by Jerzy Pilch
Her fetishism confirmed an eloquent detail, which—it goes without saying—I noticed late. In general, it is good that I noticed it at all. The material for observation was abundant and near. She often brought girls along. To me. To my apartment. Like a complete sucker, I offered them permanent hospitality. Come on by, whenever you like, and with whom you like, the second room is free. Anka Chow Chow lived with her parents. This didn’t bother her at all. Orgiastic inclinations are one thing, living with one’s parents quite another. I understood this like Mozart understood music. Chasing after babes is one thing, waking up alone is quite another. My offer concerned the first part of that conjunction. Breakfast for three figured minimally in my considerations. But I imagined the role of host with juvenile generosity. Perhaps I didn’t want to be the master of ceremonies, it wasn’t quite that kitschy, but all the same I counted—no point in trying to hide it—I counted on the idea of being admitted one of these times.
She brought along girls who were wise and stupid, short and tall, with long hair and closely shorn, clothed indifferently and dressed to kill, fat and skinny, pretty and ugly, and when, finally, I began to suspect her of complete chaos in her tastes, I discovered the key. When, the next morning, I stumbled over the next backpack of the next girlfriend lying in the hallway, the puzzle arranged itself in a logical whole. Anka had a weakness for girls with backpacks. After the discovery of this shocking truth, I knew in advance the course of the subsequent evenings. If the girl who was accompanying Anka had a handbag, it ended with supper, and often only with tea. If the new conquest had a haversack or a shoulder bag, they would sit and chat for a long time, but always, even if it was in the middle of the night, the other one would go home. It was exclusively girls with backpacks who spent the night. On these occasions, supper would be intense, but short, they would quickly go to the other room, and the light was quickly turned off in there. Once, I couldn’t stand it, I pretended that, half asleep, after a drink and in the dark, I had lost my way, and although I didn’t see anything, to this day it seems to me that, in the white bank of tangled bedclothes, I saw Anka’s hands on the duskiest and smoothest back in the world. (My delusions had not lost their panache.) I apologized, withdrew, and, pretending that I was reading a book, sat in the highest tension. It was just getting light when I finally heard steps. First Anka went to the bathroom, then looked in on me. “Why are you so upset?” she asked. “I hope you aren’t jealous about a girl. Until you can remember where you saw me for the first time, nothing doing. To make it easier for you, I will add that it was not at the match. And if you remember, who knows—maybe?” She looked me in the eye, and it was clear that she knew my most shameful thoughts. She claimed that she was teasing me, but she inflicted torments upon me.
To force me to recall anything whatsoever—that was yanking my chain enough. To force me to recall something that I couldn’t for the life of me recall—that was flagrant yanking. Just how much time had I spent in determining who looked like Tolstoy’s son-in-law in a newspaper picture? And I was able to do that only because the matter concerned my childhood. Anka Chow Chow was most definitely not a character from my childhood. Of that I was one hundred percent certain.
Once, in my youth, a girl on a Cross Section cover enraptured me. There was something extraordinary in her facial features, in the arrangement of her shoulders (back?), in any case, I kept that issue for a long time, a very long time, I think it was still wandering about my papers until recently. Quite a few years later, I made the acquaintance of a fattish, but appetizing, retired model in her thirties. Among the yellowed photos from her glory days, which she eagerly showed me, was also that cover from Cross Section. The thought that the fattish retiree once had had an incarnation so intensely remembered by me gave unusual fuel to my fading desires. Now I instinctively repeated that path; I attempted to find among old photographs, images, street scenes, the one on which there appeared some sort of excavational image of Anka. Nothing of the sort came to the surface. I badgered her to give me at least some sort of trail, the trace of a trail. For a long time she dug in her heels, saying that she wouldn’t.
Finally, seeing the total hopelessness of my dementia, she sighed and said: “OK, you could simply have seen me for the first time in Yellow Dream, since I, too, was a regular. The secret of our first meeting is not all that shocking. We simply saw each other in a café. As a consolation for that poverty, I’ll tell you a certain story, or rather a scene, at which—in my opinion—you were present two or three years ago. That’s right: you, too, were there indeed, drank the wine and the mead, but you didn’t see a thing. Maybe you were staring in another direction, or maybe you were having a collapse. There isn’t any sort of great plot to it, but hear me out, write it down, and print it; maybe the girl I will tell you about will read it, recognize the details, and report to us. I have been looking for her, and this story is like a letter in a bottle. I hope such a metaphor doesn’t irritate you.”
VI
And so, one day, let’s say it was on Friday, 2 September, in the year 2… , a few minutes before 5 in the afternoon, Anka Chow Chow dropped by Yellow Dream, and, as she did every day, she ordered a double espresso. Her usual place by the window and at the same time right by the door—looking at it from within, on the righthand side—was occupied by a colorless and badly dressed girl feverishly tapping out SMSes.
“That spoiled my mood a bit, but only a bit. For the time being, it wasn’t so bad that I would engage in a sclerotic battle for territory in a practically empty café. ‘I beg your pardon most earnestly, but I always sit here. Would you care to… etc.’”
