She spoke and I listened in silence. Sometimes I felt like screaming like an animal.
Sarah spoke in an even, monotonous voice, stopping only to let silence comment upon an image that words would have been too weak to evoke. Her story opened a secret floodgate within me.
I knew there had been Sarahs in the concentration camps. I had never met any, but I had heard of them. I didn’t know their faces were those of sick children. I had no idea that someday I would kiss one of them on the mouth.
Twelve years old. She was twelve years old when, separated from her parents, she had been sent to a special barracks for the camp officers’ pleasure. Her life had been spared because there are German officers who like little girls her age. Who like to make love to little girls her age.
Suddenly she turned her darkened eyes toward me: God was still in them. The God of chaos and impotence. The God who tortures twelve-year-old children.
“Did you ever sleep with a twelve-year-old woman?” she asked me.
Her voice was calm, composed, naked. I tried not to scream. I couldn’t justify myself. It would have been too easy.
“But you have felt like it, haven’t you?” she asked when she noticed I kept quiet. “All men feel like it.”
My eyes burned from her stare. I was afraid to scream. I couldn’t justify myself. Not to her. Especially not to her. She deserved better.
“Tell me,” she went on in a somewhat softer voice. “Is that why you’re not making love to me? Because I’m no longer twelve?”
The God of impotence made her eyes flame. Mine too. I thought: I am going to die. Whoever sees God must die. It is written in the Bible. I had never quite understood that: why should God be allied with death? Why should He want to kill a man who succeeded in seeing Him? Now, everything became clear. God was ashamed. God likes to sleep with twelve-year-old girls. And He doesn’t want us to know. Whoever sees it or guesses it must die so as not to divulge the secret. Death is only the guard who protects God, the doorkeeper of the immense brothel that we call the universe. I am going to die, I thought. And my fingers, clenched around my throat, kept pressing harder and harder, against my will.
Sarah decided to let me breathe a moment. She again looked straight ahead and went on talking as if I didn’t exist or as if I alone existed, everywhere and always.
“He was drunk. A drunken pig. He was laughing. He stank of obscenity. Especially his laugh. ‘It’s my birthday today,’ he said. ‘I want a present. A special present!’ He examined me from head to toe and snickered, ‘You’ll be my birthday present.’ I didn’t understand the meaning of his words. I was twelve. At that age you don’t know yet that girls can be offered as birthday presents…I wasn’t alone in the barracks. A dozen women stood around us. Bertha was white. So were the others. White. Like corpses. He alone, the drunkard, was red. His hands too, like the butcher’s. And his laughter went from his mouth to his eyes. ‘You’ll be my birthday present, you!’ he said. Bertha was biting her lips. She was my friend.”
She was a beautiful and sad-looking woman. She carried her head like an Oriental princess. The night she arrived in the camp, she had lost her daughter who was about Sarah’s age.
“She’s too young, sir,” she interceded. “She’s only a child.”
“If she’s here it means she is no longer a child,” he had answered, winking. “Otherwise, she would be you know where. Up there…”
His fat finger pointed to the ceiling.
“Bertha was my friend,” Sarah said. “She didn’t give up. She fought to the end. To save me she was ready to take my place. The others too for that matter.”
Sarah was silent for a moment.
In the half-darkness of the barracks, Bertha tried to divert him. Without saying a word, she began to undress. The other women—brunettes, blondes, redheads—without consulting one another did the same. In a flash they were all naked like silent, motionless statues. Sarah thought it was a bad dream, a sick nightmare. Or that she had gone mad. An inhuman silence had come over the barracks, contrasting vividly with the tenseness on the women’s faces. Outside, the sun was moving behind the horizon spilling its rusty blood over the moving shadows. It seemed that if the scene went on something terrible would happen at any moment; something that would shatter the universe, change the course of time, unmask destiny, and allow man to see at last what awaits him beyond truth, beyond death.
