It was darker inside than out. I shook the snow off myself. Nervously, I started to walk forward. I looked back, asking him for help or reassurance or something, and the guy in black, with another movement of his hand, indicated that I should just keep going forward. And so I kept walking, slowly, terrified, feeling as if I were in a film, but I wasn’t sure what kind. A romance film, I thought. A thriller, I thought. I could feel the unfathomable emptiness around me, the total absence of everything. The only sound was the metal sheeting of the roof as it crashed against the rafters. Suddenly, the darkness deepened and my steps became shorter, clumsier, and more hesitant. I put my arms out, expecting to find at any moment a wall, a door handle, a person, something, anything I could touch. I sighed and thought I heard the echo of my own sigh. Then I thought I heard the scuttling of a rat. Then I thought I heard a shout. Then I thought I heard a bit of music hidden in some distant hissing. But no. I wanted to talk, to say something, in order to feel part of the world again, but in that situation words didn’t belong to me anymore. I had gone beyond language. Beyond any rational concept. Beyond myself. Beyond any understanding of what was happening. Beyond any god or doctrine or gospel or borderline between one thing and another. Just beyond.
My hands quickly came up against something. I banged hard with my fist, almost desperately, and a heavy door opened right in front of me, a door I hadn’t even suspected was there. And before I knew it, I was inside and the door had shut behind me. I didn’t have time to decide anything. When it’s important, when it really matters, you never have time to decide anything.
I stayed still, trying to figure out where I was, what I’d gotten myself into. But there was too much smoke, and a faintly orange light like the dawn. It was a large, hot room. There were Gypsies standing, others leaning against walls or sitting on plastic or leather chairs. They were drinking. They were smoking. They were talking loudly. The ceiling was very low and the few yellowish lightbulbs were strung up like little hanged men, bouncing gently from the commotion or perhaps just out of habit. Everything had a sepia glow to it, but a weathered, opaque sort of sepia. In the main room were some steps going up and a number of passageways with small doors that people went in and out of as though it were part of some dubious game. Some Gypsies shouted something to me. I smiled at them and started to walk aimlessly through the smoky yellowish light. I realized (or I realize now) that the whole scene was shaded with a sort of forbidden tinge, a secretive tinge, the tinge of a speakeasy in 1930s Harlem. There was smoke everywhere, as though flooding over us, as though drowning us, as though everything were made of smoke, begun in smoke.
Sitting in a corner, an old man wearing rags and with an elfin face was holding his drink. He beckoned for me to come over. I hesitated, and the old man summoned me again. I walked slowly toward him. His teeth were black. He asked me something in Romany. Music, I said to him. He frowned. Music, music. The old man started to laugh. He shouted something. I felt watched by everyone else, and I don’t know why, but until then I hadn’t realized that there were only Gypsy men around me, not a single woman. The old man handed me his glass and, with another gesture of his hands, told me to drink. It tasted of brandy. I gave him the glass back and he continued talking to me as though I understood him. I shrugged. He clapped a few times and at that moment, from way off somewhere, from a different room, the sound of a piano started up. I stood there quietly. Was it a piano? It was definitely a piano. I excused myself with a weak smile.
I walked slowly through the room and then down one of the passages until I got to a half-closed door. I could still hear the muted sound of the piano. I opened the door and, dimly, like in a faded dream or in a faded dream sequence from an old film, I saw a woman putting on her makeup or brushing her hair in the mirror. She turned toward the door and stuck her tongue out at me, and I felt a primal sort of fear and slammed the door and walked back a few paces and nearly fell over. At the end of the passage, a man with gray hair shouted something at me. He looked angry. I ignored him. Without thinking about it, I tried to open another door, but it was locked. The gray-haired man carried on insulting me. I managed to open a smaller door. It was a lightless room, or rather one with only the frail glow of a solar eclipse. It smelt of hashish, of gangrene, of wet laundry. Sitting on a stool, a plump red-haired girl with her freckled breasts out was putting her stockings back on. She smiled, gestured for me to come in, her mouth open, with the look of a slippery rattlesnake, and it dawned on me that I was in a brothel. Was I in a brothel?
