, but the tale moves on, without looking back.
2.
After a cosmetic treatment for her face, Beba decided to try something else from the rich array on offer. The promotional brochure offered bathing in hay made from meadow grasses, bathing in a mash made from oat flakes (That must be quite disgusting, thought Beba), bathing in seaweed, then various kinds of massage… Beba finally chose ‘Sweet Dreams’ – a special treatment, consisting of being steeped in a bath of warm chocolate followed by a massage. First, of course, she asked Pupa whether she could put it all on the room bill. Pupa had no objection, on the contrary:
‘Just you go and have a good soak. When you come out you’ll be like a chocolate truffle!’ she said.
A young woman in a white hospital gown led Beba into a space that looked like a film set. It was a small room with an antique copper bath in the middle. The walls were covered in greenish silk wallpaper, on one wall there was a reproduction of Renoir’s Woman with Parrot, and under it, on an old-fashioned flower stand, there was a fern. How kitschy, thought Beba. What had induced the designer to connect the greenish wallpaper, the bath and its function – with the reproduction on the wall?
Here one might add that the presence of fine art in all the rooms was one of the most striking features of the Wellness Centre. It was Dr Topolanek’s doing. He considered that agreeable and unobtrusive education delayed the process of ageing just as moderate exercise did, so he had arranged for the Wellness Centre to be literally ‘clothed’ in reproductions of well-known paintings, mostly classic art. For instance, at the entrance to the Centre he had placed a reproduction o
f Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Fountain of Youth – a painting that was the symbolic representation of the fruits of Topolanek’s professional efforts.
Now Beba was lying back in the tub filled with warm chocolate. A loudspeaker was emitting that irritating new age music that is supposed to induce relaxation. Beba’s gaze was focused on the reproduction on the wall. And, hey, the living fern on the stand seemed to be imitating the fern on the right of Renoir’s painting. Beba also felt that the wallpaper echoed the blue-green tone of the walls in the picture. And, thanks to the fertile imagination of the hotel designer, the golden cage in Renoir’s painting was given form in reality in – the copper bath! The young woman in the sumptuous black dress, with a long red bow behind, had dark hair and a homely, girlish face. The woman was holding a parakeet on the finger of her right hand, while she fed it with her left. The whole of the woman’s body was bent towards the parakeet, and she appeared to Beba to be completely spellbound by the bird.
As she looked at the picture, Beba suddenly recalled a word from her childhood that she had hated more than any other: fanny! Little boys had peckers, and girls had fannies. That would have been all right if Beba had not once stayed as a little girl in the country with a relative who kept fan-tailed chickens in her garden. The fans of their tails had somehow got caught up in Beba’s child’s mind with that hated word fanny and their persistent pecking with the idea of little boys’ peckers. One day her relative wrung the neck of one of her fantails and they had chicken soup and meat for lunch. Peckers and fannies… Why hadn’t all this occurred to her before? That all this sexual business is connected in the male imagination with – ornithology! In the history of the male sexual imagination the role of women was constantly to pull onto themselves, and then push off, birds of all shapes and sizes. From Zeus who forced himself on Leda in the form of a swan onwards. And, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the swan – that unambiguous companion of women – transformed itself into a more discreet and smaller companion, a parrot!
A slide show now got underway in Beba’s head, fuddled by the sweet aroma of chocolate. That famous painting by Tiepolo of a half-naked woman with a parrot… The beauty has astonishing skin, which seems to be made of milk, motherof- pearl and blood. The young woman is wearing a pearl necklace. It is placed high on her neck, right under her jaw bone, so that it looks more like an expensive bridle than a necklace. She has a rose in her hair. Her dress has slipped off one of her shoulders, exposing her breast. The young woman is holding a copper-red parrot in her arms. Large as a hen, the parrot has gripped the woman’s hand with its claws, while its sharp beak has come dangerously close to her nipple with its mother-of-pearl sheen.
Then that Dutchman, Quirijn van Brekelenkam, from the seventeenth century. In the background of his painting a young lute-player is sitting at a table, completely absorbed in his playing, while in front of him, in the foreground, a young woman is sitting, with a parrot on her finger. She sits straight as a rod, her left hand lies relaxed in her lap, which is covered with a long white apron, while on her right hand there is – a parrot. The parrot has gripped the woman’s finger with its claws and is looking at her, while the woman gazes at the lute-player. On the floor, beside the woman’s feet, there is a jug. It is unclear whether the woman is mesmerised by the parrot on her finger, the music she is hearing or its young performer.
