YD6-109 (ULB 1993) The Host Tigress A Slavic Class And A Duel Beneath the Crystal Portal

 

Notice: This Image is AI generated to give an idea into the narrative

What happens when a house opens — and the one who moves through it becomes sovereign of the air itself?

In the Belle Époque enfilade, a Tigress hosts a Slavic class, two aging suns orbit her fire, and a torn veil remembers where wood meets glass. The bowl sways. The latch warms in an unseen palm. Light gathers, hesitates, and chooses a body to inhabit.

Is Aetheria a presence — or the invisible architecture that decides who stands at the center when the doors fold back and the room becomes a stage?

Watch closely: consciousness does not shout. It arranges space. It bends gazes. It reveals who commands the threshold — and who merely believes they do.

YD6-109 (ULB 1993) The Host Tigress A Slavic Class And A Duel Beneath the Crystal Portal 

From the lifted screen of my Texas Instruments, her shadow incessantly breaches the reflected V-stances of the crystal grand portal doors. Through the room’s spotlights, the flickering wine glasses ping light—a milky constellation drawn along blue clochettes—until the crystal tremor of blue paper serviettes ceased. I turn a glance over my shoulder toward her steady figure. Victoria stands at the head of the table, in admiration of the full-scale stretch-table, before the French canvas—the avenue void across to the wooded green flocculent foliage of the park. 

In a prolonged pause, she holds my gaze—measuring the silence she has drawn. Then, with a spintop swirl, Victoria breaks away from the lounge. She steps away from the dining march. She left her ghost’s struggle with the nudged and rummaged bottom drawer, she had see-sawed on its runners and balked. She hadn’t fought the Walnut Baroque Chest beneath the mantel’s flank, choking columns of shelved book spines. She left the drawer ajar shadows—torn plastic gleaming, and excessive bright square packs of sealed serviettes that nestled a litter among folded tablecloths. 

Her figure cuts the bare floorboard breadth, stretches through the phantom outline of the dining table and huddling backrests. She steps blindly on a diagonal toward the oak mock cabinet doors. Swaying by the kitchen wrap-heel framed behind the interleading portal. She slips into the far walkway, the telescopic bar-counter prolongs her presence along the wall as she nears the study’s ceiling mural glow. But Helios catches her before the backyard grand portal; then, with a swift pirouette, she vanishes through the dark crack of the flank nighthall door toward the sleeping quarters.

I went on doodling in my mind, my gaze drifting through the enfilade of crystal interleading portals, when—in a brief absence—an Arabian princess bursts from the crack of the flank door. Sunlight drenches the ochre swell of her veils. Fluttering from dancing fingertips, she pirouettes and arrests herself—jubilant, svelte in sleeves and pants—a foot freeing and gliding upward in the flamingo stance: knee flexed, toe pointed, bright-eyed: ‘Tra-la-la—here I am. Ain’t I gorgeous?’ Her voice carries through the hush into distant rooms: “Do you like what you see?”

As I watch her figure enveloped in a mirage—Aetheria held in Helios’ grip, a wholesome, luminous conscious fetus—my mind catches the awakening thrum, and amplifies itself. A cosmic orchestra rises and tunes to rhyme with Frank Sinatra’s voice. Refraining, unbidden, singing louder, awakening my mind’s swell: ‘… and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid…’ I feel its draft—not in Victoria's mischievous aesthetics—but in the extrapolation of competing consciousnesses, fracturing a hairline in the realm of Aetheria’s zodiacal forest.  

She holds my gaze to ransom, instilling unease—‘Forget it!’ Then she drops her eyes and tiptoes forward, her ochre veil sailing over her shoulder, waving at arms’ length, advancing while trailing fabrics flounder and shed the golden distancing light. 

The fabric sails and warps through the air until one wing falls onto the counter flowing along its telescopic-oak, blades widening, edging the culinary enclave; the other clusters across the opposing bathroom wall. Breaching the walkway, it wavers like a stingray flopping through the widened niche before the far-set dishwasher, onto feathering the fridge door, and slips off its flank, before the architrave to the grand portal casing. 

Then, I leap to my feet from behind my laptop screen, pouncing around the V-stance of the folding doors, calling in my stride across the bare room. "Stop!" But, Victoria is already drawn taut by the plume of her trailing veil. My mind locks on the portal’s cottage door, as I reach toward her—having seen the fabric snap back, yank her shoulders, buckle her knees, swoop her rearward. She twirls beneath the stubborn, writhing veil, spinning free only to face the villain of beveled small panes in the sentinel door leaf.

