I'm Not Stiller (7 page)

***

Her hair is red, very red in fact, in keeping with the new fashion, not like rose-hip jam, however, but like dry minium powder. Very curious. And with it a very fine complexion—alabaster with freckles. Also very curious, but beautiful. And her eyes? I should say they are glittering, somehow watery, even when she is not crying, bluish-green like the edges of colourless window-glass, and at the same time, of course, full of soul and therefore opaque. Unfortunately her eyebrows have been plucked to a thin line, which gives her face a graceful hardness, but also a slightly masklike appearance, as though perpetually miming surprise. Her nose looks very aristocratic, especially from the side; there is a great deal of involuntary expression in her nostrils. Her lips are rather thin for my taste, not without sensuality, but they must first be roused; and her figure (in a black tailor-made costume) has something spare and also boyish about it; it's easy to see she's a dancer; perhaps it would be more accurate to say there is something of the ephebe about her, which is unexpectedly attractive in a woman of her age. She smokes a great deal. Her very slender hand, when she stubs out the half-smoked cigarette, is by no means lacking in strength and a considerable measure of forcefulness, although she seems to see herself as completely fragile. She speaks very softly, to prevent her interlocutor from shouting. She banks on being protected. I believe this little ruse, too, is unconscious. And she smells intoxicating, just as Knobel said; it must be a very high-class make, one immediately thinks of Paris, of the perfumeries in the Place Vendome.

'How are you?' she inquired.

Her habit of always answering one question with another is something you find in many women, in fact in all women, and I'm quite familiar with it. This made it all the more necessary for me to guard against the insidious feeling of having met her before.

'Don't you recognize me?' she asked.

Her fixed idea that I am her missing husband was by no means assumed; it came out in even her most trivial remarks.

'Don't you smoke any more?' she asked.

Later—because you can't keep a conversation going indefinitely with nothing but questions, especially when they are not even genuine questions, since she would only accept one answer and simply ignored all others as being prevarication—I told her the little tale of Isidore, adapting it to the case of my beautiful visitor by omitting the five children and making free use of a dream I had recently: when Isidore turned up at home he did not fire at the birthday cake, but merely showed his two hands covered with scars ... A crazy dream.

'Oh,' sighed my lady, 'you're still the same, one can't get a word of sense out of you, nothing but freaks of fancy.'

First it was comical, then annoying, but somehow also touching. This lady from Paris sitting on my bed in her black costume, smoking one cigarette after another, was anything but a stupid person, and I could imagine spending a delightful afternoon with her, more than an afternoon in fact. Above all, her rather tired and for some reason bitter laugh was enchanting, making one curious about the experience that lay behind it, time and again I couldn't help looking at her lips and being conscious of my own. But it seemed she couldn't get away from her fixed idea that she knew me. She simply refused to believe I could be anyone else than her missing Stiller. She kept on talking about her marriage, which, I gathered, had not been all that a marriage should be. Several times I indicated my regret. When I finally got a chance to speak—she didn't talk incessantly, far from it, she interspersed her conversation with frequent pauses during which she puffed hastily at her cigarette, long minutes of bitter silence it would have required more courage to interrupt than a spate of words—when I finally got a chance to speak, I said:

'I suppose you've been told, Madame, that you are talking to a murderer?'

She ignored my remark as though it were a joke that had fallen flat.

'I'm a murderer,' I repeated at the next opportunity, 'even if the Swiss police can't establish the fact. I murdered my wife.'

It was no use.

'You're funny,' she said. 'You're really funny, I must say. At a time like this, when we haven't seen one another for half a lifetime, you start with your freaks of fancy again, your childish freaks of fancy.'

Again and again, I admit, her gravity made me momentarily uncertain, not uncertain about the fact that I had murdered my wife, but uncertain whether I should succeed in freeing this unhappy lady from her fixed idea. What did she want of me? I also tried gravity as a means of convincing her that there had never been a marriage between us, remaining grave even when she jumped up from my bed, walked up and down shaking her red hair, stood in front of my barred window smoking, her slender hands in the scanty pockets of her tight-fitting tailor-made, not saying a word but staring out at the autumnal chestnut tree, so that I could not see her face.

