There she stood before him, smiling. “Oh, doctor, why don’t you come down? The bell has rung for dinner twice.”
She spoke almost in high spirits, as if she took a little pleasure in catching him out in a small act of negligence. But as soon as she saw his face, with his hair clinging around it in damp strands, his dazed eyes shyly avoiding hers, she herself turned pale.
“For God’s sake, what has happened to you?” she faltered, and the tone of horror in her breaking voice went through him like desire. “Nothing, nothing,” he said, quickly pulling himself together. “I was deep in thought, that’s all. The whole thing was too much for me, too sudden.”
“What? What whole thing? Tell me!”
“Don’t you know? Didn’t the Councillor tell you anything about it?”
“No, nothing!” she urged him impatiently, almost driven mad by the nervous, burning, evasive expression in his eyes. “What’s happened? Tell me, please tell me!”
Then he summoned up all the strength in him to look at her clearly and without blushing. “The Councillor has been kind enough to give me an important and responsible mission, and I have accepted it. In ten days’ time I’m sailing for Mexico, to stay there for two years.”
“Two years! Dear God!” It was a cry rather than words, as her own horror shot up from deep within her. And she put out her hands in instinctive denial. It was useless for her to try, next moment, denying the feeling that had burst out of her, for already (and just how had that happened?) he had taken the hands she so passionately reached out to fend off her fear in his own, and before they knew it their trembling bodies were both aflame. Countless hours and days of unconscious longing and thirst were quenched in an endless kiss.
He had not drawn her to him, she had not drawn him to her. they had met as if driven together by a storm, falling clasped together into a bottomless abyss of the unconscious, and sinking into it was like a sweet yet burning trance—emotions too long pent up poured out in a single second, inflamed by the magnetism of chance. Only slowly, as the lips that had clung together parted, as they were still shaken by the unreality of it all, did he look into her eyes and saw a strange light behind their tender darkness. And only then was he overwhelmed by the realization that this woman, the woman he loved, must have loved him in return for a long time, for weeks, months, years, keeping tenderly silent, glowing with maternal feeling, until a moment such as this struck through her soul. The incredible nature of the realization was intoxicating. To think that he was loved, loved by the woman he had thought beyond his reach—heaven opened up, endless and flooded with light. This was the radiant noon of his life. But at the same time it all collapsed next moment, splintering sharply. For the realization that she loved him was also a farewell.
The two of them spent the ten days until his departure in a constant state of wild, ecstatic frenzy. The sudden explosive force of the feelings they had now confessed had broken down all dams and barriers, all morality and pride. They fell on one another like animals, hot and greedy, whenever they met to snatch two stolen minutes in a dark corridor, behind a door, in a corner. Hand made its way to hand, lips to lips, the restless blood of one met its kindred blood in the other, each longed feverishly for the other, every nerve burned for the sensuous touch of foot, hand, dress, some living part of the yearning body. At the same time they had to exert self-control in the house, she to hide the love that kept blazing up in her from her husband, her son, the servants, he to remain intellectually capable of the calculations, meetings and deliberations for which he was now responsible. They could never snatch more than seconds, quivering, furtive seconds when danger lay in wait, they could fleetingly approach each other only with their hands, their lips, their eyes, a greedily stolen kiss, and each, already intoxicated, was further intoxicated by the other’s hazy, sultry, smouldering presence. But it was never enough, they both felt that, never enough. So they wrote each other burning love letters, slipping ardent notes into one another’s hands like schoolchildren. He found hers in the evening, under the pillow on which he could get no sleep; she in turn found his in her coat pockets, and all these notes ended in a desperate cry asking the unhappy question: how could they bear it, a sea, a world, uncounted months, uncounted weeks, two years between blood and blood, glance and glance? They thought of nothing else, they dreamed of nothing else, and neither of them had an answer to the question, only their hands, eyes and lips, the unconscious servants of their passion, moved back and forth, longing to come together, pledging inner constancy. And then those stolen moments of touching, embracing fervently behind doors drawn nearly closed, those fearful moments would overflow with lust and fear at once, in Bacchanalian frenzy.
