ellen visson
 

Land of Plenty

Along an autumn lake in Switzerland squats a dilapidated 1906 hotel. Within its slanting roof mourn two small windows, from which pigeon waste runs in tears. Three balconies stud its torso, the fourth having collapsed eight years ago, killing a chihuahua but sparing the old woman with crutch walking it. The old woman has since died, and now combat dogs with tattooed owners prowl the streets. A pub currently occupies the hotel’s groin. On its sidewalk café, and lounging within an anonymous plastic chair, Larissa Filopovna is holding court. She senses that someday, she’ll rule something.

Larissa has escaped the Republic of Russia to play the piano in the bar of a luxury hotel down the road. Larissa’s barter in the West is a blond head with tilted blue eyes, swollen lips on a bowed mouth, and straight nose. This china-doll head is poised atop a long neck and slim build. But her teeth in large gums are tiny and sharp so that when she smiles, people rarely smile back.

“You didn’t.” Her leer beams at him. “You lying.”

“Ah but I did.”

“You very bad man.”

Larissa is maintaining a vicious flirtation with the pub’s franchise owner. She tells herself it’s a battle plan to obtain a living permit but actually Larissa is awed by Mark’s smooth American composure that seems to grip the world in its playful teeth, shaking it from time to time. He’s eighteen years beyond Larissa, who’s barely twenty. They met two weeks ago. She believes they’re destined.

Mark is a solid six-footer and ex-Mormon. While a missionary in Switzerland, he’d deserted the ranks and renounced his position in Utah’s earthly hierarchy and Heaven’s spiritual one to marry a native unbeliever. The sexual practices into which his new wife initiated him exploded the world open, a bud in fast-forward. But the flower became blown. Mark divorced once he’d become Swiss and his teenaged children now have several fathers from which to choose.

“Are you coming tonight, after work?” Mark has a wide, vague face romping with freckles across which any emotion can be projected. Veering from his skull, his boyish ears are antennae for mischief. Like his hair, his dark brown eyes have a slightly reddish cast. When not feigning innocence, they’re ballasted from behind with knowledge.

“You want me to come?”

“Many times…”

“You a very bad man,” Larissa laughs, proud because she’s understood what he’s meant in English.

“Then you should keep away from me.”

“I like bad, bad men,” she mouths, manipulating expert lips. Larissa is imitating Sue Ellen from Dallas, who’d smoldered across her television in the 90’s. When Dallas began, Russians from Vladivostok to the Urals locked onto screens to discover what they’d missed and how to get it. Larissa pops her lower lip to repeat ‘bad’ soundlessly.

Mark guffaws but when Larissa reddens, he smoothes the down across her arm with a finger. “I’m not so bad,” he says. “And you make me better.”

Larissa unfolds, her center straining towards him. “Really?” she lilts. Larissa wants no more than most. Love. A family. A country where money circulates like open air while still remaining as solid as Alps. It’s a good place to raise children. Larissa, who went from child to weary adult with not much in between, loves children. They distract her back into what she once was, before she had to entertain big spenders in Russian casinos.
Mark says he’s had enough of kids but coos at the babies of customers. This gives Larissa enormous hope.
Last week, one of his daughters—a girl of twelve—dropped by the pub. Suicide attempts, Mark explained later, interned her periodically in hospitals. It was the mother’s fault. She indulged the daughter with psychiatrists instead of keeping her in line. The girl had an old man’s sucked-in face with unnatural bags under the eyes. She’d examined Larissa through smoldering hatred.

“Encore une espèce de pute,” she’d snarled to her father, who’d smacked her hard. Larissa didn’t know what the girl said but wondered if she should step between them. Tears blurred the child’s face. “Vas te faire foutre,” she’d screamed before fleeing.

Mark continues stroking Larissa’s arm. She sighs and leans back in her chair, forgetting the girl. “I wait for night,” she murmurs, and opens her eyes enough to sight the azure lake’s glint through red maple leaves and clusters of palms. Its perfection echoes back to her all she shares with Mark.

