Dearest Nina,

Oh, you no doubt already guessed, I wanted to surprise you, but you never were one to be surprised, were you? Shaking you was always beyond me, although – by God – I’ve tried, many times… You are the one whom I miss, most out of everyone, back in the City of Lights. Since I didn’t call it home then, trust me, I shan’t start now.

Your house was a house of freedom, though, chérie, and blue skies aside, vast and unrestricted as they may be, Rome simply can’t live up to that little plot of Parisian soil anymore. Much has changed since I left it here. Even more since the time when you led the way out. Would you recognise this place at all? Would you recognise your little star in her current state? A lot of age can weigh on a girl in the span of a few months, believe me! At least I haven’t gone grey like you, cara. I could never wear that look so charmingly. So elegantly. With such sophistication. I ascribe that to your own unique talents.





As you can see, my dear friend, I am in quite a sticky situation. Jobs are scarce as it is and the pay is awful under any circumstances so that during the day, my soft and tender hands must be so rudely hardened by factory work, because as we both know, a girl’s got to eat. You wouldn’t recognise my touch any longer, chérie, it’s as tough as the balls of a cavalry soldier! Awful, I say. But I live… No, I survive, and today I had two portions of bread for dinner, which made me believe I should celebrate by writing you finally, Nina, you have not left my mind or my heart all this time. While I hackled the price of this rat’s nest of a room, while I had to beg for work, getting offered only bit parts, because no one here knows who Elvira Paolo is, and to be honest, a luxury I can afford with no one else but you, I barely know who that girl is myself yet. Well, while I pathetically persisted, you lived rent-free in my memory. The way some people insist on doing, because they are stubborn and because they are special.





Therefore, I shan’t ask how you’re faring. I imagine, better than me, and that’s good enough, principessa, that’s quite dandy. I simply send you a thousand kisses to distribute as you please, just don’t let them go to waste. Lipstick is expensive and this is my last canister of the good one. I am asked, on the daily, when “the signorina” intends to marry, and around these parts it can’t that easily be laughed off. Even if not a husband, I suppose I must look for a man to once more provide the champagne and the parties for me, because as well as you, I do miss all that. Only, you aren’t here, and the skies might very well be free, but the earth certainly isn’t. Rather, the floor is lava here. Like all of Italy is Naples now. Like all of Italy is Pompeii.





Send me your liberties, dear Giovannina, and send me your cool. More than any one body that could be named but won’t, I miss them so desperately.

A kiss and a thousand,
E.

They died only a few years apart, Germaine kicking the bucket first, before the war had ended, Eloisa following later when Italy had been liberated, though not from its poverty, so Niflheim was, if nothing else, a step up from all that. All that miserable pessimism. Hopes that had been disappointed, a hopefulness that had been lost, irrevocably.

The view down below was grey as well, but the underworld’s version of Paris had theatres, and Loki liked her style, as Eloisa liked him. They flirted harmlessly, while rehearsing Shakespeare together. He made for a better Titania than even her, she had to give him that. In this new Paris too, though, she became a sight to behold. Sure, maybe some optimism had been sacrificed in the process, left at the roadside of the way that had taken her there, but a bit of fame went a long way and made up for most lost things.

Such was Eloisa’s reasoning.

In the few years that separated their deaths, an eternity down below, after all, Germaine had come a long way in Niflheim, she had won the reputation of some strange creature of legend. Everyone knew her, as she seemed to know everyone, their comings and goings, details from their past lives. Like some collector of things that existed no longer, and which shouldn’t be deemed relevant anymore, yet here they were. After Hel had woken Eloisa up with her name, her real name, the one Sylvie used to call, silly girl, Germaine had been immediately at her side, papers to fill, sign, arrangements to accept, there was no declining anything in Niflheim. What would you go back to, if you didn’t want this?

Only, Eloisa wanted it, she wanted another chance at life, couldn’t get enough of Paris looking like everything she remembered it to be and evidently, everything everyone else remembered as well. Like so, Paris was constantly updated. Paris had, overnight, really, become delightfully modern.

What an afterlife, yes, that kept giving like that, who’d have thought?

In between new premieres and chaotic rehearsal schedules, even more chaotic than they had once been, because Loki didn’t operate with rules and regulations much, Eloisa watched Germaine. Unlike most of Paris, infamous for its crazes, its revolutions, its days of men being separated into their own little pens, and who was any poorer for such security measures, truly, the secretary of the realm’s queen was quiet and solitary, and one could be fooled to think she simply was not very interesting, a dull wallflower, but Eloisa wasn’t fooled.

It was the one time, when Eloisa Paolo had been fooled, and the trickster in question had been love. Ah, but no one can outwit love, can they? She tried, she spent most of her life that way.

Germaine, for sure, didn’t fool her, with her sad affairs and professional attire. She was Hel’s secretary now, but what wouldn’t that woman give to be more than that, to be to her what her nice, blind guy was, eternally. Eloisa knew nothing of divine matters, but she could certainly divine that it did matter. To Germaine.

That sad, silly woman.

So, Eloisa found her one day, when she had sent out surveys to all of Paris (and London, too, but no one on this side cared far enough to bridge the misty strait), her answers an ugly scrawl that she didn’t doubt the other woman would decipher as easily and elegantly as she did everything else.

“Chérie,” she greeted her, “You don’t truly care about my habits of movement, Friday through Sunday.”

Lips pursed, not a smile, not a single amusement offered her in return for her cheekiness, Germaine took her paper and skimmed it, reading at a speed that was perhaps not divine but impressive, nonetheless. Eloisa had never been one to belittle the parts of a person that were most human. Other things bored her, terribly. Give her the surprises, the imperfections, the little mistakes that shifted the world beneath your feet. Ah, she had known a girl once who had been especially gifted at that. She knew that girl, and then she didn’t know her any longer, as life goes. The French have a saying about that, still.

“What I care about is irrelevant,” Germaine told her, folding the paper on the middle. “It is necessary to the planning of new infrastructural solutions for the Parisian sector.”

“Oh, principessa,” Eloisa sighed melodramatically, throwing up both hands into the air, colourless, foggy. She called her princess, because they both knew there already was a queen, yes? “My only concern is how you’ll find your way to see me perform as Ophelia tonight. Hamlet must have some allure for you, it is so dreary and sad.”

A couple of other citizens came over to turn their papers in, Germaine taking them with curt nods. “Is that an invitation?” she asked, neutrally. Whether it was or not seemed not to be very important at all.

Yet, Eloisa wasn’t fooled. That silly woman.

“It’s an order, mademoiselle. Do not leave an empty seat in the front row, it looks awful. As if I don’t have admirers enough to fill the whole theatre.”

Turning away, perhaps others would have missed the smile ghosting across Germaine’s lips, but Eloisa had spent her life reading people like particularly inspiring paragraphs in particularly inspiring books, she gladly spent her death doing the same. Naturally, she didn’t miss it. “If I can have the streets rearranged before then,” was the reply, to the point and without promises.

When the curtain rose in the evening, however, there were no empty seats as far as you could spit, no less that you could see. And later, the Champs Élysées ran the other way, as they walked home together, Germaine and she, dead three years apart, but not apart now.