That’s when the drunkard caught the child by the arm and brutally pulled her outside the barracks. It was already dark. A reddish glow rose from the earth, filling the sky with the deep color of blood.
“The officer was intelligent,” Sarah said. “Among all the naked women who were in the barracks he had chosen me, although I was dressed. Because I was twelve. Men like to make love to women who are twelve.”
Again she turned her head toward me and the vise tightened around my throat with renewed vigor.
“You too,” she said. “If I were twelve, you would have made love to me.”
I couldn’t listen to her anymore. I had reached the end of my strength, and I thought: one more word and I’ll die. I’ll die here, on this bed, where men come to sleep with a golden-haired girl and in fact don’t know that they are making love to a twelve-year-old child.
For a brief moment I had the idea that perhaps I should take her right away. Abruptly. Without gestures, without useless words. To show her that one could fall still lower. That mud is everywhere and has no bottom. I got up slowly, took her hand, and kissed it gently. I wanted her to see. I wanted her to realize that I wanted her. That I desired her. That I too did not transcend the limits of my body. I placed my lips on her cold hand.
“That’s all?” she asked me. “You don’t want to do anything else?”
She laughed. She was trying to laugh like the other one, like the drunkard in the barracks. But she didn’t succeed. She wasn’t drunk. There was nothing obscene in her hands, or in her voice. She was as pure as one could be.
“I do,” I answered shaken.
Bending over her, I kissed her on the mouth again. She didn’t return my kiss. My lips were sealed on hers, my tongue was looking for hers. She remained passive, absent.
I straightened up and after a short hesitation I said very slowly, “I’ll tell you what you are…”
She tried to talk but I didn’t give her a chance.
“…You are a saint. A saint: that’s what you are.”
A flash of surprise crossed her sick and childlike face. Her eyes looked clearer. More cruel.
“You are mad!” she said violently. “You are really mad!”
And, letting loose, she laughed again. She imitated someone laughing. But her eyes didn’t laugh. Nor did her mouth.
“Me, a saint!” she said. “You are out of your mind. Didn’t I tell you how old I was when I had my first man? How old I was when I embarked on my career?”
She stressed the word “career,” looking defiant as she asked her question.
“Yes,” I said. “You did tell me. Twelve. You were twelve.”
She was laughing more and more. It’s the drunkard, I thought. He hasn’t left her yet.
“And in your opinion,” she went on, “a woman who starts her career at twelve is a saint? Right?”
“Right,” I said. “A saint.”
I thought: let her cry. Let her scream. Let her insult me. Anything would be better than this laugh which belongs to someone else, to a body without a soul, to a head without eyes. Anything would be better than this foreign and harmful laugh which turns her into a possessed soul.
“You’re mad,” Sarah said in a voice that tried to be gay and joyous. “The drunkard was only the first. After him came the others. All the others. I became the ‘special present’ of the barracks. The ‘special present’ that they all wanted to give themselves. I was more popular than all the other women combined. All the men loved me: the happy and the unhappy, the good and the bad, the old and the young, the gay and the taciturn. The timid an
d the depraved, the wolves and the pigs, the intellectuals and the butchers, all of them, do you hear? All came to me. And you think I am a saint. You are out of your mind, you poor man.”
And she laughed even more. But the laugh had nothing to do with her. Her whole being brought to mind an ageless, nameless suffering. Her laugh sounded dry, inhuman: it wasn’t hers, but God’s or the drunkard’s.
“You poor man!” she said. “I pity you! I would like to do something for you. Tell me, when is your birthday? I’ll have a present for you. A special present…”
And her laugh settled in me. Someday I too will be possessed. Sarah, in her black underwear, one leg slightly bent, suddenly stopped laughing. I felt the final blow was coming. Instinctively I started moving back toward the door. That’s where I heard her scream.
“You’re mad!”
“Be quiet! For heaven’s sake, be quiet!” I shouted.
I knew she would talk, that she would tell me something terrible, abominable, words that I would always hear whenever I tried to find happiness in a woman’s body.
