Letters from Yelena

by Guy Mankowski

By then your world had already become a deeply intriguing place to me. I had glimpsed at its real workings only sporadically, and in your home I could not help but look for traces of the real you. It was a quirk of fate that I was left alone in your house for those four days. My landlady had informed me that renovations were being undertaken on our block for that month, and along with the twisted ankle and your agent’s meeting, events had conspired to leave me alone in a maze of your making. I could not help hoping that I would find you at the centre of it, even in your absence.

  Your home did not disappoint. Even the most casual visitor would have seen that it served as a rich exhibition of you. Your different sides were on show amongst the sculptures, the paintings, the records and the books. Each one seemed to hold a story about you. Who had painted the portrait of you, using just red and orange, that hung in the hallway? Why did you have so many Bowie records? Who had made the sculpture that was so unnecessarily prominent in the kitchen? With each hour that passed I could not help delving deeper into your world.

  Staying in your house offered a way to stave off the feeling of abandonment. Remember, Noah, I was alone in a country I knew little about, unable to work and pretty much immobile. As a result of what Elizabeth had told me, the feeling of worthlessness still lingered and I was plagued by questions. I do not illuminate my frame of mind to then try and excuse my actions, merely to draw a backdrop for them.

  I decided to fill my attention with your writing. At first it worked too, because it was so obvious that your new protagonist was based on me. She was a dancer, trying to escape her dark past by creating a new identity for herself. She was successful at it too, and as the story progressed her ghosts progressively vanished, as she became the person she wanted to be. I was struck by the lavish way you described her, she did not appear haunted by the past at all, merely determined to leave it behind her. She had always known that she had her charms, but she had only recently been in situations where it could work to her advantage. I found myself in the strange position of envying a character that was based on me. She was more fanciful and inspirational than me. Of her, you said, ‘She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application.’ Although I did not recognise myself in that description, I hoped that one day I might.

  At that stage you did not know what exactly I had run from, and I wondered how differently your novel might have developed had you known about Bruna. But your depiction of me was not rendered obsolete by any understandable ignorance. You offered me some compelling insights into the way I present myself. You described real situations I’d been in, in which you made me sound more articulate, more persuasive, than I had ever thought I was. I found myself invigorated, as well as slightly unnerved by your depiction of me. I wondered though, had you been sticking so close to me so that you could better describe your character? Had you been encouraging my personal development so that it fitted with that of your protagonist? The Yelena in your pages was more focused, more successful than I had ever been.

  I consumed your whole book in one sitting, and was enchanted by your use of language. I read your story while slowly pacing around your home, and as I finished the final pages I found myself again distracted by the objects there on display. I was fascinated by the thought that a home could reflect the inner architecture of its owner. Wanting nothing more than to hold onto you, I felt that by understanding the parameters of your world I could ensure my presence in it. At times, the feelings of doubt and fragility in my mind were forming into sneers from a familiar, husky voice. Bruna was there, ever present in my moments of weakness. Her presence had developed from the sound of her evil laugh to her instantly recognisable taunts. You’ll never keep him, it seemed to say. Your only hope of holding onto him is to find out everything you can while you have the chance, and then using that to bond him to you.

  I began to see your home as though it were something different. I paced each room, looking for the smallest clue as to the real you. I had to know you completely. I had to know you better than any woman ever did. I noticed a drawer embedded in the side of your couch. Slowly, I opened it, and a raft of letters and photos poured out onto the floor beneath me.

  I never went looking for them. Not really. They found me. But I could have bent down, put them away and closed the drawer. My conscience will not allow me to deny that having seen them I couldn’t resist exploring them. As I picked the documents up, a black and white photo of a dark-haired girl caught my eye. She was lying topless on your bed, laughingly shielding herself from the gaze of the camera. I could not make out her face, and before I knew it I was searching through the letters to find other photos from the set.

  I found that there were many of them. And that furthermore, you had charted her body the way a mariner might chart an ocean. There were the stills of her, laughing as you photographed. Many, many photos of this girl in exactly the same pose, her chin perhaps propped up by her fist so the lens could languish on the sensuous curl of her back. Other photos, captured with the accuracy of a fetishist, which focused upon the accentuated muscles of her chest, your fingers sometimes trailing upon them. You seemed enraptured by the way she twisted her hair into one thick lock, allowing it to fall over her left shoulder. The camera also adored the sharp slash of paint around her eye, the slight digress of eyeliner in its corner. At the foot of one photo I saw that your muse had signed her name. In thick, smeared marker pen there was the single word ‘Catherine’, and the date.

  I couldn’t help it. I started to delve deeper into the documents, looking for that distinctive signature again. ‘Keep going,’ the voice seemed to say. ‘It would be utterly pointless, cowardly even, to stop now.’

