baxà

for Immanuel, for Kimika

Doris and Pasha had moved  in together right away because they’d fallen madly in love. And Pasha’s a nutter, no doubt about it. Baxà in Maltese, which suits him perfectly.

“Nothing’s perfect in this world,” Doris yells across their rathole of a flat in Gżira. She thinks nobody can hear her. It’s the same with her when she’s talking on her mobile or on the phone; she makes herself heard all the way up and down a streetful of women. Of whom Doris is one, but she’s not exactly like them, even though on the outside she’s like any of them; big bare breasts, slight pot belly, skinny legs. Still, she’s the best of the lot.

She’d never wanted to walk the streets of Gżira like the others, whom she thinks of as happy to just muddle through. She thinks of herself as a pornstar. Her mother used to call her Doristar and now it looks as if Doris has grown up to fulfil her mother’s dreams in every inverted way imaginable. She’s always touching the stars, is Doris. If it’s not alcohol, it’s sex, and if it’s not sex, it’s drugs. Doris isn’t one to happily muddle through, mind you. She’s found Baxà, a giant of a man with a cock from here to his fucking mother Russia. Every evening, when Baxà thinks she’s paced for long enough, he goes down to get her at the end of Testaferrata Street. If he finds her there he grins because it means he gets to have a go himself; if not, he grins because it means he’ll have enough money for alcohol, drugs and cigarettes.

“Enough is enough,” she’s heard yelling again. She forgets every time that a rathole is all she’s got. All she remembers is how she wanted a Japanese car, a villa in Madliena and a spanking big yacht in the Menqa, and it pisses her off to remember that the only spanking big she’s pulled off is her debt and the sadness that envelopes her.

Doris isn’t completely dissatisfied with her job. If only she could choose when to walk the streets it wouldn’t matter so much. Doris is mostly dissatisfied with Baxà who doesn’t lift a finger, just shuffles around the rathole, while she goes down to earn a living for the lot of them; for Baxà, for Vladimir – Baxà’s brother – and for Andrei, whom she agreed to call that because it sounded Maltese enough to her and it’s not too hard to pronounce.

For the rest, Doris is all over the place. She got pregnant as soon as she found work and was landed with Vladimir as well. Because she’d loved Baxà right from the start and had never uttered a single no. Not even to Vladimir. He’d threatened to kill her son if she drove him out and from that day onwards he’d made the rathole his home and turned the place into a dump.

“Fuck you and your entire race,” she yells, loud enough so that every woman can hear, “I’m off.” The Baxà thinks he can understand Maltese and he lets her go shopping. As soon as she’s said her piece she grabs  Dre – even Andrei’s hard sometimes – slams him into the pushchair that used to be hers when she was a kid and leaves. She got that pushchair when she dropped in to bid a last goodbye to her widowed mother and in order not to worry her said she wanted to give it away to charity. That day she also told her she was working for a telephone company and they’d offered to put her up in the same village since she couldn’t drive. Her mother, who never asked questions, was fine with that.

In a quarter of an hour Doris reaches Msida, stops in front of the Melaverde, spots her mother in a corner washing the floor and makes a beeline for her. Doris tells her she’ll explain everything and her mother understands without any explanation.

It’s been seven days now and people’s tongues haven’t stopped wagging. Doris, her mother and Dre now live in a town that isn’t Gżira and isn’t an island and apparently Vladimir drank so much he got a massive case of the hiccups that killed him and Baxà got so mad his curses made the rathole collapse and he was buried alive.

Written in Maltese by: Leanne Ellul

Translated to English by: Albert Gatt