It has been a long time since she
was wooed so forcefully. Janusz, consumed by twilight, bellowing
ignominiously in public. It flatters her, evoking stirrings she can
recognise. She giggles uncomfortably, a beauty framed in silky skin and
pearly teeth.
Janusz sits by day on colour-peeling, fading benches. His body arched
with twanging dignity, his equine face buried in a thickset tome,
exaggerated eyes peering through the magnifying lenses of his
gold-rimmed glasses. From time to time, he chases a dogged, greasy curl
away from his alpestrine forehead.
It was this expansive brow that most impressed me as a child. A swathe,
pulsating in venous green, a milky desert, crisscrossed with brittle
capillaries and strewn with bony rocks. Beneath this tract was Janusz:
his wondering eyes, penumbral sockets, and slithering hair.
When he summoned Dinah, his face erupted into creases, as wastelands do
before the rain. "Go away, crazy one" - my grandma, Dinah's mother,
used to shout at him half-heartedly, as she shuttered the rickety
windows. But even Janusz, who I, informed by hindsight, now know to
have been really cracked - even he perceived my grandma's protests as
eccentrically veiled summonses.
Grinning, he would press his face against the frozen casement, his
Hellenic nose made into a bulbous offering, befogged, only his toothy
smile remains, then gone.
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