When Nigel went to the bathroom, I leaned closer to the young woman and said, in way of striking up a conversation: “You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself.”
I expected her to say something like, I’m a little tired, but she kept her eyes on me for some time before finally responding: “I’m so bored of him. But that’s understandable, isn’t it? That I should grow tired of listening to the same joke a thousand times? Women like novelty more than men do, that’s why it’s the men who have always been heroes, and women the prizes.”
I stared at her, my mouth agape. Back then neither Nigel nor Xenia spoke Turkish; our common language was English. I was wondering whether or not I had understood the woman correctly.
“I’m Count Dracula’s homegirl, you better watch out,” she said, and laughed. She placed her mouth on the red wine glass lasciviously; she puckered her lips, which were the same color as the wine, and sucked the half-full glass dry in one long sip. She closed her eyes, savoring the intense pleasure coming over her; she stayed like that for a moment, then peered at me intensely. She wasn’t smiling anymore; she now looked at me with an alluring, even aggressive invitation. For an instant, her big black pupils wandered sideways; I glanced at the reflection in the windowpane. Nigel was walking back toward our table. Xenia, in a low voice, said: “You can speak Arabic, Persian, English, and Turkish. We can’t possibly find anyone else like you. He is ready to pay twice as much as he offered you. Between you and me.” She smiled again. She had managed to create a secret between us. And a shared secret is an invitation to further shared secrets, and sins. I was mature enough to understand that; seasoned enough to bear the consequences, however, I was not.
If I had to describe what we experienced after that night in a single word, I’d say “fun.” It was a journey laced with anxiety, victory, and pleasure. Sometimes Xenia did such reckless things that I, fearful of the end of that magical dream, was compelled to rein her in. Her way of groping me, ignoring her boyfriend who stood with his back to us, planting a kiss on my lips before taking the stage, winking at me mischievously while sitting at a crowded table, well within her boyfriend’s field of vision, caressing my legs under the table sometimes... perhaps these and other dangerous games were expressions of the character traits her early Hollywood femme-fatale looks implied; but I was never as aggressive and courageous in keeping up with her as the men in those films. And that spelled doom for our relationship.
The show was to be staged in a crowded hall in Cairo. That was where I woke up from a sweet fantasy which had lasted for over a year. Nigel was moving about on the stage and in the hall in a fakir costume; he was levitating and performing some improvised exotic dance. Xenia would take the stage the moment the clarinet solo started. She’d be standing in front of the mirror which would convey the images, because the first few minutes of the show consisted of reflections. The audience would see her as an image appearing and disappearing at different spots of the stage. She’d wear a modernized version of a harem outfit, a bustier gilded with gold leaves, showcasing her fair skin with stunning generosity, and a flowing skirt, covered with glittering scales. Every time she made her entrance in that costume, an odd silence would fall over the audience, followed by deafening applause. We were used to it. Xenia was an angel, an image, an apparition which would disappear at once and materialize again somewhere else in the hall, only to disappear again. But that night when her turn came, Xenia did not go out in front of the conveyor mirror.
Suddenly the music stopped. Nigel came over to where we were. He glared at his girlfriend, who had grabbed me by the collar and was manhandling me. “What’s going on here?” he asked. Just as the woman was parting her lips to say something, a deafening, defiant roar rose from the audience.
I quickly took advantage of that window of opportunity. “She’s having cramps and asked me for a painkiller.”
I didn’t know how much of the lie Nigel believed, but he silently turned around, stepped onto the platform where his conveyor mirror was, and said, “We’ll start over. Please find a more appropriate time and place to take your painkiller.” His voice, strangely enough, didn’t sound angry. Nevertheless, I decided to be more careful from then on and to warn Xenia that she should do the same.
As it turned out, however, I didn’t have to. She managed to stay away from me for eight days following our show in Cairo. She preferred to sit next to her boyfriend, somewhere far away from me, to avoid looking at me, to avoid my eyes, all the while aware that they were on her. It seemed the love affair between the two of them had been revived. Xenia laughed with exaggeration, hugged and kissed him time and again even when Nigel was carrying on with his tasteless jokes like he had when I first met them.
As you see, everything I’ve told you so far fits the mold of Hollywood melodramas. I can tell you now that the rest won’t be any different. At least, up until a particular point. That point is also the turning point of my short and pathetic adventure, which started with my trying to talk to Xenia backstage before a show in Jordan.
“We have nothing to talk about, I won’t have anything to do with a coward like you,” she said, before pushing me aside with her elbow and strutting over to the conveyor mirror platform. I followed her.
“We work together, so we should interact in a civilized manner, even if it will end soon!” I was shouting.
“Okay, so what do you want?” She had raised her voice too.
“Come to my room tonight. We should talk.”
“No, I can’t be alone with you.”
I reached out and grabbed her arm; in the same instant the spotlight came on. Following some confusion, people in the audience started laughing. My arm and part of my face had become visible next to her.
“Let go! What are you doing? You’ll ruin the show,” she said.
“Tonight...”
“Okay,” she said. “Promise?”
“Yes! Now go,” she said and started her dance. Everything was ruined.
Nigel’s headaches had started again. I didn’t mind much when I heard him whispering to Xenia backstage, “It’s time we found someone to replace this guy.”
Whenever Nigel had a headache, he withdrew to his room and occupied himself with bookbinding. He kept saying that he came from five generations of Hungarian bookbinders, bragging about it at every opportunity. Though I couldn’t really appreciate his craft, I did derive a strange kind of pleasure from the books he bound, as if I was touching some sort of sacred relic. While working as an illusionist, he bound books of various sizes in his spare time, to keep in practice so that down the road he could teach his yet-to-be-born son the fine art, and thus keep the family trade from dying out. Most importantly, I recall him explaining that this occupation was the perfect remedy for a headache. I recall him saying to Xenia once: “Why on earth do you take those stupid painkillers? We should just bind books together.”
That night Xenia came to my room for a few short minutes. “I can’t leave Nigel alone. Let’s talk in Istanbul tomorrow,” she said, and then she quickly made her way, barefoot, across the hardwood floor of the hotel, back to her room down the hall.
We were in Istanbul the next day. There was a knock on the door, so faint that at first I wasn’t even sure that’s what it was. It was careful, reminiscent of the light footsteps on the hardwood floors in the hallway. I emptied my glass of rakı at once; there was another knock. It was Xenia.