Three Short Novels (26 page)

17

T
he rain began while she waited by the hotel for the airport bus, a cold drizzle after the spell of warm weather. Three months later she was to see a newspaper item about the record cold in this city, and she was to picture the ice and snow over the earth of the forest preserve. Do you know where the forest preserve is? she had asked the landlady in the vestibule, and the landlady had answered If they say so, it's there, suspecting perhaps that the sister doubted its existence even as she had wanted to doubt the existence of her brother.

The plane rose into the rain darkening the sky before twilight. The rain was left behind and the sky was alight again for a little while, and then night took over.

Up on the small screen, way forward in the cabin, a short documentary began. She watched without benefit of sound. A famous photographer in a large fur coat and hat to match was telling anecdotes about the celebrated ones whose photographs were as famous as the persons themselves. One after the other their faces appeared. The rotund face of a Pope whose name Ilona failed to remember, an old man's face lively with a little boy's pleasure over having his
picture taken. The bland face of Eisenhower, gone before she could count the stars on his general's cap. Hemingway's face above a thick turtleneck sweater, like a sacrificial head on a platter. And oh! the very large sadness in Einstein's moist old eyes, the white strands of hair drawn up in cosmic amazement. The forever young head of John Kennedy, an earnest university debater. Then the lion head of Albert Schweitzer, like a marble sculpture of a god both animal and man. And then the coveted face of Bardot—All is dross that is not Helen. Churchill's old toad face, a toad vexed by the weight of the jewel in its head. Claud would look like that in another twenty years. Again, the photographer in his grand fur coat, relating interesting things she couldn't hear, and in a moment he, too, vanished and the screen was white and empty, and then it, too, vanished.

She gazed out at the night, but the faces on the screen remained before her eyes. They were always there before your eyes, whether you were awake or asleep, so highly visible were they. You could even assume they were among the blessed of the earth, if you wanted to, if that was your favorite delusion.

Across the aisle, the three close-cropped soldiers began a laughing jag together, shouts and spurts of laughter, waking her from shallow sleep. Then in the calm after, only murmurs here and there in the dim cabin, a dream began to surface, a dream from several nights ago, or weeks ago, that shocked her now with its meaning. She was with Martin in a small room and she was whispering Don't let him in but the door was open and her brother entered. Nothing could keep him away. He was a young man again but oh so different. A white skullcap was on his head, his eyes were lucidly dark, seeing beyond them, and he was calm as he had never been, his being infinitely resigned to the journey. No tumult anymore, no frightful suppositions. He sat down in a chair against the wall, placed on the floor a portmanteau of a past century, and the room became a waiting room. He was on his way elsewhere.

Far below lay the endless bas-relief mountains, lead color, iron color. There must be a moon, ravine shadows were sharp, and she thought—If some people were in the light, like the ones up there on the small screen, like Martin, like the woman he loved, like all those who were embraced wherever they went, it didn't follow that all the rest were lost to the dark.

18

I
t was after midnight when she climbed the stairs to her apartment. She had heard Martin's footsteps on these stairs that last night, and now she wished he was hearing hers and was drawn up from his chair or up from his bed and over to the phone, so that, when she turned the key in the lock, her phone would be ringing. The apartment was silent and remained silent.

On the kitchen table a little book lay face down, as if the lamplight had placed it there on the instant. Almost weightless in her hand, Madeleine, by André Gide. Martin must have left it that last night when he came to be with her. Something would be underlined, a passage meant as a message to her. Often he, too, relied on the wiser ones of the world to describe his dilemmas. Ah, here it was, his borrowed message. She sat down, blaming her weariness on the days past, on the hours gazing down from a great height on the depthless solitude of earth, but knowing that the weariness was over messages offered in words. Everything uttered, everything written was a message she failed to comprehend and failed to act upon.

Her vision slipped here and there, first to the last passage and then to the first, her eyes trembling with all they had seen away from home.

It was a day like all the other days. I had need to look up a date for the memoirs I was then writing. I had asked her for the key to the secretary in her room where my letters were put away. . . . Suddenly I saw her become very pale. In an effort that made her lips tremble, she told me that the drawer was empty and that my letters had ceased to exist.

What did his wife say then?

After you left, I found myself all alone again in the big house you were forsaking, with no one on whom to lean, without knowing what to do, what to become. . . . I first thought that nothing remained but to die. Yes, truly, I thought that my heart was ceasing to beat. . . . I burned your letters in order to do something. Before destroying them I reread them all, one by one. . . . They were my most precious belonging.

And he, what did he do then?

For a solid week I wept.

Ilona laid her head down on the open book. What did Martin hope for these underlined passages? Did he hope to persuade her not to forget or deform or destroy whatever he had entrusted to her of himself? Did he hope to persuade her of his love though he wasn't around anymore to confirm it? If she fell asleep where she was, not moving a muscle, without any objection from any part of her body, would her sleep be like a promise to him that she would do no harm, neither to him nor to herself nor to love, and would her promise be sensed by him, enabling him to sleep through the night beside the woman, serenely?

19

E
very day, the entire day, she wandered the city, walking miles through neighborhoods where she had never been, hoping that when she returned to the apartment the lovers would be gone and she would be alone again, alone with all those beings in her imagination who were waiting to exist, waiting to be given faces, desires, personal trinkets, foibles, failings, aches and pains, waiting to be given voices, sacred silences, waiting to rescue her, their rescuer. But the lovers were always there when she returned, and out in the city, wherever she went, she was afraid that by some trick of fate she would encounter them, they would appear, strolling out from a shop, from a café, and she would be face to face with them, inescapably.

