Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [53]
“[Me? Spiteful? Never! This girl is pretty, she can’t talk much, and she’s got a real bird in her head. She’s a perfect mannequin.]”
“You shouldn’t trust this woman,” Ulrich told Maya in English. “She says you’re crazy.”
“So did you,” Maya said, munching. She glugged some mineral water. “It’s a job and I’m an illegal. It’s a really good break for me. Of course I’m gonna take it. What did you expect?”
Ulrich flushed, slowly. “I did everything you asked from me. I never broke even one of your rules. You’re not being very grateful.”
Maya shrugged. “Jimmy, there’s a million girls in the Marienplatz. Go pick up some other girl. I’ll be fine now.”
Ulrich yanked the bag from the table and slung it over his shoulder. “[If you think you’re moving up in society by going to work in this cow’s stupid little shop, you’ll soon learn differently. If you want to go, go! But don’t think you can come crawling back to the life of freedom!]”
“Her shop’s got heating,” Maya pointed out.
Ulrich turned in fury and lurched away.
There was a long silence. “Girl, you are really cold,” Therese said at last. Half-admiring.
3
Maya went to work for Therese in her shop in the Viktualienmarkt. The shop was glass-fronted brick, untidily crammed with clothes and shoes, with a tiny office in the back where Therese scraped out a narrow financial niche. Therese dealt mostly in cash, often in barter, sometimes in precious metals. Maya lived in the shop, wore her pick of the merchandise, and slept under Therese’s desk. Therese slept in her parents’ high-rise with a variety of scruffy, dangerous-looking, semiarticulate boyfriends.
It was a great comfort to be compelled to work and not have to spend so much time being perfectly free and happy and confident. All that freedom and happiness and confidence was terribly wearing.
One night at the shop in late February, Maya awoke to find herself sleepwalking, yet still compulsively putting the stock in order. That was Mia’s doing. Mia was all right now. Mia liked this situation. Mia felt very safe and at ease now that she had duties.
Maya worked quite hard and without complaint and without much in the way of reward, and Therese appreciated this. Like most young people who had created careers for themselves in the contemporary economy, Therese was a great connoisseur of the gratuitous gesture. Still, Maya was dissatisfied. She couldn’t read the tags in the clothing, and she couldn’t discuss things properly with the customers. This would not do.
Maya begged some cash off Therese, went to a cut-rate language school in the Schwabing section of Munchen, and bought 500 cc’s of education tinctures. These particular philters were said to convey a new plasticity for language, “giving the adult brain the eager syntactical receptiveness of a child of three.” All the smart drugs in the world couldn’t make the Deutsch language a cheap or easy accomplishment—but the “child of three” part certainly met its billing. The neural dope found her inbuilt mastery of English and put its pharmaceutical foot right through it, like a boot through a stained-glass window.
“You’d better ease off that cheap dope and try learning Deutsch the old-fashioned way,” Therese said.
“Ist mein Deutsch so schlecht, Fräulein Obermufti?”
Therese sighed. “Maya, you try too hard. People enjoy having foreign girls in a couture shop. It’s cute to be a young foreign girl. At least you can make correct change with silver money, and that’s more than Klaudia has ever managed.”
“Ich verstehe nur Wurstsalat. Am Montag muss ich wieder malochen.”
“Would you stop that? It’s eerie.”
“I really need to do this so that, uhm, können Sie mir das Dingsda da im Schaufenster zeigen?”
“Listen, darling, you can’t give anyone fashion advice. You don’t have any proper sense of chic. You dress just like a little California magpie.” Therese stood up. “I never