"Don't play games with me!" Anastasia shrieked with insane fury. A stiletto heel whizzed past my ear and embedded itself into the wall. Her second shoe slammed into my solar plexus. I collapsed to the floor, groaning. Anastasia ran up and kicked me hard in the balls before grabbing my contorted face and slapping it viciously. "How dare you clean up my apartment?" Nasty screamed savagely. I leaned up, heaving for breath, and stared at her. "You think we're married or something? You have destroyed my life!"
"What are you talking about?" Anastasia burst into frenzied sobs. I got up off the floor with difficulty and led her, still weeping, into the pristine drawing room. I put my arm around her and wheezed soothing words into her ear.
"Ever since my father forced me to marry Axel, the one thing which has sustained me was a dream," Anastasia whimpered. "I wanted to be Miss Haversham." Still sniffling, she lit a cigarette.
"Who?"
"Have you ever heard of an English writer named Charles Dickens?" I nodded uncertainly. "He wrote a wonderful book called Great Expectations. It took me two years to read this book. It is the only thing I have ever read in my life."
"Come on, Nasty," I said incredulously. I gestured at the magazines I had neatly stacked on the coffee table and at the beautifully bound volumes on the tall bookshelves that lined the room. "What about these?"
"The books belong to Axel. They are all religious texts. I only look at the pictures in the magazines." Anastasia knocked some ash from her cigarette carelessly on the table top. There was no ashtray in the room. Thinking of the hours I had spent earlier painstakingly polishing the rosewood surface, bringing it to a burnished glitter, I brushed the ash off the table into my hand and put my arm around her again, keeping my hand open for more ashes. "The only way I could survive my marriage was to spend hours dreaming about Miss Haversham. She is marvelous. She spends her life in her wedding dress wandering around a house which has never been cleaned. She is wicked. She dies miserably. I wanted to be just like her." Anastasia's face crumpled. "After I became an actress and made Axel leave, I never let them clean my apartment. The maid is purely for decoration. I tried to be wicked. And now here you come along and clean everything. You bastard!" She angrily stabbed out her cigarette in my palm. The horrid smell of my burning flesh filled the room. I screamed in agony. Anastasia smiled fiendishly and reached for the butcher knife on the table.
"No, Nasty!" I said desperately. Anastasia advanced towards me with glazed eyes. The knife was very steady in her outstretched hand. I retreated towards the gigantic portrait of Anastasia which was still leaning against the wall and pulled the painting around as a shield. The knife ripped through the canvas and a deranged scream froze the blood in my veins. I timorously peeped around the painting. Anastasia lay prone on the floor. Her face was turning blue. I glanced at the portrait. The fresh cut had just missed the jugular. But she was obviously in shock. Involuntary suicide is always upsetting when it fails.
I held her tight and pulled a drape over us. In a few minutes she was breathing again. She blinked and looked around in a daze. "Darling," I said earnestly. "I promise I will never clean your apartment ever again. I'll help to make it a mess again within a couple of days. I'm good at that. You can keep living in squalor. Will you forgive me?"
Anastasia looked at me mistrustfully. Her lower lip quivered and the freckles stood out against her very pale face. My heart went out to this weird willowy waif. I hugged her. After a moment she relented and wrapped her thin arms around me. We sat on the floor, holding each other. My burnt hand hurt horribly but I hardly noticed the pain. I felt like a balloon tied to a heavy weight. I knew I was in love again.
I woke up a few hours later. I could feel Anastasia's heartbeat against mine. I reluctantly opened my eyes. Her slender body gleamed silvery in the moonlight that streamed into her bedroom. Her arm lay across my chest. Like some gentle acid, sleep had stripped Anastasia's face bare, tenderly cleansing away the smooth hard mask she wore for the world. I lay as still as I could. But presently she woke up. She smiled sleepily at me and stretched. "Did I actually sleep?" she asked in a voice that was still blurred. I nodded. "I had the strangest dream... Oh, look, the moon!" We got out of bed hand in hand and went to the window. A full moon shone golden against a dark violet sky. I felt her flesh, warm and soft beside me in the cold night air. I kissed her eyes and tenderly traced the fine outlines of her face with my finger. We kissed, a long molten merging. One kiss led to another, we were young and full of vigor, my libido was on a hair trigger...
