A Million Different Ways (Horn Duet 1)

I flew down the stairwell, weaving around the children playing hide-and-go-seek along the dark musty corridor. Their circumstances didn’t diminish their joy in the game. They ran around me squealing and giggling, blissfully unaware of the dreariness of the place.

Halfway down, a loud shout and the thump of heavy boots drifted up from the ground floor, drowning out the melody of the children’s laughter. I glanced over the railing and watched as a single file of police officers jogged up the metal stairs with purpose, weapons drawn. Panic stricken, I shrank back, pressed my spine against the wall. I had no intention of sticking around to find out whether it was a drug and prostitution raid, or a search for immigrants with expired visas. Doubling back through the door of my floor, I raced to the back of the building with my valise with no wheels banging against the side of my leg hard enough to leave a bruise.

People poured out of their apartments, the hallways crowded as they attempted to flee, the slow and weak being trampled in the process. A smothering wall of bodies blocked my escape, the reek of body odor and fear making it hard to breathe. With strength fueled by adrenaline, I bullied my way through to the emergency stairwell and ran out the service entrance.

The street was mostly empty. Only one young officer, smoking a cigarette, loitered on the corner. I wiped the nervous sweat off my brow before I walked past him, and rubbed the tiny cross around my neck in gratitude when he barely spared me a glance. As I walked to the bus stop, one of the children called my name, but I never turned around. I kept walking, away from the children, past the girls in the windows…putting as much distance between them and me as possible.

* * *

The small town was just outside the city limits. I took three buses and spent ten francs I didn’t have to spare to get there. It sat comfortably up the side of a hill, overlooking the shores of Lake Geneva; the charm of it fit for postcards and computer screen savers. Leaning my forehead against the cold bus window, I watched life fly by on fast-forward, as smears of intermittent color against the constant blue sky.

The landscape was dotted with neatly painted homes in different shades of yellow, white, and beige. The precise, geometric pattern of a vineyard stretched along the banks of the lake. Sidewalks that framed the winding, narrow roads were swept, flowerbeds neatly groomed, and grass looked trimmed with measuring tools. After all these months, I was still dazzled by the natural beauty of Switzerland, the cleanliness, the order. I was homeless and financially hanging on by a thread. I should have been scared witless yet inexplicably the tightness in my chest eased. And for the first time in months, I felt like I could breathe again.

When I stepped down from the bus, the sun made me squint and hide my eyes beneath the roof of my fingers. Across the street, an elderly man swept the front steps of his bakery shop. I asked him for directions to the estate and he kindly obliged while his wife stared at me suspiciously from behind the store window. I made slow progress down the single lane road. In an orchestrated rhythm, I switched my valise with no wheels from one sweaty hand to the other, dividing the painful task evenly.

My medical books made it ridiculously heavy. Actually it must have weighed as much as I did. Between my unusually fast metabolism and not enough food to eat, I was scared to weigh myself. I rarely looked in mirrors. That night, after running from the pub, I contemplated selling them but decided to cut back on food instead. The books were the only things of any value I had left.

A small, yellow car sped by, barely avoiding me. Too tired to step aside, I watched the tiny car speed away while the driver waved an angry fist at me and cursed in French. Unbidden, an image of my father drifted in. I could see him shaking his head and raising an eyebrow at me. His ‘princeshe’. I missed him. My father had been a man of influence in Albania. An intellectual, a visionary, a master of policy and diplomacy. That’s how his friends eulogized him on that frigid day. I used to think he was the center of the universe, the source of all truths. Not anymore. Not for a long time.

I’m the one that found him swinging in his office. An image that wouldn’t tarnish or fade. I could still see him in fine detail from time to time, when I was overly tired. His tall, lean form limp and swinging like a sack of clothes. The tinge of blue on the pale skin of his bare feet. The terrible sadness that would descend upon me shortly afterwards robbed me of breath and sapped all the strength from my limbs.