Nothing of the sort. She calmly sat down at that same panoramic window, except that she was four chairs to the right. Right in front of her, she had the little café garden, further, a view of Marszałkowska Street. She was in the very heart of Warsaw, and that still made an impression on her. Not that she was constantly staring at the Palace of Culture; for something like two years now, with the naturalness of the locals, she had ceased to notice that building, but she felt not bad—even very not bad—in its shadow.
She screened—if one may so put it—the house part and the garden part, and she didn’t note anything worth noting. True, in the corner sat a rather ripe and rather spacious busty one with a daring décolletage in a brick-red dress, but her ripeness, spaciousness, bustiness, and even brick-redness could be located just as well on the plus side as the minus. Overall balance: zero. I do not need to add that in describing the brick-red busty one, Anka glanced at me unusually significantly. The phrase brick-red busty one made an impression on me, and I attempted to disinter her incarnation from countless layers of brain dust. Supposedly, I had stared at her so ravenously that I didn’t see anything of the world beyond her. But neither her, nor the world beyond her, could I remember for all the tea in China.
The colorless girl finished tapping out SMSes, drank up what was left to drink, and left. Anka immediately moved and occupied her favorite position.
As a regular, I knew perfectly well the virtues of that spot. You sat on the invigorating border between the scorching day and the cold of the air conditioning; you saw everything, and simultaneously you remained in partial hiding. At any moment, you could set off on the chase for someone, and, at any moment, you could avoid unwanted company. At any moment, you could leave, or order something more, or—if a dire situation arose—you could dive into the depths and disappear in the toilet.
Anka took out a lighter and cigarettes. Before she lit up, that one wasn’t yet there, but by the time she had lit up, she was already there. She must have arrived in the moment of concentration on the flame. In general, this didn’t matter. It didn’t matter in what fragment of a second and from what direction she arrived, whether she arrived from the left or from the right, whether from the Roundabout or from Wspólna Street. Nothing mattered. You could see with the naked eye that she was out of the question. And it is a matter of thorough indifference from what direction women wh
o are out of the question arrive.
She was young, tall, and ravishing. But she was out of the question not because she was too young, too tall, and too ravishing. On that particular day, Anka had boundless enthusiasm and would have lunged at even that sort of beauty. But it was clear that this one had not dropped by for a solitary coffee. She had a date with someone.
“She looked around, searching for the lucky guy, whom I had already managed to hate with all my heart. She looked around, but he—most clearly—was not there yet. The ninny hadn’t gotten there yet. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let’s not be reckless. He hasn’t gotten there? Would he be late? Something didn’t add up here.” Anka Chow Chow pondered the situation, which was, on the one hand, seemingly entirely normal, on the other hand, entirely impossible. She pondered deeply and with a sort of quasi relief. She realized that her hatred was most likely premature.
It was more or less four after five, in other words the super babe had had a date for five o’clock, and since she came almost on time and was the first to get there, she had a date, almost a hundred percent for certain, with a female colleague, or some other cousin. If it had been a guy, no matter who he was—a Russian millionaire, a Hollywood star, a Milanese fashion designer—no matter who he was, he would have been waiting for her for at least a quarter hour. She was the sort of woman for whom you don’t arrive late, or even merely on time. She was the sort of woman for whom you come well ahead of time, in order to have the illusion that the dates last longer.
She spotted a free table in the corner of the garden, at a maximal distance from Anka, but with ideal visibility.
“This offered me favorable conditions for observation. From the very beginning, I rejected all attempts at establishing contact with her. I drank coffee and contemplated her without painful emotion. The ritual thoughts that I would never have her, that I would never find out what her name is, and that, having seen her once in my life in Yellow Dream, I would most certainly never see her again, didn’t trouble me in the least. She was a tall, slender, delicate, long-haired blonde. Tall, slender, and delicate blondes were, if I’m not mistaken, the absolute hit of your youth.”
VII
So they were. She didn’t have to look at me questioningly. I knew perfectly well what she was talking about. Of course, they were a hit. They were the ideal. They were the ideal not only of my youth, they were the ideal in general. Until quite recently, tall, slender, and delicate blondes constituted the unrivaled model of beauty. They became Miss Europe and Miss World. They were chosen as the queens of lyceum balls and the Miss Congenialitys of university villages. In stifling visions, they descended to us from the pages of western journals, we saw them on the screens of movie theaters, we read about them in novels, sometimes they passed us by on the street. They took our breath away, but we didn’t suffer; we were reconciled to our fate. We rejoiced that they had been created; but we knew that they were not created for us, and this caused us no pain. But they—seemingly still worshipped and adored—began to show up less and less frequently. There were fewer and fewer of them. They began to disappear, imperceptibly but inexorably. The extinction approached as quietly as a whisper. In the following years and decades, tall, slender, delicate, and long-haired blondes began to die out as a species. I don’t say that in the following years and decades there occurred a holocaust of tall blondes, but something like an extermination took place in all certainty. And this wasn’t a symbolic or metaphoric extermination. No. The cataclysm began suddenly. Suddenly, there arose the brutal storm of various retro- and afro-brunettes, multicolored Iroquois women, wet Italian women, and punkers shaven as if for delousing. Dusky pipsqueaks in combat boots, alleged Mullatoes, and hothouse Latinas bred in solariums suddenly began to sting venomously. It never occurred to poor Witkacy, who prophesied extermination through the attack of Asiatic hordes, that hordes of female Vietnamese vendors, Ukrainian cleaning women, and Russian whores would bring this extermination on their rickety busts. In addition, a propaganda campaign, prepared by who knows whom, was launched to defile and slander blondes.