"What time is it, darling?" I asked much later. "Hey, did you steal my new watch as well?" Anastasia leaned up on her elbow and smiled mischievously. She pointed towards a chest of drawers that stood in one corner of the room. I opened the top drawer. It was full of watches. Most of them had stopped. My treasured heirloom Bouvard et Pecuchet lay on top. I was about to strap it onto my hand when Anastasia grabbed it away from me and threw it back into the drawer.
"That's where I put my trophies," she said. "Axel once told me that sex killers always take something from the bodies of their victims. They hide the trophies and gloat over them in secret. Hair, pieces of skin, nipples. I take watches."
"Well, may I please have mine back?" I pleaded. "It belonged to my grandfather..."
"No." Anastasia shook her head decidedly. "Never. It's mine now. You're my latest victim. Casualties don't need to know the time."
"Will you give it back to me if I give you something in exchange?"
"What could you possibly give me?" Anastasia asked haughtily, every inch the little aristocrat.
"A drug you've never taken before. I just got it from Kalifornia." Anastasia looked interested. I looked around the floor for my jacket and opened the packet Luke had sent me. The little blue pills glowed in the dark. I offered her one. She popped it into her mouth. I followed suit and reached for my watch.
"Oh, no!" Anastasia grabbed my hand. "I'll give it back to you... if this drug interests me."
"Deal." We shook hands solemnly. "Anastasia, may I ask you something?"
"As long as it's not a favor."
"Do you remember our fight in that seedy bar in Kreuzberg?"
"Of course. It was only last night," she reminded me. Her face darkened. "This drug you gave me. It's not a sleeping pill, is it?"
"Of course not," I replied, shocked. "Would I do that to you? Besides, you already slept for hours."
"I know." Anastasia frowned. "I can't remember this strange dream I had."
"It will come back to you," I said soothingly. "But listen. Do you remember you were telling me about how spirits can move from one body to another?"
"Yes." Anastasia sighed and kissed my burned hand. "But I don't want to switch bodies now. I want to be with you."
"You are with me," I replied in confusion. "Aren't you? You didn't take over my body, did you?"
"Not yet. But I want to be with you always," Anastasia insisted.
"Always is a long time."
Anastasia pouted. "Don't you want me to be with you always?"
"Of course I do, darling," I said fervently. "As long as you don't mind me hanging out with my friends in cafes most of the time. And staring lasciviously at other women, from time to time."
"Of course not, silly." Anastasia smiled adorably. "And you won't mind me sleeping around with various gorgeous hunks, will you?"
"Sweetie, why would I mind? As long as you introduce me to all the cute starlets." We shook hands solemnly once again.
"Speaking of sleeping around, I got a postcard from Venice from Lulu and Stash," Anastasia announced. "Their honeymoon has gotten off to a fabulous start. They nearly drowned in the Grand Canal when their gondola overturned because the gondolier was so busy staring at them making love that he didn't notice a cruise ship approaching from the opposite direction. Lulu says they stink horribly and they had to take all kinds of injections because they were exposed to the canal water."
"It sounds marvellous," I said enthusiastically. "Can we go to Venice for our honeymoon?"
"I'm already married to a pillar of the Catholic church, remember?"
"Right. Besides, my mother would probably kill me for marrying someone who is not Mongolian."
"Is your mother Mongolian?"
"No, my father was. My mother just looks Mongoloid. She vehemently believes in keeping up appearances."
"How strange. So does my father," Anastasia mused. "You probably won't meet him before he dies. He's very violent."
"In that case, I hope I don't meet him. I can't stand violent men." I smashed open a window, pulled out a flowering plant by the roots, and dashed it to the floor. Dirt and splinters of glass flew everywhere. "We'll just have to make this apartment really filthy and hide here all the time," I pronounced.
Anastasia beamed. "My man," she huskily declared and held out her arms. I swaggered over. Love makes the world your playground.
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