Letters from Yelena by Guy Mankowski Read Free Book Online Page B

caramel tart and ice cream, at once hot and cool to touch. A dish I would never have allowed myself to enjoy normally, and yet here – in this role
– I was able to. I realised I had now shed my role as a seductress; it had slipped away and revealed the real Yelena for the first time. You knew nothing of the self-loathing, of the
isolation, of the silence of my past. It didn’t need to exist anymore. Your intense, flashing gaze told me it was unnecessary now. But I promised myself I would tell you about it one day, if
only for my own sense of integrity.
    You asked me how I really felt in the city. I said I still felt pretty lonely, and I wondered if I was ready to dance as a Principal. I told you about my need to please Michael, about Alina,
about how desperate I was not to go back to the Ukraine with my tail between my legs. That I felt on the edge of achieving something momentous, but that there was little evidence as to why. And
then I asked how you felt in the city, and what was happening in your world. In snatched, self-conscious sentences you told me that an eccentric uncle had left you this house three months ago,
which had forced you, for financial reasons, to return to the city that you had lived in as a younger man. ‘Hence the state of disarray.’
    Over the last crumbs of tart, as we looked back at the house, you told me about the progress of your book. You said the breakthrough of your second novel had been a pleasant surprise, given that
it had been written mainly to satirise a certain genre of ‘cutting-edge’ fiction. ‘I wrote it in a fit of despair at my life, as a desperate attempt to do something of meaning.
For years I had worked in dull bureaucratic jobs, and writing had been my escape. My first book had been written under another name as a bit of a trial run, but my second one had instantly gained a
lot of coverage. After years of frustration and hardship it brought me the kind of lifestyle I had always wanted. One which gave me the room to write. Now I suddenly find myself as a full-time
writer, but I’ve done no groundwork to understand that role. And I’m still learning to be domesticated, and yet I have this great big house. It’s so strange.’
    You said you still felt like an outsider in the city, as if by returning you were outstaying your welcome here. But that as time went by, you were rediscovering what you had first loved about
it. I asked how, with no-one telling you what to do, you had developed the rules by which to govern every moment of your own life. You looked at me as though there were years of consideration tied
up in that question. ‘I am still learning,’ you said.
    The bottle of wine was almost at an end. As its effect began to take hold, you amused me with your impression of Michael, lizard-like and effete one minute, then a kind of camp Nazi the next.
You had him down to a tee, the slightly leering gaze which crawls up your face as he considers you, the twitch of discomfort that whips around his shoulders when he momentarily realises how
disingenuous he is. I found myself laughing so hard I almost fell off the rickety rail I was perched on.
    We passed the rest of the bottle of wine between us, like guilty schoolchildren. I saw that in fact having the freedom to run your own life gave you room for small decadent pleasures, which
another’s rules could never encompass. You showed me that I didn’t need to see decisions as an unending pressure, that in time they could be a cause for celebration. I saw how addictive
you found it to make me laugh. Once I began you didn’t want me to stop, and you quickly went on linguistic flights of fancy, surreal and imaginative that had me giddy with the absurdity of it
all. Through the sheer dexterity of your words, Michael suddenly became a meerkat in a gilet, clambering sleazily up a ballerina’s leg one minute, kicked disdainfully off the next, and then
suddenly asserting his homosexuality the minute he was