A large and solid hip materializes to block her view. “And so? What is news?” rumbles out from above, the accent weighted with heavy vowels. The hip screeches a chair across cement and a torso sits at the table. Larissa remains reclining, though her languor compresses into steel. It’s Salima, a political refugee from Kosovo. Her dark hair is streaked screaming red and a blue rubber squid is pinned in it—an affectation picked up in Berlin.

“Nothing new,” clips Larissa. She traps Mark’s eye but can’t hold it. “We talking. Together.”

Salima lays her forearms on the table and ample breasts on top of them. Her careful eyeliner disappears into creases as she smiles. An immobile left cheek shines with burn-ripples that extend from ear to throat, and beyond. “Are you coming tonight?” she asks Mark. Her English is much better than Larissa’s, another thing she picked up in Berlin. “Abid has a new bull terrier in keep. Colossal. All white with one eye black.” Salima leans across her breasts and closer to Mark. Saliva has beaded on her lip. “Been training it in a cat mill. Already killed five cats and dogs. Abid swears to god it’ll tear up Hans’ pit. The bets are colossal.”

Salima’s been in Switzerland for fifteen months living from the State and the Red Cross. Larissa has to work, pay taxes, and will be forced to leave when her contract is up in twelve days. Salima’s status has been bought by her parents’ accomplished slaughter and her own slow torture and rape, which ostensibly yielded a dead child. But there are so many stories.

“A new bull?” Mark’s freckles darken. “Where’s the game?”

“Abid didn’t tell but I meet up by him at two. You come and he’ll take us both to match,” grins Salima. One canine is black but Mark grins back.

“Where you get used Trojan?” Larissa says, pointing to the blue squid in her hair.

“Same place you get yours,” Salima fires back. Mark laughs. Larissa wishes the Serbs had been allowed to finish the job.

That night Larissa muffs her set, navigating down a choppy Moon River and mourning through It’s a Wonderful Life. This instills a smug glow across the waiter whom she’s scorned but incites the hotel’s duty manager to interrupt her with stern warnings. Fear humbles Larissa, who returns to It’s a Wonderful Life as though it were.

Larissa had landed this coveted job after her grandmother died. She and her mother had nursed the old woman at home. When the grandmother could still walk, she’d doggedly lit candles in an orthodox church preserved as a museum. Larissa always considered her touched. Once bed-ridden, the old woman had bullied Larissa into lighting them for her. Larissa was afraid of the dying so she’d gone twice. The day before the grandmother passed into a coma, she’d promised to watch over them from heaven and just after her death, Larissa got a call from an agent summoning her to Switzerland. Her mother has made a connection but Larissa refuses it. The fact that her contract is almost up and that she still has no permit to stay confirms this.

The bar closes at 1am. Larissa sheds her black gown for jeans and jogs back to the pub. Mark is still there but insists on waiting for Salima. He wants to go to the dogfight. Larissa attaches herself, sullen but determined, and strains to keep her voice musical as she recounts Russian fairytales, which Mark likes.

“I have a friend,” Mark interrupts. He’d been swirling his beer in the bottom of his glass but stops to sight into her eyes. “He made a promise of marriage today for a girl at the Police of Foreigners.”

“Really?” Larissa labors at casual but her tone is joyous. “I hope he won’t regret it,” she adds but it’s too late. Mark rises, claiming sudden customers, and joins a group that just came in. Larissa is left with empty glasses and their coasters, which she stacks as he roars his hearty, American laugh. Mark catches her scowl and wiggles one ear, a trick he learned as a kid in Bountiful. Larissa’s gloom cracks, letting out laughter.

At one-fifteen Salima arrives. When she sights Larissa her mouth hardens. Salima is still wearing the rubber squid in her hair but has added as outfit a cheap garter belt over tight black shorts. Its elastic garters hold up nurses’ stockings that end just where her pants begin. Salima wears her outfit like a medal, same as the scars shining her neck. Larissa watches Mark notice, his face sprinkling with sudden cinnamon.