However, although he longed for it he was never granted full possession of the beloved body that he sensed, through her unfeeling, obstructive dress, passionately moving, feeling it pressing as if hot and naked against his—he never came really close to her in that too brightly lit house, always awake and full of ears to hear them. Only on the last day, when she came to his room, already cleared, on the pretext of helping him to pack but really to say a last goodbye, and stumbled and fell against the ottoman as she swayed under the onslaught of his embrace—then, when his kisses were already burning on the curve of her breasts under the dress he had pulled up, and were greedily travelling over the hot, white skin to the place where her heart beat in response to his own as she gasped for breath, when in that moment of surrender the gift of her body was almost his, then in her passion she stammered out a last plea. “Not now! Not here! I beg you!”
And even his heated blood was still so obedient, so much in thrall to her, so respectful of the woman he had loved as a sacred being for so long, that once again he controlled his ardour and moved away as she rose, swaying, and hid her face from him. He himself turned away too and stood there, trembling and fighting with his instincts, so visibly affected by the grief of his disappointment that she knew how much his love, denied fulfilment, was suffering because of her. Then, back in command of her own feelings again, she came close and quietly comforted him. “I couldn’t do it here, in my own house, in his own house. But when you come back, yes, whenever you like.”
The train stopped with a clatter, screeching in the vice-like hold of the brake applied to it. Like a dog waking under the touch of the whip, his eyes woke from reverie, and—what a happy moment of recognition—look, there she was, his beloved who had been so far away for so long. Now she sat there, close enough for him to feel her breathing. The brim of her hat cast a little shadow on her face as she leaned back. But as if, unconsciously, she had understood that he wanted to see her face she sat up straight, and looked at him with a mild smile. “Darmstadt,” she said, glancing out of the window. “One more station to go.” He did not reply. He just sat looking at her. Time is helpless, he thought to himself, helpless in the face of our feelings. Nine years have passed, and not a note in her voice is different, not a nerve in my body hears her in any other way. Nothing is lost, nothing is past and over, her presence is as much of a tender delight now as it was then.
He looked with passion at her quietly smiling mouth, which he could hardly remember kissing in the past, and then down at the white hands lying relaxed and at rest on her lap; he longed to bend and touch them with his lips, or take those quietly folded hands in his, just for a second, one second! But the talkative gentlemen sharing the compartment were already beginning to look at him curiously, and for the sake of his secret he leaned back again in silence. Once more they sat opposite one another without a sign or a word, and only their eyes met and kissed.
Outside a whistle blew, the train began to roll out of the station once more, and the swinging, swaying monotony of that steel cradle rocked him back into his memories. Ah, the dark, endless years between then and now, a grey sea between shore and shore, between heart and heart! What had it been like? There was a memory that he did not want to touch, he did not wish to recollect the moment of their last goodbye, the moment
on the station platform in the city where, today, he had been waiting for her with his heart wide open. No, away with it, it was over and not to be thought of any more, it was too terrible. His thoughts flew back, back again; another landscape, another time opened up in his dreams, conjured up by the rapid rhythm of the rattling wheels. He had gone to Mexico with a heart torn in two, and he managed to endure the first months there, the first terrible weeks that passed before any message from her arrived, only by cramming his head full of figures and drafted designs, by exhausting himself physically with long rides and expeditions out into the country, and what seemed endless negotiations and enquiries, but he carried them through with determination. From morning to night, he locked himself into the engine-house of the company, constantly