The Wine of Solitude (18 page)

She saw Max coming towards her; she recognised his walk and the glow of the little pipe he was smoking. ‘Is that you?’ he asked wearily.

He went over to her, leaned against the railings next to her and watched the sea in silence; one of the ship’s lanterns lit up his face. How he had changed! He was one of those men who, when they are young, seem to have finer features and look more handsome than they actually are; he wasn’t even thirty, but already his clean-shaven face, drawn at the corners of his mouth, was thicker, heavier; it had begun to crumple, turn ugly; he no longer had his beautiful silky eyelashes or the scornful crease at the corner of his handsome mouth; it was paler now, leaving him looking weary and irritated; you could see the gold fillings in his teeth.

He whistled softly to the dog. ‘Up, Svea, you’re in my spot. Move over a bit, Hélène.’

He came and sat down beside her, holding the bulldog on his lap.

‘Those lights to the right,’ said Hélène softly, ‘that must be Le Havre. How bright it looks. I think I can make out the coastline near Honfleur. Yes, it’s France, France!’

‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ he asked, sighing.

‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I be? I love France, and those lights are a good omen.’

‘Presumptuous youth,’ he scoffed. ‘The lights, the music, the shouting … You don’t see them as being in honour of an event as insignificant as the signing of a peace treaty. In your eyes they’re for you. How silly young girls can be.’

‘Now, now,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘You’d be quite happy to be in my shoes. Look at you. Fed up, irritable … and why?
I’m
content, I feel light-hearted, happy. And it’s
because I’m seventeen, darling, and that’s a joyful time of life.’

She slowly raised her bare arm to her lips and licked the smooth, suntanned skin to taste the salt left there by ten days at sea.

Max looked at her with curiosity. ‘Shall I tell you something?’ he asked after thinking for a moment. ‘I hope you won’t be offended. You haven’t grown up in the way you’d like me to think, you’ve simply got younger. At fifteen you were a little old lady. Now, at last, you’re the age you should be.’

‘Well, well,’ she whispered, ‘so you’ve noticed that?’

He nodded. ‘I notice everything, understand everything, and when I don’t understand, it’s because I don’t want to.’

‘Oh, really?’ she said, while she was actually thinking, ‘So, the game is on. We’ll soon see who wins …’

She was trembling with a cunning, cruel excitement, but at the same time she felt truly sad. ‘I’m no better than them, in the end …’

She remembered an unhappy little girl whose heart was filled with love; she affectionately contemplated that image, deep within her, and spoke to it: ‘Patience, you’ll see …’

The ship sailed on between the two illuminated coastlines; between France and England, fanfare answered fanfare as fireworks mirrored fireworks; and in the reddish sea mist the boat slowly drifted towards the brightly shining ports decorated with flags and banners.

Hélène clenched her trembling hands together in a childlike gesture, just as she had in the past. ‘I used to come here when I was a child. It was the only place in the world that
I was happy,’ she said softly, expecting him to respond with the dry little scornful laugh she knew so well.

But at first he didn’t reply at all and, when he did speak, his voice was different: gentle and hesitant. ‘I know you didn’t have a happy childhood. You see, Hélène, sometimes people are bad without realising it. You can’t always make your life turn out the way you want it to be. You’re at an age when …’

He fell silent.

‘I wonder if you would understand the real meaning of the word passion?’

He smoked for a moment in silence, looking up at the stars. ‘They’re barely shining … The lights from the ground are masking them … What was I saying? Yes, passion … Take your father, for example. He’s passionate about gambling and it’s an invincible, horrible obsession. You belong to a race of passionate people, my poor Hélène, who abandon themselves to their obsessions completely, ignoring any sense of duty or morality. That’s just how they are. You won’t change them. I’m not like them. It’s just that there are certain ties that can’t be undone, ties that keep you tightly bound, that strangle you. I know I can behave badly, but at least I feel regret, I can’t forget everything else in the world. I don’t understand that obsession, that cruelty. I thought I did understand …’

He turned away and slowly placed his hand over his eyes, feeling ashamed and almost certainly wiping away a tear. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me,’ he said at last. ‘Since my mother died, Hélène, I feel so depressed. Oh, it’s so sad, you have no idea. I loved my mother so much … To other people she seemed harsh and cold. But when it came to me, she
loved me so much. Whenever I walked over to her I could see her face change, light up, not with a smile, but with a kind of inner light, a light that shone only for me.’