At one-thirty, Mark closes the bar. There’s a full moon. They walk along the breezy lake, where across the water a thousand tiny strobe lights flicker. Salima is guiding them to Abid and she makes easy conversation, English flowing like water running into a metallic basin. Larissa understands little. She concentrates instead on brushing Mark’s hand. His fingertips flirt back across the rounded cushions on her curled palm, sending shivers of memory through her. Larissa observes Salima and is satisfied at the ridiculous way her garters snap as she strides along the quay.

They cross a footbridge spanning a river. Salima’s high-heels rattle the iron, their echoes ricocheting off the water like machinegun fire.

“Look.” Mark points to sudden shadows zooming out from under the bridge to spread up and across the water. “Bats.” They halt to watch the rapid flutters dissolve into the night.

“Beautiful,” says Salima. “Hey,” she points, and Larissa also registers the instant when moonlight pierces a translucent wing spread by splayed bones, as the creature veers downward. They stand transfixed by the splendor of ugliness.

“Colossal,” Larissa pronounces, then reddens at the smirk tottering across Mark’s lips while Salima sneers.

“We turn here,” she says. They follow Salima up a hill.

Abid is waiting in an open field. Under the moon his face shimmers a hard, asphalt-blue when he sees Salima arrive with a group. The African also thinks they’ve no money but Mark slides a roll of bills halfway from a pocket, eliciting from Abid a muscular smile equal to the pink and white dog leashed beside him. The bull terrier is guarding the strangers. He has a pink nose on an egg-shaped head, within which are sunk small, triangular eyes. “A pig’s head,” thinks Larissa, except that all its muscles are straining through its skin. She pretends scorn to examine Abid. A barrel-stud in his left ear smolders like a dense planet at midnight, and Larissa guesses it’s platinum, same as the chain around his neck. Abid is famous around here, and his iron forehead and flared nose radiate authority. Larissa secretly trembles.

A sudden child skirmishes to appear beside Abid and clings, hugging his calf. He’s a mulatto and no more than five. In profile, heavy lashes that curl at their tips shade one amber eye. His mouth is full and blooming, his lips a darker pink than the dog’s snout. He snuggles those lips against that muzzle, and the dog jumps up to romp. Abid fires out staccato words, and dog and child take their positions to face the strangers. Larissa flinches at an albumen-white cast over the boy’s left eye, like an egg that’s been covered too long to fry. The child tentatively plucks at his father’s pants but releases the cloth immediately.

“He cute boy, your son,” Larissa says to Abid in English.

“If one could breed children like dogs he would have been destroyed as soon as he opened his eyes.” Abid has answered in French but Mark doesn’t translate.

“You’re taking him?” Salima asks. The boy is looking up at his father.

“His first match. It will teach him life.” The fierce forehead smoothes to reflect moonlight. Then it creases again. “And this crowd?” he shoots at Salima, his chin indicating Larissa because Mark has money. “Why this crowd? From where?”

“Abid—“

“You choose who are your friends. Stay with them.”

“But Abid. Isn’t your wife here? With the boy. I thought—“

“Quiet, woman.”

The large African pivots, a pinwheel upon which the dog and child are mere extensions, and strides away. Salima joins them. Mark and Larissa trail behind.

They’re soon in a small city with old, anonymous buildings. They descend below ground and into a basement that resembles a stone-lined cave. Its low and rounded form immures eighty people, and the smoky air is already tainted with sweat and rusty with blood. A charged murmur simmers beneath the haze. Larissa’s heart chatters in her chest like some caged monkey as everything takes on an abrupt clarity. She seems to see the room as in a vision, with each face distinct. A sudden lubrication of sweat bursts into her armpits.

