The typing in the back room thundered pompously. I met Mona in this exchange office in St. Vitus eighteen months ago. I had just peeled myself out of the hands of my boss and buried my nose in the novel I was reading at the time. My boss fancied himself a writer. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, he was a tall, bony bachelor. He moonlighted as an editor of an environmental magazine with a circulation of zilch and dabbled in fiction. Editor had a needlefish mouth and a hard-edged jawline. His face looked gaunt, scripture-like, and I got the feeling that inside he gaped empty as a walnut shell.
I had just put the sorted schillings, lira, and marks into the safe in his office and was about to go back to the reception desk. As I turned, I faced him only inches from me, quiet as a thief, eyes blazing with urgency. He lunged forward and swung his arms around me as if there was no question about what he was doing. He proceeded to stuff my mouth with his tongue and my shirt with his hands, deft as a taxidermist packing a bird with cotton. As if my body could not hold itself up without him filling it.
He pressed his crotch into the bowl of my hip, dug into me tooth and claw. My shirt came off diving like an ambushed bird. Shoved against the metal safe, I could feel his belt scratching against my abdomen, file drawer handles cutting into my back. We wrestle-kissed see-sawing between hunger and nausea, me clutching at my jeans as his hands rushed into them.
“Come on, c’mon, Ida, gimme some,” he breathed into my face, his erection furious, his breath sour. I ducked under his arm, and covering my breasts with my left hand, picked up my shirt from the dusty parquet floor. He started pacing back and forth around the room, wiping sweat out of his eyes, bemoaning his singledom, his cursed life, his unrecognized talent, prospects such as me. A thin frizz of hair haloed around the red frenzy of his face.
One time last fall, and one time only—after we closed the exchange office for the day— things got hot and heavy with us. We had stopped at the tavern briefly, after which he walked me home. I’d had a couple of drinks and felt momentarily aroused by who knows what, the change of seasons, the temperature drop, the liveliness of the sea wind. Technically speaking, I was still a virgin, not counting the round hairbrush handle, the thermometer, and so on. What I needed, though, was something more significant, a miracle hand to pick me up and set me free beyond the monotony of the everyday. I don’t actually know why I made out with him. He repulsed me. These things, they happen.
In his dank office I felt like a small animal, sick inside. I wanted to make his hands dematerialize, to fade away and vanish into a twist of smoke, right in front of his eyes. I wanted him flailing around his cluttered desk with useless arm stumps and his stupid erection. Instead, I told him that he was a fine man, but that I had herpes and didn’t want to infect him. He promptly calmed down. I walked over to the front room, sat back at the reception counter, picked up my book, and hid my face in its relieving pages.
◆
The open front door let in the gurgle of waves swelling against the dock. The sea was wine-dark and moody that day. I didn’t hear her walk in.
“Good morning,” she cleared her throat.
She resembled a dream gone bad. Matted ash blond hair, cut in a short utilitarian style, bordered her square face and hazy, slightly distant eyes. A hunter-green parka hugged her shoulders, and beneath it a plaid shirt hung loose down to the narrow gorge between her breasts. She placed her duffel bag next to her feet, looked straight at me and twisted her mouth.
“I’ll be bartending at the Moon Valley,” she said referring to the harbor tavern, a quaint hangout for local drifters and punk rock kids, then asked if I happened to know of any vacant rooms for rent.
I’d been living in the seasonal workers quarters, a small two-bedroom. Not a comfy playground, but fine, inexpensive digs that became a kind of an extended stay after I arrived here two years ago for what was supposed to be a summer gig.
“I’ll pay half the rent and keep out of your hair.”
When she walked out, I noticed someone had dragged a skiff onto the dock. It lay upside down, its old paint gone, waiting for a new coat.
By the end of the day, I no longer lived solo. And my social circle doubled. I stayed up that night and continued reading the novel. It was about this morphine addict, an ex-cop, who gets out from a psyche ward and meets a shady but stunning woman in a hotel bar. They go upstairs to the room and fuck, after which he wakes up submerged in the tub of ice and his own blood, with a missing kidney. She’s already gone, and he, of course, falls in love with her. Shady Gorgeous, body like a knife.
Perhaps that’s what love is—a hole someone leaves in us, a lasting void. I fell in love with Shady Gorgeous, too.
