U there?
Dominxxika_N39: Sexy Amy…? U there?
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m here! I’m here!
Dominxxika_N39: O I so happy u r online!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Me too! I’ve been going on like every chance I get! But u’re never there!
Dominxxika_N39: My husband is hang around so much since he get back from business trip. Now he gone but he come back soon.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Did he lock the door and windows again?
Dominxxika_N39: Yes…
Dominxxika_N39: And… he… chain me… to bed post… on my ankle.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: WTF?! Serious??
Dominxxika_N39: He just get sweaty and nervous. But do not worry, my beauty, I drag whole bed to the doorway, and chain long enough for me to use living room computer.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Omg. We gotta get u outta there.
Dominxxika_N39: Lock and chain is iron. This is not possible.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: It is possible! Stop saying that, we’ll figure out a way.
Dominxxika_N39: I’m scared… there is no way. I cannot break free and meet you at Jewish cemetery anymore.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: That doesn’t matter. I’m coming.
Dominxxika_N39: What?
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m coming to Prague and I’ll get up to Zelevcice and I’ll save you!
Dominxxika_N39: This is high ambitious plan.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I have almost 800 dollars in my savings account. And my mom is always forgetting her wallet around the house. And I’m gonna be 18 next week.
Dominxxika_N39: Your birthday? O my beauty, my love, how I want to wish you happy birthday with my kisses.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: You can. You can!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m getting outta here and I’m coming to Prague! I’ll take out the 800 next Tuesday. Then use my mom’s credit card to buy the ticket for Friday. Which is also my birthday. So, whatever, no one can stop me, I’ll be 18.
Dominxxika_N39: O my dream, I am waiting for you!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Send me your adrs. And the times your husband is away each day.
Dominxxika_N39: O you are such brave girl!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I love you, Dominika. And Archangel Michael told me, it’s all going to be alright.
Dominxxika_N39: I love you million times from my throat, in my eyes, and on my fingertips!
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Don’t lose hope! One week!
Dominxxika_N39: I will touch your whole body with mine and I will hold you in my arms and you will be my angel.
Someone is going to come
“They want me for the part!” Aimée and Dominique were jumping up and down, holding onto each other.
The play was at the prominent Théâtre National de Chaillot near the Eiffel Tower, in their epic Jean Vilar auditorium, seating 1,250, moreover it was that famous Polish director, the one who, a couple of years back, did Goethe’s Faust vertically, meaning he hooked all his actors into rock-climbing ropes. It was about mortal gravity, and the devil. The critics loved it.
For his next production he decided to simplify. He was suddenly done with concepts. It was his theatrical homecoming. He wanted good actors. He wanted to feel that feeling, when you watch someone experience something, breath by breath. Instead of backing up, he longed to get closer. And so the Polish director went with none other than Jon Fosse, the Norwegian playwright hailed as the contemporary Beckett, the purified Ibsen, the master of silence.
It’s true that the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe in the Left Bank, one of France’s six national theatres, already did Fosse’s Autumn Dream, appropriately last autumn. But quite frankly, both Chaillot and the Polish director thought that they could do Fosse better.
They chose Fosse’s very first play, Someone Is Going to Come, about a man (HE) and a woman (SHE) who buy an old house in the middle of nowhere so that they can get away from everyone and everything, and be alone together. As soon as they get out there, though, the anxiety begins between them that someone is going to come by. The man assures the woman that they are finally alone now, no neighbours, no friends, no distractions, they can relax, and just…
SHE
A beautiful old house
Far away from other houses
and from other people
HE
You and I alone
SHE
Not just alone
but alone together
[…]
HE
And no-one is going to come
But then, someone comes. A younger man to whom this house belonged in fact, who had sold it and moved into a more suitable place for himself, ironically becoming their nearest neighbour. He came by just to say Hello and see the house…
“They want me they want me they want me!” Dominique was clenching her fists.
Aimée put her arms around Dominique.
They were kissing now.
They were on the bed now.
Through the window, Die schönen Berge, with those seventy-two waterfalls and the braggart gods in the clouds.
They went out to dinner that night at the restaurant called Oberland, recommended by Klaus, who urged them to try the potato rösti. Dominique even put on her favourite heels that she was always packing and never wearing, the shiny leather pumps.
Although the younger man, the previous owner of the house, is the only one in the near vicinity, his visit unravels the anxiety further. He could come back at any time and say Hello again. He could invite them over or invite himself over. And did one of them, within the couple, secretly hope that someone would indeed come?
On the train back, Dominique fell asleep in the crux of Aimée’s shoulder.
When she woke up she said she had had a dream where she tasted something sweet, so sweet…
“Do you ever taste in your dreams?” she asked Aimée.
“…so sweet, like honey, but somehow… bitter… at the end.”
Then Dominique told Aimée about Homer’s Odyssey, when Telemachus, Odysseus’ son is depressed after failing to find his father, and Helen comes to him and mixes a substance into their wine so that “…all sense of woe delivers to the wind.”
I Am the Wind
Dominique started rehearsal, and she was a completely different person it seemed, always in a whirlwind of her thoughts and ideas and explanations.
“It’s my favourite Fosse play,” she kept adding when she explained what she was working on, “excluding, of course, his most recent, I Am the Wind, but that’s for two men stuck at sea, and the casting is not flexible apparently, they have to be men, because only men can be lost souls, women – women are ghosts…”
One afternoon, after having lunch with her father in the 16th arrondissement, Aimée passed by Café du Trocadéro. On the terrace, she spotted Dominique sitting with Claire, two espressos on the table. Dominique was speaking with so much light in her face and Claire was listening with delicacy, sliding her hand up and down Dominique’s forearm.