But she is tone-deaf to my warning. I draw nearer—close enough to see the pane’s splintered beading, a sharp spear through her veil. I’m unfolding the memory of Polish illegal men and women who strip paint: shaving back a century from the flat rails and stiles, razor blade to a scraper, ill-adapted to the glass beads’ molded lips, shunting the wood grains. 

She thwarts me off, her back turned. She yanks the impaled veil, driving the airy fabric further into a wedging hold, refusing to let it tear. She crawls up its thinning trail and yanks again. Her eyes remain unrelenting before the capricious veil fishhooked to the door. In the struggle, neither concedes. She shakes the cloth from her hand, in disgrace, to her regret returns fists tight—her back a square barrier to my attempt to thread the veil six inches free. Reading blindly, her eyes saying. 'You don't know any better than me!' Then, with yanks of her wildest imagination, she throws her weight into a brutal tug-of-war—shredding the veil. 

Trailing shreds of veil, Victoria follows through in skating pivots before braking to an abrupt stop on the bare running floorboards. The intercom buzz slices through the room. She springs beside the translucent stained-glass entrance, snatches the handset from the wainscot-capped cradle, and jabs the release button. 

To my dismay, I ask. “Sais-tu qui tu viens de laisser entrer ?—[Do you know who you just let inside?]” 

She spins away, ignoring my security remark, her ochre veil wavering as she crosses toward the vintage chest of drawers—a telling gaze fixing the charcoal Hi-Fi tower blending into the marble slab. 

I call after her: “Ma petite! N'abandonne pas tes invités—[You can’t leave your guests behind!]” 

She upholds her stride midway across the bare dining room, glances over her shoulder, and withdraws with a flicker in her eyes: ‘I must have music.’

Beneath Victoria’s columns of book spines—a parade of authors and titles ranked in graduated height—the  largest hardcover lies open, its gutter spread wide, glossy images flashing between scrawled lines of text. Her hand reaches for the fascia of the Hi-Fi tower. She resists the impulse to slot a compact disc and instead presses a single button. The radio stirs to life, among the books, releasing a soft wash of classic music through the air. 

I remain rooted in the corner—my laptop and its unfinished task, cloaked behind my shoulders—poised at the threshold between the translucent stained-glass archway—on hold for the glazier's restituted crown with fruit and ivy and the lounge’s interleading grand crystal portal. 

Beyond that corner, a gust slips in from the street door, muffled through the vestibule. A hush. Then scuffles—whispers. 

I hold still, gauging the rhythm of body motion, steps stifled to a guess behind the translucent trellis of the floral arch. The door’s blue stained-glass—a milky way twinkling on its surface—dims as a lucid spot gathers, fast-swelling to a zombie blemish. ‘My Little One,’ I call, the words only echoing in my mind. ‘Oughtn't you to receive your guests?’

In pursuance of a gentle knock, I step to the door frame’s crease; the brass Cupid unlatches, crack open to face a lurking couple. The dark-haired girl’s soft voice in a French timbre: “Jane,” she says. 

Her dewy eyes skim past me, detaching from my looming presence. The fledgling student’s gaze reaches across the bare floorboards, joints and grains. Swiveling offside before the mantel and its flanking columns of books, her look is calling—’Victoria?’—instilling a flicker of doubt: ’Am I at the right place?’ 

She brushes past my porter’s poise, a still wave, the door ready and squared open—‘Come in’—ready, for the ULB’s Slavic class of trailing ghosts. Not before the lurking ash-blond young man trailing his fledgling honeymoon bride. He follows in from the ±0 Belle Époque landing, sketched with the run upstairs of spindled balustrades like curious neighbors. “Francois,” he says in a French timbre—fledgling-manly, shy, but meeting my eyes. 

I am caught short, braced in line with the door, expecting condescending youth François releases himself from my guard and edges past. Jane glances over her shoulder, exchanging a look with her boyfriend. I catch a glimpse of her boost—steadying herself, drawn to the brink of adult confidence. 

Then Victoria appears from the shadows besides the kitchen heel-wrap, almost by magic—fearless in her appeased veil, oblivious to the blind corner altercation where the villainous cottage door’s glass beading had earlier speared her. 

