Before dinner Igor asked Selma to speak a little more slowly. He said his business acquaintances had trouble understanding her accent. Selma thought he was joking, but he did not laugh. She had lived in the city for fifteen years, ran her own business and spoke every day with people who understood her perfectly well. Still, she repeated a few sentences before the mirror, angry with herself for trying to sound more acceptable to the man who shared her bed.
At the restaurant Igor introduced her as someone who had grown up abroad. That explained her accent before she opened her mouth. Selma had grown up in a small town a few hours away. Her experience abroad consisted of one school holiday at her aunt's. She looked at him, expecting a correction. He continued discussing her "international experience", rearranging her life as easily as a waiter moving a misplaced glass.
The woman across the table asked which city she had lived in. Selma named her hometown. Igor interrupted to say that was where the family house stood, but she continued. She explained that her father drove a bus, her mother kept a small shop, and she had cut her first customers' hair in a room behind the kitchen. She did not offer these facts as a challenge. They were ordinary truths she suddenly had to defend from a man who considered them insufficiently elegant.
One guest laughed and asked Igor where the story about living abroad had come from. Igor said he had expressed himself badly. Selma replied that it was not the first time, although it was the first time she had heard it before so many people. Dinner paused. A business partner tried to change the subject to the menu. Selma thanked him, stood and said she would spend the rest of the evening elsewhere. She did not wait for Igor to decide whether to follow her or stay with his carefully chosen witnesses.
He followed her to the exit and accused her of humiliating him. He did not say he was ashamed of lying. He said those people were important. Selma asked what made them so important that she had to become someone else to sit with them. He had no answer that sounded good outside the restaurant. The taxi arrived while he was still saying he had not meant it that way. For the first time that evening she spoke quickly, naturally and without apology.
The next day she collected her things. Among them was a photograph of her parents' shop he had never put on the shelf, supposedly because it did not suit the frame. Selma took both photograph and frame. Later she heard the dinner was remembered as an embarrassing scandal. She did not try to repair that version. She had enough work restoring her own voice to the place from which, for love, she had begun moving it herself.