The Great Cleanup - стр. 15
Anna, feeling scared, looked all over herself. No, she found no wounds, not even a scratch. But she realized what the matter was: next to the magnificent house and the smartly dressed gentleman, Anna looked rather strange in her blue dressing-gown and the red slippers with furry white poof-balls, which by some miracle stayed on her feet. Luckily the gentleman did not see what she wore under her “outer garments”. Anna was embarrassed:
“Well…”
“Never mind!” the impressive gentleman reassured her.
He immediately beckoned to two young ladies in bright light dresses, who were standing on the porch of the house:
“Help Mathilda get herself in order, then serve the table, we'll be having lunch. But no hurry, carry out all the procedures properly.” Then he turned to Anna again: “With your permission, I'll get back to my business. I need to settle something here. You do know that with what we do, delays have dangerous ends…”
Again she just had the time to start with: “But…” when the gentleman already turned around and went away at a brisk pace. Anna looked at the girls, intending to explain that she is not Mathilda at all and some mix-up has happened. But both ladies, a redhead and a mulatto, shook their heads, refusing to listen:
“We were commanded to help you get back in order. Nothing else concerns us. Please, come with us. If you refuse, we’ll be in trouble with the master…”
Anna pitied the girls who could suffer because of her. Besides, she really appreciated the chance to fix herself up. Perhaps she could live with the dressing-gown and the slippers, but she also noticed she had dirty hands and arms. Sniffing the air, she felt that she smelled of asphalt, car exhaust and the devil knows what other unpleasant road stuff. Anna could well imagine that her hair was now unkempt and, in all likelihood, not quite clean too. With this imagination, she agreed:
“All right, let's fix me up a bit, but then I will explain everything…”
The girls held her elbows carefully, as if afraid that she would slip on the stairs of the porch and break into shards like a crystal vase, and led her into the house. Together they went through a spacious hall, full of marble sculptures of fair naked young men and maidens, its walls covered with paintings of unintelligible colourful scrawls and squiggles.
The red-headed girl proudly pointed to the paintings:
“Van Gogh… Monet… Pissaro… Morisot…”
“Piss pot,” the mulatto took her turn, pointing somewhere, too.
They came into a corridor with bronze, or perhaps even gold, candelabra, holding energy-saving electric bulbs. The girls opened one of the doors:
“Come in, please.”
They entered a small well-lit room. At one of the walls there were a small table, a few armchairs and a locker. The other side had a shower cabin in the left corner and another door in the right one.
Now that they stopped, Anna could finally take a good look at the ladies accompanying her. One was about the same age as herself, but well-groomed, and so she seemed to look nearly ten years younger. She was a head taller than Anna and, unlike Anna, had red hair and green eyes. She kept squinting, as if she was near-sighted or hiding something deep in the wily pupils of her eyes.
The other girl, a bronze-skinned mulatto, had brown eyes. Straight black hair streamed down her shoulders. She was far younger than her mate and, therefore, than Anna too.