SULTANNA FRANTSUZOVA

By Katarzyna Kozanecka

Columbia University

 

A long, long time ago, in a northernmost city built by one king by way of gift for his queen, women frequented the theatre in hats adorned with live flowers. Each evening, whilst the musicians tuned their instruments, bees worked the hall collecting pollen from these blooms. After, neath the enormous stage, they spun honey, and their hum was indistinguishable from the hum of Sultanna Frantsuzova’s sewing machine.

 

Sultanna Frantsuzova was possessed by gold hands. Twas said, that ballerinas who wore the dresses she sewed, carried themselves across the stage like something else. Twas neither a question of thread nor of cloth nor of the cut of the dresses, but rather, of the love with which Sultanna Frantsuzova sewed them. She measured cloth, certain she was measuring happiness. Each stitch was a dew drop on a spider web, each line of embroidery a gurgling stream.

 

Silver needle in gold hand, she sat there neath the stage even as the performance unravelled the audience into a sprawl of marvel: lest a sleeve unwittingly tear, lest a hem kneel, lest a stocking go for a run. The stage was her ceiling; through this thin ceiling she heard the slap of fine legs in thin shoes. She knew that, any minute now, the ballerinas would open their fists and throw to the wind the tiny poppyseeds hidden in those fists; the seeds, becoming crows, would scatter to the rafters. Later they would play the role of shadows.

 

But the applause always belonged to the women, not the shadows: their dresses by evening's end were wilted petals; their slippers were worn to invisibility; their lips were smeared with honey; their hair gathered in bun-nests bound for natural history museums. The applause furthered the momentum of Sultanna Frantsuzova's heartbeat.

 

All this comes to us by way of answer to the words of one bloke, “Allow me to inquire as to the reason for your happiness.”

 

 

June 2006. Moskva.