The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner

Author:Rachel Kushner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

“From Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!” the announcer calls into the microphone.

There’s a clatter of applause.

The French Nazi remembers zazou. It was a jazz thing during the war. Girls in chunky heels and fishnets, with dark lipstick and parasols. Or maybe it was berets, he can’t recall. Boys in zoot suits, an unseemly glisten of salad oil in their hair. They were bohemians who struck poses near the outdoor tables at Café de Flore, bumming cigarettes and slurping whatever broth you left in the bottom of your soup bowl. It wasn’t about poverty. It was a style of dissidence. By the time the zazou were being rounded up by German patrols, he was far away from Paris. Marching waist-deep into a cold apocalypse with a Panzerfaust over his shoulder.

The accompanist touches a few keys on the piano, the beginning of an old-fashioned danzón. Rachel K floats out from behind a Chinoiserie screen, draped in black chiffon and a cascade of rooster tail feathers that glint metallic green under the lights. The partition and a satin chaise longue transform the stage into a girl’s private dressing room, a feminine alcove of upholstery, unrobing and mirrors with an audience of men watching intently as she drops her feathers and chiffon on the chaise, and steps forward. A tropical wraith with chemical blonde hair. Blue lights illuminate her white skin, white like a body filmed underwater. A body glimpsed across a night-lit swimming pool, or in the glaucous depths of dreams.

The “variety” of her dance comes after the show: discreet hotel room trysts, unlike the blatant commerce that goes on everywhere in Havana, at all times of day, behind bed sheets strung across vacant lots. She eludes the term “whore” with the smoke and mirrors of “demimondaine.” Girl of the underworld, an in-between space, a twilight, neither light nor dark, but a shimmering, aqueous blue. She makes a life out of twilight.

Even in her real privacy, in her dressing room or in her alcove apartment, she is never purely alone, but playing the part of alone for some invisible watcher. Her stage partition and parasol are even the same Chinoiserie print, so that walking to buy cigarettes or milk she can’t escape the feeling of standing onstage, dropping the green-glinting feathers in a fluffy pile, a loose feather or two detaching to float by itself. The boundary between her private life and public life has blurred, as has the boundary between engaging her body only in intimate pleasures with people she trusts, and using it as an object she owns. She suspects these boundaries are delicate and probably can’t be repaired. But this is on some level a relief, to a girl who believes only in the present, and certainly not in guilt. There’s no use in fretting, or attempting to fix what cannot be.

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