‘I think I might have something for you,’ replied Good News, and led me into the depths of the long, narrow space.
At the far end stood a circular clothes rail with jackets hanging on it. Without having to think, she reached out and extracted a lovely down coat in a crimson shade.
‘How about this one?’ The large surfaces of the bright windows were reflected in her eyes, which shone with a beautiful, pure light.
Yes, the jacket was a perfect fit. I felt like an Animal that has been given back its stolen fur. In the pocket I found a little shell, and decided it was a small gift from the previous owner. Like a wish: ‘May it serve you well.’
I also bought some gloves at this shop, two pairs. I was just about to rummage in a basket full of hats when I noticed a large black Cat lying in it. And next to it, among the scarves, there was another one, identical, but bigger. Mentally, I named the Cats Hat and Scarf, though afterwards I always found it very hard to tell them apart. Good News’ black Cats.
This sweet little shop assistant with Manchurian beauty (she was also wearing a fake-fur hat) made me a cup of tea and pulled a chair up to the gas heater for me to warm myself.
That was how our friendship began.
There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one’s throat to tighten and one’s eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall. Perhaps they are messengers, like the servants who find a lost prince who’s unaware of his origins, show him the robe that he wore in his native country, and remind him how to return home.
She too suffered from her own special illness – a very rare and bizarre one. She had no hair. No eyebrows, or eyelashes. She’d never had any – she was born like that. Genes, or Astrology. I of course think it’s Astrology. Oh yes, I verified it in her Horoscope: Damaged Mars close to the Ascendant, on the side of the twelfth house and in opposition to Saturn in the sixth (this sort of Mars also produces covert activities and unclear motives).
So she drew herself lovely eyebrows with a pencil, and tiny little lines on her eyelids to look like lashes; the illusion was perfect. She always wore a turban, a hat, occasionally a wig, or else she wound a scarf around her head. In summer I gazed in amazement at her forearms, entirely devoid of those little darker or fairer hairs that we all have.
I often wonder why we find some people attractive and not others. And I have a Theory about it, which is that there is such a thing as a perfectly harmonious shape to which our bodies instinctively aspire. We choose in others the features that seem to match this ideal. The aim of evolution is purely aesthetic – it’s not to do with adaptation at all. Evolution is about beauty, about achieving the most perfect form for each shape.
Only when I saw this girl did I realise how ugly our body hair is – those brows in the middle of the forehead, the eyelashes, the stubble on our heads, armpits and groin. Why on earth do we have this peculiar stigma? I think that in paradise we must have been devoid of hair. Naked and smooth.
She told me she was born in a village outside Kłodzko, into a very large family. Her father drank and died before his time. Her mother was sick, seriously so. She suffered from depression and had ended up in hospital, drugged into a stupor. Good News coped as best she could. She had passed her final secondary-school exams with flying colours, but hadn’t gone to college because she had no money, on top of which she was taking care of her siblings. She decided to earn the money for her studies, but couldn’t find a job. Finally the owner of this chain of second-hand shops had taken her on, but the salary was so low she was barely able to survive on it, and from year to year her studies were further and further postponed. When there was nobody in the shop, she read. I knew what books she liked, because she put them on a shelf and lent them to her customers – gloomy horror stories, Gothic novels with crumpled covers featuring a drawing of a Bat. Perverted monks, severed hands that murder people, coffins flushed out of graveyards by floods. Evidently reading this sort of thing confirmed her in the conviction that we are not living in the worst of worlds, and taught her optimism.
When I heard Good News’ account of her life, I mentally began to formulate questions that start with the words ‘Why don’t you…’, followed by a description of what – in our view – one should do in this sort of situation. My lips were on the point of producing one of these impertinent ‘why don’t yous’ when I bit my tongue.
That’s just what the colour magazines do – just for a moment I’d wanted to be like them: they tell us what we’ve failed to do, where we’ve messed up, what we’ve neglected; ultimately, they set us on ourselves, filling us with self-contempt.
So I didn’t say a word. Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate. So I told Good News about my life too, and invited her to my home to meet my Little Girls. And that’s what happened.
In an effort to help her I went to the local authority, but I found out there’s no support, no grants for people like Good News. The woman behind the desk advised me to arrange a bank loan, the kind you pay back once you finish your studies and start to work. There are also free computer, dressmaking and flower-arranging courses. But those, unfortunately, are only for the unemployed. So she would have to quit her job in order to go on one.
I made a trip to the bank as well, where I was given a stack of forms to complete. But there was one vital condition – Good News had to secure a place at college first. And I knew that eventually she would achieve her aim.
It’s good to sit in Good News’ shop. It’s the cosiest place in town. Mothers with children meet up here, and old ladies on their way to lunch at the pensioners’ canteen. The car park security guard and frozen saleswomen from the vegetable market come here. Everyone is given something hot to drink. One could say that Good News runs a cafe here.
Today I was to wait for her to lock up this sanctuary, and then we’d be off to the Czech Republic with Dizzy to visit the bookshop that sells Blake. Good News was folding some bandanas. She never said much, and if she did speak, she did it quietly, so you had to listen to her very carefully. The last few customers were still browsing the clothes rails in search of a bargain. I stretched out on a chair and closed my eyes blissfully.
‘Have you heard about the foxes that have been seen out on the Plateau, near where you live? Fluffy, white foxes.’
I froze. Near where I live? I opened my eyes and saw the Gentleman with the Poodle.
‘Apparently that rich fellow with the funny name released some from his farm,’ he said, standing in front of me with several pairs of trousers slung over his arm. His Poodle was looking at me, a doggy smile on its face – it clearly recognised me.
‘Innerd?’ I asked.
‘That’s the one,’ confirmed the man, and then addressed Good News. ‘Would you please find me some trousers with an eightycentimetre waist?’ Then at once he went back to his story. ‘They can’t locate the man. He’s gone missing. Vanished without trace. Like a needle in a haystack,’ the old gentleman went on. ‘He’s probably run away with his lover to a warmer country. And as he was rich, he’ll find it easy to hide. Apparently he was mixed up in some sort of racket.’
A young man with a shaved head who’d been asking about Nike or Puma track suits and was now rummaging among the clothes rails responded. ‘It wasn’t a racket, it was the mafia,’ he said, hardly opening his mouth at all. ‘They were importing furs illegally from Russia, using his farm as a cover. He hadn’t settled up with the Russian mafia, so he got scared and did a runner.’