Scattered across the floorboards, the fledgling couple thaw as Victoria, trailing her wavering ochre veil, draws them into her vibrant greetings. She tempers the veil to a drafty hush and gathers the couple from the wings, away from the brown marble mantel, while soft music airs from the speakers tucked high between the flanking columns of books. 

She leads them across the floorboard march, through the gaping crystal portal, and along the far aisle to the stretch tables, where she had earlier unrolled white paper across the seams of joined, irregular boards—her brother Jephte’s table, which I had brought up from the -2 cellar into light. She settles them amid the glitters, half-faint behind the floral arrangement.

Bright-eyed, Victoria fetches each guest from the sentinel door where I stand poised. She greets them in their stride, forward, veer, threading alongside the white catwalk—hemmed in by a myriad of glittering wisps of blue silk. The guests vanish among Jane and Francois in the medley of vacant chairs beneath the high ceiling draped in striated green and yellow fabric, with tie-backs drawn open to the French doors' tapestry of the avenue’s void. But sunlight creeps across the street—Helios’s touch reaching over the rooftop ridge—as Nyx snuggles through a fading evening golden sheen into the foliage of the park’s wooded hedgerow. 

To the stragglers at the end of the rush, I close the door and sidestep, aware that the buzzer is bound to sound again. I remain, incognito to porter duty, as the imprint of Victoria’s defiant second-year examination revision returns to mind. 

They faced the entrance—transom and sidelights lit under early spotlights—the combined doorframe clouded in blue spray-paint, awaiting the long-overdue restoration of the missing stained-glass panels from Hasselt glass and mirror merchant. 

Her thick-rimmed glasses dangled from a neck string as she brainstormed, planted in the black Duco-padded dining chairs beside Florence—thin-framed, and intent—before a white paper unrolled and taped across the door: a charted encyclopedia spread declaring, ‘Do not disturb—Leave us alone!’ 

For days on end they sparred and conferred, spectacles lifting and dropping, ballpoint pens stabbing the page, clipboards balanced on their laps while they charted the colorful, underlined roots and branching structures of Slavic languages.

Now, like a sudden hailstorm at the door, the guests spill through the doorway, past me and between the phantom V-stance screen of bi-fold doors. I had earlier helped drive them—fragile glass wafers, a century of small panes—as their distorted, heavily settled joinery seams fold on their hinges. They scrape across the floorboards’ grains as I plant the leaves into the portal’s thick wall casings, two rooms surrendered into one. 

Victoria integrates into a swarming younger generation, clouding the gaping head of the table. A humming surge gathers, then breaks into tumultuous voices as students fill the flanks, drawn inward onto standing behind ill-matched backrests. They huddle around the festive stretch, where two bright, almost intimidating floral arrangements hold a Gemini symmetry, Victoria’s Moon presiding. 

The brass Cupid—the apartment’s trinket, Aetheria’s relict in my grip—Nathalie’s foolishness in her demeanor breaks the trend as she slips in late, last, beneath the hush of a greeting smile. She lends herself to the mood, Mona-Lisa magnetic, drawing me from duty; the door falls shut beside me, its draft gathering from memory. Levelheaded, at a measured, dripping pace, she advances toward the thinning head of the table. Victoria bursts into a climactic welcome, draws her friend in, and the two vanish into the swarm. 

Leaving the Slavic class of students pent up along the aisles of vacant backrests, Victoria breaches from the gaping crystal portal, the table’s hum tethered behind her as it falls into chatting voices. With subtle strides she crosses diagonally over the wide run of floorboards, skirting the mock cabinet doors that wrap a horseshoe heel. 

She slips by the villainous glass-wafer door and scoots through the telescopic bar standup edging the bathroom wall under the spotlight. Before the study’s sunroom glow, she U-turns into the culinary enclave, casting a glance across the worktop—her eyes leaping the empty room toward her guests against the distant light of the draped French doors. 

In her fancy, Victoria stands poised before the blue glass conic bowl—one of the twins in milky green that decorates her dining table in quieter hours. When they rested on a constricted heel, its yawning rings spiraling toward a sweeping collar where flower petals float on water amid tea-light flames. 

Her eyes fall on the empty blue; her nimble fingers wait to be deployed from the bowl she palms. I cannot envisage her mind—a cocktail in the making. Then, her eyes’ twitch, and I break away, glancing over my shoulder to catch the crack of the opening entrance I left behind.