“Be still!” I begged.
“A saint, me?” she screamed like a madwoman. “I want you to know this and remember it: sometimes I felt pleasure with them…I hated myself afterward and even while it lasted, but my body sometimes loved them…And my body is me…Me, a saint? Do you know what I really am? I was telling you. I am—”
I had reached the limit. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was going to throw up. Quickly I unlocked the door and opened it as fast as I could. I had to get out of that house at once. Second floor. First floor. Doorman. The street. Run. Fast. Run.
Only later, while running, did I notice that my fingers were still clutching my throat.
“SARAH,” I said in a choked voice.
“Yes,” Kathleen said. “It’s your mother’s name. I know.”
“It’s the name of a saint.”
I spent days and weeks looking for Sarah. I went back to the café where I had met her. I asked in every hotel in the neighborhood. To no avail. Nobody seemed to have seen or known the golden-haired girl who bore my mother’s name. The waiter who had served us did not remember. The hotel doormen all said they had never seen her. And yet I didn’t give up hope. Sometimes I think I’m still looking for her. I would like to meet her, if only once. To do what I should have done that afternoon: make love to her.
“Your mother is dead,” Kathleen said.
She wanted to hurt herself. Suffer openly. So I would see. So I would know that she was suffering with me, that we were bound together by suffering. She was able to hurt me just to show me that she too was unhappy.
“I know she is dead,” I said. “But sometimes I refuse to admit it. Sometimes I think that mothers can’t die.”
It’s true. I can’t believe my mother is dead. Perhaps because I didn’t see her dead. I saw her walking away with hundreds of people who were swallowed up by the night. If she had told me, “Good-bye, my son. I’m going to die,” perhaps I could believe it more now.
Father is dead. I know that. I saw him pass away. I don’t look for him among the people in the street. But sometimes I look for my mother. She’s not dead. Not really. Here and there I see one of her features in some woman on the subway, on a bus, in a café. And these women, I love and hate them at the same time.
Kathleen. Tears were coming to her eyes. My mother didn’t cry. At least not when other people were there. She only offered her tears to God.
Kathleen looked a little like my mother; she had her high forehead, and her chin had the same pure lines. But Kathleen wasn’t dead. And she was crying.
IN THE BEGINNING she didn’t cry. We were on the same level. We dealt with each other like equals. We were free. Each one free from himself and free from the other. When I didn’t feel like keeping a date, I didn’t. She did the same. And neither of us was angry or even hurt. When I didn’t talk for a whole night, she didn’t try to make me explain. The familiar question asked by lovers, “What are you thinking about?” didn’t enter our conversations. Hardness had become our religion. Nothing was said that wasn’t essential. We tried to convince each other that we could live, hope, and despair, alone. Each kiss could have been the last. At any moment the temple could have collapsed. The future didn’t exist since it was useless. At night we made love silently, almost like our own witnesses. A stranger watching us in the street could easily have taken us for enemies. Rightly so, perhaps. True enemies aren’t always the ones who hate each other.
I shouldn’t have said I’d see her again in New York. I should have told her that it wasn’t worthy of us to reopen the parentheses: air moving into it would make everything rot.
She had changed. Kathleen was no longer free. She only imitated the other. Her marriage had destroyed her inside. She had lost all interest in life. The days were all alike. People all said the same thing. Instead of listening to them, you could follow TV programs. Her husband’s friends and colleagues bored her. Their wives got on her nerves; she saw herself sentenced to become one of them. Very soon.
In New York, we met every day. She came to my place. I went to her place. We went out a lot, to the theater, to concerts. We discussed literature, music, poetry. I tried to be nice. I was patient, kind, understanding. I treated her as if she were ill. The fight had been over for a long time. Now I was trying to help her get back on her feet.