Editor believed my herpes fib. What I started to believe was that all any person wanted was someone who’d take away a part of them. A total, irreparable catastrophe. That, and solace.
◆
Mona was a kleptomaniac. I never suspected it. She didn’t seem the compulsive type. She did have a habit of walking into the bathroom without knocking. The first time she did that I stood with one leg rooted on the ground, and the other propped on the sink, my inner thigh raw from waxing strips. Toothy January sunlight splashed through the frosted-glass window onto the square white tiles. The door opened directly to the skinny sink, my snatch rimmed with flamingo-colored bikini line. Mona seemed unfazed.
“Have any change on you, Twiggy? I need to go to the post office to make a call,” she said, one hand propped on her waist.
I placed my palm between my legs and pointed my chin in the direction of my ankle where my jeans and underwear gathered in a small puddle, and said, “Check my pockets.” She pulled out a couple bills, frilled like dried leaves, and walked out leaving the door open. Suddenly I became aware of the hollowness of the bathroom. The cool air nipped at my bare ass, my burning face. I felt sheepish, my face that of a guilty-looking dog that took a dump somewhere along a busy highway. But then a lighthearted swish of hilarity washed over me. Directly behind me squatted the toilet semi-partitioned by a simple shower curtain. Above the toilet hung a kitchen vent, which, when needed, churned the air, and provided a little more privacy than the curtain did. At least it muffled involuntary sounds, the posterior fizzle, the petard, Our Lady of Flatulence. Along the back wall, to my left, stretched the shower—an open, trough-like space with floor slightly sloping to the drain in the middle, and two showerheads bent the way tired bus riders holding onto the straps face each other in silence on the way to work.
Mona thought nothing of brushing her teeth naked while I’d be on the toilet, or walking into the shower while I was there already washing myself. At first, I resisted looking at her breasts folding over her ribs, her wet protruding nipples gazing sideways, her high-set hips, her wheat-colored muff. As the water poured over me, I got used to studying the tile grout in front of me and the irregular angles at which some tiles snuck away from the wall. I’d turn my pale rear to her, hair snaking down my back, but I don’t think she would’ve cared even if young Marlon Brando showered next to her.
My body looked boyish, lean, breasts the size of clenched baby fists. I ate carefully those days, and eventually trained my bowels into submission, making them do their loyal work of elimination in evenings, well before Mona would return home from work and unlock the front door.
She’d slide her boots off by the coat rack in the tiny hallway, then, while unbuttoning her parka, she’d walk into her room, located directly to her right. A few minutes later, she’d emerge, barefooted, shirt sleeves rolled up. She did this every night. Then she’d walk to the kitchen window, press her elbows into the sill and look at the bay in silence, the fishing boats slowly eating the path toward the horizon.
I never asked Mona if she had ever married, or if she had children. She looked old enough to have had them, and I knew better not to ask. With Mona, the rent became brilliantly cheap, and for the most part she kept out of my hair.
◆
Yet, a part of me entertained the possibility of eventually having future with Mona. The two of us, I thought, could share the bathroom for years to come, arrive home after work into our quietude, mine and hers together. I’d gradually grow stockier, stronger. She’d talk to me about her past. We’d get good at living. We’d travel together. Maybe, just maybe, she’d never leave.
Future aside, Mona, in a strange way, provided solace to me. She smelled of black pepper and wind. Of wild asparagus and cypress. Her footsteps reminded me of home, my mother walking in the door after the night shift. Of reassurance, possibility.
She looked out for me in quiet, undemonstrative ways. During my periods, she used to place heat packs on my back and offer me alternating sips of yarrow tea and small slugs of scotch. She used to touch the small of my back as if guiding the pain out.
On music nights she got hefty tips from out-of-town visitors, people with more money and education than any of us had. She brought home leftovers: bread heels, scraps of sharp sheep cheese, crispy fried mackerel wrapped in newspaper, a laminate pot of soupy chard, and polenta. She ate at the kitchen window late at night, sucking the fish heads creek-clean. In the mornings she fried thick slices of polenta with eggs. She’d make me a plate and then eat the rest straight from the pan, sopping up the bright orange yolk with day-old bread.