“Hey Abid,” greets their entrance. Hands are slapped, twisted, thumbs grasped, released. Boys with various piercings and more or less shaven heads stand at attention near a wall from which two cages protrude like bulging, iron eyes. A red brick of a boy with one eyebrow pierced and the edge of an ear hidden by silver rings squats beside one. A girl next to him stands, legs apart, her knobbed skull pushing through stubble. She’s sheathed below in black spandex, around which an old-lady’s’ girdle grips her in its fist. Rubber garters hold up net stockings amputated at mid-calf by combat boots. Her navel glitters with a jeweled stud below a black bustier. This outfit squelches Salima’s pretensions to style, and Larissa wishes Mark would notice but he won’t. The girl leans on a long wooden wedge riddled with bite marks.

The girl comes up to cheek-kiss Abid three times, a Swiss custom.

“You’ve got more than one bitch with you, I see,” she clips in French. Mark and Salima understand, but Larissa knows only by the girl’s eyes. “Who are they?”

“It’s cool,” says Abid.

“Don’t bring your crotch business in here, Bamboula.”

“He has money, connasse. He’s no flick.”

“I’m gonna go for the game,” Mark says so she can hear his American accent. There are no Americans in the Swiss police.

“Bien, OK,” she nods and steps back. “Hans.”

The short, red brick of a boy with the pierced eyebrow shoves through the crowd and grabs the girl’s hand to pass her a leash. Larissa sees a tan pit bull with a half-white face before it’s hurried away. Hans and Abid converse in a formal French and the boy extends a sharp, studded tongue at Abid, who laughs without smiling. Larissa tugs Mark’s sleeve and he explains that the dogs will be washed because some cheaters douse fur with poison.

Marks steps up to a large olive-skinned man taking bets. Larissa’s eyes widen then narrow as she recognizes purple, thousand-franc bills. Mark counts out twice what she’s earned in three months. He makes a joke with his easy way to the man, who laughs, and is moving off towards the pit when he recognizes his daughter. Larissa doesn’t understand at first why Mark freezes but then recognizes her, too. The daughter has blackened her hair, eyes and lips. Her nails, also black, are chewed and ragged. One hand disappears behind, into the low-slung waist of a boy’s pants. She watches her father register this, then extends a newly studded and pointed tongue. The boy has a matching one. Mark turns abruptly away.

Larissa sidles after him. The crowd crushes around her like interlocking gears she must dodge, and she can barely sight Mark’s tousled, auburn hair near the basement’s center. That hair hovers over the pit, which she discovers is formed by boards and lined with a white carpet already stained red and flecked with spittle. Before Larissa can take Mark’s arm she feels a sudden pressure against her leg: Abid’s son is hugging her thigh, pressing it with his chest, his one good eye aimed into hers. Larissa murmurs malinki, then sinks her fingers into his mulatto curls and scratches his head. He squirms his scalp into her fingers while still managing to gaze up, his cast-eye blind yet searching. But then Larissa sights a blue-rubber squid bobbing towards Mark on its red tide. She gently shoves the boy aside.

“Where’s Marcel’s pit?“ she hears in a mix of Serb and Russian as she weaves through the crowd.

“Dying, the loser. Dumped upstairs.” It’s the large olive-skinned man who took Mark’s bet. “Fuckin’ dog wasn’t game. Wouldn’t cross the scratch line.”

Salima has already curled a tentacle around Mark.

“Damn. And he’d beat Conan.”

“Yeh. Marcel prod-shocked him forward but Frippo chomped right on.”

Hope frolics in Larissa’s chest as she sights Mark undoing Salima’s arm. Then Larissa sees Mark’s daughter again. She’s standing on tiptoe, sneering at her father who pretends to ignore her. Her boyfriend has a dog, too. Larissa joins Mark, who throws a proprietary arm around Larissa until she’s smashed up against him. Larissa knows that she’s serving as both a shield against and a dare to the daughter, and glories at these sudden functions. She instantly recalls her grandmother. That such roles have intrigued themselves into Mark’s life seems an answer from the old woman, and Larissa silently thanks her.

A hush follows Abid and the red-brick of a boy as they return with their washed dogs. Each leads his animal into the ring and crouches beside it. Neither dog barks and only the white bull snarls. The girl with the girdle appears holding a video camera, the arm limp at her side. A muscled boy with a tattoo slithering around his neck steps into the ring. He’s holding the gnawed wedge of wood, with which he traces a line halving the ring. The girl raises her camera. “Release your dogs,” he cries.

