The Balloonist (36 page)

When the coffee was warm I poured it into a cup and added a little cognac to it, and set it on the table by the chart. The meteorological indications on the chart, as might be expected for so remote a part of the world, were rather meager. Still, there were a number of spidery wind symbols—circles with arrows of various length sticking out of them, to indicate average direction and velocity—in the region between Greenland and Franz Josef Land. For half an hour I happily made notes, even extrapolating the data mathematically so that I was able to draw in a few of my own symbols farther north on the blank part of the chart. Then there was a rap-rap at the door, a rather peremptory one. In the back of my mind I think I expected the concièrge with a telegram, perhaps from Waldemer in New York, otherwise I wouldn't have been so incautious as to open.

I unlatched the door enough to see who it was and Theodor pushed his way in. Before I could say a word he took a nickel-plated revolver out of his greatcoat and fired it at me point-blank. It was no joke; the sharp bang was enough to break the eardrums and there was a stench of powder. In the space of less than half a second my heart leaped twice and every nerve jangled like a billion electric doorbells: once when he fired and once when I grasped that he had missed me. I ducked to one side with my ears ringing and he fired twice more. A second or so after this there was a sound of descending glass. Probably from a picture on the wall; I didn't turn my head to look. There were still two shots left in the thing, perhaps three. I wasn't an expert on firearms but the difference in practical
terms was negligible. If he kept on in his present humour, in this small room with no place to hide, he might even hit me eventually. I changed my tactics abruptly and attacked. I managed to get his wrists in my hands just as the infernal contraption went off again. A little storm of dust and grit fell down on us from the ceiling. I was surprised at the steely, fierce, and cunning strength I felt between my fingers; it was like trying to hold two angry pythons by the neck. I let go one of the wrists and concentrated on the other. By coming within a hair of breaking the thumb, I managed to pry the pistol out of the hand. It fell to the floor and, still holding one python and trying to elude the other, I bent down, retrieved it, and pitched it through the open window into the courtyard. But he wasn't satisfied; he went right on trying to tear me to pieces with his fingernails. Or let us say she now, since the weapon had become a more traditionally feminine one. This was less frightening than the part immediately previous, but even more painful. I had no more desire to be permanently disfigured than to be shot. We fell in a heap on the floor, I on top, the greatcoat and the flailing limbs underneath. For some time I tried to subdue all these arms and legs, but it was uphill work, since I myself possessed only one limb for each of his—of hers. That concièrge! Would she ever get around to sending for the police? I didn't know whether to hope that she would or hope that she wouldn't. I decided to hope that she wouldn't.

She didn't, evidently deciding that the sounds (shots, glass breaking, bumping bodies) were only from one of my experiments. And what was happening now? The nature of our struggle, it became evident after a while, had gradually metamorphosed without either of us being aware of it. It wasn't true, I reflected as I meditated in an oddly detached way on my sensations, that I possessed only one limb for each of hers. Tarnation! I swear by Great Thor in Thunderhouse that my chief concern—my only concern—was to get her subdued and to secure my own personal safety and survival, and secondarily to try to bring some sense into her fevered brain. But the very gestures of our struggle—her writhing and trying to scratch, my attempts to immobilize her limbs and defend myself—were only those that multiplied the points of our contact. Not for nothing had the nineteenth century decreed that young ladies and gentlemen were not to engage in wrestling matches while alone in lodgings. Her greatcoat had come open and the rest of her clothing, I noted in a distant part of my mind that I had for some reason kept in reserve, was also considerably disarranged. Her defence, or attack, now chiefly took the form of clutching the lower part of my face and pulling it toward her own. Our four lower limbs had now given up clashing head-on and divided up the field of encounter: hers apart to either side, mine between them. In all honesty I believed—I still believe—that I continued the pretence of struggle longer than she did. Yet it was surely not she who removed the necessary parts of my clothing; this was hardly possible since her fingers, no longer daggers now but velvet and feverish, were playing over the face pressed against her own. Her panting, her feline snarls of menace, had changed into a sound still rhythmic but something like weeping.

“I really
wanted to kill you,” she sobbed.

“Yes, and I really wanted to stop you.”

“Then why are we doing this?”

“I don't know.”

“Why wouldn't you. Answer when. I spoke Swedish to you?” she wrenched out between sobs.

I paid no attention to her questions, nor she to mine. “Why didn't you shoot the flautist? Or the music teacher in Passy?”

I didn't want. You to come. To the recital.”

“Did you ever ask what I want?”

“It was all. It was all for you. Don't you know that?”

“Elixir Vert-Galant. You deserve whatever—”

‘Now, oh, dearest one, now now
now now!
”

Only an inch or so from my eyes I saw her teeth grip her lower lip and a bright thread of blood spring out between them. The set teeth only gradually loosened their hold. A convulsive warm thing inside or between us still kicked now and then, more weakly and at widening intervals, like a fish dying. Her head, with a clocklike slowness, turned away from me to the right until I could see only the cheek. I was aware of the sound and rhythm of her breathing under me, not only with her lungs, but with her whole body. Inside, at the point where all the pyrotechnics had taken place, only a little spark crept ant-like now and then through the ashes. When at last, it seemed, the thirst for air in her was sated, the slow undulations spreading from her lungs to her throat, her limbs, gradually ceased.