I had enjoyed watching Mona go about her tasks, tending to the bar, wiping down its top. A certain silent wisdom hovered over her, like a cloud trapped on a cool mountaintop. At home I savored sitting at the kitchen table with a book and, through the bathroom door left open, I watched her get ready for work. She used to brush her teeth in a hard, back-and-forth motion, spit into the sink, then gurgle and quickly run damp fingers through her hair. On special nights, before slipping on her shirt, she’d blot and carefully outline her lips in her only lipstick, peach-blush. On her wide face, with brows and lashes only insinuations of color, her lips shined as bright as a sliver of dawn breaking across the horizon.
It seemed as if Mona temporarily filled up a kind of vacancy. As if I had been sitting at an abandoned train station for years, and then she came and sat next to me, and for a moment I forgot about the train I had been waiting for.
◆
Torn fishnets draped the stone walls of the Moon Valley, golden quince sat on windowsills, and exposed bulbs hung, as if in resignation, over scuffed wooden tables. Other than the dusty bocce court by the market, where a few old men, mostly grandfathers in greasy pants and undershirts, would toss ball, the Moon Valley was the only place where people could gather.
In the cavernous nook in the back, bands would open with Roy Orbison or Johnny Cash covers in an angularly-rendered English. On slow days the local band, four guys who called themselves Pussy Smoke, played shirtless and skinny, delivering bright sonic punches, raw punk rock, usually too fucked up to hold themselves fully upright.
Sometimes fifteen to twenty misfits would gather, mostly youth from nearby places. They’d wear ripped jeans with chains and safety pins in their earlobes, the look they found in foreign music magazines. A bunch up front would spring up-down in pogo. Others, along the perimeter of the room, would nod along to unrefined noise, like philosophers in agreement with its wisdom of chaos. Pussy Smoke screamed and barked against school, against church, against politicians, against disco music, against the holes in their shoes and the hole in the collective soul, against, against.
In summers, this chanteur, we called him Hound, used to vacation in our town. He’d sit on a bar stool near the entrance, his English setter by his feet—a cared-for, genteel creature, his fur brushed and lustrous. They had matching wavy peppered hair, and while playing love ballads, the man would hold the guitar tight by the neck and pick the strings with the delicate precision of pleasuring a woman. The slow tempo, the intense melodies, and the crackle of his voice would wash over the sleeping dog and hush the tavern down. People would listen to him. In reverie, they’d bow down their heads the way women passing a roadside shrine do. Editor looked up to him. Between songs, he’d sometimes look over at me and grin like a jackal.
Hound reminded me of the ubiquitous western quasi-spiritualists: uniformed in white linen shirt with rolled-up sleeves, baggy linen pants, and a pair of leather sandals. His toenails were abnormally large and square. People assumed he was a moderate success abroad. Mona, however, would treat Hound with the same reserve as she treated the rest of the patrons. All we knew, he could’ve been just another gastarbeiter.
◆
One night, after a long day at work, which I primarily spent reading crime novels, I stopped by the Moon Valley. Niko, the cook, had already cleaned the kitchen and left. The tavern echoed with the choir of high-pitched cicadas pouring in through the front door. Those were the last sounds of pleasant nights, the chirping songs that die out with the cold’s first chokehold.
There was hardly anyone there, except Fran, a regular, who always sat three wooden stools from the left end of the bar. Fran was a middle-aged man with a worn but kind face and intensely melancholy eyes. He lived with his bed-ridden mother in a small house, drank more than he should’ve, and maintained the two of them by doing simple manual work—fishing, cleaning the market square, clearing septic tanks, collecting empty bottles from street trash cans, and delivering meals the convent nuns cooked for the elderly. He was the only man ever to flirt with Mona. He simply hadn’t enough common sense. Or perhaps he suffered the worst kind of romanticism.
As usual, Mona made me a bamboo, a half coke, half red wine drink, and placed it in front of me. She leaned in over the bar, making sure only I can hear her, and said, “I’m leaving next week.”
“Going home to visit family?” I asked, thinking everyone has someone somewhere. Perhaps a man?
“Nah, gonna try out Germany,” she said, then pulled off the towel hanging on the lever of the coffee machine. “Berlin.”
“Germany?! How come?”
“Winds change direction, and so should I,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, and started wiping glass rings off the bar top.
I nodded along, knowing well what direction the winds of change blew. Away from these shores.
“Might as well, there’s nothing to miss here, anyway,” I said and tried not to sound bitter.
