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Dear Reader, I was cruising through some old files, looking for inspiration, when I came across this. I have no idea who Lizvet is, or what Janos's problem is, or what was supposed to happen next. I kind of wish I did. It was a damp day without rain; a spring day oppressed by the last grasp of winter; a good day to hunker down behind the café windows streaked with condensation and soak in the radiators' heat -- but there was Lizvet Cheslov at an outdoor table, her shoulders hunched and her scarf pulled up to her chin, looking like a pinch-faced owl as she gazed across the broad quai at the steel-colored lake. Even without a wind the lake breathed its chill in the city's face, and the air was rough with coal smoke, brick dust, and the high water smell from the canal. Janos wrapped his own scarf a little tighter and said her name. Lizvet looked up as if she had been pulled out of a deep reverie, but without surprise. "There you are," she said, no more than a pleasant statement of fact. She tipped up her face to receive his kiss and he gave it, not too intimate, one cheek and then the other. "I haven't ordered," she said. "I decided to wait." "You shouldn't have, you need something warm in this cold." "Always taking care," she said. Perhaps a little fondly? "It's not that cold." Her gaze drifted away from him, back to the flat dull water of the lake, the dim hills beyond. It was, in this weather, a frankly boring view, and Janos wondered if she saw something in it he did not, or if she was looking at anything outside her head. The waiter came and he ordered them both coffee and cake. "How are you?" he said, his dutiful question. She turned and smiled at him, and this time he felt that she really saw him. She had gray-blue eyes, watercolor eyes, the hue of the iris distinct from the clear whites and black pupils. Brown-eyed Janos was struck by how obvious it was in her eyes, that the pupil is really a hole. But then her eyes always fascinated him. He admitted to himself he was perhaps obsessed, if mildly, harmlessly, with what she saw, how she saw, with what she had seen. More so today, given the news he carried. He rubbed a knuckle across his mouth, a reminder to himself to keep silent until she had spoken. There you go. A little piece of May 2006. Hope you're well, Holly |
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