Katia's Friends (III)

(Continued from posts below)

They left and Katia asked if she could put on some music. I said yes and she popped a cassette into the tape player in her room. It was “Phantasmagoria” by a group called Curved Air. I had loved the album when I was 15 – seven years before. It started with two bold strokes on the violin, then a descending pattern of eighth notes with an echo effect. It was dated, but it brought me back to my younger days and my life in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Katia took a picture of me. A few days later, I was passing her room and I noticed she had developed the film and put my picture in a plastic cube on her desk. I thought this was odd, being that I lived there. The other sides of the cube were decorated with pictures of other people – friends, I assumed.

One of my students had loaned me an antique Underwood typewriter so I could write the short stories I’d wanted to write when I came to Europe. The brackets that held the ribbon in place weren’t high enough to keep the ribbon from flying out of its place whenever I hit a capital letter, though, so I taped sticks of cardboard onto them. One afternoon when I got back from class, I was typing away at a story I’d been trying to write for a long time. The story was about the day before I moved from Los Angeles to the suburbs when I was 12. That morning, my friends Richard and Gary met me behind a restaurant and we went climbing on rooftops along a busy street. It was a farewell to my life in the city.

A friend of Katia’s came over. He was another student and he was also taking French classes. He was older and called himself Jules even though was German. Katia took him in her room and I could hear them getting it on as I typed. I stopped typing and put on some Billie Holiday music so I wouldn’t have to listen. I can’t say I liked the idea of her having sex in the next room on a weekday afternoon, but I couldn’t complain about it, either. After all, she had offered herself to me first. And her marriage, at that point, only existed officially, for visa purposes.

Saturday morning I went grocery shopping. When I came back, Katia called me from the shower.

“I’m stuck in here. I forgot a towel. Could you get one from my room and hand it to me?”

So I did. She reached her arm out from behind the shower curtain and said thank you. She stepped out of the shower with her towel wrapped around her and walked past me to her room.

So there I was with a beautiful, naked young woman, fresh out of the shower, in my apartment. I was a healthy young man with a normal sex drive. But I followed my rule: no relationships with the roommate. She was married and I needed the rent money. I put the groceries away and made us some lunch.

That afternoon, her friend Jules came over with Gyorgy, who was a friend of Katia’s from Budapest. He had wild frizzy hair and he was a filmmaker. He saw one of my books – “Blood Letters and Bad Men: An Encyclopedia of American Crime” and went nuts.

“Can I read this?” he asked, wide-eyed with excitement. Sure, I told him. I explained that I used it to teach English, photocopying the entries on Jesse James and John Dillinger so that my students could read and discuss them. I stayed away from the gory stuff in class, though. But I urged him to read the entry on the cannibal killer Albert Fish, which he did – and loved. We bonded.

“What are you doing in France?” I asked him. “Are you making movies?”

“No, I’m a political refugee.”

“Oh really? For a film you made?”

“Well, one I was making. It’s that there were some people I was working with. They were in trouble. The government wasn’t happy with them.”

Katia walked into my room and joined us. She spoke a sentence or two of Hungarian with him. The mood changed.

“I was telling him that he didn’t understand what it was like there,” she said to Gyorgy. Then she turned to me and said: “We had a good friend who disappeared.”

“Disappeared? How?” I was hoping for some elaboration.

“Gone. One day he was just gone,” Katia said.

“The police got him? The government? Did anyone see him get arrested?”

“No,” she said. “No one ever does.”

Maybe it was their rudimentary French, or maybe I didn’t know how to ask the right questions, but I still wasn’t getting the full picture.

“Did he do anything wrong?” I asked. “Was he a criminal? A drug dealer? Leading a revolutionary cell?”

They both shrugged.

“We were students,” Katia said.

Maybe it was our rudimentary French. Maybe it was tough to communicate. They were trying to tell me that it could’ve happened to anyone. I think that’s what they were trying to tell me.

Katia went into the kitchen to make us coffee. Jules, Gyorgy and I went into the living room. Gyorgy grabbed a small platform that the previous tenants had left behind. It was a wooden box made from pieces of particle board with carpeting wrapped around it. I was using it sometimes as a coffee table, sometimes as low seat. He stood it on its side and sat on it.

“Hey, if you want to sit on that, fine, but not on its side,” I said. “It’ll break. Look at the way it’s put together.”

Gyorgy laid it flat. But Jules decided to give me some shit.

“It’s funny how people are in Europe,” he said. “When I was in the United States, I stayed with some friends and they let me drive their car. I was amazed at how open and generous they were.”

He was implying that I was being stingy and controlling with my carpeted box.

“If you came to visit me in the states, I’d let you drive my car, too,” I told him. “The car’s insured. That’s my only piece of furniture, man. I don’t have insurance for it. So if it breaks, I have to throw it out. Then I won’t even have this pathetic little thing I can use as a coffee table. I’ll have nothing in my living room. I’d be upset.”

Katia brought us a coffee pot and cups and served the coffee.

“And I’m looking around at the four of us and I don’t see us going to get me a coffee table if this thing breaks.”

“You’ve got a point,” Jules acknowledged. “But you will acknowledge, that the mentality is different in America.”

“I will acknowledge that,” I said. It was an easy enough point to concede. Mentalities are different country to country. I’d met enough people in my travels to have learned that. United States, Germany, Hungary, England, France – things are really different, everywhere and when things are different, people think differently.

We drank the coffee quickly. It was winter and the days were short. The light in the sky was already fading and the apartment was getting darker every minute. I went back into my room and tried to work on my story. Katia and her friends left.