At first she listened to him with astonishment. To her, the love of a child for a mother was not a feeling easy to understand. But then she started to think he was wallowing in his sorrow, feeding it with all the anger he felt towards Bella and her tyrannical, all-consuming love.

Meanwhile, he was remembering something his mother had said to him one day when they were quarrelling a very long time ago. It made him feel uneasy: ‘And one fine day you’ll marry Hélène. That’s what always happens in the end.’ He had laughed at the time. Now he smiled, for when someone is dead, certain insignificant words they’ve said take on a new, prophetic, threatening meaning. He pushed the memory from his thoughts.

‘If you like,’ Hélène said softly, ‘we could be … good friends …’

He sighed. ‘I’d like that very much. I hardly have any friends. I have no friends at all.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘You know, we could have been friends a long time ago, if you’d wanted to. But you were horrible …’

‘Now, now,’ she said, laughing, ‘don’t push it. We’ve also signed a peace treaty tonight, you and I …’ She jumped down. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Asleep. She can’t stand it when the ship rocks.’

‘Ah,’ he murmured, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘Goodnight …’

Oddly enough, the cargo boat was transporting a shipment of theatre sets from Norkøping to Le Havre. The sea was so choppy that they couldn’t anchor in Le Havre, so the ship
followed the estuary of the Seine to Rouen. In the morning the countryside was full of fruit trees. Hélène stood dead still, rooted to the spot with surprise, looking at the peaceful landscape. Apple trees … It seemed as extraordinary to her as seeing palm trees, or bread and cheese hanging from the branches. Then Rouen appeared and, that very evening, they were in Paris.

In Paris, Karol was waiting for them. He was thinner; his clothing hung off his hunched shoulders in great folds; beneath the thin, dry skin on his face the outline of his bones appeared so distinctly that you could follow the line of his strong jaw; his eyes had blackish-brown circles round them; every one of his gestures was nervous and hesitant; he seemed consumed from within by some inner fire.

He briefly kissed his daughter, slapped Max on the back, then turned round and affectionately took Bella’s arm and held her close. ‘Ah, my darling, my darling wife …’

Then, immediately, a flood of incomprehensible words and numbers washed over Hélène’s head.

Paris was sad, deserted, lit up only by the odd street lamp and the bright stars. Hélène recognised each of the streets.

They crossed the Place Vendôme; it was dark and empty.

Bella pouted and said, ‘So this is Paris? My God, how it’s changed!’

‘We’re making money everywhere we turn,’ whispered Karol. ‘We rolling in it.’

That autumn, Karol left for New York, leaving his wife a new car whose wheels and headlights sparkled with gold.

Sometimes the chambermaid would wake Hélène early in the morning with news that they were leaving in an hour. Where were they going? No one knew. The morning would pass. The car would wait. The servants would carry down Bella’s cases, hatboxes and toiletries. Then the chambermaid would cross the entrance hall carrying the jewellery box and make-up case, sit down in the back of the car and wait. Max and Bella were quarrelling. Hélène could hear them from her room, first cold and calm, then gradually becoming more and more passionate and full of hate.

‘Never again, I swear it!’

‘Stop making a scene …’

‘A scene! You poison the existence of everyone around you …’

‘In the past …’

‘In the past, I was mad. When a madman recovers his sanity, should he remain locked up in his cell for ever?’

‘Well, then, get out, who’s stopping you?’

‘If you say that one more time …’

‘Why not? Go on, that’s right, get out, you miserable, ungrateful thing. No, no, Max, my darling, forgive me, forgive me. Don’t look at me like that …’

By now it was nearly twelve o’clock. They had to have lunch. They ate in deadly silence. Bella, her eyes swollen from crying, stared out into the street. Max, his hands shaking, leafed through a Michelin guide whose pages tore when he touched them. The chambermaid had gone back upstairs to her room with the jewellery box and make-up case. The car sat waiting. The driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. A series of servants took the suitcases back upstairs.

Hélène went and knocked on her mother’s door. ‘Are we going somewhere today, Mama?’

