‘I have a proposition for you.’ David approaches me with his signature drawl. I am in the middle of wolfing down a cream cheese bagel and the bodega coffee, the only things I can afford to eat for lunch that week, before I run back to class.
His manner isn’t nervous, nor is it overbearing. He is just there – still, steady gaze, not a hint of emotion. The skinny woman with tattoos and blue hair continues to brew coffee behind the cafe counter and neither one of the two, canoodling on the couch, moves away from the other’s lips. It’s almost as if the moment isn’t happening. I wipe my hands nervously. I know I am an ugly eater.
‘Will you do the sound for my thesis film?’
I am flattered. I imagine myself to be this sort of mysterious, unassailable sound recordist with cool tech, traveling through the Black Forest in Germany and capturing sounds the frozen lake makes when skaters rollerblade on it, maybe I have a cool pseudonym, maybe I can create such a mystery of aura around me that if I composed a single synth and released it on Soundcloud, it would get a million listens. Nobody in school appears to feel the same way.
Before I can respond, David sits down in front of me, his hands gripping his coffee cup and for the first time, I notice how he’s chewed his nails down to stubs. Conscious of the similarities between us, I put my gloves back on. He tells me it’s an experimental film, only one scene, perhaps two-three lighting set-ups, and how we can knock it off in a day. The sound has to do most of the storytelling as he doesn’t subscribe to expository dialogue or trite narrative set-ups. I nod along, excited at finally being asked to exercise what I think is my one true skill.
‘You know, you’re the only one who can handle how headstrong I am.’ He stands up and sticks his hand out. I clasp it, surprised at how clammy it is even at -2 degrees. He tells me we are going to shoot in about two weeks and there isn’t much prep required and that we can stay in touch via email since phones aren’t his thing. I smile politely and try not to meet the barista’s eyes that are now fixated on me. Self-conscious, I wave David bye as he slips out as inconspicuously as he entered. Then, I hurry to class.
We are learning Photography from Cinematography and the professor is a sixty-something embittered old lady with salt and pepper hair and thick, square plastic glasses perched on her aquiline nose. Her bright eyes, dulled with age, bulge and distort behind the glasses as she regards us with derision; the projector beaming images from the American Famine on the white board behind her.
‘You,’ she points her long, nimble finger at me. ‘Tell me what you see.’
I almost jump out of my seat. I am not used to this kind of attention. I usually slink in and out of school, collecting my cups of coffee and checking the student’s board for my list of classes, while trying to attract as little attention as I can to myself. I dressed in opaque black tights and oversized bomber jackets to hide what felt like rolls of fat encompassing my body greedily. On the odd occasion that somebody addressed me directly, I assumed a tone of superiority to avoid further conversation.
The professor clears her throat, ‘Look at it from the back of your head.’
I don’t understand what that means. Wouldn’t that mean I’d need to shut my eyes? The Professor has an entire theory about how as adults we lost our ability to see things clearly. The imposition of our perception on visual imagery is what leads to ‘otherisation’, ‘the zoo effect,’ she exclaims to show exactly why Steve McCurry’s work sucks. I suppose, in some way, she means bearing witness to events outside of oneself without letting one’s own subjective experience taint one’s understanding.
I don’t understand much of what she says. She talks quite madly, and often whips her fingers swiftly on top of the heads of the students to get them to use their ‘mind’s eye.’ I know she isn’t a very successful photographer and is teaching in a small community college in the Czech Republic. It’s hard to take anything she says seriously but still, it pricks when she fails me that semester. I don’t know how to tell her that bearing witness often also means keeping your mouth shut. That speaking up can elicit ridicule, defiance and worse still, indifference.
I look at the woman in the black and white photo, looking straight into the camera’s eye, her young kid draped around her shoulders like a growing vine. She seems to be daring the photographer to take a photo of her. I can tell from the grain and the light that she is in her early 30s, that the famine has aged her sooner than plain biology, that her features are angular like a model’s and that she isn’t pleased with being looked at.
‘A young mother with her child,’ I finally say, hoping that my answer is vague enough to not be wrong. The professor almost snorts in contempt. I shrink into my seat. I feel immensely small.
There is nothing about David that suggests he thinks of himself as ‘small’. Perhaps, that’s part of the reason why I am so eager to work on his set. Being around him gives me a strange sense of assurance, even though he has an odd manner that borders on creepy. He talks without blinking for several minutes; that is, when he does talk. Mostly, he wanders around our cramped school property, clutching a styrofoam cup of steaming black coffee, dressed in a black bomber jacket. David isn’t particularly attractive nor is he ugly. He looks like I imagine an AI-generated image of the most average Caucasian man would look: tight-cropped blonde hair, blue eyes with fine crow’s feet, a straight set of white teeth that often break into a boyish smile and large, manly hands that look very capable. He has a wiry build, always dresses in nondescript clothes, which I think is his attempt at blending in, but only makes him continually stand out. Nobody knows where he lives, nobody bothers finding out. He is never at any after-class drinking affair or chatting and smoking cigarettes with the film kids in the courtyard. He diligently attends every class but doesn’t participate much or ask too many questions. He doesn’t even hide behind his mobile phone or laptop screen. He just stands there, styrofoam cup in hand, a blank look in his eyes, the pupils of which appear black from a distance. There are some rumours going around about how his father is a Ukranian drug lord, now in prison, and how he grew up as a Ukranian refugee in Sweden but he speaks French and German fluently so it’s hard to verify any of this. He doesn’t have a social media presence, just an account on Instagram where he captures all sorts of strange and wonderful insects. His bio reads: Invertebrates For Life. He has pictures of Phasmids, Mantids, Whipspiders, Roaches, Beetles. Each photo has a detailed caption about the origin of the insect, its species, its life span, its place in the ecosystem. He only ever posts a photo of his face if there is an insect delicately perched on the bridge of his nose. Thousands and thousands of insects, one after the other. I’d once seen a post about a pair of dead cockroaches that he’d buried in a miniature coffin that he’d carved out of mahogany or oakwood. They lay there, next to one another, their spiky legs thrown up in the air, their antennae still and lifeless. The caption talked about how these two roaches were monogamous and one had died from the grief of the other being unceremoniously killed. A video accompanied the photo where David lit a candle and closed the casket while Nick Cave played in the background. How odd can he really be if he listens to Nick Cave?
I’m not sure why I am drawn to recording sound in film school. It’s not like I’ve ever learnt how to play an instrument or even have an enviable collection of vinyl records or cassettes or CDs. I’d only ever prescribed to the Walkmans that gave way to iPods to illegally downloaded songs to streaming websites and sensibilities lost in a clutter of predetermined algorithms. I don’t have a desire for technology or science and working in sound requires both. But recording sound has a mystical quality, it allows me a private space, gives me a way to tune out the world. There is nothing extraordinary about the way I perceive sound and my understanding of its technicalities are largely pedestrian. I half-blame a culture that associates science with young boys and men but there was something about computers, numbers, computations, frequencies, sine waves that terrified me. I couldn’t allow myself to make a mistake. The sense of possibility that comes with the fluidity of literature, or the interpretation of history, or the subjectivity of political science was absent.
I say film school but what I really mean is a small film community. There are around thirty of us rotating between various film theory and practical classes for six-eight hours a day, nestled in a small villa on the outskirts of Prague. There’s an old Gothic church that’s visible from the sound studio. We had our inauguration ceremony in there, as well as our graduation. The Dean’s office is inside the church too, which is slightly ominous. It recalls a darker time in history. Being cocooned in one space with a multitude of ideas, thoughts, ways of being, speaking, eating, fucking, breathing, filming, we are bound to collide, especially when language acts more like a barrier than a way to connect. But recording feels safe. Sound doesn’t lie and can tell a whole other story even as the image leads you to believe something else, you don’t need language to understand sound, the colour of your skin or your accent can’t determine how you perceive sounds. A footstep on dead leaves is a sign of autumn. If it’s slow and empty, it could mean danger. Children laughing in the background can signal warmth. The click of a lighter, the slow inhale of the first puff, the sharp exhale of breath on a cold winter morning, the faraway sound of the television, the static between radio channels, the crackle of wood splinters as a fire licks them. Sounds that feel comforting and equally non-intrusive, like an old school friend you rub shoulders with on long walks but don’t have to necessarily speak to.
Making friends is harder than I thought it would be. I am fresh off the heels of being a fairly popular girl with an offbeat career and enough charm to make my way around downtown parties and day jobs in small firms without ever really trying. Liquor and a constant stream of women who adored me and men who wanted to have sex with me had lent me a sense of confidence that dissipated very quickly in this post-graduate program. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what you wear or how often you party; all that matters are your ideas, the films you are inspired by, how good your work is, how many hours you spend on an edit, what films you can reference during lessons. It is a different kind of world and one where I have to work very quickly to distinguish myself from the noise. I find myself receding behind the comfort that mixing sound on a set provides; a socially acceptable reason to disconnect from everything.
I don’t think I am particularly lonely but on some mornings, I wake up and look out at the church steeple outside the attic window of my small Soviet-style apartment and feel a sudden emptiness that crawls up my stomach and settles into my throat. I try to keep it at bay by running errands at the grocery store, or smoking cigarettes at street corners while politely nodding at strangers covered in woollens and fleece jackets. I frantically re-check my schedule; there’s got to be one class, some class I could attend. No classes on Sundays. I could go to the park but the grass is cold and the horizon dips into mist, sleets of ice cover the park walkways, so I settle inside my warm room with a slice of pizza and a can of local beer and put my field recordings together, creating loops and loops of aural journeys, strange radio shows, picking up random dialogues from various movies and stitching new narratives out of them. The disparate sounds keep me company and every time I take a break and the silence begins to creep in again, I let the hourly sound of the church bells lull me to sleep.
The night David approaches me, I hurry home from school to research what mixing kits would be the best for his set-up and lose track of deli pizza or the sound of the church bells.
The next day, I spot David on a bench in the courtyard, next to a slender girl. She has wispy, long brown hair, a gold septum ring and sparkling blue eyes. Her skin is so pale, you can see the veins in her neck and in her hands. She is dressed like a schoolgirl – oxford shoes with laces, thick white socks up to her knees, a charcoal grey skirt and a plaid button-down cardigan. There is a distinct line of thin brown hair on top of her upper lip, giving her decidedly feminine face an unexpected masculine bearing. She wears a bright red fleece jacket. She has high cheekbones and a gaunt look, like an errant orphan. Her head tilts down with poise as David whispers very close to her ear. Her hands are clasped neatly in her lap as David’s are too. Her face is impassive as she listens to him. They look like siblings. I have the impulse to take a photo but I stop myself.
At the end of class, I see them walk out of the main entrance, her arm looped into his and suddenly, they appear to be much older.
For the next few days, I see them together everywhere. Walking in step on cobblestone roads around the school, eating soup in silence across from one another at the nearby restaurace, huddled in a corner of the couch at the school cafe. Through fragments of conversations, I learn that she is an exchange student from a liberal arts school in America, that she briefly worked for Cirque du Soleil in Chicago and is now pursuing acting in Prague. Her instagram handle is @thesweatiestwomanintheworld and has videos of her pirouetting through colourful silk binds cascading from the ceiling, photos of her in shiny purple leotards holding headstands, climbing atop several sweaty girls, time lapses of intricate yoga poses and circus acrobatics. Our eyes meet in the school cafeteria. She doesn’t smile and her eyes seem to turn black as they turn languidly towards me. I am about to say something, but she collects her cup of black coffee and walks away. Everybody thinks she is quite shy, I just think she doesn’t have time for unimportant conversations.
Although I am prepared with my gear and have brushed up on my recording basics, I am unable to sleep the night before David’s shoot. The familiar sounds of the church bell grate on my nerves. I am nervous and realise I haven’t asked him for the script. I’m not sure when I doze off but I jump out of the bed the minute the alarm rings. It’s five am and the sky is pitch black, the stars brighter than ever. It’s a beautiful night but I feel nauseous. Maybe it’s the pot of black coffee on an empty stomach, maybe it’s nerves. I feel like I am stepping into my first ever performance, a nervous debutante where the odds are already stacked against me, perhaps, due to the colour of my skin or the shape of my body, or just quite plainly, my lack of talent.
I book an Uber, swear to myself I’ll take the tram more often and jump into its back seat. The cabbie regards me with an aggressive indifference, glancing at me occasionally from his rear-view as I take the empty streets in.
On set, the lighting is halfway set up. A single 650W HMI beams a pool of yellow light onto the carpeted floor. I gulp two cups of instant coffee and begin to set up my Fostex kit, securing the shooting perimeter with wires that I neatly tuck out of sight. I test the room tone, pad the walls with acoustic membrane, check the levels to cut all the unnecessary noise out. Soon after, I stand in a corner and admire my handiwork. Not a stray wire in sight. I am ready. Alexander, a sweet Swedish twenty-something who moonlights as a security guard at the local club, is booming today. We nod at each other, and he cracks a few jokes at David’s expense that I smile to.
David enters with Elizabeth and the energy of the room changes immediately. Alex, the cinematographer and I stare at them with impunity. She is dressed in a short black cocktail dress, her spindly legs are freshly waxed and smoothened with moisturiser. Her frame is willowy when she doesn’t have layers of coats on. She has gold glitter on her eyelids and a deep red lipstick that makes her look much older than she is. David explains the scene to her in a hushed tone in a corner and although they're in the shadows, I can see Elizabeth cross her arms protectively. I click record as the clapper takes his position in front of the camera.
‘Scene 1, take 1.’
I hear the soft whir of the recording begin; I have my left index finger and thumb holding the volume button and the right one on the knob that controls gain. I feel the strain in my muscles melt away and I feel like I’ve fused with my recording kit.
I hear the sound of a door unlock, footsteps across the carpeted floor, I adjust the gain as the footsteps come closer. A hand clasping another hand. The sharp inhale of nervous breath. The scratch of a fingernail on nylon. A hand caressing what sounds like a neck. I’m focussed on adjusting the levels. I close my eyes and the yellow fades into black. The sharp clang of a belt unbuckling. The creak of a couch. The sounds of fabric shifting, adjusting to accommodate somebody else. More creaks of the couch that reverberate in the studio. I make a mental note to dial down the reverb later. I hear the heavy heaving and the rhythmic thrusting of a body. David’s breath is slow and heavy until it picks up pace. Elizabeth makes no sound except a soft moan that is soon muffled. A harder thrust and a whimper. Breathing that picks up pace, still in rhythm until it turns into pulsing grunts. Finally, a loud moan that trembles in its timbre and breaks in its pace. The sound of a metallic belt fastening and a zipper zipping up. Zipping up sounds very different from unzipping, I make a mental note.
‘What the fuck man?’
Alex’s thick Malmo drawl breaks the illusion. Distracted, I look up at the scene. Elizabeth sits with her legs folded beneath her on the couch, her stockings askew, her glittery dress has ridden up her thighs, her lipstick is smeared and her hands are clasped tightly at the edge of her dress, pulling it down. I notice a wet patch across the glittery black. Everybody is staring. I’m not sure why but I feel like retching.
David clears his throat and the sound rings across the room and clips on my headphones.
‘Ouch!’ I snap them off and suddenly, everyone gets busy again.
The cinematographer wraps the camera back and switches the HMI off. The studio is momentarily doused in darkness until bright white tungsten light fills up the room. Alex drops the mic stand and mutters to himself. I spot the red of the recording button and switch it off. I try not to look at Elizabeth who seems to have frozen on the couch like a time-stamp.
David slips both his hands into his pocket and steps out of the studio. I hear the water running from a tap in the bathroom next door. I know I have to check the kit to see if the recordings are in order. I finally look at Elizabeth.
She gets up, straightens her dress and walks out without looking at any of us.
‘Är du okej?’ Alex asks in Swedish. Elizabeth looks at him briefly, her eyes blacker than ever, before descending down the stairs, her oxford shoes clip-clopping loudly in the empty building.
‘I don’t think she understands Swedish,’ I finally say.
‘What the fuck man? What was that about? I didn’t read the script, I never read the script. Did you?’
I shrug and begin to pack my kit up. I ask for a moment of silence as I take the room tone. The dull, electric sound of the radiator all European rooms have embedded in their structure courses through the Fostex kit. Everybody leaves without a word. Alex asks me if I want to grab a kebab and a beer as we step out into the biting cold but I politely decline as I catch the tram back home.
The next morning, I see David in the courtyard through the frosted cafe window. I collect my cup of coffee and make my way to class when he falls into step with me.
‘How’s it sounding?’
‘Good. Pretty good. Very clean audio,’ I murmur as I quicken my pace. I feel an inexplicable need to physically distance myself from him.
‘Want to go over the audio after school today? Maybe at yours?’
I want to say no but I want him to hear how sleekly I’d managed to capture the audio, how good everything sounded.
‘Yeah, we can take the tram back together.’
In class, Alex is whispering conspiratorially with the cinematographer in Swedish. I don’t understand Swedish but I can guess what they must be discussing. I distract myself by going over today’s lesson. The lesson begins and halfway through dissecting a scene from Mulholland Drive, Alex leans over.
‘Yo, I’m going to be taking this up with the Dean. Do you want to come with me?’
‘Taking what up?’
‘Whatever the fuck happened yesterday on David’s set. That was not okay. The girl is sixteen!’
‘She’s sixteen?’
‘Her age doesn’t matter. Are you coming?’
‘I didn’t see anything.’
Alex looks at me like I’m scum. These Swedes like to be on their high horse a lot because their welfare-run society hardly has any problems. The cinematographer’s parents are Bosnian refugees and the Swedish government pays his post-grad tuition. The Swedes have one of the lowest crime rates against women in the world. Just last week, Alex’s flatmate, Ajda, also Swedish, started a petition on campus against eve-teasing when a guy on a tram catcalled her. Of course, their biggest problem is things going too far on a film set. Alex doesn’t even pay his own tuition; his Government takes care of it while I have to take a loan out to study here. I am the one who has to make a million rounds to the immigration office in the hope of a visa extension only to get a meagre one month after graduation to hunt for a job. I am the one who sits in a corner, sinking further into the putrid chairs of the immigration office where an overweight Czech man who smells of beer, smoke and onion sweat breathes down on me and whispers as though he is spitting venom, ‘indická děvka,’ loosely translated to ‘Indian whore.’ I’d taken a four-week course on spoken Czech and it has mainly helped me navigate taxi cabs on drunk nights, the underground subway system and racist Immigration officers. I doubt it would help me get a job.
‘Have you spoken to Elizabeth?‘
She’s obviously terrified, the poor girl. It’s fine, you don’t have to come along but, if I need a witness, I’m calling you.’
I snorted. Witness? We’re not in court. The professor throws me a dirty look and I sober up.
As classes end for the day, I peek around the cafe and the equipment room and don’t see any sign of Elizabeth. I go to her Instagram and realise that her profile’s been deactivated. It’s freezing cold but I can feel a sweat breaking out on my brow. The right thing to do would be to accompany Alex to the Dean but the fact is that I didn’t actually see anything. What’s also a fact is that David’s entrusted me with the sound for his thesis film, his degree is contingent on it and if I attest to something I haven’t actually seen, wouldn’t I be letting him down? Jeopardising his degree even? If there is one thing that being a product of the Indian education system has taught me, it’s that degrees are imperative. To get that coveted job, the nice apartment and the girl with the long hair and warm hugs. David needed the degree. Also, why would the Dean believe Alex? Our intimacy coach had taught us several classes on how to navigate intimacy between actors. I’d seen David there, rapt with attention, interrupting often with questions that were somehow drowning in depth and redundancy at the same time, eliciting annoyed groans from fellow classmates and a tired quality from the professor. David was always trying hard to win the intimacy coach's favour but only managed to incite thinly veiled contempt. He didn’t understand that the professors didn’t care as much as the school brochures would have you believe. They were underpaid, they would rather be shooting their magnum opus in the dark, brittle forests on the outskirts of Prague with medieval costumes and stale dialogues. They were never in the mood to entertain David’s theory about how Josef Sudek, the Czech master of photography, was in fact in cahoots with the Nazis well before the invasion in 1939. David seemed to absorb a plethora of information and synthesise it into witty trivia and questionable theses at the speed of light. His nervous energy was evident in his black eyes darting across several hangers-on in the courtyard – the French-Lebanese girl in a green plaid skirt and stockings chain-smoking as she spoke about the political implications of the French new-wave in the Far East, the Indian kid from an Army family with a newfound coke addiction, the Syrian refugee on reservation with her depressing, under-exposed films about lost passports and the pain of a foreign land. David was never caught up in any such sentimentality or stereotype that would win him favours. He was stubbornly individualistic, collected insects with no compunction and was unflinching about subjects like #MeToo that most film-makers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.
I sit in the cafeteria, my hands cupped around the steaming cup of black coffee when the blue-haired barista speaks to me for the first time in nine months.
‘They have a committee hearing at six today.’
Her plastic-rimmed glasses sit at the edge of her sharp nose and she has eyes like blue agate stones. With blue hair whisked to one side and wiry arms, she could be pretty but insisted on dressing like a local meth-addict with a predilection for punk rock. Her arms were covered in a mesh of torn pink stockings cut at the edges and crimping into her wrist, leaving marks from the pressure. Her legs were encased in sky blue stockings and accentuated her toned calves. I heard she’d fallen in love with an Indian boy who wouldn’t have sex with her unless they got married. They broke up in about three months and she’d taken to residing in a gruff anger ever since, her arms working methodically at the Nespresso coffee machine and frothing milk with an uncanny focus for the hundred cappuccinos she brewed in a day. I briefly wondered if she harboured a certain apathy for coffee or the strong, bitter smell of coffee beans roasting.
‘You were on David’s set?’
She looks at me expectantly and I reach into my overcoat pocket for forty-five crowns. I slip a note of fifty into her cold, sweaty hands.
‘Why would they keep a committee meeting at six on a Friday?’
She looks at me like I am crazy. My mounting misery is relieved by David popping his head in. His hoodie is off his head and he has a strangely welcoming smile, flecks of fresh snow dotting his hair like a halo.
‘Tram leaves in ten.’
David and I walk in step to the station. His strides are long, assured and his breathing in rhythm with the church bell chiming six. I wait at the tram stop, my legs intertwined as a chilly wind blows around us. David ducks into the bodega and returns with a cup of steaming coffee. I can feel passers by watching us. I take a step backwards to increase the physical distance between us but David, uncaring of social norms, comes in closer and speaks about his edit which is coming along swimmingly. My focus shifts to the yellow, crusty tartar between his teeth, the piercing black of his eyes, his well-formed hands waving frantically through the air, his pitch rising with his excitement. I only come around to the present when I hear him mention Elizabeth.
‘Elizabeth’s acting left a lot to be desired but I don’t blame her, she’s only sixteen. I thought I’d prepped her sufficiently for the screen but clearly not.’ He averts his eyes as he speaks about her. Before I can say anything, the tram rumbles to a stop near us and David steps aside to let me board.
A few hours have passed since we’d been cocooned on two chairs perched beside one another. David has been listening to my recordings on loop. The sun has dipped well beyond the horizon and a purplish darkness has enveloped the sky. There is an empty box of take-out pizza discarded on the bed and several cups of coffee. I am experiencing some sense of disassociation where I feel like I am watching myself listen to the sounds I’ve recorded from a far corner of the room. Unzipping, rhythmic thrusting, the refrigerator hum of the electricals in the studio, Alex’s disgruntled dismantling of the lights. My phone lies in a corner buzzing with texts, probably from my mother.
‘It’s excellent. Probably the best sound anybody’s done this year. Don’t be surprised if you win the award.’
I break into a smile. Every muscle in my body has tensed with the focus of sitting here with David, going over my recordings. I feel my muscles loosening up and I can feel a wave of tears rushing up to my throat. It had been a miserable nine months. I had no friends, the weather was relentless, I ran out of money every month and the man at the cafe where I ate lunch every Sunday never smiled at me. It felt good to be acknowledged, to be seen and for a brief moment, the idea of my impending student debt, the pointlessness of wanting a job in Czech Republic, the fact that I broke down several times on the underground subway system when I lost my way due to some unnamed memory or trauma that would resurface and up end any logical skills I might have, the night where I convinced myself I was being followed, broken into a sprint and collapsed outside my apartment door, heaving in the cold winter night only to realise I did not have a stalker, or the night I mustered enough courage to venture out to Cross Club with dirty drum and bass and did some ecstasy only to lose my friends and my jacket and have my ass smacked by an unnamed assailant or the time a man with a scar across his cheek threateningly wielded a pen-knife two seats away from me on a tram and nobody blinked an eye, or when, I, assaulted by acute loneliness on Christmas day, had grudgingly managed to log onto Tinder and met a guy who wouldn’t pull out when I asked him to, or the fact that I bled the heaviest that month on account of the emergency contraceptive pill – all of that seemed to fade away a bit, like a distant memory.
David sighs dramatically and leans back into his chair in repose, taking a swig of the beer. I lean forward awkwardly and embrace him in my arms, feeling his muscles tighten against my bones and then relax indefinitely.
On the bus ride to Elbancice, a chalet David’s uncle owned two hours away from the city centre, I look at the vast swathe of snow, unflattened and covering the landscape, still as a shroud. The sharp spikes of the spruce trees stand tall, devoid of any leaves or warmth. No birds swarm the sky and no animals emerge from their burrows to give my eyes a break from the wasteland of snow. I can’t stop staring as the muffled sounds of Czech metal emanate from David’s headphones. David has convinced me to come to his uncle’s chalet for a weekend of regrouping. The plan is to fish in the pond behind his house, make fires from scratch, recite poetry and look at old Josef Sudek prints. I am hesitant; I’ve never been invited to spend a weekend somewhere with somebody without the idea of sex implied. A blooming friendship feels far more exciting and terrifying in equal parts. I am constantly negotiating a space between revulsion and attraction to David and neither feeling makes much sense to me. But, the country has its own charms and, in some way, I am sick of the stifling perfection of the city centre – the Gothic churches, the cobblestoned streets, the sweet little bodegas with their kitsch aesthetic – remnants of a fairy tale I hadn’t experienced. So, I have agreed. Being out of town also helps avoiding having to explain my sudden kinship with David to Alex and crew on campus. I am ready for a weekend away to get my thoughts in order. Maybe if we down enough Becharovka, I can get David to talk about what actually happened on set. In some sense, I feel like I am betraying my crew members, especially Alex, but in some other sense, their self-righteousness is oppressive.
We turn up at the edge of the chalet, embedded in a deep, dry forest. The sun dips behind the horizon and casts an ungodly shadow over the looming structure. The only house for as far as the eye can see, it looks decidedly haunted. Peeling paint exposes red brick, several rooms open into a hall-like area piled with antiquated objects: a rusty radio transistor, plastic lace table covers, some paintings mostly ruined with time, an ominous grand piano, broken chairs, a dusty dvd player, stacks of candles and a brass candelabra. I am forbidden from touching any of the objects and am soon beckoned up to chop blocks of wooden logs stacked outside the chalet to get a fire going. It is numbing cold and the wind is like an icy blade across my exposed cheeks. I labour through the chopping, my body that is not used to manual work, eliciting a corny laugh from David’s uncle, Marcel. Marcel is a robust man with deep-set eyes and a stern look dissipated by the wide grin he breaks into when laughing at somebody. He is absolutely delighted to meet David’s exotic friend. It’s only after much convincing that he stops referring to me as David’s ‘přítelkyni’ or girlfriend. He asks me if Indians play football or if we have plumbing systems in our homes. At some point, he brings out a beautiful Afghan carpet that he lays out on the floor with much flourish and announces that his father got it from Paharaganj in the 1930s. Later, David takes me on a tour of the various bedrooms with their tiny windows, blue paint chipping around their edges, and rock-hard beds to show me the work of Jana Nagyova, David Cerny’s girlfriend. She has painted a parody of his famous Miminka sculptures of metallic babies with barcodes embedded where their face should be. In her painting, Cerny’s babies climb up the famous Zizkov tv tower as a faceless man hangs from the edge of the painting with red paint dripping down his sides while tiny aeroplanes dot the landscape around him. ‘David cheated on her with a Gyspy woman and soon after, she painted this,’ Marcel says. Later, I check my Instagram on the weak wifi connection and realise that Elizabeth’s profile is still deactivated.
David gets busy skinning the fresh carp Marcel caught earlier that day as we sit in the kitchen, the orange fire licking the inside of the soot-lined chimney and the warmth settling into our bones. Marcel tells me about his days running the first few clubs in Prague and working his way up from being a bouncer at the door to the owner. He talks about the legality of hard drugs in Prague and the meth and alcohol problem most people seemed to have. He swigs from a glass of Slivovice, a particularly pungent Czech liqueur made from plums, as he talks about the rising number of rape cases in the Capital. My lids feel heavy with the wood smoke, the cigarettes and the Slivovice. I lay my head back and survey the chalet which evokes a strange, contrasting image – one entrenched in the brutalism and sparseness of the Soviet era and another drenched in the excess of the Christian period. Marcel subscribes to neither time. He considers himself a messiah for the artists in exile during the Soviet rule and shows me the underground basement where the artists hid. The steps to the basement are narrow and have black metallic pipes on either side, and as the door to the basement opens, I feel a drop in temperature.
Back in the womb-like cocoon of the kitchen, David leaves the fish soaked with butter, garlic and some Indonesian herbs Marcel picked up on his travels and disappears into one of the bedrooms. My mind wanders with an old Gypsy tune sung by a Czech pop singer and my eyes close gently.
I come back around to the hazy image of a man in front of me, covered in a conical white cloth with cut outs for eyes and see a pair of piercing black eyes looking into mine. I’m awake but I seem to be lucid dreaming. I want to scream but I can’t. The hooded man moves closer to me and extends a very human hand to caress my face. I scream and the chair falls back with a graceless thud. My ass hits the edge of the chair and I feel a splitting pain at the base of my spine. I break into furious, hot tears. Over David’s snorting laughter, I look out of the kitchen window and see Marcel on a phone call, oblivious. I’m terrified in a way I’ve only been once before. David yanks his hood off.
‘Sophia, you okay? This is just a costume from my school play. I can’t believe Marcel still has it…’
I can’t look him in the eye. What kind of a school play needed its students to dress up in KKK hoods? I don’t know what to feel. All I know is that I want to go back to the familiarity of my attic room, the church bells and the take-out pizza. I grab my phone and I try to book an Uber. I can hear David talking to me but his voice sounds like it’s coming from another room. I come back into my body when the cab turns around the corner, flooding Marcel, his phone call and the kitchen with a pool of warm, yellow light.
As the cab rides out on the icy path, I watch as my jagged breath fogs up the windows. Marcel’s house is the only building for as far as the eye can see. The car turns the corner and his castle is swallowed by the night sky.
The three and a half years after college, in Delhi, was spent between hunting for affordable housing, working dead-end jobs, drinking too much, and securing lifelong friendships. The mix of spending the last two years of my school life in an all-girls’ boarding school and the newfound freedom that came with moving to New Delhi that meant pay cheques that felt fat at the time, and the general lack of inhibition and control that marked life there, were both heady and suffocating. Most people in my circle had never moved out of the city, lived in their parent’s palatial homes, didn’t need to get real jobs on account of their sizeable inheritances and had a lot of time to spare. It was easy to get swept up in the glamour – being young, hot and hip in the capital felt like an endless dream, a joyride without a destination. Not only did it feel okay to coast through life in a haze of drinks, drugs and affable company, it felt necessary. How else did one live when one was young? Looking in from the outside, it would be easy to dismiss this life as superficial, excessive but it taught me unforgettable lessons along the way. Like, how a married man will never leave his wife for you, despite his pathetic insistence. How landlords, when they know you’re a single girl living by yourself in the city, will try to strong-arm you for a higher rent and never return the entire deposit when you move out. How, when living on the roadside, chana-kulchais something you should cherish as long as you can before your stomach caves with the abuse it has had to endure. How most people mean well, but not in Delhi. How looking good is a bigger measure of success than anything else you might have achieved. Delhi is a schizophrenic city and it’s easy to live dual lives without thinking too much of the consequences.
While my mother stayed an hour away from my windowless studio in Vasant Kunj, I had taken to drinking myself silly at the local Gymkhana on her access card every alternate day. Being young, single and available, my attraction to men was always distinguished by a baseline revulsion. It’s as if, intrinsically, I knew what they were capable of. What was foreign to me was the aggression and entitlement with which Delhi men approached women; I confused their persistence for bravado, to an interest in me. It was within these vagaries that I first realised the futility of speaking up. Not only were you branded uptight, but soon a whore too.
The mood was as dubious and inviting as it always was at the Warp Core parties. The basement of an extravagant Sainak Farms villa turned into a cocaine den, replete with average DJs, tall men with pupils the size of coins, the faint smell of warm beer and sweat on the dance floor and unabashed staring. I bumped into him on the dance floor, as I stood gyrating and swaying in front of the enormous speakers, trashy techno thumping through the sound-proofed room. He wore white-rimmed glasses, had a scruffy beard, shoulders that hunched and was wearing a blue ikat kurta. He rocked from foot to foot, moving to the music with a kind of nervous energy and distinctly looked like he didn’t belong at this party. He slipped his hand into his pocket to unearth a lighter and I caught a glimpse of a paperback in his back pocket. I was intrigued and wanted to chat but didn’t know how to. So, I resorted to staring at him, hoping he’d catch my eye and walk over. At some point in the night, as my friends disappeared into various bedrooms and cars, I went upstairs to the kebabstall that the owner of the villa had organised. The Delhi cold was particularly biting and beautiful this side of town, Gulmohar trees for as far as the eye could see. Flashes of car headlights as fancy models of Mercedes whizzed past. Halfway through a kebab, he walked up to me and I immediately broke into an unwitting smile. I don’t remember the conversation too clearly today but I remember being taken with his voice, his hair, his smile. He told me about how he worked as an investigative journalist and was doing a story on Bhalswa, the relocation site now turned Delhi’s biggest slum. I spoke to him about the odd jobs I did to make rent. He asked me about my plans for the future and told me about his dying cat and his favourite female authors. I spoke with him about my estrangement from my parents since their unannounced separation. He asked me if I had Russian lineage. I laughed, flattered at the obvious connotation of being confused for somebody mysterious and beautiful – and told him that the name Sophia had Arabic roots and was the name of my father’s mother who passed away when he was ten years old. He tut-tutted in sympathy while his orb-like eyes rested on me. I remember feeling warm at being seen, a strange sense of separation from the rest of the party crowd; this connection was special and I was lucky to have found it in the most serendipitous way.
After a shared kebab, he offered to drop me back home. I sat beside him, conscious of the sudden closeness, a vacuum of silence between us as he rolled a joint beside me. His driver remained in the front seat, the engine on and cool air from the air conditioning wafting through the car. His car smelt of citrus and whiskey. I wondered if I smelt of sweat. We shared the joint in a kind of weightless silence. I told him where I needed to be dropped off and as the car glided on the main road, I took in Delhi’s expansive vista. Clear, wide roads, stray dogs guarding metro station entrances, yellow street lights collecting in pools. I was stoned and everything was accentuated in my mind – the party, the crispness of the night air, our connection. He leaned in without much warning and his lips grazed my neck. We began to kiss as the driver looked straight ahead, stoic, invisible, trained not to remind us of his existence. Kissing turned into heavy petting and his hand slipped under my shirt. I stopped him gently and tried to come up for some air, I was feeling decidedly dizzy when his hand snaked under my skirt. I felt the edge of his fingertips across my crotch. I sprung backwards – too soon. He seemed to have not heard me. He continued kissing my neck and caressing my thigh. Maybe I said it too softly. His grip got stronger on my upper thigh, I could feel the pressure from his fingertips, nails digging in into my muscle. Stop. I barely hissed the word out. From the corner of my eye, I saw that we were crossing a friend’s house near Khan Market. I remember opening the door of the moving car and hurtling down and into the sidewalk. I bruised both my elbows and lost an earring as I broke into a half-sprint to her main gate and the car stopped a few feet ahead. I rang the doorbell frantically as he poked his head out of the car, yelled ‘cocktease’ with a leering smile and slammed the door shut. The car disappeared around the corner as my friend opened the door. Half-asleep, she fixed me some ginger tea and sat down in bed, Yoko and Ono, her two shih tzus curled up like furry balls around her feet. I clasped the mug and I felt its warmth radiating into my body. I knew she was irritated at being woken up and I wanted to apologise but I seem to have lost my voice.
’So?’
I stayed quiet. She stared at me – I knew I didn’t paint a very wholesome picture with my smudged mascara, smeared lipstick and boozy breath.
‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’
I told her about the party, about how I lost my friends in the crowd, how dated the music was, how average the kebabs were, that I didn’t tell her before but I was telling her now that I got into film school in Czech Republic, that my parents were separating, that I loved her and would dearly miss her, that Yoko was almost human and could sense that I was sad, that I forgot my apartment keys and had to barge in on her like this. She noticed the hickey on my neck and the pressure marks on my thigh and didn’t say anything. She threw me a blanket, turned her back to the wall and went to sleep, her gentle snores melting into the night sky as it broke into a pinkish dawn.
I received his friend request on Facebook the weekend I was leaving the country. I didn’t accept it, nor did I reject it and it hung in this virtual limbo between closure and cowardice.
As the Uber rolls up to the city of Prague, my network returns and I log onto Instagram. Elizabeth’s profile is back on. I wonder if I should email the Dean or speak with him directly on Monday.
The next morning, I receive a text from David, asking me for coffee. I ignore it and take the tram straight to school.
*
Alina G’s writing spans the disciplines of screenwriting, nonfiction and fiction. She is an alumna of the 2019 Dum Pukht Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in Jamhoor Mag, Anti Heroin Chic Mag, Out of Print, Himal Southasian, The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, Helter Skelter, The Swaddle,and others. This story is an excerpt from her forthcoming novel.