A Tophlovski fic for my friend Blame Canada's birthday. :) This is a historical AU set in France in 1926. Right now, it's just a one-shot, but I may write a sequel/second chapter at some point.
Warnings for references to ethnic/anti-Semitic violence and war horrors.
Only at night did The White Swans venture out to the beach. Sated and drunk, they brooded in the lavender twilight, frustration and disappointment festering in their midst. For the most part, the waves climbing up the shore canceled out the distant noises of the guests back at the hotel, but it was still possible to hear them if you concentrated enough.
"I just remembered something," Wendy said, her voice lifeless.
"Hm?"
"I heard a rumor that the Mole is staying here."
"The Mole?" Kyle asked. "The artist?"
"Yes."
"Isn't he supposed to be a recluse?"
"I don't know," she said in a particular tone. "It's just something I heard."
The man eating at the bar the other day came to mind. The restaurant had only just opened and was almost completely empty. As Kyle waited for his coffee, sleepless and agitated, he stared at the man from behind, grateful for a distraction from continued ruminating over the night's mediocre fuck. Frankly, the man looked like a bum off the street. On closer inspection, however, Kyle noticed that he was wearing a brown leather jacket and nice shoes. It was his sloppy long hair and unshaven face that made him look grotesque.
That was it, grotesque – as grotesque as The Pit, so described by Eric as "shit smeared on a canvas."
Could it be…?
"I think I might've seen him," Kyle said to his wife.
"Oh?"
He relayed to her the tale of that morning in the restaurant.
"Did you find him attractive?" she wanted to know, her tone a little sharp.
"In a gruff sort of way, yes."
"Well," she began, pausing to exhale the smoke, "if it is him, proceed with caution. He seems like a psychopath."
"I don't get any Uranian vibes from his art."
"I wouldn't think so."
In fact, there was no place for sexuality at all amid the anguish of the Mole's aggressive brushstrokes. At least not in the few pieces Kyle had seen. He thought of Autumn, the work from that show that was clearest in his mind. It depicted a grievously wounded nude form on the forest floor, the light on his body filtered through the trees above. The color of the blood mixed in with the fallen autumn leaves, making it difficult to immediately discern that the man was horrendously injured. The piece came across as very wet, layered with heaps of paint à la Van Gogh, and the figure's face was so pained it was truly uncomfortable to look at.
What confounded Kyle was that the Mole's art continued to be popular at a time when the world wanted to forget such things. It was unfair, in a personal way. He suspected there was a freakshow component involved, that people were more interested in the shock value than the actual message. The Mole's secrecy was undoubtedly another component – no one knew his real name, and he didn't give interviews, so there was a flurry of fascination about him. Kyle had not fallen victim to that intrigue, but now that the Mole was possibly staying at this same resort, he was beginning to slip too.
The White Swans, the director and the actress, were similar beyond their ghostly-white skin and long necks: they were avid intellectuals; ruthlessly intelligent (not all intellectuals were); and, necessarily for their partnership, hopelessly sexually inverted. They also both had terrible tempers.
The night began with the English Swan's anger.
"These women are all normal," Wendy rasped under her breath, saying the word "normal" with profound disgust. Her chestnut eyes were huge, throbbing with exasperation.
The two of them were in the restaurant, seated at a table in the far corner, and she was drunk, drunk enough to be so explicit with her frustrations. Their food hadn't arrived yet (the kitchen was backed up), so Kyle had little choice but to let himself serve as the dart board for his wife's complaints. For as unconventional as their marriage was, it was times like these that Kyle felt like any other married man. He swallowed this bitter thought with another gulp of his martini, dutifully reminding himself that his wife's ears had absorbed so many of his own rants and also, that their strange symbiosis was only a marriage on paper. It hadn't even been consummated.
At any rate, he glanced around the crowded restaurant before offering any commentary. There were some women here, but with men, naturally. "Why don't you try to seduce someone's wife?" was not a good suggestion; Kyle knew better than that.
"Maybe someone new will arrive soon," Kyle said, and, from the tone of his voice, Wendy was likely to infer that he didn't care all that much about whether she found a woman here to court.
And indeed, she narrowed those fierce eyes at him, the muscles around them twitching with aggravation that threatened to redirect itself towards her husband, who she had heard being fucked to satisfaction the previous night.
At least he'd spared her the details. She didn't want to know. Sometimes she did, but not tonight. Tonight, she ate an entire steak much too quickly and ended up feeling tearfully fat.
