The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [37]
I had never done this before. We both waited for a second.
“You have to take off your pants,” Vera said, seemingly delighted by my awkwardness.
“Oh, yeah, right.” I stood up and took off my blue jeans and lay back down again.
Vera went to stir the wax.
“How did you meet your husband?” I asked.
She came over and put a strip of hot wax on my leg.
“He worked in the company where I did. I was twenty. It was a marketing studio. We sold stuff to shopping malls. One day, he asked me to go out for coffee. The next day he came to work with his document and asked me to marry him. I went to meet his family. Neither of us had gone to university. But the people in his family had. His mother was a professor, his father a lawyer. They played chess. I fell in love with them.
“When there’s a lot of love, there’s a lot of suffering,” she went on.
She tapped on the strip of wax on my leg to see if it was dry, then pulled it.
“Owwww!” It hurt like hell. I looked up at Vera. What the hell was I doing to myself?
“Oops, okay, it’s always the worst the first time. You have to breathe in.” She pressed my shoulder back down on the bed. “I’ll tell you when.” She put another strip of wax down.
“But Dima and I weren’t in love, we respected each other a lot. He was a wonderful companion. We had fights sometimes, but it didn’t matter. We were always doing things. We’d stay up all night talking until six in the morning, then have coffee. Or we’d play cards. I always lost. Okay, breathe.”
I breathed in. She pulled the strip. It still hurt, but not quite so much.
“We had a little quinta, where we went to work on the weekends. We’d bring the kids. We went fishing. Or collected herbs or nuts, which we dried on the roof and sold at the pharmacy. You could get a certificate that said you had sold herbs at the pharmacy, which meant you could buy an imported piece of clothing or shoes. Everyone had money, that wasn’t the problem, there just wasn’t anything to buy. Okay, breathe.”
“Things started to change when he got the gangrene. They had to cut off a foot and then a leg. He started drinking and got aggressive. He felt a lot of pain. When he was drunk, he didn’t feel it. He didn’t want to be an invalid. We found out he could get a prosthesis in Germany, though it cost a lot. There was a war vet, from World War Two, who had one. He said to us, ‘Your husband’s still young, he can do it.’ But then they cut off the other leg. Breathe. By now, he was staying in the clinic. We would visit him. He was jealous and thought I had a lover. I didn’t have a lover. I didn’t even have time to think. Okay, turn over.”
I had been lying faceup and now lay facedown. She put wax all over the back of my legs.
“Finally, it was his birthday. He went to a friend’s and got so drunk that the ambulance came. He died three days later. His organism was too weak to sustain all that alcohol.”
“My God,” I said.
“I cried a lot. I cried all the time during those years. That’s why I never get depressed. I’ve never been depressed because I always cry. Okay, breathe.”
I thought about how hard it was for me to cry. Maybe the inverse was true for me. I’d been depressed for years because I hadn’t cried. But before I could get to the end of that thought, Vera ripped off another strip. Another searing pain, that left my whole body quivering.
She returned to the pot of wax. I lay there thinking for a second. “What did you use to do in Belarus?” I asked.
“I was the manager of a hotel.”
Vera’s situation in this sense was exactly the opposite of Isolde’s. Argentina for Isolde had meant instant promotion. She had leaped ranks for essential reasons, she was Austrian. Vera had stepped down, joining the ranks of that worldwide league of immigrants who live in states of demotion, whose present occupations reflect in no way their past ones or the ones for which they’ve been trained. She had arrived eight years ago at the age of forty, with her children in tow. Coming here was a way for her son to avoid military service, which she wanted him to do, as it could be brutal.