Snapshot ✓

Snapshot

The photograph was in monochrome.

My gaze hovered on it longer than it had on any other piece in the gallery. It was weird. This photograph – blown up to perhaps ten times its original size – was like a black hole on the clinical white walls of the gallery. It just sucked you in, with its heavy contrast and age-old allure.

"Do you like it?"

I turned round to meet the gaze of an old man. I had been staring at the photograph for so long that I felt now like a dreamer, waking after a particularly long sleep. I took a moment to process what he had said and told him, "Yes. Very much."

He just nodded, seeming quite content, and he moved along.

I turned my attention back to the photograph.

It was of a young woman; her eyes meeting not the lens of the camera but the face of the cameraman. Her lips had been tugged into an inscrutable sort of smirk, and her heavily made-up eyes held a glint of anticipation – perhaps even danger? Her hair had been made up like an old Hollywood star's, and large rings shone on her beckoning fingers.

"I love it, don't you?" came a voice beside me. It sounded American, and distinctly sharp.

Turning, I saw that the voice belonged to a young man with a large camera.

I nodded. "Yes," I said. "I do."

"You know what?" he went on. "That woman was a commie spy back in the day! She would flirt with our boys and worm all sorts of secrets out of them!" He spoke like some veteran from the twentieth century, yet he couldn't have been more than twenty years old.

I gave him a slow, confused look. "How could you possibly know that?" I asked. The photograph had only one word attached to it, and that was its title: Grace.

He shrugged. "I just know!" he declared. "It's in my blood! I'm an American. I know American things. About America," he added, as if to clarify. "And I'll be damned if that woman isn't Natalya Durova: commie spy."

"She's not," I pointed out. "Her name's Grace."

The man just blew this off with a dismissive hand gesture. "Whatever. That's probably just the Russian equivalent for Espionage Grenade I-Hate-Democracy."

I doubted it.

Eventually the man spotted a new photograph to observe and he scurried over to that instead, leaving me for five minutes before I was called by yet another voice.

"Excuse me?" It was a little girl. She couldn't have been more than six, and she wore some felt fairy wings on the back of her pink coat. "Miss? Miss? Did you take that?" She pointed at the photograph.

I shook my head, smiling slightly. "No, sweetie. But do you like it?"

"I love it!" she breathed, looking the subject up and down. "I bet she's a duchess!"

"Duchess?" I repeated.

"Yeah," she sighed dreamily. "Really rich and fancy and stuff. Probably with a bunch of servants and a couple horses too. Look at those rings." She pointed at the rings. "Gold, I bet you," she added in a conspiratorial mutter.

I just smiled, and looked around the gallery's room for one of the girl's parents. Soon a couple ran over to claim her, and I was soon brushing off their hurried apologies.

When the couple had ushered her away, I thought I might move on to look at some other photographs – I had been at this one for too long – when along came the first man who had come to speak to me.

"Still here?" he chuckled. "You must really like this one."

I nodded.

"So did I," he sighed fondly, looking up at the photograph. Even though the woman's eyes were looking away from the lens, I got the sudden, blatant feeling that she was looking at him.

"You're the photographer," I said, beginning to smile a little.

He nodded. "Guilty."

"So who was she?"

The man shrugged. "Well, we met in Moscow back when she went by the name Natalya Durova..."

I couldn't help but allow myself a surprised laugh. "You're not serious?"

"No," the man admitted, smiling. "But does it matter? This photo's nothing but a snapshot; to you she is no-one, and therefore anyone. Isn't that beautiful?"

I had to admit, it was. This woman was a spy, a duchess and the lover of a young cameraman all at once. She was a conjurer of a thousand stories, each unique to every observer; the elusive face behind any tale you put to her. She was a snapshot: nothing, and therefore anything.

Yet I still turned to the photographer and pleaded, "Tell me who she was. Who she really was, I mean."

The man just smiled gently at the photograph and said, "Out of this whole gallery, I suppose only I'll ever really know, but I'll tell you this: that photograph may be in monochrome, but her life was in colour."

___

[A/N]

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