One day she saw the woman again. It happened in an Italian café not far from her apartment. Ilona was inside, sitting at one of the small round tables and facing the door. She chose to sit facing the door because if she sat with her back to the door the lovers might enter without recognizing her. The place was fragrant with coffee and steamed milk and pastries. The day was warm, the door open, and she began to hear the voices around her after so long a time of hearing
only his voice and her own in memory, repeating their last words to each other. Obsession wears itself out or wears out its prey, the self—one and the same, and then the world around begins to make itself known again like a person returning after twenty years away, brimming with his own life. Then the woman was in the doorway, her little boy at her side, the woman she had seen only one evening and who, since then, she saw everywhere.

The patrons in the café faded away, along with their voices, along with the world. Then the woman saw her, their eyes met, and the wound opened unbearably wide because the woman's eyes must look into his while they loved, the woman's eyes were like a stage where all her life went on for him to see. The man who came up beside her wasn't Martin, but the wound was not to be healed simply because Martin was elsewhere, even if he were never to lie in love again with this woman, even if he were to love a thousand others and forget this one. Ilona saw the man frown when the woman told him she had changed her mind about this café. Only a fraction of a minute had passed, he had locked the car in that time or stopped to glance into a shop window, and what could have caused her in so short a time to refuse to enter this place? He glanced around at the patrons, at Ilona, and found no one to suspect, no one he had seen before and no one to remember.

When Ilona looked up again they were gone. So close a resemblance between the woman and the man beside her—she saw it clearly now. The man was the brother whom Claud had told her about, a sculptor living in Italy, in Florence, and on his rapid way to fame. They were brother and sister reflecting each other's beauty. Years later, when Martin and the woman were married and living in Florence, Ilona was to dream of the three, the woman, her brother, and Martin, sitting side by side on a bench in a marble rotunda, the woman between the men, precious to them, protected by their love. They were troubled, they were waiting for a verdict, a parting—Ilona
didn't know what. She was barred from their lives. She saw only that Martin and the woman were holding hands, fingers entwined, she saw that their love was deepened by sorrow, and she tried to pry their fingers apart, waking herself with a harsh cry of despair over herself, over who she had become—desirous denier, scourge.

Before she went out into the streets she gave them enough time to leave the neighborhood, and then she found the streets as unfamiliar as those in another city. It was as if she belonged nowhere, as if this city, this part of the earth was no longer accessible, as if the earth itself belonged now to the woman and to her brother and to Martin. She got lost deliberately, wandering until evening, afraid to enter the apartment because the lovers, waiting there, would seem more enduring than ever.

Above the narrow passageway the little green globe was lit, casting a patina over the bank of mailboxes all alike. A letter from her child was waiting for her. Climbing the stairs, she began to read by the light of the large, dim globe that hung above the courtyard, fascinated by the foreign envelope, by the handwriting, like a provincial who has never received a letter in her whole life.

Dearest Mother,

First of all I am perfectly well and hope you will tell me you are too. If you ever wake up in the middle of the night, I hope you remember to tell yourself you blessed me, so you can go back to sleep. One night you must have done just that. It was when we got lost, John and I, because he was in so much of a rush to start up into the mountains before the monsoons came. He got careless about the trails, he was in such a hurry, and we ended up high in the mountains but not where we should have been. It was beautiful even though we were lost. We camped on the shore of a Hindu sacred lake. There was a mist over the lake until sunset when the mist lifted and we saw
how incredibly blue it was. It's hard to describe that blue. It was either a deep blue or a light blue, because the lake was so clear and reflective and deep. We were camped in a stone hut and we'd been out of food for three days. We built a fire and got rid of the leeches on us. We took off our clothes and hung them on a pole over the smoke, and the leeches dropped off, and we stood close to the fire and pulled the leeches off each other. That night I thought We're going to be all right because my mother just woke up and remembered she blessed me. Of course the time was different because of the time zones, but that didn't matter. The next day we hiked over the pass and weak, weak, weak, we came down through a forest fragrant with vanilla and into a valley covered with mist, where we heard bells and knew we were safe. We came to a hut and two boys were in there and they gave us eggs and yogurt and yak-butter tea. They directed us to their aunt's house in the village, where we could stay for the night. On our way down to the village we met a hippie washing his clothes in the stream. “Hi,” he said. “I'm Harvey. I'm from New York.” So you see, we weren't lost anymore.

When we were up in the mountains we couldn't see the farther mountains because a mist was over everything, the way it is before the monsoons, but for about five minutes the mist parted and we saw those terribly high peaks far in the distance, and the wind was whipping long snow banners off the tops. We were really high, we had to take slow steps, the oxygen was so thin.

I am back now in Swayambhu in our little house, two stories, with a view of the Kathmandu valley as the storms blow in. The windows are only latticework and open to the night air, and I burn Chinese mosquito coils to keep the monsters out. Below the window is a water buffalo and I brush my teeth
and spit on his back. He doesn't seem to mind. I walk around the hill to the springs for our water, which I carry in an earthenware jug. Except Tuesdays when it's men's day. Nearby is a Buddhist temple on top of a mount, with the eyes of Buddha painted on the walls. Sacred temple monkeys with crazy faces live in the trees on the mount. The priests wear orange robes and walk around the mount, spinning their prayer wheels. The prayer wheels are silver cylinders and inscribed on them are the words Om Mane Padme Hum, something like that, and the priests say these words as they go around, and the words go up to heaven.

Mother, you ought to come here. You said it would be like a rite of passage for me and you made it possible for me to come here. You said you weren't ready yet for your rite of passage. You said you'd have to invent your own. Mother, you are a contrary person, like you used to call me. But I love you with all my heart, whoever you are.