Haut Couture (4.10.2014)

The plane passed the blue mountains of Algeria and now flew over the Sahara. The Sahara stretched on for a long time. A palpable nine-kilometer thick air did not prevent her from viewing the desert with the patterns of the barchans. The yellow below changed to pink, then to almost black, pierced, like blood vessels, by a network of light veins – the beds of long-gone rivers; then everything was yellow again. Then she grew tired of looking, and fell asleep.

…

It was hot in Bamako. She was struck by some clay-colored building with tall clay spikes on top of the walls, and by the leper sitting at the door of the store, reaching out to touch the passersby. And also by the fact that gold objects were very cheap here. But she had only the ten per diem dollars she had been given for the trip, and not a single ruble.

…

As it turned out, Congo was building socialism. The Soviet Union helped, of course; they built a maternity hospital in Brazzaville as a gift and a seven-story hotel against a loan. And, of course, no one believed that the loan would ever be repaid. At the construction of the hotel, where she came to conduct architectural supervision, the working day always started the same way. The Congolese foreman, Monsieur Kansa, would climb up to the second floor of a pile of construction debris and make a fiery speech to the workers. It always ended like this: “Un! – shouted Kansa. – Peuple! – answered the chorus. And again: “Un! – Combat! – shouted the chorus. – Une! – Liberté! That is: – One people! One struggle! One freedom!

After getting an ideological charge, everyone went back to their places. Some, however, stayed and fiddled merrily on the same pile, which they enlarged or diminished. …

The French had taught the Congolese, and they did the plastering perfectly, making the shiny walls inside the hotel look like marble. The Congolese probably didn’t realize that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and she had to blush when the workers indignantly brought her tiles sent from the Soviet Union: “Madame! Voilà, madame! – that was an invitation to look. The gray tiles had not only imprecise sizes, but also six different shades! They could not be used to make a single color floor or to make any kind of pattern. She was ashamed of her country.

In Congo, you could wear flip-flops barefoot all year long if you wanted to. She began to get used to the fact that at six in the afternoon a crimson sunset blazed over the black trees and it was dark almost immediately. To the fact that peanuts grow almost like potatoes. To the stores that sell cloth and other things next to kerosene and thick chunks of salted dried fish. To the fact that the sturdy cotton fabrics with African designs that women wrap themselves in and men make their collarless shirts out of are not made here, but somewhere else, like the Philippines or India.

And what nylon knitwear was sold in the French store! There was nothing like that at home. And here, one could not help but want to buy all these non-wicking fabrics in different colors. And cotton fabrics somehow cost the same or even more! But there was plenty of cotton at home, too. She bought some nylon cutoffs and made a couple of dresses herself. But with one dress she went to the dressmaker. Frenchwomen often wore dresses with a high collar, like a “turtleneck,” and very open shoulders, and she wanted the same. The French dressmaker, who also owned a little store, worked with her in the tiny corner of her back room, where they could hardly sleep together. As she pinned the dress on her, she exclaimed: Madame, vous avez fortes hanches! – Qu’est-ce que hanches? she would ask, and the dressmaker would respectfully point to her firm Russian hips. How wonderful your hips are. She kept repeating the phrase “haut couture” and learned that the haut couture seamstresses do not sew anything with a sewing-machine, only by hand; in a word, they are top class.

Shortly after she left for the Soviet Union, the anthem of Congo-Brazzaville came to be The Internationale” – “We’ll destroy the whole world of violence to the ground, and then…”. Acquaintances laughed that it was her doing.

And then forty years, even forty-five years, passed. The fashion for socialism was gone almost everywhere. So was the fashion for nylon; today everyone is chasing cotton. A few unstitched pieces of nylon are still on her mezzanine. She recently found Brazzaville on the Google globe. A lot had changed there, a tall skyscraper had grown in the middle of the city. She also found her hotel, which at the time had passed with flying colors. Even on the satellite images she could see it was deserted, out of commission. They would probably tear it down, too, and build a five-star hotel. The location is very advantageous, almost on the coast of the Congo, next to the ferry to Kinshasa. This much for an haut couture.

Source: https://aldoninarp.livejournal.com/88447.html