  I found a couple of shoeboxes filled with letters – all signed by various different women. In one box I saw that every letter ended with her distinctive, lazy scrawl. As I read her words I experienced an exhilarating, singular thrill, knowing that I was trespassing into a realm that could be very dangerous. I started to think it was worth the risk, it was possible that by doing this I could soothe my own anxieties and also gain enough knowledge to work out how to keep you. I want you to know, Noah, I read those letters like an archaeologist searching for a mysterious subject through miles of sand. I was looking for you. It was never mere nosiness or abandon that drove me. I don’t know if it makes my intrusion better or worse, but the mutual fascination between us fuelled the search. A symptom of love, you might argue.

  The letters suggested that you and Catherine met just after you’d broken up with Elizabeth. Catherine, it seemed, was a sculptor who you had met at an exhibition. There were various references to ‘the night of the exhibition’, where you had first been introduced. You’d started to argue about a certain painter. Bickering inevitably turned into flirtation, leading to a meeting that began a passionate affair.

  Catherine’s first letters were waspish, dismissive, but the writing suddenly became sexualised and even aggressive. Letter after letter detailed the two of you at your most intimate. How she loved to be scratched in the act of lovemaking, and how you in turned loved the way she reacted. The precise sound of the scream she made when you bit her neck, which you described in indulgent and onomatopoeic terms. You described the way the tone of her voice lowered after you had brought her to climax, and the effect that had on you.

  My eyes struggled at first to linger for long enough on the details. Gold heels with long stilettos were mentioned, a perfect black dress that she wore on a certain night out, when the two of you took a taxi to nightclubs on the edge of the city. Clasping yourself together for hours to the sound of dirty electro music before going home to inevitably act out your fantasies on one another. Corsets were mentioned, black ribbons that tied together wrists, stockings worn with a great sense of erotic occasion and then ripped to shreds in the act of lovemaking. The images searing past me, some lodging in my consciousne
ss, some just glancing past me – too painful for me to yet absorb.

  Having ensnared her, it seemed that she now suddenly expected a great deal of you. You had to live up to some agreement that was never specified. It seemed evident that whatever the agreement was, it was asking a lot of you, as she only ever seemed to reference it using critical terms. I remember reading the sentence, ‘If you want really me, then you must prove you are what you say you are.’ It seemed that you had perhaps captured every inch of Catherine’s body in the photographs because you had quickly learnt that she would only briefly be in your life. Whatever she was asking of you, you evidently didn’t feel able to give it. In the end I read every letter of hers in that box – but this mysterious agreement was never specified. What was apparent though, was that your relationship was more physical than emotional, and that you were both giving one another something that no-one else had offered before.

  I was slightly relieved to see those photos covered in dust as if you hadn’t needed them lately, and yet I wondered why you had not photographed me in that way. The letters betrayed that she was of Italian origin, but that she had lived in England for the duration of your affair. You had once mentioned that your last serious lover had suddenly vanished from your life, and I did notice how suddenly the letters ended. You had never explained to me why she disappeared, and I found myself scouring the final letters for traces of an explanation. The only possible explanation seemed to lie in her repeated declarations that you prove yourself to her; and these requests became more and more pronounced in the final few letters. I could only conclude she then vanished, and must have left much unresolved in you.

  It shames me to admit that I became so consumed with the thought of this elusive woman that at one point I spread out all of Catherine’s letters and photos on the floor. I hoped this would allow me to learn and then mimic what it was about her that had appealed to you, so that I could come to replace her completely. But all I did was intoxicate myself with the impressions left by a ghost. I knew all about the urgent way you made love, the way she liked you to rub her hands, the afternoons you spent hunting for antiques along the coast. But of course, the real Catherine remained undefined, embedded somewhere amongst that distinctive, looping handwriting. Eluding both you and me.

  The thirst for knowledge consumed me. I needed to know more about the woman I so desperately wanted to replace. It didn’t even help to recall the assuring words you had left me with. I was now so panicked that I was unable to use them, and so they couldn’t calm me. Despite my best attempts to reason with myself, when I visited the pharmacy for painkillers I found myself cautiously browsing the hair dyes, eventually fixing on a brown tint that promised the exact sheen your camera had evidently striven to capture. Back at your house, I washed it through my hair whilst singing; to try and convince myself that this was just something I was doing for fun rather than trying to mimic and transcend the elusive charms of a ghost. Afterwards, focused on the mirror, I bunched my hair into one single lock and place it over my shoulder, and found myself perfecting the pout that had come so naturally to her.

  I was suddenly overcome by tiredness. I left the letters on the floor and went up to your bed. I had the sense of a knot tightening in my head, a feeling I had not had since the days before the Vaganova. A feeling which then I had only ever been able to relieve with the guilty, sterile comfort of a razor blade. I found myself in your bathroom, looking for something sharp. ‘No, don’t,’ I told myself. ‘Don’t give in to it.’

  Without the relief of release, sleep did not come quickly. I was left to fight with those thoughts in the darkness; vulnerable to being carried wherever they wanted me to go. I knew there was no escaping the fact that I had just crossed a boundary, and entered a place that it would not be easy to return from.