A horse-faced figure emerges into the gaping Belle Époque landing—an early-retired bureaucratic official. He pauses, skeletal in a draping gray suit, casting measured eyes through the youthful crowd. Invisible to them, he lingers in the province of their youth as though it were territory to reoccupy. His gaze hunts across the bare room toward the bustling wing in enfilade, touring back to the opposing wing, then swoops and settles on Victoria, pent behind the kitchen wrap, her figure held against the evening sunlight.

Within the empty room, I’m invisible to the prosaic character who steps off from shutting the door, chest puffed beneath an autumn-patterned shirt, its thin collar drawn into a lopsided tie knot. He strides toward the far middle floorboards, entering Victoria’s field of sight as she spends glimpses orbiting her distant guests. 

In the hush, she drops her eyes, slipping behind an aversive mask; she turns instead to the culinary utensils laid blind across the worktop. Meanwhile, the prosaic character drifts into distant classroom chatter—misplace, misalign, out of fine tuning—his words project toward her, seeking to catch: “Pour les examens à venir…—[For the coming examinations, I’ll be revising through the following weeks at home.]”

Victoria remains unstirred as he peels himself from a study group—a mother’s-boy, an unshackled heir—and converses blindly into her face glow, caught in the luminescent backsplash. The wrap counter resists his advance. His elbows perch on the shelf, shoulders pitching forward—an overreach of the miniature balustrade run, disguised as ease. 

Mr. Prosaic talks on the verge of capsizing—unseeing, yet determined to be heard. Wonky, as though the kitchen was an annex of his classroom, he hovers above the bowl resting beside the gas cooktop burners. He slides in sync as Victoria’s octopus-tentacles cross the inner corner of her worktop—scattering orange rinds, banana skins, brushing off the serrated tufts of a pineapple crown. Stealthily, he nudges for an exclusive study group with her. 

Victoria, by an inadvertent glance, trolls the horse-face into looking over his shoulder. He cannot imagine himself a moment earlier. But I can—unseen in their midst. Mr. Prosaic’s envy fixes on the square-shouldered soldier striking a despot posture at the threshold. He flicks a skeptic eye, his head slewing in resilient objection, sulking the newcomer from the Slavic class. 

Peering through a drift from the wing of swarming Slavic class youth toward Victoria, both men strobe between them the beacon of their third eye. Mr. Despot—undeterred, groomed in a beige business suit pressed to authority—offers a heeled half-salute and marches away from the shutting door. Soldiering in soft shoes, he sneaks up behind Mr. Prosaid along the floorboards, skirting the flanking wainscot wall, and draws up behind him.

Mr. Despot’s measured approach breathes a Flemish greeting, piggybacking—far from the French courtly romance—to pin Victoria. While a grave Walloon accent deters, vaulting ahead of yesterday’s classroom tales to breach the Fleming. Mr. Despot draws up, soldering a stalking ambush toward Mr. Prosaic’s hair-cape. Mr. Prosaic’s voice thins; he heeds. The conversation chokes against the hunched shoulders perched on the kitchen wrap. Mr. Despot lines up abreast of Mr. Prosaic, who sulks, crouched at the counter—eyes hushed on the worktop before Victoria in the backsplash glow. 

There, Mr. Despot finds the walkway into Victoria’s realm, debuting the bladed telescopic-leg. He scooches into the sheath of a passage and pauses. Oblivious to the spear-bead’s earlier haphazard piercing of Victoria’s floundering veil, he seeks only resonance in her favor. Yet the interleading crystal portal’s villainous wafer door leaf stands poised in its glittering beveled mosaic, holding the faint outline of a duel already sown. 

As Mr. Despot’s greeting trails, the words bleed into a family drama—“Zowel mijn zoons als mijn dochter willen me niet meer zien.—[both my sons and daughter, don’t want to see me anymore.]” He stands, intense, across the outer corner. The two men hold one another in the corner of an eye across the angle of the kitchen wrap, sharing Victoria as she bustles over the station, scraps and tools scattered, while I stand by, unseen. An aural cloak settles over the Fleming’s suit jacket, ghosting the army uniform, steering me into his robotic universe of parades—pilfering the bank of his consciousness.

