Fiction and Drama

Daria Serenko

I peered into their sympathetic faces and couldn’t tell them apart

When I first went to work at the state institution, I saw only girls. That was what they called themselves — “girls” — with an intonation that shifted from exclamatory to questioning depending on the kind of catastrophe unfolding around them. And catastrophes, I understood immediately, were an inevitable part of the unstable cosmogony of our daily work routine.

We worked in a small district library, in an office without windows. The girls’ computers appeared bigger than the girls themselves. Sometimes you could neither see nor hear the girls over the wide monitors and whirring of desktops, at which point you would have to get up from your chair to assure yourself that another living being was present. The lack of windows in the room was apparently compensated for by a photo print pasted from floor to ceiling: tropical greenery and a steep, tumultuous waterfall whose foaming currents came crashing down from up high. The picture was a daily reminder not so much of fresh air as of power hierarchy.

There was a time when I tried to preserve some bodily autonomy — eating separately, taking the bus to the metro separately — but this self-separation very quickly lost any meaning. My life at the time was also basically a catastrophe, so I felt at home at work: it was fun and terrifying, and the boundaries between private and public were washed out by alcohol and deadlines. The girls accepted me as one of their own. We often turned into a single many-armed, many-legged creature, jubilant, all-powerful, devastating. In those moments, I no longer felt my own powerlessness or the weakness in my knees.

At the same time, while studying the girls, I often caught the automatism of my gaze, lightly arrogant, ironic, sweetly condescending, and mythologizing female collectivity. I justified it by my particular status: I’m just passing through. Sometimes, when I looked at everyone in a glum and mistrustful mood, it seemed like the girls only existed down to the waist, that under the tables they didn’t exist and there was just a tangle of different-colored wires carrying signals off to somewhere else. Of course, it could be that I still hated women and just wasn’t drawn to them. Or maybe on those days, it was me who wasn’t all there under the table.