Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [75]
“It’s true that combining landlady with all those other social functions does seem excessive.”
“She spies on me! She reports me to hygiene authorities. She poisons the minds of my friends against me.” His brows knotted. “Did she talk to you? What did she say?”
“We didn’t really talk. She just gave me all these free coupons. Look, I can rent a bicycle with this one. And this chipcard here has a Praha net directory in English. I wonder what it says about photography studios.”
“It’s all rubbish. Worthless! A commercial snare!”
“When was the last time you actually paid the rent here? I mean, how do you remember to pay the rent?”
“Oh, I pay. Of course I pay! You think Najadova runs a charity? I’m sure she reminds me.”
She cooked. They ate. Emil was upset. The loss of his morning and the quarrel with the landlady had put him off his feed. His hair looked much nicer now, but Emil was a congenital challenge to grooming. He spent the evening paging through his catalog of works. This was not a good sign.
She seemed unable to shrug off the argument—the fight had shredded her nerves. As the night advanced she grew ever more irritable. She was jumpy, short-tempered. She felt bad—a strange internal tightness.
Her breasts grew swollen and achy. Then she realized the truth. It had been such a long time that it almost felt like an illness. But it was womanhood. She was about to have her first period in forty years.
They went to bed. Sex chased his bad mood away, but left her feeling as if she’d been sandpapered. The night wore on. She began to realize that she was in for a very hard time. No mere lighthearted hiatus in the month’s erotic festivities. The event stealing over her body was something vengeful and postwomanly and medical. Her eyelids were swollen, her face felt waxed and puffy, and an ominous intimate ache was building deep within the pelvic girdle. Her mood was profoundly unstable. It seemed to rocket up and crash down with every other breath.
Emil tumbled into sleep. After an hour she began to quietly weep with bewilderment and pain. Crying usually helped her a lot nowadays, it came easily and would wash any sadness away like clear water over clean sand. But weeping wasn’t working that way tonight. When the tears gave out, she felt very sane, and very lucid, and very, very low.
She shook Emil awake as he lay peacefully slumbering.
“Darling, wake up, I have to tell you something.”
Emil woke up, coughed, sat up in bed, and visibly reassembled his command of English. “What is it? It’s late.”
“You remember who I am, don’t you?”
“You’re Maya, but if you tell me anything this late at night, I won’t remember tomorrow.”
“I don’t want you to remember it, Emil. I just want to tell it to you. I have to tell it to you. Now.”
Emil grew alert. He tucked the heavy curtain behind the headboard of the bed and a turbid mix of moonlight and streetlight entered the studio. He looked into her eyes. “You’ve been crying.”
“Yes …”
“And you have to confess something? Yes, I can see.… I already know it. I can see the truth there in your eyes.… You’ve been unfaithful to me!”
Amazed, she shook her head.
“No, no,” he insisted, raising one hand. “You don’t have to tell me a word! It’s all too obvious! A beautiful young girl, with a poor shattered crackpot—no man in the world could be easier to deceive! I know—I offer nothing to command a woman’s loyalty. My arms, my lips—what do those matter? When Emil himself is a ghost! A man who scarcely exists!”
“Emil, listen to me now.”
“Did I ever ask you to be faithful to me? I never asked for that! All I asked was that you not humiliate me. I gave you freedom to do as you please—take a dozen lovers, take a hundred! Just don’t let me know. And yet you have to let me know, don’t you? You have to shatter my illusions with