Abid and the square boy unsnap their leads and jump back, spider-crouching in the ring. The white bull wrinkles its brow, giving it a worried look, while the pit lunges across the scratch line to sink canines into the bull’s muzzle. Abid jumps back in fury, his face splattered with the bull’s blood.

“Work it! Work it out,” he shouts.

“Come on, lay it down,” urges the other.

The white bull recovers, shaking loose to leave some flesh, then lunges. In a movement too fast to follow the pit pirouettes its head and the white bull only rips an ear. Both dogs pause, blood pumping from the pit’s severed ear. Then they lock onto each other’s faces.

“Come on, chew him.” The spectators are frantic. “Work it. Chew him good.”

Larissa’s vision suddenly expands to encase both the crowd and the two dogs, locked now to form a single, writhing creature. She’s viewing them through a fisheye lens as if she were the girl with the video. Each face is angled but also sharply lit. She can’t osmose this—yet she’s processing it all—when she sights from the periphery a small sobbing figure moving fast. It scrambles over the boards and bounds up to his father’s bull just as the referee is inserting the wedge into the pit’s jaw to break its hold because it has a canine through an eye. Its own are clouded with blood. Abid shouts “No!” but it’s too late for, as the pit’s jaws are pried open, the confusion of smells—the bull’s acrid odor and the same on the boy—mislead the pit to clamp onto the child, who’s silent for an instant before his scream rakes the air. The pit begins tearing its head from side to side.

Larissa stares at what resembles in its clarity a digital image: the boy is joined with the pit, while the white bull seems to be eating the pit’s throat. They’re all dancing a very slow and languid dance, though Larissa can sense it’s quick. Abid has grabbed the wedge and is savagely prying at the pit’s jaws. The referee has grabbed its hind legs to lean back and pull, but the dog stays clamped to the boy. The pit’s owner is lumbering towards them in slow motion when suddenly a barefoot form bounds over the boards with a knife. It’s Salima, who expertly slides the blade across the pit’s throat. The dog relaxes but its jaws unlock only in death.

Abid needs first to subdue his bull that, in its pain and confusion, is poised, barking viciously at anyone who dares approach the child. The girl with the video is still filming.

Larissa turns to Mark for help but he’s gone. She scouts the room and sights his auburn head among others, jigging up the stairs for the door. Larissa’s throat sears with the acid of betrayal but then she sees Mark’s daughter, her body locked against his back, her arms around his waist. Larissa notes black tears streaking the girl’s profile, which looks twelve for the first time.

Someone has managed to prod the white bull into a cage. Abid is glistening as though under water, terror savaging his face. Salima crouches beside the boy. She’s using a garter as tourniquet to stem the blood pumping from the small, gray form. The girl is still filming, and Abid rises like a wave to smash the camera out of her hand.

“Fuck you all to hell,” the girl shrieks, but Larissa is already up the stairs and out the door, snapped into the cold of the coming winter’s dawn. She runs back through the field and stops only when she reaches the lake, alone and panting.

The sun is behind a black peak on the eastern mountains. The peak looms, rays piercing the sky around it like spokes. The dark mountain looks like some figure at the end of time when all the bodies rise to be judged, and Larissa gazes at its glowering head. She’s never known about herself before. But now, confronted by the flaring vision of those two dogs locked into one creature whose identity can be defined only through death, she shudders and fades like a shadow. She understands now that she hasn’t the guts of necessity or its tools to succeed. Larissa wants to return to Russia, where cowardice is good camouflage and somehow even the violence is indolent.

Slogging through the next days as if they were molasses, Larissa plunks out tunes each night and lies in bed by day. Mark never calls. The vacuum of him inside her keeps her from food.

Two days before her forced departure, Larissa rises at noon. She goes to buy an Argumenty i fakty but instead runs into Salima, who’s heading to the hospital to find the child and Abid. Nervous about something, Salima wants Larissa to go along. Larissa follows because resisting Salima would take effort; but also because of the child’s exploding face, which still shatters her reveries from time to time.