We seldom evoked the past and only with caution, so as not to tarnish it. Sometimes as we listened to a passage from Bach, or noticed the shape of a cloud playing with the sun, we were seized by the same emotion. She would touch my hand and ask me, “Do you remember?”
And I would answer, “Yes, Kathleen. Of course. I remember.”
Before, she would never have felt like proving to me that she remembered. On the contrary, we both would have felt ashamed to have fallen prey to the past, to an emotion from the past. I would have turned my head away. I would have talked about something else. Now we no longer struggled.
Then one day, she confessed…
We were drinking coffee in her room. On the radio Isaac Stern was playing the Beethoven violin concerto. We had heard it in Paris at the Salle Pleyel. I remembered that she had taken my hand and that I had pushed her away brusquely. If she would take my hand now, I thought, I wouldn’t pull it away.
“Look at me,” Kathleen said.
I looked at her. She had a tormented smile. She had the face of a woman who has been abandoned and is conscious of it. She was tapping on the cup with her long fingers.
“Yes,” I told her. “I remember.”
She put down the cup, got up, and knelt before me. There, without lowering her head, without blushing, in a firm voice—almost as she used to be—she told me, “I think I love you.”
She was going to continue but I interrupted her. “Be quiet!” I told her harshly.
I didn’t want to hear her say: I have loved you since the first time we met.
My harshness was not reflected on her face. But her smile had become a little deeper, a little more sickly.
“It isn’t my fault,” she apologized. “I tried. I struggled.”
Beethoven, the Salle Pleyel, Stern, love. Love that makes everything complicated. While hate simplifies everything. Hatred puts accents on things and beings, and on what separates them. Love erases accents. I thought: here’s another minute that will punctuate my existence.
“Are you sad?” Kathleen asked, distressed.
“No.”
Poor Kathleen! She was no longer trying to imitate her other self. Her face was covered with anguish. Her eyes had become strangely small.
“You’re going to leave me?”
Love and despair. They go together. One contains some trace of the other. I thought: she must have suffered a lot. It is my turn to try to repair the damage. I have to treat her as if she were ill. I know. To do this is to insult her other self. But the other self doesn’t exist. No longer exists. And this one is broken.
“I’m not going to leave you,” I answered in the voice of a faithful friend.
A tear slid down her cheek. “You pity me,” Kathleen said.
“I don’t pity you,” I said eagerly.
I was lying. I would have to lie. A lot. She was ill. It is all right to lie to sick people. To her other self I would not have lied.
During the following weeks and months, Kathleen wasted away.
Having nothing to do—she neither felt like working nor needed to work—she spent her days in her room, at her window, or in front of a mirror, alone and unhappy, conscious of her solitude, of her unhappiness.
As before, we went on seeing each other every evening. Dinners, shows, concerts. Once I tried to reason with her: she was wrong to feel sorry for herself. It wasn’t worthy of her or of me. She should find some work, be busy, fill up her days. She had to find an aim in life.
“An aim,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “An aim. What aim? The Salvation Army? Be a patron of starving artists? Go to India to help the lepers? An aim? Where would I look for it?”
That’s when I had an idea. I told her that I loved her too.
She refused to believe it. She demanded proof. I proved it to her. All the incidents that in the past had shown that there was no love between us, now, all of a sudden, showed the contrary. “Why did you pull away your hand at the concert?” “I didn’t want to betray myself.” “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you loved me?” “Because I loved you.” “Why did you always look me right in the eyes?” “To discover my love mirrored in them.”
For weeks she was on her guard. And so was I. I considered myself her nurse. Sometimes I toyed with the thought that perhaps she too was treating me like a sick person. Someday we would take off our masks. One of us would say: I was only playing. So was I, the other would answer. And there would be a bitter taste in our mouths. But then it was a pity this was only a game.
However, she wasn’t playing. If you play you do not suffer. The part of us which observes us, which watches us play, does not suffer. Kathleen had suffered. In spite of my arguments, she wasn’t convinced. She often cried while I was away. When we were together her good spirits were too forced.