The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [17]
I didn’t care. I took Anusha’s hand and dragged her forward, the blue coat coming after us. We started up the un-moving escalator. The top man came down. The other came up from behind. It was a face-off half way.
“Look,” I said to him. “I promised her. The Mona Lisa. O.K.? We don’t want to examine it. We don’t want to admire it. We just want to have a glance and escape.”
Back in the reception area we gathered with the rest of the bus-tour Poles. They came up to us; girls offering their wrists to let us sniff the mix of perfume samples they’d sprayed at a gift shop. Some showed us postcards. Some told us they’d found a soup in the café not unlike Polish noodle soup.
And they all asked the same question: “Did you see the Mona Lisa?”
I put on a superior expression, conveying: As if the Mona Lisa is the only reason to come to the Louvre. But no one paid attention.
Anusha said, “No. We did not see the Mona Lisa. We saw Islamic Art and Mesopotamia.”
When we were alone on the bus, she was quiet. After some time, she said, “Kevish. You promise.”
“I’m sorry, Anusha.”
It was really just bad planning. Or no planning. Which was usually how I traveled. But I should not have played by my own rules when it came to someone else’s dream.
Our bus disgorged us somewhere in Versailles, in the vicinity of our hotel, and the entire group poured into a McDonald’s.
“We’re not eating here,” I said. “Let’s walk back to the hotel and find something really delicious.”
Just up the street was a café with outdoor tables under an awning. I ordered Anusha a crepe with two scoops of ice cream and strawberries. She didn’t call it a crepe though. She said, “Naleshniki.” She ate it with a fork and knife, concentrating. The ice cream was white on her red lips.
It was probably against her will, but soon she got a trace of what might have been a smile.
I have seen the Mona Lisa, long ago, as I mentioned. Her smile is small, nearly flat, sly. It tells of something that has just happened, and of something that is just about to happen.
Anusha asked, “Tonight you will be with me, Kevish—or go to bar with Polish people?”
“I have a plan,” I said. “Let’s go directly to the hotel, up the stairs, to the room, no wandering.”
“Sometimes it is best,” she said, and went back to her naleshniki.
Kevin McCaughey undertook his first solo journey in 1980, at the age of eighteen. He spent three months in Europe and thirteen hundred dollars. Airfare included. Later he studied Swedish in Sweden, Polish in Poland, and Russian in Vladivostok. For the last ten years he has worked as an English language materials developer and teacher trainer in the U.S., Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This is his fourth story in Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing editions. His website of English teaching audio is English Teachers Everywhere, www.etseverywhere.com.
KATHERINE JAMIESON
Ain’t Ready for No Man
A woman discovers herself in Guyana.
AS A CHILD I WAS HAUNTED BY THE “SAVE THE CHILDREN” ad campaign. A block of simple text, a black and white photo. In the time it takes you to finish reading this paragraph, a child will have died of starvation. The children were my age, dark-skinned, dressed in slips, stained shorts, nothing. Babies screamed, their mouths stretched open for the food that would never come. As I began reading, a girl would stare out at me with a hungry, little smile. Here I am, she would say, still alive. And, being a literal child, when I finished reading I would think, now she’s dead.
Children were dying in Ethiopia, hundreds of them in camps, their bellies distended so they looked fat, like they could tip over on their skinny legs. They lived with their starving mothers and fathers, starving brothers and sisters. On TV I saw them move in slow motion, too tired to wave away the sucking flies in the corners of their eyes. I cried