METANOIA

Oasis

"The Empire" is a loud and dignified name for an appropriate establishment located in one of London's most expensive areas. During the day, as the sunlight streamed into the restaurant through the panoramic windows on the first floor, and classical music spread softly through the walls, drowning out conversations about business or new purchases, I found myself thinking that the place, with its ceiling frescoes, sculptures, marble walls and gilded, colourful furniture made by Italian craftsmen at my father's personal request, was transformed at night, behind massive doors, into a place of lust and money. I saw people's faces change as they touched the notes of their winnings, as they inhaled their scent, as they kissed and shook the bundle in front of everyone. The stuffiness of the closed and dark windowless room, the clouds of cigar smoke on the ceiling, the ashes on the blood red gambling table — these people were different from the visitors who came in during the day, these were real lunatics with the urge to inflict pain and intimidation; here they became slaves to their own desires and vices, martyrs of their own world of immorality and misery, an endless escape from the meaninglessness of existence to the inner destruction of colossal loss.

My father had to make a name for himself from scratch when his once influential Neapolitan family was reduced in an instant to a handful of ashes, worthless. It was the restaurant that became an oasis for people like him — immigrants forced to leave their homeland to escape the police and endless persecution, heartbroken, clad in cold-blooded masculine faces, desperate to recapture their childhood. Here they were young men, arguing loudly, hurling insults (some even with chairs and money), drinking, freeing their minds from the cage of everyday dullness in which they were strict dictators, eliminating their enemies, punishing their subordinates and beating their wives. Their true selves were revealed, where in a world full of death, all they cared about was how to make money out of it. If the blood on their hands were imprinted on the surface of the furniture they touched, my restaurant would become the epitome of an infected soldier's wound on the battlefield.

The Empire also became my oasis. As a child, I had little idea that one day I would run what I thought would be a powerful restaurant, but as time went on, and my interests shifted more and more towards my father's business, my desires collided with the reality that no matter how much I proved my worth by going to the lair of the worst criminals, no matter how much I proved my effectiveness as a leader by organising magnificent car thefts, I was still a woman. By inheriting The Empire, I permanently cemented my name in the mouths of the disgruntled men who still insisted that I had made a grave mistake in preferring the cold weapons to the warm bed of my husband, as well as the women who clearly condemned my desire to bring my death closer. But I knew that I had begun to end the mindless reign of cruel men who equated their daughters with a bargaining chip — it took me to become as cold as the ice their wives applied to their bruised faces.

In defiance of the law, my father, Robert Wollstonecraft, set up a restaurant where he ran unofficial games (often poker). It was a kind of protest against the legal system that had banned him from his home country for many years. In the beginning there were only three gambling rooms, discreetly located on the first and second floors, opening their doors only late at night; his father used to boast that half the British government sat at the gambling tables, confirming his theory about the relativism of justice that had caught up with him as a child. In the short time I have been running the restaurant, I have added two more rooms in the basement.

The sharp nose of my black heels was stained with ash, which lay in small piles on the hard pavement — neither the icy wind that blasted my cheeks and tangled my hair, nor the morning rain had carried away the remains of the fire. Thomas told me of two completely burnt out gambling halls that would take at least a month and a half to rebuild — forty-five days that promised constant losses and an endless stream of nightly customers to the remaining three rooms.