at work hammering out numbers, talking, writing all the time, only to hear his inner voice desperately crying out one name, hers. He numbed himself with work as another man might with alcohol or drugs, merely to deaden the strength of his emotions. But every evening, however tired he was, he sat down to describe on sheet after sheet of paper, writing for hour after hour, everything that he had done in the day, and by every post he sent whole bundles of these feverishly written pages to a cover address on which they had agreed, so that his distant beloved could follow his life hourly as she used to at home, and he felt her mild gaze resting on his daily work, sharing it in her mind over a thousand sea miles, over hills and horizons. The letters he received from her were his reward. Her handwriting was upright, her words calm, betraying passion but in disciplined form. They told him first, without complaint, about her daily life, and it was as if he felt her steady blue gaze bent on him, although without her smile, the faint, reassuring smile which removed all that was severe from any gravity. These letters had been food and drink to the lonely man. In his own passionate emotion, he took them with him on journeys through the plains and the mountains, he had pockets specially sewn to his saddle to protect them from sudden cloudbursts and the rivers that they had to ford on surveying expeditions. He had read those letters so often that he knew them by heart, word for word, he had unfolded them so often that the creases in the paper were wearing transparent, and certain words were blurred by kisses and tears. Sometimes, when he was alone and knew that no one was near him, he began reading them aloud in her own tone of voice, magically conjuring up the presence of his distant love. Sometimes he suddenly rose in the night when he had thought of a particular word, a sentence, a closing salutation, put on the light to find it again and to dream of the image of her hand in the written characters, moving on up from that hand to her arm, her shoulder, her head, her whole physical presence transported over land and sea. And like a man chopping trees down in the jungle, he chopped into the wild and still impenetrably menacing time ahead of him with berserk strength and frenzy, impatient to see it thinning out, to have his return in sight, his journey home, the prospect that he had imagined a thousand times of the moment when they would first embrace again. He had hung a calendar over the bed roughly knocked together for him in his quickly constructed wooden house with its corrugated iron roof in the new workers’ colony, and every evening he would cross off the day he had just worked his way through—though he often impatiently crossed it off as early as midday—and he counted and re-counted the ever-diminishing black and red series of days still to be endured: four hundred and twenty, four hundred and nineteen, four hundred and eighteen days to go before they met again. For he was not counting, as other people have done since the birth of Christ, from a beginning but only up to a certain time, the time of his return. And whenever that span of time reached a round number, four hundred or three hundred and fifty or three hundred, or when it was her birthday or name-day, the day when he first saw her or the day when she first revealed her own feelings for him—on such days he always gave a kind of party for those around him, who wondered why, and in their ignorance asked questions. He gave money to the mestizos’ dirty children and brandy to the workers, who shouted and capered around like wild brown foals, he put on his own Sunday best and had wine brought, and the finest of the canned food. A flag flew, a flame of joy, from a specially erected flagpole, and if neighbours or his assistants, feeling curious, asked what saint’s day or other strange occasion he was celebrating, he only smiled and said, “Never mind that, just celebrate it with me!”
So it went on for weeks and months, a year worked its way to death and then another half a year, then there were only seven small, wretched, poor little weeks left until the day appointed for his return. In his boundless impatience he had long ago worked out how long the voyage would take, and to the astonishment of the clerks in the shipping office had booked and paid for his passage on the Arkansas a hundred days before she was due to leave.