When they arrive the mother and not Abid is there. The Swiss woman stares at them as though Salima and Larissa were no better than the predatory squid still clamped in Salima’s hair. The child is sheathed in a pelvic cast that extends down one leg. He’s bent over a tray across which is spread a jigsaw puzzle but, when he sights the two women, his face pinches into a howl, the rolling depths of which penetrate the halls. The boy reaches out for his mother but Larissa has already fled.

Outside the hospital Salima ignores Larissa’s face. “So how is Mark?” she asks. Her eyes are open and bland.

“Fine,” Larissa lies.

“The police,” Salima admits. “Been lying down low.”

“I want to tell you…”

Larissa pauses. In three days she’ll be back in Moscow, defeated. A compulsion to communicate to this rival her begrudged admiration competes with the need to conceal Mark’s humiliating betrayal.

“What is it?” Sunlight from the west is striking Salima’s burn-ripples, shining them into a melted-doll’s face. A sudden image of Salima expertly slicing the pit’s throat, which then parts like sighing lips brimming with blood, snaps Larissa back. “What?” Salima repeats.

Larissa examines her watch-face to gain time. Relief billows up as she realizes that she has only a half-hour to change and be at her piano. “I late for work,” she says. The squid bobs into the distance.

During her set that night, memories of Mark fuse with hot shame and failure to blister Larissa and, as anesthetic, she later drinks a bottle of Stolichnaya someone left her as tip. Her hangover takes up most of the next day, discouraging her from phoning Mark, and then it’s time to leave.

At home in Moscow, Larissa breathes the familiar and snaps out of her lethargy. Russia is evolving, opening its fat arms to the world. From within its familiar embrace, Larissa now simmers with rage to prove something to Mark but can’t find what. She liquidates all her Swiss francs on new teeth and clothes to prepare for some plan before discovering she’s pregnant.

Weeping, she consults the mother who’d once kept her. After much debate and on the second tearful day, they light candles in the church for the baby, to whom Larissa has already given the grandmother’s name. She rents out her studio and moves back in with her mother.

Larissa plays piano in hotel bars, which are less lucrative than the casino but much quieter, and where she can work even when she starts to show. Tonight between sets she’s pondering what might have happened if Mark had looked back while fleeing up those stairs with his daughter. These scenarios feature luridly sentimental declarations from Mark, to whom she then announces the baby. She turns a vodka glass around and around but doesn’t drink. Instead she calls the pub on a mobile phone she’d bought before she knew about the baby. Mark answers after five rings.

“Hello,” says Larissa, lilting in the same tone with which she’d once recounted Russian fairytales.

A skip of silence passes, freezing inside her chest. “Hey. Larissa.” Another silence grows. It’s denser and weighs more. “Did you get back ok?”

“Back ‘ok’ where?” Larissa’s English is suddenly very good. “Back ‘ok’ from dog fight? Or back ‘ok’ to Russia.”

“Where are you?”

As if he hadn’t understood.

“Is child all right?” Larissa asks.

“What child?”

There’s a heavy beat in the background from the juke. “Yes,” says Larissa. “There are so many children. Your daughter, for example.” Music hammers on. Then Larissa clips: “Well. Bye-bye” and quickly slams the end-key with her thumb.

The frozen silence in Larissa’s chest has spread to crack ice-crystals of hopelessness through her limbs. She throws the vodka down her throat after all but starts crying only after she gets home and into bed, where she stays for a week. Her mother cajoles and threatens but Larissa gets up only once she feels combative again. When she’s especially harassed, she goes to the grandmother’s church to light a candle for Mark. After all, he’s the father of the life she’ll now be ruling instead of her own.

THE END

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ellen visson has stories forthcoming in descant, Absinthe: New European Writing and Tiferet. She’s recently published stories in The Literary Review and ByLine, with work in Das Beste, The Journal of Irreproducible Results and International Living.