Thousands of jokes about blondes perfectly familiar to you, pasquinades about blondes, pamphlets against blondes got under the skin of the masses, who were always inclined to mount pogroms. The ideal of the blonde beauty has reached the pavement. The great extermination has come for the blondes.
How were the subtle and delicate, fearful and defenseless poor things supposed to defend themselves? What were they supposed to do? They did what all hounded tribes do in the face of extermination. They changed their confession and hair color, cut their hair short and colored it dark. They denied it over and over, and not for all the treasures in the world would they acknowledge their blonde roots. Those who had fallen the lowest, and those who were dyed the most, were first in line to attack their blonde former sisters. The most noble of them emigrated or went into the underground. And the tall, slender, delicate, and long-haired blondes definitively—so it would seem—disappeared from the face of the earth. Once in a while, we would see their shadows in archival films or on old photographs, but such traces only increased their absence.
I wanted to say that it is time to return tall, delicate, and long-haired blondes to grace; I wanted to deliver a daring and convincing defense of blondes; after the defense, I wanted to go on to a soaring encomium of blondes, but I gave it up. Anka’s hair, thick as graphite, gleamed like Siberian anthracite.
VIII
The girl was wearing a dirty-russet blouse with shoulder straps and jeans. What sort of shoes she had on, Anka—strange to say—didn’t know. In general, she didn’t remember other details except for a wide pants belt with classical patterns. Was she aware that, sooner or later, the greater part of the image would irrevocably slip from her mind, and so—just like me in such situations—she concentrated on fundamental things? One way or another, God gave her a sign. The blonde’s back was like a soaring flame. She had sat down, however, facing Anka. God had given her a sign, but He didn’t allow her to contemplate it.
“What was I supposed to do? Get offended? Avert my glance? My cult of women’s backs had not reached the point of such deviations, nor had I completely lost my marbles. Quite the contrary. What is more, the splendor of her collar bones rivaled the splendor of her shoulder blades. A rare case of complete harmony. I stared greedily. Not only at the collar bones. There is no point in hiding it: I was desperately and shamelessly fixed on the movements of her breasts under the dirty-russet blouse.
“Incidentally, the dirty-russet blouse was of an exclusive label, which one, I don’t precisely know, but top of the line. That was quite certainly a piece of clothing purchased that summer in Rome or Barcelona.” Anka emphasized this circumstance for my sake.
“For your generation, dirty-russet will be, until the end of your days, the color of People’s Poland’s train linemen. Granted, her blouse was dirty-russet, but this doesn’t mean that it was a rag from a second-hand store or an air-dropped tatter from the times of Martial Law. But returning to her breasts, you have to say in all simplicity: they were fantastic. I don’t know whether you are aware of this, but there exist certain types of fantastic busts that are not accepted by their owners, but even on account of that, on account of their—so to say—self-questioning, are all the more fantastic.”
I wasn’t aware of this. Anka, on the other hand, immediately knew perfectly well that the blonde beauty was not satisfied with her bust. It goes without saying that then, in Yellow Dream, that skepticism wasn’t visible. It was quite easy to imagine, however, and even to behold clairvoyantly, how she stands day after day in front of the mirror and is in a bad mood, or, in the best case, has hefty doubts, because she thinks obsessively that they are too small, too delicate, too soft, too spindly, not spherical enough, etc. And what is more, those manias were justified in some sense. She did not—according to objective measurements—have an ideal figure. The geometrical profile of her body was not the full sinusoid in the desired places. Her bust
was, in fact, too small, too delicate, too fidgety, and too spindly.
“Not that I would, you know, carp, but the rear that flashed at me a moment ago—regardless of its fieriness—is too flat. And yet, the overall sum: dazzling, captivating, and—as in some dreams—suffocating. The ideal of beauty is based on geometry, but the ideal of femininity is based on changeability. Forgive the erudite metaphors, but the ideal of femininity in its essence is not Euclidian—it is Heraclitean.”
The blonde belle approached the counter, ordered tea (let’s not get all excited about the informality of this choice), returned to the table, glanced at her watch. Anka wasn’t especially curious about her tardy female colleague, nor was there even a hint of the rookie’s speculations whether she, too, would be dazzling. That was even out of the question from the point of view of probability. There are few lasting and verifiable principles in the world, but the principle that, in a pair of girlfriends, one is the cow always comes true! Always! This is incontrovertible. “And so, I was curious, at the most, about the shape of the shadow that would approach her splendor any moment now.”