"I'm going swimming," she declared, leaning against the wall in the elevator.
"What? No," Kyle said. "You're drunk; you'll drown."
"No I won't."
"Yes you will; you're drunk," he repeated.
"I don't care."
"So, what, you're going to ruin my night all because you suddenly decided to go for a swim?" Kyle argued, nearly spitting out the words as they headed to their connected suite.
She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I don't want to have to watch you swim!" Kyle declared, loudly.
"Then don't," she said with a shrug before proceeding to walk again.
He groaned, tearing at his hair, his brain shrieking, "Do kurwy nędzy!"
As she was fumbling with the key to open the door, he said to her, "Why don't you just go to bed? Aren't you tired?"
She stopped and gave him that bland, unfazed look again before calmly saying, "You're under no obligation to watch me swim. I know how to swim, for God's sake. However, if Neptune decides to come up from the sea and drag me into the depths of the Mediterranean, well, then I suppose that'd be nice for you, huh?"
"Not really, no!" Kyle barked, and she threw her head back and laughed, saying, "What a loving husband you are."
Kyle scowled even harder.
Inside, she went through the connecting door to her own suite, closing it behind her. Forty minutes went by, and Kyle was delightfully certain that she had passed out. In fact, he was already fixing his hair and dotting fresh cologne on his wrists when he heard the sound of the door opening. His heart dropped in his chest, landing in the pit of his abdomen and effectively squandering the beginnings of arousal that came with preparing for a night of cruising.
She was standing there in her bathing robe with a rolled-up towel under her arm, seeming more sober than before.
"I'm leaving," she told him, reminding him again that he didn't need to come.
The thing was though, the more she said that, the more obligated he felt. And he didn't like that. He looked at himself in the mirror, his displeasure magnifying. The door to Wendy's suite opened and closed, but he didn't hear it lock, which was a bad sign. Spitting and cursing, he got up and went to lock it for her when he discovered that it was indeed locked. Which was a good sign. And, if he could take the liberty of extrapolating a bit here, it also meant she wasn't so drunk as to drown herself. Also, if Kyle remembered correctly, he had read that there were men who had survived the sinking of the Titanic by being horribly inebriated, so that also boded well. He did not bother remembering that that was because the waters of the Atlantic had been freezing, as he had already convinced himself that his wife would be fine.
So, he continued freshening up before heading back out himself, fingers crossed that he would run into that Swiss gentleman from the other night. He hadn't caught his name – there hadn't been much speaking at all. Kyle had noticed a wedding ring, and he just hoped the man's wife wasn't here. That would irritate him.
These were the things he was thinking as he waited for the elevator. And waited and waited. And then waited some more before huffing and ramming the already-lit button with his manicured finger, tapping his foot in frustration. Anyone watching would've thought it almost comedic, the way he performed him impatience, as if he were an actor in a gag reel. He even looked at his watch.
Irritated, he went to take the steps. Inside the stairwell, just before he set foot on the third step, he was assaulted with something far worse than the annoyance of the elevator. At first, he didn't know what it was. The thing was soft, hitting the bridge of his nose and rolling down it, falling apart along the way. It was when he smelled it that he knew what it was – cigarette ash. Making a loud sound of disgust, he looked around, almost wondering if a piece had found itself in his hair and only just dislodged.
But then, he looked up.
Leaning over the railing on the next floor was a despicable-looking man, staring at him with wide eyes that were so intense it was like another affront. Kyle glared at him, no less infuriated to realize that he was in fact the man from the bar that morning, the ostensible Mole.
"Well?" Kyle demanded.
The man simply blinked those wide eyes, his cigarette threatening to fall from his parted lips.
"Well!?" Kyle reiterated. "Do you usually go around using people as ashtrays?!"
With confounding sincerity, the man asked, "Did it hit you?" His voice was deep, gruff, that of a person who overindulged in cigarettes to the nthdegree.
"'Did it hit me?' 'Did it hit me'!? Yes, it hit me, you goddamn imbecile! Right in my fucking face!" Kyle shouted in exasperation, further shaken by the way his voice echoed through the concrete stairwell.
"Sorry then."
That was it: "Sorry then." He said it with such indifference he might as well have added a shrug for good measure. And that, that was not okay. That was what compelled Kyle to march up to the top floor of the hotel, where he confronted the haggard ingrate, to whom he shouted, "What the hell is wrong with you?! You just chuck a piece of ash in a stranger's face and say 'sorry' like that, like you don't even mean it?! Were you raised by wolves or something?!"