'Madame,' I said, taking one of her cigarettes, 'you flew down here to forgive your lost husband; you have waited years for this grave, indeed solemn hour, and I can understand that it's a blow for you to find that I'm not the man you have waited for with all your desire to forgive everything. I'm not the man, Madame.'

Her only answer was to puff out smoke.

'I think,' I said, now smoking myself, 'that is obvious, there is no need to discuss it.'

'What's obvious?'

'That I'm not your lost husband.'

'Why not?' she asked without looking at me.

At least I could see the back of her shapely head.

'Madame,' I said with undiminished gravity,. 'I'm deeply moved to hear you speak of your unhappy marriage, but, if you will forgive my saying so, the more I listen to you the less I understand what you want of me, in fact I don't understand at all. What can a lady like you, who, thank God, have so brilliantly recovered from the effects of your unhappy marriage, want with me—a man who murdered his wife. To be quite frank, I don't understand what it is you want to forgive me?'

Silence.

'You live in Paris?' I asked.

Then the figure turned. Her face, partially unmasked by quiet dismay and more beautiful than before, making one think that contact must be possible, contact in the realm of truth—her face had for a short space of time a look that made me want to kiss her on the brow, and perhaps I ought to have done so, regardless of whether she misinterpreted it or not; for a short space of time, then her face seemed to close again and back she came with her fixed idea:

'Anatol, what's the matter with you?'

Again I told her:

'My name is White.'

She simply turned the tables, acting as though I were the one with the fixed idea. She threw her lighted cigarette out of the barred window (which is strictly forbidden, like so much here) and stood in front of me without taking hold of me of course, but knowing quite well that I should take hold of her and suddenly overcome by remorse beg her forgiveness. And in fact for a few moments we were quite defenceless, we smiled, although it wasn't funny at all. I might have looked like a gnome, a minotaur, anything you like, and it would have made no difference whatever; she was simply incapable of perceiving any other being than her vanished Stiller.

'I didn't think,' she said, 'you would ever go bald on top. But it quite suits you.'

I was simply struck dumb. I was helpless. If I had taken hold of this lady and strangled her she would have gone on believing I was her lost husband.

'Why didn't you ever write?'

I said nothing.

'I didn't even know whether you were still alive—'

I said nothing.

'Where have you been all these years?'

I said nothing.

'You say nothing—'

I said nothing.

'Fancy disappearing like that,' she said. 'Going off and never writing me a line. And just at that time. I might have died.'

Once I said:

'That's enough.'

I don't know what else she talked about, she went on until I took hold of her, and even then she was unshakable in her fixed idea, taking every reaction of mine, whether I laughed or trembled, as a confirmation. She didn't stop forgiving me, though I grabbed hold of her, shook her till her hair-combs fell in showers all round and flung her on the hard bed, where she lay with a torn blouse, crumpled costume, tousled hair, and an expression of bewildered innocence, unable to rise because I was kneeling on the bed gripping her two hot hands in my left fist so that she shut her lovely eyes in pain. Her loose hair was gloriously silky and as light as gossamer. She was breathing heavily as though she had been running, her chest heaving and her mouth open. Her front teeth were splendid, not without fillings, but otherwise gleaming like mother of pearl. And since I had gripped her delicate lower jaw with my other hand, she was incapable of speaking. I looked at her as though she were an object, suddenly quite sober, as though she were just any unknown woman. If

Knobel, my warder, hadn't come with the ash-tray—

***

It's no good running away. I know that and keep repeating it to myself every day. It's no good running away. I ran away to avoid committing murder, and now I've learnt that my very attempt to run away was the murder. There is only one thing to do: to take this knowledge upon myself, even if no one shares with me this knowledge that I have murdered a life.