And then Courbet. That painting of Courbet’s of a lascivious, naked woman’s body on a crumpled bed. The woman’s legs are partly open, her luxuriant brown hair is spread sumptuously over the bed. The woman is relaxed, exhausted, as though her passionate lover has just left the room. In the background is a stand for a parrot, with a water dish on the top and crossbars at the sides. While the woman is lying there, the parrot has left its observation post – its perch – and landed on its owner’s hand. The parrot has spread both its wings wide, as though it were in a state of total ecstasy. And again, a riddle. Perhaps there was no lover, perhaps the parrot is that perfect lover, a flying penis, the tool of the male painter’s imagination, which has satisfied the woman and is now spreading its wings in satisfaction.
In Delacroix’s painting, a naked beauty is sitting on a sofa, although it looks as though she is sitting on open bales of silk. One would not notice the parrot had the beauty not let her hand dangle, followed by her sleepy face with its half-closed eyes, towards the foot of the sofa, towards a parrot crouching in the dark shadows. The naked woman is evidently playing with the parrot and seems to be about to stroke the feathery crest on its head. And again, it is not clear: is the parrot a toy, a living vibrator, a substitute for a lover or is it the lover himself? Or could it be that the woman is playing with her own genitals, embodied in – a parrot.
Then Manet’s Woman with Parrot, painted in the same year as the Courbet! Olympia is dressed from head to foot in a peach-coloured habit almost as ascetic as a nun’s. On a tall perch is her companion, a grey parrot. The parrot has bowed its head, it seems despondent. Olympia is holding a small bunch of flowers, which she has moved a little away from her nose, or perhaps she is just about to smell them. Her gaze is directed straight at the observer. At the bottom of the parrot’s perch lies a large, half-peeled orange – the one licentious detail in the painting. Who is the parrot in the picture? The woman’s grey dejected genitals or her unsatisfied companion, whose rival is that ecstatic parrot in Courbet’s painting? Or are the two painters – Manet and Courbet – sending each other secret messages about the length of their respective penises?
And then Marcel Duchamp, who paints a woman in stockings – as Courbet does in one of his paintings! The woman’s legs are parted, but, unlike Courbet, Duchamp places his parrot unambiguously at the very entrance to the woman’s vagina.
Frida Kahlo also uses parrots as a decorative detail! In one picture she puts a green parrot on her shoulder, like a pirate; in another she paints herself with four parrots, one on each shoulder and two in her lap. And she is holding a cigarette at the same time.
And René Magritte? His painting is the portrait of a young woman with loose copper-red hair. The woman has a dress with a collar made of rich white lace. There is lace also at the end of her long sleeves, like gloves. The woman is standing beside a tree in which birds are perched. One bird with a luxuriant coppery crest and a long slender beak is particularly striking. The woman has picked up another bird with both hands and is eating it as though it were a ripe fig. We can see the bird’s dark red insides, its heart and liver, but surprisingly there isn’t a drop of blood! The lace collar and cuffs remain astonishingly white. The woman has a lascivious look on her face and the painting has the unambiguous title Pleasure.
Women and their enchantment with birds… Apart from bisexual Frida Kahlo, a woman who appears in the picture as a man with a moustache and a cigarette in her hand, the authors of this implicit eroto-ornithological debauchery are all men. And, were the women to be asked, their choice of favourite bird would certainly not be a parrot but – Superman! Is it a bird? Is it a plane…?
Beba was feeling somewhat faint from the slide show in her head and the aroma of the chocolate. So she got out of the bath and went to look for the shower. In passing she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror and gave a start. She looked like a gigantic chocolate owl.
‘What about your massage, madam?’ the woman in the white coat called after her.
‘We’ll leave the massage for another time,’ said Beba, getting into the shower. Instead of raising her spirits, the bath had had quite the opposite effect. Beba felt as though she had emerged from a whirlpool which had drained all her energy.
Hurrying to tell Pupa what that stupid ‘truffle’ was like, Beba nearly collided with Mr Shaker. Catching sight of an unappealing woman, spreading a disagreeable sweet smell round her, Mr Shaker scowled.
‘Have a nice lay,’ said Beba pleasantly.
Mr Shaker said nothing, just rolled his eyes and hurried on his way.
Heavens, what an
unpleasant guy! thought Beba. Because Beba, knowing that Mr Shaker and Kukla were going to play golf that afternoon, had simply wanted to wish him a nice day.
What about us? We hasten on. While life mocks us, often seeming absurd, the tale flies on through the air – like a bird!
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 12