I went back into the main room. The old man was still there. He gave me his glass again and I drank all the brandy while he and the others made fun of me. I didn’t mind much. I could still hear the piano. I was feeling a bit dizzy. I tried to ask him where the music was coming from, but he just smiled his rotten smile and clapped a few times. Piano, I shouted. Where’s the piano? Upstairs? I pointed, and he, his hand festooned with gold rings and chains, signaled to me that I should go ahead, go on up.
The stairs were steep. I started to climb up, but as I did so the sound of the piano appeared to be descending the stairs. Like a cat going down eighty-eight steps. Like it was looking for me. I reached a mezzanine or a landing with a number of closed doors. The ceiling was even lower here and the walls were painted burgundy and there was a single yellow lightbulb hanging in the middle, swinging. I crouched down. I felt hypnotized. Comatose, even. Straddling some nonexistent and probably dangerous border. But the piano was still playing. Yes, there it was, the tinkling of the piano. Close by. I could hear its tune, but I couldn’t find it. An invisible tune, I thought. An ethereal tune, I thought. It had to be Milan.
I opened one of the doors. Sitting on the edge of a rickety old bed was a very pale girl with lank black hair and big blue eyes. She seemed to be fifteen or sixteen from where I stood, but she could have been older. She had the look of someone who had just been crying. She was wearing a long turquoise skirt and a very light sleeveless white blouse. She was barefoot. Her skin shone, maybe with sweat, although I doubt it. On her wrists and ankles she wore thin chains made of fake gold coins. She looked at me sternly, almost sadly, and I don’t know why, but I stood still, holding the door handle. Suddenly, and in silence, she got up and walked slowly toward me. She put her cold hand on mine and both our hands closed the door together and then the sound of the piano faded a little. She was taller than I’d thought. I felt her face close to my face and I inhaled her breath, which smelled like rain, or perhaps it smelled like mandarins, and in her eyes I saw all the sensuality of a Gypsy woman. I heard the piano again and started to smile out of sheer nervousness. She placed her hands on my chest and pushed me into the wall. She pressed herself against me. Now her fingers were gently caressing my cheeks, my neck, my stomach; they were finding their way into my pockets and rummaging until they reached my money, maybe the last of it. I felt dizzy, feverish, and sometimes what reigns is confusion, and sometimes confusion holds the reins. She perched her little Gypsy feet on top of mine. I felt the warmth of her crotch on mine. I shut my eyes hard and put my hands on the ceiling to hold myself steady, to hold it all steady, and I listened to the muffled piano and felt how the girl’s damp hands slid down my neck and my torso, and at that moment I thought about the Gypsies’ third talent, which is a secret, and I thought about pirouettes, about all those pirouettes, and I thought that the lines of my life had been drawn to diverge at that moment, right there, at that very point, at that very second, in front of that turquoise, spectral Gypsy, and suddenly, through the cloud of smoke, I thought I saw Milan’s father’s face, which at the same time was my own father’s face, calling me in Romany or maybe in Hebrew and holding out one of his hands so that I’d take it and he could help me. The fingers of the young girl inserted themselves expertly into my pants. I opened my eyes. With my hands still on the ceiling, I put my mouth to her marzipan cheek. I wanted to tell her something, anything. But suddenly she was on her knees. She whipped my pants down almost violently, sank all the warmth of her face into me, and looked up at me beseechingly with her big sky blue eyes. The piano, I whispered in a Spanish that sounded too lascivious, trembling and smiling euphorically while feeling judged by such blue eyes, and then I thought I heard, far off, as though subliminally, as though tangled up, as though it came from inside me, as though threaded through the rest of that music and all the music of the universe, one of the syncopated melodies of Melodious Thunk. Impossible to know which one. Better that way.