***

Freaks of fancy! I'm supposed to tell my life story, and when I try to make myself understood they say, 'Freaks of fancy'. (At least I know now where my counsel picked up this expression together with the patronizing smile that goes with it.) He listens as long as I talk about my house in Oakland, about Negroes and other facts; but as soon as I come to the real story, as soon as I try to tell him things that cannot be verified by a photograph—for example, what happens after you put a bullet in your temple—my counsel cleans his finger-nails and waits for a chance to interrupt me with some trifle.

'You had a house in Oakland?'

'Yes,' I said briefly; 'why?'

'Where's Oakland?'

'Opposite San Francisco.'

'Ah,' said my counsel, 'really?'

It was thirteen feet wide and forty-two feet long (my counsel makes a note, that's the sort of thing he wants to know) and to be quite exact it was really more of a shingle-hut. It once housed the labourers of a farm, but the farm was swallowed up by the town and only the now tumble-down hut remained, along with a giant tree, a eucalyptus—I shall never forget the silvery rustle of its leaves. Round about there was nothing but roofs, a sky filled with leaning telephone poles carrying the washing of my Negro neighbours. To be precise again, there were Chinese living on my right. And the little overgrown garden must not be forgotten. On Sundays you heard the Negroes singing in their wooden church. Otherwise there was silence, a great deal of silence, occasionally broken by the hoarse wail of sirens from the harbour and the rattle of chains that makes the blood curdle. Incidentally, I wasn't the owner of this little shingle-hut, only the tenant. I had absolutely no money at the time. The rent consisted in my having to feed the cat. I can't stand cats. But the cat's food stood ready in green tins, and in compensation I had a kitchen with a
cooker
and a refrigerator, and even a radio. In the hot nights the silence was often almost unbearable; I was glad to have the radio.

'And you lived there all on your own?'

'No,' I said, 'with the cat.'

He had even got beyond making a note of the cat ... Yet this cat, I now believe, was the first warning. Her owners called her Little Grey and had always fed her in the kitchen, a custom I was not inclined to continue, because of the smell apart from anything else. I opened the daily tin and tipped the revolting stuff on to a plate in the garden, an arrangement which on her side, spoilt as she was, the cat was not inclined to accept. She jumped up to the sill of my open window and glowered at me with her green eyes, spitting. How could I read under such circumstances? I flung her out into the Californian night, a bundle with kicking paws, and shut all the windows. She crouched outside the pane and spat, she spat for hours at a time, for weeks on end, whenever I looked at her. I never failed to give her the tinned food, that was my duty, the only one I had at that time. And she never failed to slip into the house again through some open window (I couldn't spend the whole summer behind closed windows), unexpectedly rubbing herself against my legs just when I was feeling happy. It became a real struggle, a ridiculous struggle to see who could hold out longest, a horrible struggle; night after night I lay awake because she was howling round my hut, denouncing me to the whole neighbourhood as a cruel man. I let her in and shoved her into the refrigerator, but still I couldn't sleep. When I took pity on her, she had stopped spitting; I warmed her some milk, which she vomited. She looked at me as though threatening to die. She was quite capable of ruining everything for me, the little shingle-hut, the garden—She was there even when she wasn't there; she brought me to the point of going to look for her when it was time to shut up for the night. I asked the Negroes sitting on the kerb whether they had seen Little Grey, and they shrugged their round shoulders. She stayed away eleven days and nights. One hot evening, just when Helen had come to see me, she jumped on to the window sill. 'My goodness,' cried Helen; the cat was sitting there with a gaping wound in her face dripping with blood, and looking at me as though I had wounded her. For a week I fed her in the kitchen: she had brought it off. At least almost, for one night after midnight, when I had been dreaming about her, I went downstairs, took her out from among the warm pillows she had snuggled into, and carried her out into the garden—but not without first making sure her wound was healed. Everything began all over again; once more she crouched outside the window and spat. I should never get the better of this animal—

My counsel smiled.

'But apart from the cat, I mean, you lived alone.'

'No,' I said, 'with Helen.'

'Who is Helen?'