She sidesteps before the cutting board, lifts a strawberry from the store’s mock basket tray, pinches off the leafy whorl, and separates the berries. A lethal kitchen blade, slices cubes while Mr. Despot speaks as if it were yesterday—"Ik heb mijn vrouw een huis geboden, en voor mijn kinderen gezorgd; hoe kon ze me verlaten?—[I provided my wife a house, and for my children, how could she leave me?]” 

Her palm heels across the board, gathering the strawberry cubes. In cupped hands, she shifts across the angle of her enclave, releasing them before Mr. Prosaic into the milk blue parabolic glass bowl. She sweeps the worktop clean, drawing Mr. Despot in sync along the telescopic oak boards, scaled back to the four-inch bar shelf. A sigh—in a heaven-struck, almost comical tone—at the extreme end besides the disposal bin: "Ze heeft me vier jaar geleden verlaten!—[She left me four years ago!]” 

In limbic resonance: “Ik heb een loopbaan bij defensie achter de rug.—[I’ve had a career in the armed forces.]” She scoops the chunks of her favored Pink Lady, drops them into the bowl, and shifts back toward the end of the worktop. A flick of the faucet lever over the composite white granite triple basins—water streams over her hands. 

The Hydra of my mind hovers toward the polders, catching a holographic shimmering: Mr. Despot stepping outside a brick villa, trailing the plume of a scent—’my home’—unfurling a wide girdle of groomed lawns spread into an affluent suburbia. 

A car pulls up at the horn of the crescent driveway, his words to Victoria still echoing in my head: “Mijn vrouw is категоrisch—ze weigert me te ontmoeten.—[My wife is categorical—she refuses to meet me.]” 

As Mr. Despot’s words linger—“Once a week, my daughter, by obligation…”—my mind settles in the world he inhabits. A door opens. A youthful figure steps into sunlight. Like a home-care nurse—without enthusiasm, yet bound to duty—she circles to the rear, where she meets her eager father, already churning his greeting into quibbles. 

She yields a reluctant step, drawn toward the shade cast by the eaves; a cold breezeway stretches between them. Together, they fade from the paved driveway. 

She reappears from the shadows into daylight—her obligation fulfilled—slides back into the car, and the vehicle disappears through the far horn of the crescent drive.

To my surprise, Victoria turns in the culinary enclave toward the white marble slender mantelpiece—she coils. From the wine rack nested in the open hearth, she uncoils with a bottle in each hand and poses under Mr. Despot’s gaze. He stands sealed in a warrior’s heroism, after underscoring: “My two sons are explicit. Loyal to their mother, refusing even to speak to me.”

With a sidestep toward the inner sink, she set the bottle heels atop the worktop and pops the corks. Gripping the bottlenecks, she wrist-twists and flips the bottles heel-high in the air. Under the hush of watchful men - gluck, glu-gluck… - spouts of wine extend straight into the parabolic bowl, stirring up the fruit onto floating. 

With a dry flourish, she flips the empty bottles upright and slides them across the sink to the far end of the worktop. She gazes at the myriad of bright morsels drifting in the parabolic bowl, her expression tightening—’How am I going to carry this to my guests?’

Victoria paws away from the culinary peninsula, the blue shallow brim washing ahead of her into the walkway. 

Mr. Despot—dazed by the disorder of his own life—lets his gaze scatter. It draws him backward into the niche housing the dishwasher, where he stands watching beside the closed doors of the technical shaft, in the shadow of the fridge. 

Across the seam of her path, at the kitchen wrap, Mr. Prosaic stirs from his silence—startled awake. His blatant scrutiny buckles at the opening cleft; his gaze fixes, adrift in a mama’s dream. He edges back into the gaping interleading portal, retreating toward the column of shelved book spines, watching her parade.

Challenged by intersecting spotlights measuring an expanse across the bare run of floorboards, she pauses in the grid of beams—held beside her realm of books flanking the chimney. The bowl poised in her paws, she fixes her gaze. Floating fruits drift in a restless wash, the resting ladle handle tipping the tide—rising and ebbing along the shallow curve of the glass, her strides frozen, appeasing the menacing spill beneath hesitant eyes. 

Reassured, she steps forward. The Slavic class parts in her approach, then folds back around on her. Between two vacant backrests at the center of the table, the blue parabolic bowl reappears—entering the clearing at arms’ stretch. Victoria leans in behind the nearest bouquet and lowers the flanged bowl into the silence. Her eyes withdraw behind accomplished hands, sweating out the dare, vanishing amid a swarm of wide lifting eyes—‘Can we start?’