VII
So they were. She didn’t have to look at me questioningly. I knew perfectly well what she was talking about. Of course, they were a hit. They were the ideal. They were the ideal not only of my youth, they were the ideal in general. Until quite recently, tall, slender, and delicate blondes constituted the unrivaled model of beauty. They became Miss Europe and Miss World. They were chosen as the queens of lyceum balls and the Miss Congenialitys of university villages. In stifling visions, they descended to us from the pages of western journals, we saw them on the screens of movie theaters, we read about them in novels, sometimes they passed us by on the street. They took our breath away, but we didn’t suffer; we were reconciled to our fate. We rejoiced that they had been created; but we knew that they were not created for us, and this caused us no pain. But they — seemingly still worshipped and adored — began to show up less and less frequently. There were fewer and fewer of them. They began to disappear, imperceptibly but inexorably. The extinction approached as quietly as a whisper. In the following years and decades, tall, slender, delicate, and long-haired blondes began to die out as a species. I don’t say that in the following years and decades there occurred a holocaust of tall blondes, but something like an extermination took place in all certainty. And this wasn’t a symbolic or metaphoric extermination. No. The cataclysm began suddenly. Suddenly, there arose the brutal storm of various retro- and afro-brunettes, multicolored Iroquois women, wet Italian women, and punkers shaven as if for delousing. Dusky pipsqueaks in combat boots, alleged Mullatoes, and hothouse Latinas bred in solariums suddenly began to sting venomously. It never occurred to poor Witkacy, who prophesied extermination through the attack of Asiatic hordes, that hordes of female Vietnamese vendors, Ukrainian cleaning women, and Russian whores would bring this extermination on their rickety busts. In addition, a propaganda campaign, prepared by who knows whom, was launched to defile and slander blondes.
Thousands of jokes about blondes perfectly familiar to you, pasquinades about blondes, pamphlets against blondes got under the skin of the masses, who were always inclined to mount pogroms. The ideal of the blonde beauty has reached the pavement. The great extermination has come for the blondes.
How were the subtle and delicate, fearful and defenseless poor things supposed to defend themselves? What were they supposed to do? They did what all hounded tribes do in the face of extermination. They changed their confession and hair color, cut their hair short and colored it dark. They denied it over and over, and not for all the treasures in the world would they acknowledge their blonde roots. Those who had fallen the lowest, and those who were dyed the most, were first in line to attack their blonde former sisters. The most noble of them emigrated or went into the underground. And the tall, slender, delicate, and long-haired blondes definitively — so it would seem — disappeared from the face of the earth. Once in a while, we would see their shadows in archival films or on old photographs, but such traces only increased their absence.
I wanted to say that it is time to return tall, delicate, and long-haired blondes to grace; I wanted to deliver a daring and convincing defense of blondes; after the defense, I wanted to go on to a soaring encomium of blondes, but I gave it up. Anka’s hair, thick as graphite, gleamed like Siberian anthracite.
VIII
The girl was wearing a dirty-russet blouse with shoulder straps and jeans. What sort of shoes she had on, Anka — strange to say — didn’t know. In general, she didn’t remember other details except for a wide pants belt with classical patterns. Was she aware that, sooner or later, the greater part of the image would irrevocably slip from her mind, and so — just like me in such situations — she concentrated on fundamental things? One way or another, God gave her a sign. The blonde’s back was like a soaring flame. She had sat down, however, facing Anka. God had given her a sign, but He didn’t allow her to contemplate it.
“What was I supposed to do? Get offended? Avert my glance? My cult of women’s backs had not reached the point of such deviations, nor had I completely lost my marbles. Quite the contrary. What is more, the splendor of her collar bones rivaled the splendor of her shoulder blades. A rare case of complete harmony. I stared greedily. Not only at the collar bones. There is no point in hiding it: I was desperately and shamelessly fixed on the movements of her breasts under the dirty-russet blouse.
“Incidentally, the dirty-russet blouse was of an exclusive label, which one, I don’t precisely know, but top of the line. That was quite certainly a piece of clothing purchased that summer in Rome or Barcelona.” Anka emphasized this circumstance for my sake.
“For your generation, dirty-russet will be, until the end of your days, the color of People’s Poland’s train linemen. Granted, her blouse was dirty-russet, but this doesn’t mean that it was a rag from a second-hand store or an air-dropped tatter from the times of Martial Law. But returning to her breasts, you have to say in all simplicity: they were fantastic. I don’t know whether you are aware of this, but there exist certain types of fantastic busts that are not accepted by their owners, but even on account of that, on account of their — so to say — self-questioning, are all the more fantastic.”
I wasn’t aware of this. Anka, on the other hand, immediately knew perfectly well that the blonde beauty was not satisfied with her bust. It goes without saying that then, in Yellow Dream, that skepticism wasn’t visible. It was quite easy to imagine, however, and even to behold clairvoyantly, how she stands day after day in front of the mirror and is in a bad mood, or, in the best case, has hefty doubts, because she thinks obsessively that they are too small, too delicate, too soft, too spindly, not spherical enough, etc. And what is more, those manias were justified in some sense. She did not — according to objective measurements — have an ideal figure. The geometrical profile of her body was not the full sinusoid in the desired places. Her bust was, in fact, too small, too delicate, too fidgety, and too spindly.
“Not that I would, you know, carp, but the rear that flashed at me a moment ago — regardless of its fieriness — is too flat. And yet, the overall sum: dazzling, captivating, and — as in some dreams — suffocating. The ideal of beauty is based on geometry, but the ideal of femininity is based on changeability. Forgive the erudite metaphors, but the ideal of femininity in its essence is not Euclidian — it is Heraclitean.”
The blonde belle approached the counter, ordered tea (let’s not get all excited about the informality of this choice), returned to the table, glanced at her watch. Anka wasn’t especially curious about her tardy female colleague, nor was there even a hint of the rookie’s speculations whether she, too, would be dazzling. That was even out of the question from the point of view of probability. There are few lasting and verifiable principles in the world, but the principle that, in a pair of girlfriends, one is the cow always comes true! Always! This is incontrovertible. “And so, I was curious, at the most, about the shape of the shadow that would approach her splendor any moment now.”
And suddenly, there you have it! A complete change of situation! A sudden and unforeseen turn in a plot that had been foreseen to the last iota. Not one, but two shadows glide to her light! And those are not shadows in miniskirts or summer dresses! Those aren’t shadows at all! Two flesh-and-blood guys approach her, greet her, make certain that they have come to the right person, take a seat, and immediately begin the conversation. Two guys of flesh and blood, and especially one of them. Although it is not easy to determine definitively which one of them was of flesh and blood, and which one less so. They seemed to be a couple: director and vice-director. Supervisor and the supervisor’s deputy. Manager and the manager’s assistant. Boss and his — for want of anything better — bodyguard. The boss, at first glance, gave the impression of being the guy of flesh and blood, everything in him was strong and distinctive: the solarium skin, the black shiny hair, the dark sports jacket, the gray slacks, the shirt with white and blue stripes, the appropriate tie, the impressive height, the beefy shoulders — in a word, a classic imitation of the Mediterranean lout. Whereas the other was grayish, slovenly, badly composed; it seemed that he was wearing a suit, but perhaps he didn’t have a suit at all; his hair was somehow combed, or maybe not, maybe he was even bald; it was as if he held a stuffed briefcase tightly under his arm, but maybe that was an illusion. He was there, but perhaps he didn’t exist at all. The first was distinctive in the extreme, the second extremely indistinct. Hence the doubt: which one was of flesh and blood?