Authors: Albert Cohen
'On your feet!' he ordered, and she turned over and got up slowly. 'Come on! Stir every fibre of your being!'
'What else do you want from me?' she asked.
'The belly-dance!'
She shook her head in refusal, looking him in the eye, hands clenched. Trembling with rage, he bit his lip. So, when he asked her to perform a modest belly-dance, a dance of the belly only, all he got was a blank refusal. But her other lover-man had only to ask and there was lap-dancing galore! Oh the expert pumping of her thighs and buttocks beneath the white-maned chimpanzee, and oh how she clung to that mane of white! Oh, foul couple coupling! A bitch and her dog, two rasping-breathed beasts, their sweaty conjoinings, their smells, their juices.
She coughed, and he was aware of her standing before him. She who once had been a panting bitch on heat, Dietsch's more than willing partner, now cut a sorry figure, pale-faced and thin, as she stood before him, weary unto death, hands clenched, poor brave little hands, such a sorry figure with her mackintosh, her slip, her collapsed stockings, her puffy nose, her eyes swollen with tears, her lustrous eyes ringed with sickly blue. His darling, his own darling. Oh cursed physical love! Gursed passion!
PART SEVEN
CHAPTER 103
The ceiling light had been left on and burned lugubriously in the room where the noon sun seeped through the drawn curtains. Lying motionless in bed, eyes staring, he listened to the sounds of life outside and watched the httle bustling shadows toing and froing upside down on the ceiling in the gap above the curtains, feet first, heads inverted, miniature silhouettes going about their lawful occasions. Here they were again in Geneva, back at the Ritz.
Careful to avoid touching her, he leaned across to look at the absurd little girl with the made-up face who was sleeping at his side, or pretending to sleep, doped to the eyeballs with ether, pathetic in her little tennis skirt which had ridden-halfway up her thighs, barelegged, with those little socks, the slippers intended to make her look like a little girl, the childish ringlets and the bow of pink ribbon.
He took the ether bottle which she was holding close to her chest, removed the stopper, and inhaled. She turned over, murmured she wanted some too, inhaled in turn, several times, then handed the bottle back to him. 'Don't look at me,' she said, and she turned over again and shut her eyes. Oh those holidays she'd spent in the mountains with Éliane, the chalet, the tapping of someone sharpening a scythe. Oh the clear, far-off sound, the pure sound in the diamond air, the sound of summer, the sound of childhood.
She sat up, careful to avoid touching him, glanced across at the little alarm clock, picked up the phone, and ordered lunch. 'No, not a table, just a tray, thank you.' She put the receiver down, took the ether bottle from him, and inhaled deeply, eyes closed, surrendering to the cool sweetness invading her. Yesterday, Kanakis's wife had stared curiously in the street but had not acknowledged her. The day before, her cousin Saladin had pretended she hadn't seen her. They used to play together when they were little. She never returned that dolly I loaned her. Should I phone and ask for it back?
'Leave the tray by the door. I'll come for it.'
She got out of bed, opened the door, picked up the tray, put it on the bed, and got back between the sheets. Keeping their distance, they ate in silence in the stifling semi-darkness while a heavy, insistent bluebottle zig-zagged witlessly over them, droned on and on, unbearably superior, furious, obstinate, bold, asserting its right to be a nuisance and only too happy to be exercising it. In the silence broken only by the scrape of fork on knife or the occasional clink of a wineglass, they chewed with the faint, unflattering sounds of masticating teeth. In front of them a bar of sunlight, in which slow diamonds of dust danced decorously, struck a silver tureen lid, which bounced it on to the wall. She moved her knee to alter the angle of the tray and redirect the bright disc on to the ceiling. Éliane, their childhood games. They'd played dazzling each other with mirrors. They'd called it 'having sun-fights'.
Still taking care to avoid touching him, she got out of bed, a phoney schoolgirl with smudgy make-up, and dumped the tray on the floor, while he, still in bed, hastily stuffed under the counterpane the lacy brassière which Ingrid Groning had left behind.