“This place is going to feel empty without you,” I said looking past her shoulder at lined-up bottles, at men slouching along the bar like slugs on a fallen log, and kids talking about the revolutionary power of music.
“I’ll be back, Twiggy, and I’ll send money for rent,” she winked at me, then topped my glass, this time with just wine, and handed me a greasy newspaper swaddle of fried fish. This time, sardines, “Here, for breakfast.”
And so she left. In a blink. Before dawn, she walked to the bus station carrying that same duffle bag, leaving behind enough money on the kitchen table to cover her part of the rent for the next three months, and the door to her bedroom locked. I watched her from one of the windows, her solid frame disappearing down the narrow road, and the fluorescent strip on her bag reflecting the streetlight.
Saffron thistles and bramble conked out by the side of the road. She walked the narrow strip of dirt, the trail that in summer is powdery like compact blush and in fall turns wet like a tube of tinted moisturizer. A fitful gust of wind started picking up, shaking the treetops and stirring the dried pine needles around the street, then whisked them away.
Folks at the Moon Valley said she arrived safely to Germany, pointing at the Berlin postcard pinned behind the bar. It said, in a left-slanting, pointed cursive, Deutschland ist sehr gut. Remember to change the oil in the fryer.
Four weeks after she left, I also received a few pieces of mail from her, which arrived in a burst, within a few days from each other. The thin envelopes were covered in three Bundespost stamps each and a blue MIT LUFTPOST sticker.
Dear Ida.
I got a room in a courtyard apartment in Kreuzberg. It’s a bare bones Wohnegemeinschaft with a stairwell toilet that I share with a bunch of Turkish workers, but it’ll do temporarily. There’s plenty of work. Stocking drugstore shelves, cleaning hotels, schlepping stuff for restaurants, easy factory work. I’ll try to learn the language. It sounds similar to hacking. That shouldn’t be difficult.
Twiggy.
Food is cheap at the University Mensa. I’m pretty sure it’s 35% sawdust. And Turkish grub is cheap, too. There’s this warm sandwich, the Dönner kebab, that’s haven packed with succulent lamb. You should come, get fat.
Ida.
Workers who’ve been here a while say the government gives cash to gastarbeiters to leave the country. Some companies give several months’ pay, just to leave. You should come, stay for a few months, then cash the offer.
◆
“Niko, did ya know some folks drink piss?” Fran asked as the cook who tended the bar in Mona’s absence busied himself collecting empty glasses along the countertop. “And ya know what else? Some eat shit, turns them on. There’s even a big word for that,” he said while picking a scab off his chin and placing it between his teeth.
“Oh, man, I don’t care.”
“Yeah, right, you short-legged liar,” Fran quipped defensively, brushing cigarette ashes off his shirt. He turned to look at the stage, lifting his chin with the pride of a small-town smarty.
“Look at them grating apes. They should be admitted to music gulags,” Fran continued talking. On the stage the cover band played “California Dreaming” in a serious, military rendition, then transitioned, ever so smoothly, to “Las Mananitas.”
“Musicians created the world,” Niko laughed. “Before them there was only silence. Nada. A great big cosmic nothing.”
“And when everything went to pieces, there came cover bands.”
Niko laughed at Fran again, then leaned over the counter toward me, and the news slipped out like a fish through a pair of hands, “Mona’s not coming back.” Fran’s face winced, “Did Frau Mona find herself a wealthy Schwäbe?”
“I heard she walked into the department store where she was working in the back room, and cops walked her out in handcuffs,” Niko said, then, rinsing the froth-laced beer mugs in the sink, added, “One of those big shops the size of a town.”
“The fuck you saying? She got arrested?” Fran asked and immediately lit another cigarette. “What the fuck happened?” His face was flushed, eyes bright.
“Not sure, heard rumors she got blinded with bling on store shelves, stuffed her jacket with random things. Bottle openers, aftershave, fishing bait, some such. Makes no sense,” Niko said emptying an ashtray into the undercounter trash bin.
“Damn. I’d’ve saved my best catch for her every morning, all the herring and the squid, so long as she’d let me have her lil’ fishy,” Fran slurred. “Hell, I’d’ve pirated the whole coast for her.”
Niko flung the kitchen towel in the direction of Fran, as if swatting a fly, and shaking his head poured himself a vodka tonic. I gave Fran a disproving stare. He let out a nervous chuckle. “What?! She needs a good banging, you know it. If she had a man, this wouldn’t’ve happened,” Fran added.
