“I really am going,” Lillian repeated, irritated because he did not believe her.
He nodded. “You’re going tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow or in a week we’ll unpack again. Why do you put yourself through this for nothing?”
“Boris!” she cried. “Stop it. It’s no use any more. I’m going.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No, today.”
She felt his gentleness and his disbelief; there again were the spider webs that were to entangle her and hold her fast. “I am going,” she said resolutely. “Today. With Clerfayt!”
She saw the change in his eyes. “With Clerfayt?”
“Yes.” She looked squarely at him. She wanted to get it over with quickly. “I’m going away by myself. But I will be riding with Clerfayt because he is leaving today and I don’t have the courage to take the train. I’m not going with him for any other reason. Alone, I’m not strong enough to fight clear of everything up here.”
“To fight clear of me?”
“Of you, too—but not in the way you think.”
Volkov took a step forward into the room. “You cannot go,” he said.
“Yes, Boris, I can. I wanted to write to you. Look there—” She gestured toward a small brass wastepaper basket near her table. “It’s no use. I couldn’t. It’s hopeless to try to explain it.”
Hopeless, he thought. What does that mean? Why is something that didn’t even exist yesterday hopeless today? He looked down at the clothes and the shoes. A second ago they had still represented a sweet disorder; now they suddenly glittered with the bitter light of parting and were weapons aimed at his heart. He no longer saw them as charming frivolities; he looked at them with the pain one feels coming from the funeral of a loved person and unexpectedly seeing some of his personal possessions—a hat, a shirt, a pair of shoes. “You cannot go!” he said.
She shook her head. “I know that I can’t explain it. That’s why I thought of going away without seeing you, and of writing to you from down below. But I couldn’t have done that either. Don’t make it hard for me!”
Don’t make it hard for me, he thought. They always say that, these little packets of grace, egotism, and helplessness; they always say it when they set about tearing your heart to pieces. Don’t make it hard for me. Did they ever wonder whether they were making it hard for the man? But wouldn’t it be even worse if they really thought of that side of it? Wouldn’t that have the fatal quality of pity: like giving caresses while you held nettles in your hand?
“You’re going with Clerfayt?”
“I’m riding down with Clerfayt,” Lillian replied tormentedly. “He’s taking me with him like a man picking up a hitchhiker. We’ll go our separate ways in Paris. I’m staying there and he’s going on. My uncle lives there. He’s in charge of that little trust fund I have. So I will stay there.”
“At your uncle’s?”
“In Paris.”
She knew that she was not telling the truth, but at the moment it seemed to her to be the truth. “Please understand me, Boris!” she pleaded.
He looked at the suitcases. “Why do you want to be understood? It’s enough that you’re going.”
She bowed her head. “You’re right. Go on hitting me.”
Go on hitting, he thought. If you as much as twitched for a moment, they said, “Go on hitting,” as though you were the one who was leaving. Their logic never extended beyond the last reply; everything before that was immediately stricken off the record. Not what caused the cry, but the cry itself counted. “I’m not hitting you,” he said.
“You want me to stay with you.”
“I want you to stay here. That’s different.”
I, too, am already lying, he thought. Of course I only want her to stay with me; she’s all I have, the last I have. The planet earth has shrunk for me to this village; I can count its inhabitants, know almost every one of them; this has become my world and she is what I want in this world; I cannot lose her, I must not lose her, but I have already lost her. “I don’t want you to throw your life away like worthless money,” he said.
“These are words, Boris. If someone in prison has the choice of living free for a year and then dying, or of rotting in prison—what choice should he make?”
“You are not in prison, Dusha! You have a frightfully false conception of what life is like down below.”
“I realize that. I don’t know what it’s like, after all. I only know the part that consisted of war, betrayal, and misery, and even though the rest may also be full of disappointments, it couldn’t be worse than the part I know and that, I know, cannot be the whole of it. There must be something else, too; the other parts that I don’t know, that speak out of books and pictures and music and make me restless and call me—” She stopped abruptly. “Let’s not talk any more, Boris. Everything I say is false; it becomes false while I am saying it; the words become false and sentimental and don’t convey it. They turn into knives, and I don’t want to hurt you. Yet every word must be a stab if I try to be honest, and even when I think I’m being honest, I’m still not—don’t you see that I don’t know myself?”
She looked at him with a mixture of pity, hostility, and love grown powerless. Why did he force her to go over everything she had told herself a thousand times and already wanted to forget?
“Let Clerfayt go off by himself. In a few days you’ll realize how wrong it would have been to follow that Pied Piper,” Volkov said.
“Boris,” Lillian replied hopelessly, “it isn’t Clerfayt. Does it always have to be another man?”
He did not answer. Why am I saying these things to her? he thought. I’m a fool; I’m doing everything to drive her away. Why don’t I smile and tell her she’s doing perfectly right? Why don’t I make use of the old trick? Don’t I know that a man who wants to hold on to a woman loses her, while women run after the man who smilingly lets them go? Have I forgotten that? “No,” he said, “it need not always be another man. But if it isn’t, why don’t you ask me whether I want to come with you?”
“You?”
Wrong, he thought, wrong again! Why am I forcing myself on her? She wants to escape from illness—why should she take a sick man with her? I’m the last man she would like to travel with.
“I don’t want to take anything with me, Boris,” she replied. “I love you, but I want to take nothing with me.”
“You want to forget everything?”
Wrong again, he thought in desperation.
“I don’t know,” Lillian said, downcast. “I don’t want to take anything with me from here. I can’t. Don’t torture me.”
For a moment, he stood very still. He knew that it was better to say no more; but at the same time it seemed to him frightfully important to explain to her that both of them no longer had long to live and that the thing she now so detested in her life—all the time that hung so heavy for her—would some day be the most important thing of all, when only hours and days were left, and that she would bitterly repent that she had thrown time away, the time that now seemed to her nothing but interminable boredom. But he knew also that as soon as he attempted to say this, every word would be transformed into sentimentality, which was no more bearable for being the truth, and which could never reach to her.
It was too late. From one breath to the next, it was suddenly too late. What moment had he let slip? He did not know. Yesterday, all had been closeness and familiarity, and now a wall of glass had slid between them like that between the driver’s seat and the rear in a limousine. They could still see one another, but mutual understanding had ceased; they heard one another, but theirs were different languages that floated past each other’s ears and did not reach the mind. There was no longer anything to be done. The estrangement that had grown up overnight filled everything. It was there in every look and every gesture. There was no longer anything to be done.
“Good-by, Lillian,” he said.
“Forgive me, Boris.”
“In love t
here is never anything to forgive.”
She had no time to think. A nurse came with a summons from the Dalai Lama.
The doctor smelled of good soap and antiseptic linen. “I saw you in the ski lodge last night,” he said stiffly.
Lillian nodded.
“You know that you are not supposed to go out.”
“Yes, I know.”
A flush passed over the Dalai Lama’s pale face. “It seems to be a matter of indifference to you whether or not you follow these orders. I must ask you to leave the sanatorium. Perhaps elsewhere you will find a place that better suits your wishes.”
Lillian did not reply; the irony was too sharp.
“I have spoken with the head nurse,” the Dalai Lama continued, interpreting her silence as fright. “She tells me that this is not the first time she has warned you. You have disregarded the warnings. This sort of thing destroys the morale of the sanatorium. We cannot tolerate someone who—”
“I realize that,” Lillian interrupted him. “I will leave the sanatorium this afternoon.”
The Dalai Lama looked at her in surprise. “There’s not that much of a hurry,” he replied at last. “Take your time, until you’ve found another place. Or have you already done so?”
“No.”
The doctor was thrown somewhat off course. He had expected tears and appeals to be given another chance. “Why are you working so determinedly against your own health, Miss Dunkerque?” he asked finally.
“It didn’t improve when I did everything that was prescribed.”
“But that is certainly no reason to stop doing the right things when your condition takes a turn for the worse,” the doctor exclaimed irritably. “On the contrary. That is the time to be particularly careful.”
When it takes a turn for the worse, Lillian thought. The news did not strike her as hard as it had done yesterday, when the nurse had let it slip out. “Self-destructive nonsense,” the Dalai Lama went on thundering. He was firmly convinced that he had a heart of gold under a rough exterior. “Put that nonsense out of your pretty head.”
He gripped her shoulder and shook her gently. “Oh, well, go back to your room, and from now on obey the regulations one hundred per cent.”
Lillian slid her shoulder out from under his hand. “I would only go on breaking the rules,” she said quietly. “That’s why it would be better for me to leave the sanatorium.”
Far from frightening her, what the Dalai Lama had said about her condition had made her coolly sure of herself. It also made her feel better about Boris, since freedom of choice now seemed to have been taken from her, in a strange fashion. She felt like a soldier who after long waiting has received his marching orders. Now there was nothing more to do than to obey. The new situation had already taken possession of her, just as the soldier’s marching orders were already part of the uniform and the battle—and perhaps also of the end.
“Don’t drive things to extremes,” the Dalai Lama thundered. “The sanatoriums up here are pretty filled up. Where would you go? To a pension?”
There he stood, the big, good-natured god of the sanatorium, fuming because this intransigent chit was taking him at his word about dismissal, and was forcing him to take it back. “The few rules we have are in your own interest, after all,” he growled. “Where would we be if we let people do just what they liked? As for the rest—we’re not running a prison here. Or do you think we are?”
Lillian smiled. “Not any more,” she said. “And I am not a patient any longer. You can speak to me now as you would to a woman. Not as if I were a chid or a convict.”
She saw the flush rise to the Dalai Lama’s face again. Then she was outside.
She finished packing her clothes. By this evening I shall have left the mountains, she thought. For the first time in years, she felt an expectation that gave promise of fulfillment; not the expectation of a mirage that was years away and always receded further. Here was something that would be fulfilled during the next few hours. Past and future hung in a quivering balance, and her first feeling was not of loneliness, but of high, tense solitude. She was taking nothing with her and she did not know where she was going.
She was afraid that Volkov would appear again, and longed to see him once more. As she closed her suitcases, her eyes were blind with tears. She waited until she had calmed down a bit. Then she paid her bill and fended off two assaults by the Crocodile—the second in the Dalai Lama’s name. She said good-by to Dolores Palmer, Maria Savini, and Charles Ney, who stared at her as the Japanese during the war might have looked at their suicide pilots. Then she returned to her room and waited. She heard a scratching and barking at the door. When she opened it, Volkov’s shepherd dog came in. The animal loved her and had often come by himself to visit her. She thought Boris had sent it, and that he would be along in a moment. But he did not come. Instead, the room nurse appeared with the information that Manuela’s relatives were going to send the dead girl to Bogotá in a zinc casket.
“When?” Lillian asked, for the sake of saying something.
“Today. They want to get out of here as quickly as possible. The sleigh is already waiting outside. Usually the caskets are sent out at night, but this time it has to make a ship. The family are traveling by plane.”
“I must go now,” Lillian murmured. She had heard Clerfayt’s car. “Good-by.”
She closed the door behind her and went down the long corridor like an escaping thief. She hoped to get through the lobby unnoticed, but the Crocodile was waiting beside the elevator.
“The chief asked me to tell you again that you can stay. And that you ought to stay.”
“Thank you,” Lillian said, and walked on.
“Be reasonable, Miss Dunkerque. You don’t understand your situation. You must not leave the mountains now. You would not live out the year.”
“That’s just why I must go.”
Lillian went on. At the bridge tables a few heads turned toward her; otherwise the lobby was deserted. The patients were taking their rest cures. Boris was not there. Hollmann stood at the front door.
“If you’re absolutely determined to leave, at least go by train,” the Crocodile said.
Mutely, Lillian showed the head nurse her fur coat and warm clothes. The Crocodile made a contemptuous gesture. “A lot of good that does. Do you insist on committing suicide?”
“Everyone does that—some faster than others. We will be driving carefully. And not far.”
The front door was very close now. The sun blazed in from outside. A few more steps, Lillian thought, and she would have run this gantlet.
One more step! “You have been warned,” the even cold voice at her side said. “We wash our hands.”
Lillian did not feel in a humorous mood, but she could not help smiling. The Crocodile had saved the situation with a last cliché. “Wash them and sterilize them,” Lillian said. “Good-by! Thanks for everything.”
She was outside. The snow blazed back the light so strongly that she could barely see. “Au revoir, Hollmann!”
“Au revoir, Lillian. I’ll be following you soon.”
She looked up. He was laughing. Thank God, she thought, at last someone who doesn’t behave like a schoolmaster. Hollmann wrapped her in her woolen stole and her fur coat. “We’ll drive slowly,” Clerfayt said. “When the sun goes down, we’ll close the top. Now the sides protect you against the wind.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Can we go?”
“You haven’t forgotten anything?”
“No.”
“If you have, it can be sent later.”
She had not thought of that. It came as a sudden comfort. She had imagined that all ties would be cut off, once she left. “Yes, that’s true; things can be sent later,” she said.
A small man who looked like a cross between a waiter and a sexton came hurrying across the square. Clerfayt started. “Why, that’s—”
The man passed close by the car as he entered the sanatorium, and Clerfayt reco
gnized him. He was wearing a dark suit, a black hat, and carried a suitcase. It was the man who used to go along with the coffins. He seemed transformed, was no longer seedy and morose looking, but merry and authoritative. He was on the way to Bogotá.
“Who?” Lillian asked.
“Nothing. I thought it was someone I knew. Ready?”
“Yes,” Lillian said. “Ready.”
The car started. Hollmann waved. There was no sign of Boris. The dog ran after the car for a while, then dropped back. Lillian looked around. On the sun terraces, which had been empty a moment before, a long row of people had appeared. The patients who had been resting in their deck chairs, had all stood up. They had learned the news via the sanatorium grapevine and now, hearing the motor, they were standing in a thin row, dark against the stark blue sky, looking down.
“Like the top row in a bullfighting arena,” Clerfayt said.
“Yes,” Lillian replied. “But what are we? The bulls or the matador?”
“Always the bulls. But we think we’re the matadors.”
Chapter Seven
THE CAR GLIDED SLOWLY through a white gorge above which the gentian-blue sky flowed like a mirrored brook. They were already over the pass, but the snow was still piled almost six feet high on both sides of the road. They could not yet see over it. Nothing existed but the walls of snow and the blue ribbon of sky. If you leaned back long enough, you no longer knew which was above and which below, the blueness or the whiteness.
Then came the smell of resin and firs, and a village came into view, brown and flat. Clerfayt stopped. “We can take the chains off, I think,” he said. “How is it farther down?” he asked the gas-station attendant.
“Rugged.”
“What?”
Clerfayt looked at the boy. He was wearing a red sweater, a new leather jacket, steel-rimmed glasses, and had acne and protruding ears. “Why, I know you! Herbert or Helmut or—”