  Yelena

  Noah,

  This isn’t a letter so much as a confession, and I know you are aware of that. That night, there was tension inside me that was building and building. It felt impossible to relax in a place that I now knew contained so many secrets. I found myself curling up in a small corner of the bed, trying to tell myself that this would all be resolved as soon as you came back.

  Part of the tension came from guilt, and another part from fear. A kind of skewed logic had begun to take hold of my brain. I had damaged our relationship by betraying your trust and yet I hadn’t achieved anything in doing so. After all, I didn’t have enough information to feel that I could keep you. So I decided that I might as well go further.

  I got up, walked over to your computer and switched it on. As it whirred to life I told myself that I would only look for your writing on it, which would allow me to understand you more. I felt I was only addressing the concern that Elizabeth had raised; that I should be reading your work. Just as the computer started up, a small envelope shaped symbol appeared in the corner of the screen. Above it, the caption read: ‘You have 1 New Message – from C’.

  I clicked on it. I can’t justify each decision from now on, I was caught in the momentum. As I opened the email there was a small portrait of its sender in its top left corner. A shiver went through me as I saw that she had a thick crop of dark hair, but the photo was too small to distinguish her features. The email had only been sent a few hours ago, at 6.13pm. It read:

  Dear Noah

  It was lovely to see you at the talk last week. It’s such a shame we weren’t able to speak for longer, but I understand that you have many commitments to keep. Nonetheless, our brief conversation was just as illuminating as I had expected it to be. I do hope you get the chance to look up my most recent work, as you mentioned you might. It would be thrilling to hear your thoughts on it.

  Xxx

  C

  I read the message once, with an encroaching sense of horror, and then again and again. I feel feverish now, just recalling that moment.

  The email seemed to demonstrate just how cursed I was by fate. Here I was, immersed in your home, pining for your return, and yet here was proof that you were flirting with other women. The email instantly called into question the validity of all the hopes and expectations I had for us. During the dizzying hours that followed I urged myself to find it in me to trust. But then I had no experience of rightfully trusting anyone. What I did have was the sense that I was missing something if all seemed well, and there, in tedious black and white, was the proof that my suspicions were reasonable. Suddenly all my guilt about reading your letters evaporated.

  After a few tense hours between the sheets, my mind told me not to simply give in, but to fight. I quickly decided that I must respond to this ‘C’. I had to message her back, to neuter this threat. I was going to masquerade as you, to subtly investigate just what was going on. And then I was going to cover my tracks.

  I carefully typed my reply, anxious to use exactly the right tone. It had to be both subtle and flirtatious, a careful approximation of the manner in which you’d have spoken to her. I felt strangely comfortable adopting your tone – inquisitive, calm, and yet quietly attentive. I enquired about where I might find her new work, mentioned it was a shame we’d not spoken for longer. I knew that my reply needed to be ambiguous enough to accommodate if you had just met her, or if you’d known her for a very long time. At the end of it I mentioned that I was no longer using this email account, and I diverted her to a new email address, which I quickly registered and activated. I remember that it contained some variation of your surname. It pains me to think it probably still exists, somewhere in the digital wilderness. And before I had even checked it, it was sent. I then deleted my reply, along with her original email so you would never know she had been in touch.

  I kept the new account open on the screen. A few minutes later a response appeared in it:

  Dear Noah,

  What a pleasant surprise to have such a quick reply! As a famous writer I didn’t think you would get the chance to reply to such vague requests by admirers, especially at night! It would be an honour to show you my new
work. So many of the people at those events are old and boring, you were the first vaguely interesting person I had spoken to all day! Perhaps one day we can meet again and finish that conversation?

  Xxx

  C

  That was definitely where it should have ended – well, clearly I see now it should never even have gone that far. I needed to know if this ‘C’ was the elusive Catherine that had left so suddenly. I needed to know if she posed any real threat. I needed to meet her.

  Dear C, (my reply read)

  Why wait? Let’s meet tomorrow at 12pm, under the statue in the town square. We can go for a bite to eat, and you can tell me more about your work.

  x

  Noah

  The email felt like a clumsy, temporary solution, but I felt emboldened by the thought that I was tackling my anxieties head on. In a strange way, Noah, at that moment I felt proud that I was fighting so hard to protect our relationship. Only now do I see how flawed my logic was, how twisted my concept of normal behaviour had become that night. You would be away for a couple more days, and I told myself this would give me plenty of time to identify ‘C’, remove her from your life, cover my tracks and perhaps even prepare a fitting confession for when you returned home. That night I almost slept well, because I was able to convince myself that very soon this mental intensity would be over, and I would be able to go back to enjoying my new life.

  The following morning the sky was overcast, and it looked as if it would rain at any moment. I dressed smartly, already formulating in my mind how I would handle this meeting once it was confirmed. My reflection in the mirror, with my hair now darkened, somewhat frightened me. I ran my fingers through it, and let it fall naturally down my back. To lighten the change in me I wore a slash of red lipstick, with my black raincoat and high heels. There was just enough time to check for a response from C before setting off. Sure enough, there was a new message: