Grey clumps of mould, slowly dissolving into squelchy porridge under the wheels of the tram, are all that’s left to us from the crystalline decadence of the recent snowstorm, the glittering silence of the fields when all sounds were muffled, when distant starlight broke into thousands of dazzling flakes on softly padded ground.
On New Year’s Eve, the world made perfect sense: a promise of magic hidden at its very core, waiting to be revealed like a gem pressed into a closed palm, like a pixie sound asleep, wings aquiver, in the bud of a flower.
Today is the second of January, the month of slush and disillusionment.
« Prochain arrêt: ‘Bouchet’. Sortie à gauche! » says an invisible woman. A reassuring presence on every journey, she records transport announcements from Geneva to France’s Côte d’Azur. One day — hopefully a long way off — her retirement will send shockwaves across the French-speaking part of Europe, for what are we all to do without her peppy enthusiasm brightening up our greyest Januaries, the lowest of our Mondays?
The doors slide open, and they walk in. A man in a felt hat, his spindly body of an overgrown stick insect swaying back and forth; a long-haired woman with the languid face of a harem dweller, her gazelle eyes half-closed.
They sit down, and a curious pantomime begins. The man talks, and talks, and talks. His eyes fixed on the woman, his praying mantis hands awkwardly angled, he strains to amuse her, to earn her approval. She listens, motionless, her eyes unblinking: no hint of a smile, not a word uttered in response.
She could at least nod, I think, out of pity if nothing else. Or just walk away and put him out of his misery.
Undeterred, the man keeps talking as if his life depended on it, as if the slightest pause in this restless babble would shatter him. At last, she raises her eyebrows in silent acknowledgement of his effort: a small kindness.
He lights up — a lapdog gobbling up a bone — and throws himself back into obsessive animation.
On and on it goes as the tram rolls along, the man still swatting away at the impending silence, the woman still frozen, growing a little paler with each thud of slush on the rails, until she unzips her jacket and reveals a large, puffed-out, distended belly beneath the curtain of her gleaming hair.
She places no protective hand over the bloated mound, administering no tender, somewhat complacent rubbing that would put her on a sort of elevated plane of existence, from where she might look down upon a world less fortunate than her. On the contrary, the swelling under her jacket seems to be painfully isolated — a source of fear and anguish, not giddy anticipation; and though the man never looks at it, his chatter becomes ever more disjointed and erratic.
« Hôpital de La Tour, » comes the announcement from the speakers.
The woman’s eyes growing wider and rounder than anything I have ever seen, she retreats even further into silence. Sealed in a fortified chamber of pursed lips and tightly clasped hands, she reminds me of the post-Soviet nineties of my childhood, when people would put two front doors in their apartments to ward off break-ins: one an unassuming wooden plank, the other a block of solid iron, its locks ominously clicking with each turn of the key. Once it clanged shut, there was no going in.
When the woman struggles to stand up, the man darts forward to support her as delicately as if she were made of crystal, his stick figure suddenly soft and desolate; and yet when he catches her eye, he beams at her again. They step out of the tram, arm-in-arm.
As they fade into the distance, snow begins to fall. A fresh sheen of magic slowly conceals the grey slush, the gaping holes of mashed dirt on the asphalt, the contorted branches of naked trees: perhaps once more, a hidden promise at the centre of the world.
Läilä Örken works in the field of international relations. In the evenings, she writes fiction and is working on a novel. Her short stories appear, or are about to, in the Eunoia Review, Pinch, Hobart, Bright Flash Literary Review, Crow & Cross Keys, the Raven Review, and elsewhere.
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