“The woman is in jail, Fran. Show some respect, for God’s sake.”
“Ya vol!” Fran jokingly expressed his agreement in German, then added sotto voce to himself, cigarette dangling from his mouth, “And when she was all done eating the fish I caught for her, I’d lick her clean head-to-toe, mother cat style.”
“Word is she swiped all sorts of stuff, men’s watches, boxer shorts, pocket knives, razor blades. Supposedly her coat was so full that when they shoved her into the police car, she looked like a body that’s been swelling underwater for weeks. She lost her mind, I think,” Niko said, and started polishing white porcelain cups and stacking them on the coffee machine.
The band on the stage began playing “I Walk the Line,” the singer belting into, “I kee-ep a cloze vatch on dis hard-of-mine.” For a little while Niko’s words flickered in the dim light like fire made out of damp wood. I thought of Mona. I imagined tiny droplets of dormant desire trapped inside empty spaces of her body. Small universes of desire. I imagined those droplets gathered, and the water rising up through her collarbone, the tough axis of her will, breaking through and gushing like oil out of earth. Like celebration. I imagined her desire felt a little like a catastrophe, the way love makes you feel like you’re simultaneously breaking apart and becoming new.
◆
Mona left rent money under the fruit bowl in the kitchen and a few odd things around the apartment: her favorite coffee mug, a shirt in the laundry bin, and a pair of beat-up green galoshes. Her room remained locked like a letter that never made it to the recipient, all its whispers held inside. She stopped writing and soon all sorts of rumors spread about her. I figured life took hold of her. She went as a guest worker, and if lucky she’d become a German.
The place soon started feeling hollow. The corners of rooms gaped dark, the kitchen window empty, the stove flameless. The bathroom seemed unsettlingly bare. The coat hanger reached upwards like a solitary hand, and the air constantly smelled of resignation.
The coming weeks brought a strange wave of yearning. Every day I kept waking up in a ditch of unease, restless and directionless. Time had a sticky, long dial tone to it. The mornings seemed strange, vacant. I just wanted to go.
◆
At the agency I avoided Editor. He had brazened after Mona left and got grabby again. Eventually I told him I had to miss work for a few days. It’d be over a church holiday when the exchange office would anyway be closed, so he wouldn’t even be affected by my absence. I had a doctor’s appointment, I said, and some business to take care of in the city. I had already packed and decided to go abroad. Perhaps I’d enroll in night classes, learn a new language. I’d heard of people who had moved to Sweden, maybe I could work there as a hotel desk clerk, or in Italy as la badante, basically an au pair, just for old folks. Anything, I thought, would be a start. Late that night I swiped a couple hundred British pounds from Editor’s safe and took the manuscript pile next to his typewriter to the empty dock and tossed it into the sea, its darkness taking in a pandemonium of white falling sheets.
Early in the morning, with all my belongings in hand, I left Mona’s and my place behind. Her room remained locked the way she had left it. I caught the same bus to the city. As I boarded it, I took the last glance at the town. St. Vitus was heartbreakingly pretty at the thinning of the season. Seagulls landed on mooring bollards and lifted off masts like synchronized swimmers. The number of people strolling by diminished by day. The pungent scent of dying flowers drifted in the air as did the stale sea gathered in the guts of boats. Nature in decay. Nature in its most beautiful.
For the last time I took in the sound of the boat rigs clinking to the beat of the sea waves. I thought of Mona standing in our bathroom door and asking for money, and her long shadow the morning she left. I imagined her living in some sort of foreign heaven for thieves. I saw her standing under a magical blossoming tree, picking from it whatever longing her heart desired. It went that way forever, I thought, the heart knowing no limits, her hands forever busy harvesting.
I thought of Editor’s hands collecting words from his typewriter, the rhythmic click-clack of their Danse Macabre, their stuffing my body, the nauseating fullness I still feel, Niko lifting baskets of golden calamari rings from the fryer, Fran gathering shit out of septic tanks, Hound pulling sexy sadness out of his guitar. I thought of sinking into the hollow-bird vacancy within me. Shady Gorgeous fishing a kidney out of a man who loved her. More than anything I thought of the variance of grace with which each one of us loosened whatever desire we carried inside us.