As she got back into bed, she brushed against his leg, which he removed at once. Snuggling down with her face to the wall, she closed her eyes. The hidey-hole she'd made with Éliane in Tantieme's garden, for what they'd called their 'desert-island treasure'. They'd dug the hole next to a tree, and written secret instructions for finding it again in Éliane's Bible. They'd buried little bits of glass, chocolate-paper, coins, sweets, a chocolate bear, and a curtain ring which was supposed to be a wedding ring for when she grew up. Then they'd fallen out and she'd punched Ehane on the nose and then they'd made up and they'd used the blood from her nose to write a tragic letter supposedly written after the wreck of the three-masted schooner
The Shark,
they'd collected the drips in a spoon and dipped the pen in it and they'd taken turns to write. She had written that she would only
dig up the desert-island treasure on the day she got married and she'd put the ring on her loving husband's finger. And then there had been resolutions, written backwards so no one would be able to decipher them, about going in for Spiritual Uplift and about leading a noble life in future. Well, the future had come, the future was now, and it was she who had phoned Ingrid last night and had willed what had happened. I did it to keep you, she said to herself, and her lips silently shaped the words as she half-buried her head under her pillow.
He took the dish of confectionery and put it between them. They helped themselves in the semi-darkness, she to the fondants and he to the Turkish delight, which he munched slowly, occasionally sniffing ether, reviewing their -life together, the wretched life they'd lived together for more than two years. Today was the ninth of September. Two years and three months since that first night at the Ritz. Nearly a year since the jealous-of-Dietsch crises. He had been genuinely jealous, though he'd also fanned the flames, for he derived pleasure from torturing himself with visions, conjuring up images, embroidering them, using them as a stick to beat himself with, to make himself suffer, to make her suffer, hoping to drag them out of the quagmire and fashion a life of passion which banished the tedium. It had been a godsend for their anaemia. Exit boredom; enter drama! The dire delight of being able to make love again as though they meant it, she once more desirable and desiring. Those scenes, first at Agay and then in Marseilles. The jealousy had continued after they got back to Belle de Mai. Then the interlude of the slashed wrists: he'd done it because he felt so ashamed for making her unhappy, and it had meant being carted off to hospital. Then she'd caught pneumonia. She'd been looked after by him, just him, without a nurse, against the doctor's advice. Day and night for weeks on end he had cared for her and washed her like a child, had put her on the bedpan several times a day and emptied it and wafted the mephitic stench away. Blessed weeks. No more jealousy, wafted away for ever by the enamel bedpan. Sights and smells he would never forget. Blessed weeks. He had watched over his patient and felt glad that her poor suffering body, demeaned by sickness, had known fleeting joys with Dietsch, a decent man, who now seemed not so bad after all. Alas, as she convalesced and her health returned, he had sensed amorous stirrings in her, felt the gaze of the sweet enchantress on him. And so once again he had been forced to cast himself as the irresistible-eyed cock-of-the-walk, and she had been delighted and had rushed off to do her hair and slip into something pointlessly voluptuous and cover the lamp in her bedroom with gallows red to create a climate of sensuality, desperately hoping a successful rogering would constitute an unambiguous test, and, deciding post-coitally that high marks could indeed be awarded, she proceeded at once to hang nauseatingly sentimental caresses on his neck and hair, like crawling spiders of gratitude, and made his flesh creep with fond little questions and fonder appreciative endorsements. And he'd reverted to taking several baths a day and shaving at least twice, to racking his brains for poetic ways of praising his angel's beauty and the various parts of her anatomy, to having to come up with new words each day because she was insatiable, because he cherished her, and because he loved to see her inhaling contentment with the air she breathed. And once more those daunting records of Mozart and Bach, more sunsets and pointless couplings followed by remorseless debriefings which involved massive expenditures of soul. And after that? After that, they'd travelled. Now and then he had manufactured little green-eyed Dietschodramas out of the goodness of his heart, to keep her happy, and then he had grown weary and Dietsch sank without trace, Dietsch's parts were left in peace. Their decision, after they got back from Egypt, to settle in Geneva, in the house at Bellevue. Excited, her head full of fancies, she had bloomed afresh as she threw herself into the task of creating a harmonious setting. 