The man shook his head and snorted, making a sound in his throat akin to a bitter laugh. He returned his gaze to Kyle, and that was what made Kyle pause, his thoughts faltering as he absorbed the intensity of those autumnal eyes, the gold flecks, the incredible amount of life to them, even despite the fatigue of the dark circles underneath. And it was from that that Kyle knew with that this was the Mole.
"Well, what the hell else do you want?" the man said.
Kyle gave him a hard look and said, "An interview."
If there had been even a shred of uncertainty left in Kyle's mind, it was gone now that the Mole was staring at him like a threatened animal, unsure whether to fight or flee.
Narrowing his eyes, the Mole asked, "Who are you?"
"Here? A victim seeking recompense."
The Mole looked him up and down, still with those narrowed eyes. It made Kyle uncomfortable. He was beginning to think he should just leave. In his head, he could hear Wendy's voice saying, "He seems like a psychopath."
But then, the corner of the Mole's mouth flicked into a tiny, almost sarcastic little smile. "Sure, I'll give you an interview."
"What? Really?"
Shrugging, the man said, "Yeah, why not?"
"You're the Mole," Kyle stated, confused now. "The artist no one knows anything about."
"Everyone knows everything about me."
"That's not true," Kyle argued. "No one knows your name, your philosophy, where you're from… No one even knows how old you are."
"None of that shit matters."
"Then why have you been so secretive about it?"
That was what got the Mole to look at him again. His eyes went from neutral to inquisitive in the brief moment before he looked away again. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and licked his lips, saying nothing. Kyle waited for him to respond, on edge and on guard.
When the Mole peered at him again, it was with thick suspicion. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"Kyle Broflovski."
His gaze suddenly changed from hostile to intrigued. "The film director?" he asked.
"That would be me," Kyle said staunchly.
The Mole's incredulity almost seemed sincere as he said, "Are you really?"
"Of course I am," Kyle snapped, offended.
"Well then," the Mole said, extinguishing his cigarette on the railing and standing up straight, "let's do it."
The Mole had claimed the bed, lying upright on the side Kyle slept, his ankles crossed and shoes still on. He had just lit a fresh cigarette and was holding his glass of Jérome Napoléon cognac from the top, his fingers all around the rim. This was what Kyle was seeing as he sat in the armchair in the corner of the room, about two feet from the bed. His notebook, not yet open, was in his lap, and in his left hand, a pencil.
Taking a deep breath, Kyle opened to a fresh sheet and said, "Alright then. So, first off, what's your name?"
"The Mole."
Oh, cute. Cute.
Sternly, Kyle said, "No, your legal name. Your birth name."
"That's not relevant."
"You said you'd let me interview you!" Kyle spat, in no mood to be toyed with.
The Mole raised his eyebrows before furrowing them again, regarding Kyle.
"I am," he replied, evenly.
"Then answer my damn questions!"
Waving his hand with the cigarette in a dismissive fashion, the Mole said, "Next question."
Kyle acquiesced: "Fine," he said, his lips a tight line. "Why do you paint what you do? What compels you to paint what has been described as 'grotesque' imagery?"
The artist's eyes were searching as he stared at the director, as if he were looking for the answer in Kyle. Again, Kyle began to feel uncomfortable.
After at least half a minute of silent staring, Kyle said, "What is it?"
The Mole's final reply was, "I'm an artist, not a rhetorician."
"Yes," Kyle agreed, leaning forward and praying the bastard would elaborate.
But the Mole did not elaborate. He merely took a long sip of cognac – nearly half of it – before reaching over and setting the glass on the nightstand. Next, he simply lay there and continued smoking, now with his cigarette in his mouth, hands folded over his chest. His gaze was vacant, fixed forward.
"Look, are you going to answer my questions are not?" Kyle said, having reached his limit. "Because if not, I have other things to do."
"I am answering your questions," the Mole said. "You just don't like my answers."
Kyle opened his mouth to speak, but, before he did, he realized that the Mole was right. His sweaty hand gripped the pencil, ready to break it.
Ultimately, he managed to utter, "Fine. Yes, that's fine. Fine."
As if broken from a terrible trance, he blinked back to life and scribbled down the interview thus far.
Next, Kyle asked, "Tell me, why have you been so secretive about your life?"
"All my private information is right there on display," the Mole said. "That's the burden of being an artist."
