Page 70 - WTP Vol. IX #6

Two Women (continued from preceding page)
soles of his shoes which house Guus’s boat-like feet. He’s playing with his camera and every so often looks up. He doesn’t see Magda until she enters the prem- ises. Now Guus grins and waves. At the same time he points the lens of his camera at her. She smiles and covers her face with her left hand. The place is the same, it never changes, but there won’t be any déjà vu. Only for a fraction of a second does she remember the woman who sat exactly where Guus sits now.
Beata has been in London for ten days. The apart- ment is tiny, but at least now Paula lives by herself, not with three roommates like before. And to Beata’s relief she has a job as a designer at an advertising company and makes good money. When Paula is at work, Beata does some sightseeing, not a lot, because the city is overwhelming. She avoids museums, they tire her out. Today she’s at home. She’ll meet Paula after she gets off work, and they’ll go to the opening of an exhibition at some gallery or other. Beata would have preferred something else, but Paula is interested in art. She graduated from the academy of fine arts.
Beata gets off the subway where Paula told her to. She’s had enough of London, those crowds of people everywhere, the din, the strange smells. She’s flying home in four days. Paula waits for her near a newspa- per kiosk. Together they leave the pit of the station. The gallery is close by, Paula tells her, about a ten- minute walk. It’s in an old building covered with li- chen of chipped plaster. Inside everything is spic and span, the walls nicely painted, the floors polished.
The place gets more and more crowded by the min- ute. Paula introduces Beata to her friends. “My mother,” she says. “My mother,” she repeats.
“Don’t worry about me. Talk to your friends,” Beata says to her. “I’ll see everything on my own.”
With a glass of white wine in her hand she walks to the last room. She’ll start from here. The room is empty. All the guests have gathered in the large main room where the paintings they came to see are.
The black arrow on the wall shows the direction to be followed. You begin from the left wall, then move to the middle, and then to the right, like the hands of the clock. Only photos are here, better than those unintelligible smears in the other two rooms. The photographs hang on the wall arranged continuously like film frames. The first image has someone’s eyes, only the eyes. Then there are fragments of the face, the nose, the chin, and at last the whole face fills the frame. But no hair to be seen. The next photo is a nor- mal portrait, and now it’s clear that this is a woman’s head. The woman is eating something, the spoon
with ice-cream wandering up to the mouth. The face seems familiar. Beata often thinks she recognizes someone whom she couldn’t have met before.
She steps up to the wall in the middle. Someone’s eyes again, a different pair of eyes, and other bits of the face, the nose, the cheek, the lips. Why these frag- ments? Why break the face into separate features? This feels like a physiognomic theft, a violation. It draws you in like something you know you’d better not look at, like pictures of the dead. Here’s the whole face again. This one too looks familiar.
A wave of shock runs up her spine. She’s staring at her own face, her mirror image. But how can it be her? It’s surreal, too absurd for words. Could she be having visual hallucinations? Could it be someone like her, her double? Everybody has one, they say. In the next frame a tube of lipstick is touching up the lips. In the one over, there’s a headshot with hair, her own hair, her sunglasses pushed up. There’s no doubt it’s her. She’s holding a white cup.
All of it comes back. The white cup, the coffee, the café garden, last August, the photographer who took all those pictures. Different angles, different takes, multiple shots of parts of the face, en face, in profile,
a tube of lipstick, an open purse, a cup set aside on the table. She never sensed that the eye of the camera was on her. It all comes back.
The last sequence of frames. She and the young woman are in them together. Beata is leaning over her, stroking her arm, and finally several close ups— one face almost touching the other, Beata whispering something intimate into the strange woman’s ear. And again the eyes, only the eyes, their eyes together as if they belonged to the same face.
Beata can’t take it anymore. She feels painfully ex- posed, more naked than when she’s naked. She has to find Paula and leave immediately to keep her from seeing the photos. She can’t let anyone recognize her. She’ll say she’s having a migraine. She does get them sometimes. At the exit she notices a large sign she missed when entering the room. It announces the title of the exhibition: “Encounters.”
Translated by the author
Hryniewicz-Yarbrough is a translator and essayist. Her work has ap- peared in The American Scholar, LitHub, The New Yorker, Plough- shares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Her essay collection Objects of Affection was published by Braddock Avenue Books.
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