Letters from Yelena Read Online Free PDF

an enclosed idyll, a world of easy
affluence that seemed impermeable to danger. Pale white apartments studded with wide windows, set above us by pillars, skirted the courtyard. The streetlamps in the yard tastefully lit our arrival,
and yet were too delicate for the occupants of the apartments to be roused by our late entrance. Through the windows we could see flashes of the worlds these homes contained. In one, a chic looking
woman with dark hair sipped a flute of champagne over a suited man, who was reclining on a white sofa. In another, we could hear the muted laughter of a dinner party, of chinked glasses, and we saw
slim silhouettes pass through one another like ghosts. It was as if we had stepped into an enclosed universe of easy luxury. I could tell that you were still not quite sure why you had brought me
here, after what had been only our first proper conversation. But the look you gave me suggested that with me at your side, for the first time you did not feel like an alien in this place.
    ‘It is beautiful.’ I said. You looked relieved.
    ‘Have you seen the one you want yet? I couldn’t guarantee you a parking space, but I’m sure there’ll at least be a railing to chain your bike on. It wouldn’t be
very far for you to walk to the conservatoire.’ You spoke as if you were selling me a lifestyle – as if you actually possessed the means by which to give me this life.
    ‘That one up there will do,’ I said, pointing out the home of the champagne woman. Such warmth emanated from those houses. Even the most opulent homes in Donetsk had always seemed so
spare, so cold. It sounds strange, but I had never seen somewhere before that I’d have liked to have lived, somewhere I could imagine being. The courtyard gave me that sense of aspiration for
the first time. I looked up again. I wanted to live in that home, stand at that window after a dinner party with your friends, wearing a glistening black dress. Considering how I had drowned my
past in the river below us, I imagined how triumphant I would feel. And that sudden flash of inspiration was all that was required to illuminate for a second how my current state of mind looked.
Dark, dusty, and littered with half-buried skeletons.
    ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ you said. You took my hand. You must have wondered if you had lost me at that point, but I felt a need to show that you had not. Usually flirtations
are exchanges of variable temperature, with each party taking it in turns to push and pull. But here, so sacred did this link seem, that I was too cautious to test it, even gently. We had
demonstrably come to this place as some sort of flirtatious joke, but the serious undertones of this visit had become quickly apparent. ‘I think any of them would do,’ I said. And then
I realised the champagne woman was watching us.
    I wondered where the evening might have taken us next, but I wanted to leave it on a high. At the ballet, at the launch party and in the glittering courtyard you had only ever seen me in
glamorous settings. I didn’t want to take you back to the squalor of my flat, and prevent you from imagining me as the woman I wanted to be. Perhaps I didn’t want to yet see your life
as it really was either. I knew my façade was important to you, but I think yours was equally to me as well. We had constructed certain images of ourselves, through our shared sense of
possibility. And in that delicious shift of intimacy that life can occasionally offer, we had begun to build that world through our joint association with it.
    You walked with me until we were a few streets from my flat. At times I darted ahead of you, and when I fretted over having caught my dress on a fence you told me that it didn’t matter
– I would look beautiful regardless. Usually I found it distasteful when men called me beautiful, especially if they didn’t know me. But I was almost able to take the compliment from
you. I was still aware of how little I knew