Then came the disastrous day that pitilessly tore up not only his calendar but, with total indifference, the lives and thoughts of millions, leaving them in shreds. A day of disaster indeed—early in the morning, in his capacity as a surveyor, he had ridden across the sulphur-yellow plain and up into the mountains with horses and mules, taking two foremen and a party of labourers, to investigate a new drilling site where it was thought there might be magnesite. The mestizos hammered, dug, pounded and generally investigated the site under a pitiless sun that blazed down from overhead, and was reflected back again at a right angle from the bare rock. But like a man possessed he drove the workers on, would not allow his thirsty tongue the hundred paces it would take him to go to the quickly dug trench for water—he wanted to get back to the post office and see her letter, her words. And when they had not reached the full depth of the site on the third day, and the trial borehole was still being drilled, he was overcome by a senseless longing for her message, a thirst for her words, which deranged him so far that he decided to ride back alone all night, just to collect the letter that must surely have come in the post yesterday. He simply left the others in their tent and, accompanied only by one servant, rode along a dangerously dark bridle path all night to the railway station. But when in the morning, freezing from the icy cold of the mountain range, they finally rode their steaming horses into the little town, an unusual sight met their eyes. The few white settlers had left their work and were standing around the station in the midst of a shouting, questioning, stupidly gaping throng of mestizos and native Indians. It was difficult to make a way through this agitated crowd, but once they had reached the post office they found unexpected news waiting. Telegrams had come from the coast—Europe was at war, Germany against France, Austria against Russia. He refused to believe it, dug his spurs into the flanks of his stumbling horse so hard that the frightened animal reared, whinnying, and raced away to the government building, where he heard even more shattering news. It was all true, and even worse, Britain had also declared war. The seven seas were closed to Germans. An iron curtain had come down between the two continents, cutting them off from each other for an incalculable length of time.
It was useless for him to pound the table with his clenched fist in his first fury, as if to strike out at an invisible foe; millions of helpless people were now raging in the same way as the dungeon walls of their destiny closed in on them. He immediately weighed up all the possibilities of smuggling himself across to Europe by some bold and cunning means, thus checkmating Fate, but the British consul, a friend of his who happened to be present, indicated with a cautious note of warning in his voice that he personally was obliged to keep an eye on all his movements from now on. So he could comfort himself only with the hope, soon to be disappointed, as it was for millions of others, that such madness could not last long, and within a few weeks or a few months this foolish prank played by diplomats and generals left to their own devices would be over. Before long, something else was added to that thin fibre of hope, a stronger power and better able to numb his feelings—work. In cables sent by way of Sweden, his company commissioned him to prevent possible sequestration by registering his Mexican branch of it independently and running it, with a few figureheads appointed to
the board, as a Mexican firm. This task called for the utmost managerial energy. Since the war itself, that imperious entrepreneur, also wanted ore from the mines, production must be speeded up and the company’s work was redoubled. It required all his powers, and drowned out even the echo of any thoughts of his own. He worked with fanatical intensity for twelve or fourteen hours a day, sinking into bed in the evening worn down by the crushing weight of numbers, to sleep dreamlessly,
Yet all the same, while he thought his feelings were unchanged, his passionate inner tension gradually relaxed. It is not in human nature to live entirely on memories, and just as the plants and every living structure need nourishment from the soil and new light from the sky, if their colours are not to fade and their petals to drop, even such apparently unearthly things as dreams need a certain amount of nourishment from the senses, some tender pictorial aid, or their blood will run thin and their radiance be dimmed. And so it was with this passionate man before he even noticed it. When weeks, months, and finally a year and then a second year brought not a single message from her, not a written word, no sign, her picture gradually began to fade. Every day consumed in work made another grain or so of ash settle over her memory; it still showed through, like the red glow under the ashes in the grate, but finally the grey layer grew thicker and thicker. He still sometimes took out her letters, but the ink had faded, the words no longer went straight to his heart, and once he was shocked, looking at her photograph, to find that he could no longer remember the colour of her eyes. And it was less and less often that he picked up those once precious proofs of love, the letters that had magically given him new life, without realizing that he was tired of her eternal silence, tired of talking senselessly to a shadow that never answered. In addition the mining business, which was soon doing very well, threw him together with other people, other partners; he sought out company, friends, women. And when a trip in the third year of the war took him to the house of a prosperous German businessman in Vera Cruz, and he met the man’s daughter, a quiet, blonde, home-loving girl, fear of being always alone in the middle of a world rushing headlong into hatred, war and madness overcame him. He quickly made up his mind and proposed marriage. Then came a child, a second followed, living flowers flourishing on the forgotten grave of his love. Now the circle was closed; all was busy activity outside it, inside there was domestic calm, and after four or five years he would not have known the man he once was.