"Don't be absurd; you know what I mean," Kyle warned.
"Ahh, you dislike it so much now?" the Mole asked, a derisive quality to his voice.
"What the hell are you talking about," Kyle snapped.
"The Absurd."
The Polish Swan's pale face paled even further. Although he had managed to hold firm on this painful topic back when the damage was ripest, here and now, in his hotel room with the notorious Mole, the reminder of his magnum opus' failure somehow left him so vulnerable that he wanted to launch himself out the window.
Without Head was Kyle's child. It was his most experimental film, a collection of clips of various lengths, all of them purposefully senseless, e.g. a slaughterhouse paired with carnival music, a man digging a hole to discover a wooden box with a living dog inside. There was a focus on imagery and details, e.g. a bead of sweat rolling down a neck, a piece of wet newspaper on the sidewalk. It was bold and rambunctious, refusing all rules and presenting itself simply as it was. He had worked on it furiously right after the war, finishing it in less than five months.
At best, it had been described as a "colossal failure," and at worst, "absolute shit, the cinematic finger-painting of a disordered mind."
Kyle cleared his throat, struggling to reorient himself in the moment. In the gravest tone, he said, "Sometimes they refuse to see what you put right in front of their faces."
"True," the Mole agreed before downing the rest of the cognac.
Huffing, Kyle proceeded with the interview, knowing to expect ridiculous answers but speaking so authoritatively that he hoped the Mole would respond seriously.
"Here are some easy ones," Kyle began. "Where are you from? And how old are you?"
Suddenly seriously and inextricably silent, the Mole looked at Kyle and said, "You want to know the truth?"
"Yes!" Kyle uttered sharply.
Eyebrows raised and eyes closed, the Mole said, "Well. For starters, I'm not French, but half-French, half-Spanish. French mother, Spanish father. I was born some fifty ago in a little village in La Mancha. I left the place with my horse and neighbor, who I fucked all the way to Paris. My neighbor, that is, not the horse. Although if you wish to call me a horsefucker, by all means, feel free. Creative freedom and all that."
Kyle was about to chuck his notebook at him. He didn't know which was worse, that summary of Don Quixote, or the homosexual implications. No, it was the latter. The latter was what had Kyle glaring at him with his utmost wrath, nearly shrieking as he said, "That's not funny! That's not funny at all! What's wrong with you!?"
At that, the Mole simply blinked in surprise, appearing almost taken aback. That enraged Kyle even further, for it was as if he were so stunned by his outburst, even judging him for it, as if he had not been the one to induce it. In fact, none of this was acceptable, and if this had been on set, Kyle would have had the son of a bitch canned twenty times by now.
Pointing his pencil like a headmaster, Kyle spat, "You're not going to give me a straight answer, are you?"
"I suppose not," The Mole confessed.
And Kyle was about to kick him out. He really was. But then, The Mole said, "How about we switch."
"Switch?"
"I be the interviewer and you be the interviewee."
His left eyebrow raised comically high (as it did), Kyle asked in incredulity, "You want to interview me?"
"Yeah."
"Why?" Kyle asked.
"Aren't you a famous director?"
"Well. Yes," Kyle agreed in a posh tone, straightening up in the chair. "Yes I am."
It was then that the Mole cracked a brutish and lopsided smile, revealing a sharp canine.
"Then let me interview you."
"Fine."
Kyle got up and handed him his pencil and notebook, instructing him to start on a new page. Upon taking them, the Mole sat up further in the bed, his torso now fully erect against the pillows, and licked his fingers to turn the next page, which was both disgusting and unnecessary.
To add insult to injury, the Mole put the eraser end of the pencil to his mouth and even began nibbling on it like a kindergartener. Kyle threw a hand up and rolled his eyes, wondering if the Paris art crowd knew the Mole's habits were as grotesque as his art.
Wrongly – perhaps even foolishly – Kyle had anticipated this interview would be like any other, with questions like, "What was your inspiration for xfilm or x character?"; "What do you enjoy most about directing?"; "What do you hope people take away from x film?"
But instead, the Mole began asking the most insane, even trivial, questions, which, admittedly, was characteristic.
"In The Hanging Gardens, what color scheme would you have gone for if the film were in color?"
Kyle peered at him. It was, he had to admit, an interesting question.
His response was: "Color is irrelevant. What I'm doing is creating an illusion, a farce of reality in black and white. So I consider contrast, not color."
