—
CHED HAD MET Füst a few times and said he wouldn’t want any daughter of his going anywhere near “that dickhead,” but the first time he said that I took it with more than a pinch of salt. For starters Aisha’s polite refusal to have a crush on her friendly neighborhood pop star was something of an ego bruiser. There were a few other small but influential factors: Füst’s being ten years younger than Ched, and its being well-known that Füst composes, arranges, and writes the lyrics for all his (mostly successful) songs himself… no voices. It just wasn’t really possible for Ched to like him. Füst was forever being photographed wearing dark gray turtlenecks, was engaged to be married to a soloist at the Bolshoi Ballet, didn’t seem to go to nightclubs, and reportedly enjoyed art-house film, the occasional dinner party, and the company of his cat Kleinzach. A clean-shaven man with a vocal tone reminiscent of post-coital whispers, that was Matyas Füst. The way he sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is no joke.
—
CHED HAD been away for about a month when I got home to find “love to hatred turn’d.” Noor was making dinner, checking his recipe board after each step even though he knew it just as well as if he’d written it himself. The not-so-hidden charms of a man who takes his time over every detail… especially once you distract him for just long enough to turn all his attention onto you. It didn’t occur to me to ask about the kids until halfway through our very late dinner. Bad stepfather.
“Er… have the kids already eaten?”
Noor shook his head. “They promised they’d have something later.”
“Hmmm. Why?”
“Not sure. Heartbreak, I think.”
“Ah, so the face shifter isn’t The One after all?”
“No, it’s not Day — well, it is Day, but only because she can’t let Aisha go through it all on her own.”
The sisters were huddled together on Aisha’s bed with a laptop between them. They closed the laptop when I came into the room, leaving me to look around at the bare walls and wonder what had happened. Both girls were red-eyed and strenuously denied being upset. When I left the room I clearly heard Day say: “You’ve got to stop watching it,” and Aisha answered: “I know, but I can’t.” Then she said, “Maybe it isn’t true, Day? It probably isn’t true,” and Day said, “Oh, Aisha.”
—
NOOR AND I WATCHED the video ourselves downstairs. It was called “A Question About Matyas Füst.” Noor found it hard to watch in one go; he kept pausing it. This cowardly pacing would normally have been grounds for a dispute; I agreed with him just that once, though. The video opened with a woman sitting on the floor in her underwear, showing us marks all over her body. A lot of the marks were needle track marks, but they were outnumbered by marks I hadn’t wanted Day and Aisha to ever become acquainted with: bruises left by fists and boots. I dreaded the end of the camera’s journey up to the woman’s face and didn’t know what to think when I saw that it was untouched, even a subdued kind of pretty. No makeup, clean, mousy-looking hair, age absolutely anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five. I’d seen girls who resembled her waitressing in seedy bars across the Continent, removing customers’ hands from their backsides without turning to see who the hand belonged to, their gestures as automatic and unemotional as swatting midges.
She pulled a T-shirt on and looked at the camera for a little while before she started talking. You could tell from her eyes that she was out of her head on something and probably couldn’t have told you her own name if you’d asked her. Her English was far below fluency, but since she was in her happy place she didn’t bother struggling with pronunciation, just said what she had to say and left us to figure it out. She wanted us to know that “the entertainer” Matyas Füst had picked her up on a street corner a few hours after he’d played a sold-out concert in Greenwich. She’d spent the rest of the night with him and he hadn’t proved very entertaining at all. Tell us a bit more about yourself, the person holding the camera said — a woman, I think, trying to sound gentle, but her voice was thick with anger. The woman on camera obediently stated that she was often on street corners trying to get money, and that she didn’t often get lucky: The men she signaled to could usually tell just by looking at the backs of her hands that she’d gone too far into whatever she was doing. But Matyas Füst didn’t care about that: He’d had a fight with his controlling bitch of a girlfriend and it had taken all he had not to hit the girlfriend. Taking your fists to a prima ballerina with an adoring host of family and friends would be a very messy and expensive blunder. So he went looking for someone nobody cared about. And he found… me… the woman on-screen said, and giggled. Noor pressed pause again and left the room, went upstairs, and knocked on Aisha’s bedroom door. “Come and eat,” he said, and Aisha and Day said they’d come in a minute.
—
HOURS LATER they still hadn’t come downstairs. We’d watched the rest of the clip by then. The whole thing was only three minutes and thirty seconds long, but we kept trying to watch it through Aisha’s and Day’s eyes, this woman telling us that after they’d had sex Füst had insulted her so that she slapped him, and once he’d received the slap he’d smiled (her fingers plucked at the corners of her mouth until we could see just how he’d smiled), told her she’d “started it,” and proceeded to beat her until she couldn’t stand up. She’d hit back, she said, even from her place at his feet she’d hit back, but every time he hit harder. Then he stood over her in all his wealth and fame and arrogance and shrugged when she said she wasn’t going to keep quiet about this. Matyas Füst had shrugged and asked her if she thought anybody was going to give a shit that someone like her had got hurt. A nameless junkie with seriously crazy English. Look at you, he said. And look at me. He threw a handful of money at her and told her it was better for her to keep her mouth shut and spend that, or save it for a rainy day. Then he went back to his girlfriend. They must have made up, because she’d seen photos of them having a romantic dinner in a restaurant, and hints had been dropped about their wedding plans. I look him on Google. The woman on-camera seemed proud of her diligence. Then she asked us her question about Matyas Füst: Did anybody care that he’d hurt her, someone like her? She was just wondering. She laughed and gave us a perky little wave at the end. Thank you. Nice day to you.
Aisha came in cradling her laptop in her arms. Day followed, hands helplessly rising and falling. “It’s not just the clip, it’s the comments,” she said, when she saw us.
Ah yes, the comments.
Noor couldn’t make himself look, so Aisha and I read some of them aloud. There was a lot of LOL cool allegations junkie, maybe it was all a dream? and LMAO people will say anything to ruin a good man’s reputation stay strong Matyas!
If only that was the worst of it. Aisha’s haggard face as she read: Oh boohoo. What’s this one complaining about? He paid her, didn’t he? She hit him, didn’t she? Admitted all this herself. Does she think you can hit someone and just walk away? I read: She should count herself lucky: men probably treat broken down old whores worse than that in her country. And she got to bang Matyas! Matyas Füst can beat me up any time baby LOL