I became
aware of my surroundings again and collected myself to take note of them scientifically. Theodor's officer cap was upside down against the wall across the room. The greatcoat was sprawled in one direction, essential parts of my own clothing flung in another. Some cataclysm had evidently struck here, one that snapped buttons and tore away garments. The picture with the shattered glass, as I had expected, was an engraving of
The Wife of Poetus
in which the Latin matron was plunging a sword into her bosom and commenting to her husband, “Non dolet.” Near it a chair had fallen over and was lying with four legs in the air, like a dead animal. A detail that surprised me was that the small nickel revolver was lying on the floor by the window. There were two possible explanations of this. One was that I was mistaken and it had not gone out the window after all. I was sure I had caught a glimpse of it curving through the open rectangle and downward into the darkness, but perhaps I had only been deluded by my boy's vanity about throwing things. The other was even less plausible: that the concièrge had been annoyed by my throwing things down into her courtyard, which was really only a dank little well in which she kept the trash bins, had retrieved it, climbed up five flights, opened the door, clambered over our wildly convulsing bodies (oh, Major, your experiments), and set it on the floor by the window as a reproach. It was true she was a reproachful person by temperament, but she was not given to such complicated silent gestures. I picked the thing up, found out after a little fumbling how to break it open, and shook out the shiny little brass husks in the cylinder. There were five of them, all empty. Well, she had done her best. I slipped it into the desk drawer, rather furtively, with my back turned.

But she was not interested in the revolver, it was something that belonged to Theodor and it had nothing to do with her. She got up quite calmly now, even matter-of-factly and with a kind of religious simplicity, and began readjusting her clothing, the male gestures she was obliged to fall into in order to fasten certain buttons contrasting oddly with the mass of unpinned hair that fell over her face. Then she went to the sink, dampened a towel, and removed the traces of salty moisture from around her eyes and the blood from her lip. Her manner in doing all this was even and unhurried, stately, with a touch of the austere politeness she always assumed with persons with whom she chose to be a little
distant, or when she preferred not to talk. It was as though the act we had just performed was a ritual of purification (now there's a strange idea, oh, dix-neuvième siècle!) which had restored to her not only her calm but her confidence, her assurance in herself that she was superior to the world around her, along with its vicissitudes and most of its inhabitants. Next in this even sequence of events she filled a not very clean tumbler at the tap and drank the contents, slowly but in a single long draught without taking the glass from her lips. Our eyes met over the top of the glass but she said nothing. Finally she went to the worktable, took up the old red-painted shears I kept there for dealing with things like cardboard and tinfoil, and began cutting off her hair just below the level of the earlobes. The hair had seemed profuse falling over her face, but there was even more of it when it came down handful by handful onto the table. Finally there was a heap of it in the centre of the pilot chart, shadowy, snakelike, faintly iridescent. Working without a mirror in this way she hadn't done a very good job. It was ragged around the edges and a little lower on one side than on the other. But it sufficed; the ends of her ears appeared under it, and when she tossed her head it flung out and then came back into place again, boy-like. With the cap on she looked the same as before except for the cut on her lower lip. The shears she put in the pocket of the greatcoat.

She came back to the table and seemed uncertain what to do with the hair; not what to do with it but what to use as a container. Finally she rolled it up in the pilot chart itself and put it in my arms, simply and modestly, with a smile, and the air of one conveying a gift. Then, still without a word (she had not spoken after she rose up off the floor), she went out the door, leaving me the hair, and taking for herself the little machine by which it had been cut off like a flower and left to die.

Luisa was going to Stresa, short hair and all. I was not invited. The aunt would go along and the Polish cousin, perhaps the mother. I had to go to Hamburg anyhow, to talk thalers with the brewers. We agreed to meet in Switzerland, somewhere. But it wasn't just somewhere; she knew exactly the place she had in mind. “Just by the Simplon. When I come up from Italy over the pass you'll be there. The place is called Brig, in the Valais. There's an inn. It's called—I forget what the inn is called. You can find it in the Baedeker. Goodbye.”

She always
spoke English now, which avoided the awkward second person in French: tu was too intimate and vous too distant, even impolite. It (vous) would have involved an awkward backing up from where we had been before, whereas tu would have indicated that nothing had changed, everything was as before. What had changed, then? I wasn't sure exactly. One thing that had changed, it seemed, was that an absolute rule or taboo of our relationship had been violated: the one that decreed that
that
couldn't happen in Paris, only in Finland, Stresa, and other far-flung corners of the globe. But
had
it happened in Paris? As the days went by I meditated on this. Perhaps not. No, it hadn't. Still, how could I reason thus, with the broken glass from the picture frame still unswept on the floor and the bundle of soft hair rolled up in the chart? I borrowed from Luisa a logic that was circular and retrograde, perhaps devious, but consoling. Since man is free, and woman also according to the aunt, we do exactly what we choose to do in this world. What we have not chosen to do does not happen. And neither of us, I persisted in believing in the face of all evidence, had willed to behave in such an irresponsible and beastly fashion, even when one of us was in danger of his life and the other defending herself against an enraged Swedish lunatic. Ergo and Q.E.D., it hadn't happened. How to explain then that I had the half-healed scars of her claw marks on my face? They were still there, on that day three weeks later when she said goodbye to me in Quai d'Orléans for the last time. If she noticed them she gave no sign. “Goodbye.” That last English word—so final in contrast to the promise of au revoir or auf Wiedersehen—was spoken dryly, even with a touch of distance or dismissal. Against any risk that I might take her hand, she held both of them behind her. It was very correct. The aunt was present, observing from across the drawing room with faint denying vibrations of her head. Nay, nay! Nothing shall happen in Brig! I took my leave, seeing that this was the only thing in the house for the moment that they wished me to take.