"Hmm," the Mole murmured, nodding as he scribbled that response down. He seemed impressed. Kyle was pleased.
The next question the Mole asked was, "What's your favorite geometric shape?"
A totally bizarre question that Kyle, an aficionado of geometry, was more than pleased to answer: "An obtuse triangle. They're awful, maddening things. It sounds so clean and neat, doesn't it, 'a triangle with one angle larger than ninety degrees.' The reality of it is horrendous though – they're such strange, awkward things. I love them."
The Mole was writing all this down. His demeanor had transformed: he was no longer crude and derisive, but studious and attentive, asking questions with grave interest. It was abundantly clear he was familiar with Kyle's filmography, perhaps even a fan, for in between his completely random and inane questions, he also brought up rather unimportant details from specific scenes, such as the white lamp in the living room in the dream sequence in Countdown from Infinity – he wanted to know where it was from, what make and model it was. Kyle didn't know. The Mole seemed disappointed.
It was in this strange way that the strangest interview Kyle had ever had continued, time proceeding as both of them got drunker. By midnight, the bottle of cognac was empty, whereas it had almost been full at the start of the night. Kyle had opened the window to air the room out, as the Mole was a fervent chain smoker. Not even the view of the beach reminded him of his wife; he had completely forgotten about the ordeal.
The Mole's final question was about poor, reviled Without Head: "What did you hope for them to see?" he asked. His voice was milder, lacking his usual dull gruffness, which Kyle could only construe as pity.
The director let out a bitter, caustic laugh and shook his head, looking out at the blackness of the night. He was very drunk. He told the Mole a story: "My earliest memory is seeing a policeman jam the butt of a rifle into my father's head. I couldn't have been more than three years old. My father fell to the ground like a rag doll, and they kicked him over and over again to make him stand back up. I didn't understand it; I didn't understand any of it – what my father had done, why we had to leave home, where we were going. Forty years later, I understand. I understand why Prussia expelled the Poles and the Jews. But it doesn't make sense. It didn't make sense then either, and everyone knew it too.
"I would see this senselessness again in my life. Piles and piles of dead bodies. The bloated blue corpses of soldiers gassed to death. An eighteen-year-old with his legs blown off, crying for his mother. So much death, so much despair. So little sense.
"Unlike you, however, I am not so literal. I don't need to show the audience an open wound to show them suffering. Suffering itself isn't the point, anyway. Why do you think I called it Without Head? None of it is supposed to make sense – it is indeed 'nonsense,' as the idiot editorialists at least managed to grasp. The suffering I showed – the anguish of the pregnant prostitute walking the streets, the hogs on the conveyor belt with their throats cut, bleeding and gasping for breath – what was the point of all that anguish? Maybe you'll say because she was a whore, or because there's a demand for meat. Just like Prussia wanted to Germanize, just like the Spanish wanted to Christianize.
"See, you're playing a fool's game if you look for logic in the illogical. That's the mistake everyone made with Without Head. My expectations for the public were too high, and I suffered for it. Perhaps it is simply too much for the average man to embrace the absurd condition. Kierkegaard was wrong, by the way. Faith is of no recourse – there's no escape from the Absurd, not in religion, not in death. That is what I wanted them to see. That is what I wanted them to feel as they saw a woman giving birth in the sewers, the despair of senselessness."
Never in any interview had Kyle been so honest, nor so descriptive about his misunderstood child. Nor had he ever been so open about himself to a virtual stranger, and as the Mole continued writing down the response, he already began to regret it. He wondered if it would show up in a film magazine. People would probably find the oddity of the whole thing compelling, he thought with a grimace.
As the Mole was leaving, he stopped and looked at Kyle for a moment. Those eyes were so rich, the green and amber flashing even in the shadows of the foyer. There was something he wanted to say; Kyle could sense it as strongly as he could sense his maleness. The regret of not seducing the Mole was suddenly powerful, but at this point, it would have been too personal.
Even though he was drunk, and even though it was such a simple, true statement, the Mole was still slow to utter: "It's my favorite film. It inspired me a lot."
It was the first time Kyle had ever heard that, and it would also be the last. He couldn't stop himself from smiling, which he resented, deeply, though perhaps he shouldn't have. Here was a man who had understood his vision, who cherished it even, and in that, Kyle had never felt so connected to anyone. It was thus that, when the Mole left, the loneliness was so strange and so crippling that Kyle went and slept with his wife, who was also alone.