'No, darling, you must have this room, it's much more elegantly proportioned and the view is so expansive.' Acquisition of Persian carpets and period Spanish furniture. A score of vivid, vital days. But, once the harmonious setting had been created, the unacknowledged claustrophobia, the need for other people, people at any price, the need to have people around, even strangers, even those who were not clubbable. At Belle de Mai their love had been younger and they had held out longer against their lonely lighthouse-keeping existence. But in Bellevue the asthma of solitude had set in unbearably by the third week. Hiding their mortification, they had gone back to the Ritz. Oh, their bleak conjunctions, she faking pleasure, oh yes, out of consideration, poor girl. Oh, the way the both of them, equally wretched, had resorted to pathetic stimuli, in unspoken complicity. They had looked to their mirrors. At certain junctures they had resorted to using dirty words, like whips. They had looked to books. 'Darling, I've bought a book, it's a bit naughty but terribly well done: there's no harm in both of us reading it together, is there?' And she had brought home others, even naughtier, as she said, unhappy daughter of an austere line. And thence, gradually, to practices which she found to her taste, or pretended to find to her taste. Sometimes, seeking reassurance, she would mutter to him in the near-dark of their nights. 'Tell me, it's not wrong, is it, if I get a bit infernal, if I do those things, tell me, when two people love each other everything is beautiful, isn't that right?' She was fond of saying 'infernal', a word which had succeeded the coy 'naughty' and raised a flicker of sulphurous flames over their unadventurous expedients. And after that? After that were her dreams, she'd probably made them up, which she told him as she lay close to him in the night, in their bed, in a whisper. 'Darling, I had such a peculiar dream last night: I was yours, and there was a beautiful young woman by the side of the bed, watching.' A few days later, another and bolder dream. Then there'd been others, still worse, and she'd always told them in the night, in the dark. He had listened to her fabrications with shame and despair. 'Darling, I dreamt I was being loved by two men, but each of the men was you.' The last statement was intended to safeguard appearances, so that she could be faithful and infernal at the same time. Next Ingrid Groning had returned to the Ritz. Suddenly it was the friendship stakes between the two women. She began talking to him far too much about how beautiful Ingrid was, about what beautiful breasts she had. Last night she had dressed up like a schoolgirl. Then, at midnight, she had suggested inviting Ingrid along. The horror of it. 'Be pure, for our God is pure,' the Chief Rabbi had always told him, while his hand still lay heavy on his head after the sabbath-day blessing. Forgive me, my lord and father. Oh the synagogue of his childhood, the steps leading up to the dais enclosed by the marble balustrade, and at its centre the lectern used by the presiding cantor. Upstairs, the gallery. There the women sat, fenced in by lattice-work screens behind which figures stirred. Down-stairs, on a kind of throne, his father, and he standing by his side, by the side of the revered Chief Rabbi, proud to be his son. Oh sweet joy of hearing the cantor sing in the tongue of their ancestors. And at the far end, facing the dais, the velvet and gold of the Ark of the Holy Commandments, and he was in Israel, with brothers joined.
In their bathroom, she squatted on the white japanned seat and then changed her mind. No, he might hear. How bizarre, still going out of my way to avoid anything that might upset him. Throwing a dressing-gown over her schoolgirl get-up, she went out into the corridor, opened the door of one of the bathrooms further down the hall, pushed the bolt home, lifted the skirt of her dressing-gown, sat down on the white japanned seat, put the ether bottle she had brought with her on the floor, stood up, pulled the chain, stood watching the miniature cataract frothing in the china bowl, sat down again, tore off a sheet of lavatory paper and folded it once, then twice. Oh, Tantlérie's garden, the young quince-tree hung with little pink fruit like lanterns, the split mirabelle-tree with mahogany-dark resin which oozed from a crack and which she worked with her fingers, the bench by the little fountain which never quite stopped running where the blue-tits came to drink, the old green bench which had wrinkled in the rain and picking off its flaking green scales had been such fun. Oh, Tantlérie's garden, the kindly old sequoia swaying as though it had a mind of its own, the three blossom-wreathed branches of the apricot-tree reaching airily out across the window panes, the bird that warned of coming rain repeating its monotonous call. Oh, the summer rain in the garden, the rhythms in the drainpipes when it rained, water dripping from the eaves on to the canvas of the awning below, the large stained patch which had formed where it fell, falling with an expansive, rhythmic beat which rose above the steady rustling continuum of the summer rain as a solo instrument floats above the sound of the orchestra, and she stayed where she was for some time and listened, listened to the falling rain, happy.