‘I don’t know. Leave me alone. In any case, where could we go? It’s late. Hélène, where are you, Hélène? Yes, we’re leaving, right away, in an hour. But just go away. Leave me in peace, for the love of God! All of you, just leave me alone! You all wish I were dead!’

She was crying. The car still waited. Bella had the servant unpack her cosmetics and plastered make-up on again to repair her face.

‘Do you know where we’re going, Mademoiselle?’ the driver asked.

Hélène didn’t know. She waited. When her mother and Max finally came downstairs, pale and still shaking with fury, it was late. A delicate mist rose from the damp streets towards the clear red sky. They set off, randomly choosing one of the roads that led out of Paris. No one spoke. Bella’s eyes filled with tears; she didn’t wipe them away because she
didn’t want to ruin her make-up, just dabbed at them nervously, recalling with pity and tenderness the woman she used to be. Who in the world, apart from Karol perhaps, remembered that young woman walking along the streets of Paris one autumn evening, dressed in the latest 1905 fashion, a large straw hat perched on top of her black chignon, its short veil forming a tulle frame round her face? She was young, then, rather awkward with too much perfume and inexpensive make-up inexpertly applied, but her skin was so white and smooth. Everything seemed wonderful to her. Why did she get married? Why do people realise the existence that might have been theirs so late in life? Why did she resist that Argentinean she’d known as a young woman? He would have ended up leaving her, but there would have been others to replace him. She wasn’t a hypocrite. ‘What do men want from me?’ she thought. ‘I can’t change my body or put out the fire that burns in my blood. Was I made to be a good wife and mother? Max fell in love with me because I was nothing like those gloomy middle-class women he met, and now he won’t forgive me for having remained who I am. Is that my fault?’

She remembered the Paris of her past, the day she had first arrived there fifteen years before: the fine rain with its smell of musk that fell slowly against a background of light. Every house was lit up in the darkness. A man followed her. He’d wanted her to go with him. Oh, how passionately she had wished never again to return to Russia, never again to see her husband and daughter, just to go away with him, not because she loved him, but because he symbolised a free and happy life. Happy? And why not? But she was still young then and hadn’t dared. She’d been afraid of having an affair
and being poor. She had still carried pictures of Boris and Hélène in a little silk bag sewn into her blouse, along with her passport and return ticket. Stupid, cowardly youth. Unique, irreplaceable youth! She felt as if Max had stolen it from her. Because of him, she had carelessly let time slip by, without thinking of holding on to those precious moments, without savouring each and every drop of happiness. And now, he didn’t love her any more …

She turned towards him and looked at him through her tears. They had left Paris. They were driving through the countryside. Night had fallen. The scent of fresh grass rose from the meadows mingled with the smell of milk from the farms. They went past sleepy villages and, in the headlights of the car, they saw a white façade, a flashing traffic marker and, at the entrance to a church, white angels carved in stone, smiling mysteriously, their wings folded. A pale yellow dog or cat came out of the shadows, its flashing eyes reflecting the car’s headlights, then an old woman appeared in a white dressing gown standing near the open shutters. The driver, who could barely keep his eyes open, grumbled, and the brakes screeched as he nervously applied them, but they kept going, like madmen, towards Normandy or Provence, while Bella said over and over again, ‘We should have gone somewhere else. I don’t like this road, I don’t like this car. I’m bored with it all, everything is frustrating, sad, horrible.’

And her eyes fell upon the cold, motionless face beside her with love, despair and anguish.

At midnight, they stopped for dinner at an empty inn.

They ate, and Hélène waited for the quarrel to begin with malicious joy: always present, yet invisible, it seemed to simmer near the surface, like flames beneath the ashes.

‘You really must have lost your mind to want to travel like this.’

‘You could have stayed in Paris.’

‘I swear that this is the last time I’ll ever go with you.’

‘You’re such a bore.’

‘And you are unbelievably selfish. You’re on a diet, and you don’t give a damn if everyone else is dying of hunger.’

‘Please do not be crude in front of my daughter.’

‘I’m not crude, but you are certainly mad.’

Hélène watched them, smiling. She deliberately reminded herself of the past, still so near, when she had sat between them this way and watched their every movement in terror, jumping every time they raised their voices, knowing very well that her mother’s anger would inevitably fall back on to her because she was so weak, or on to Mademoiselle Rose. But now, nothing in the world had the power to make her suffer.