The Active Side of Infinity Read Online Free PDF

small hall and she had closed
the door behind us, she greeted Eddie in terribly accented English.
"Hallo, Eddie. You brought friend, eh?"
    Eddie shook her hand, and then kissed it, gallantly. He acted as if he
were most calm, yet I noticed his unconscious gestures of
being ill at ease.
    "How are you today, Madame Ludmilla?" he said, trying to sound
like an American and flubbing it.
    I never discovered why Eddie always wanted to sound like an American
whenever he was transacting business in those houses of ill
repute. I had the suspicion that he did it because Americans were
known to be wealthy, and he wanted to establish his rich man's bona fides with them.
    Eddie turned to me and said in his phony American accent, "I leave
you in good hands, kiddo."
    He sounded so awful, so foreign to my ears, that I laughed out loud.
Madame Ludmilla didn't seem perturbed at all by my explosion of mirth. Eddie
kissed Madame Ludmilla's hand again and left.
    "You speak English, my boy?" she shouted as if I were deaf.
"You look Eyipcian, or perhaps Torkish."
    I assured Madame Ludmilla that I was neither, and that I did speak
English. She asked me then if I fancied her "figures in
front of a mirror." I didn't know what to say. I just shook my head affirmatively.
    "I give you good show," she assured me. "Figures in
front of a mirror is only foreplay. When you are hot and
ready, tell me to stop."
    From the small hall where we were standing we walked into a dark and eerie
room. The windows were heavily curtained. There were some
low-voltage light bulbs on fixtures attached to the wall. The
bulbs were shaped like tubes and protruded straight out at right angles from
the wall. There was a profusion of objects around the room:
pieces of furniture like small chests of drawers, antique tables and chairs; a
roll-top desk set against the wall and crammed with papers, pencils,
rulers, and at least a dozen pairs of scissors. Madame Ludmilla made me sit
down on an old stuffed chair.
    "The bed is in the other room, darling," she said, pointing to
the other side of the room. "This is my antisala. Here
I give show to get you hot and ready."
    She dropped her red robe, kicked off her slippers, and opened the double
doors of two armoires standing side by side against the wall. Attached
to the inside of each door was a full- length mirror.
    "And now the music, my boy," Madame Ludmilla said, then
cranked a Victrola that appeared to be in mint condition, shiny, like
new. She put on a record. The music was a haunting melody that
reminded me of a circus march.
    "And now my show," she said, and began to twirl around to the
accompaniment of the haunting melody. The skin of Madame
Ludmilla's body was tight, for the most part, and extraordinarily
white, though she was not young. She must have been in her well-lived late forties.
Her belly sagged, not a great deal, but a bit, and so did her voluminous
breasts. The skin of her face also sagged into noticeable jowls. She had a
small nose and heavily painted red lips. She wore thick
black mascara. She brought to mind the prototype of an aging prostitute. Yet
there was something childlike about her, a girlish abandon and
trust, a sweetness that jolted me.
    "And now, figures in front of a mirror," Madame Ludmilla
announced while the music continued.
    "Leg, leg, leg!" she said, kicking one leg up in the air, and
then the other, in time with the music. She had her right hand on top of her
head, like a little girl who is not sure that she can perform the
movements.
    "Turn, turn, turn!" she said, turning like a top.
    "Butt, butt, butt!" she said then, showing me her bare behind
like a cancan dancer.
    She repeated the sequence over and over until the music began to fade
when the Victrola's spring wound down. I had the feeling that Madame
Ludmilla was twirling away into the distance, becoming
smaller and smaller as the music faded. Some despair and loneliness that I
didn't know existed in me came to the surface, from the depths of