Free Black Vodka by Deborah Levy

Elisa asks Rona if there is a better way to live than this, Rona replies, You will have to be more specific about what you regard as ‘this’ and what you regard as ‘that’. While Rona chopped her eighty-third potato into six slices, I made ten tall jugs of margarita and Elisa barbecued plenty of chicken drumsticks over an old oil drum sawed in half. Then we went off to dress for our Big Day.
    As I soaked in the bath, I saw a starling through the window, swaying to and fro on the bay tree. Once again, the sad grey childhood shoes my bride decorated with feathers flashed before my eyes, as they have done so often in my adult life. And then I dragged in a vision for a wedding outfit. Yes, while men and women argue on the moon, I will go for the exuberant and baroque. I will swank around my Victorian house with its boarded-up fireplaces and nineteenth-century plumbing in a suit made from tartan and silk. I will comb my black hair already threaded with silver and scent it with rose water from the orchards of Istanbul.
    My first glimpse of Elisa was through a haze of smoke from the barbecue. My orphan bride wore a silver mesh dress, lime sandals and yards of eyelashes. Beautiful breath beautiful breath beautiful breath. I loved every part of her. The registrar from Orpington looked us in the eye and said words like Honour and Cherish without blinking. Gnats hovered above the sizzling chicken. Pete and Mike exchanged a lustful look. A car alarm went off.
    Elisa said Yes and I said Yes.
    We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled and said yes without blinking. I wished my mother could hear us say yes and I thought about the stories she told me when I was a child and walked on garden walls that seemed so high but she always said yes, yes climb up and walk on that wall, I will hold your hand and tell you about the skyscrapers of Chicago.
    Elisa and I exchanged rings. The best man and best woman threw rice over our heads. We kissed. We felt each other panic under our wedding clothes as the rice fell to the ground. Perhaps it frightened the starling because it flew away. It had some feathers missing from its neck and one of its eyes had closed up. We were pleased the bird had spotted somewhere better to live but we secretly wanted it to stay. And then we saw that our three cats were hiding in the bay tree and realised it had found a safer place to live.
    Elisa and I, the last two smokers on earth, sit under the bay tree, listening to our cats purr while they sharpen their claws and lick each other clean. My new wife plays with my fingers and the sun, which is setting, prints colour into the concrete towerblocks.
    Elisa says, ‘Now that we are married, your mother is my mother too.’ Yes, we are orphans groping for things we are connected to, vague and blind things like the cold bright wedding rings on our fingers. While I sit smoking with Elisa, a halo of midges circling her head as she crosses and uncrosses her long legs, I recall for her my mother’s stories which sometimes sound like dreams: Benito Mussolini smiling in a hat with an eagle on it, the Wall Street Crash, a woman staring at a boat in Hiroshima, the Minghetti cigars my father smoked, Elise Davis walking on a fifty-foot high wire holding an umbrella, Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus in the USA the day the buses were no longer segregated, Algerians eating honey cake after they won independence from France, a teenage boy climbing over the Berlin Wall that separated capitalism from communism, a line from a play called Ubu Roi : ‘WELL PERE UBU, ARE YOU CONTENT WITH YOUR LOT?’, Mahatma Gandhi, the Black Panthers, Tom and Jerry, powdered eggs, miners digging deep in the earth for coal.
    I press my lips against Elisa’s eyelids and lead her to the honeymoon chamber where I have dimmed the lights and washed the