Visions of Isabelle

LICENSE NOTES

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
 
This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
 
If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.
 
If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy.
 
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Buy Direct from Crossroad Press

Novels:

Blind Side

Pattern Crimes

Switch

Mirror Maze

Tangier

Wallflower

Unabridged Audiobooks

Pattern Crimes

Switch

Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one-time 20% savings!
 
We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available.

Find us at:
 
http://store.crossroadpress.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is not a biography. It is a novel, a fantasy, based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt. Though it contains distortions and inventions devised to serve the telling of a story, many of the events took place, and many of the characters lived. The names have not been changed, except in a few cases.

December 14, 1914

To Major édouard De Susbielle

Sir:

It has come to my attention that after a memorial service organized under the auspices of the Resident-General, Commander in Chief, General Lyautey, in honor of the memory of my late friend, Isabelle Eberhardt, also known as Si Mahmoud, you were overheard to make certain disparaging remarks in the officers' mess at the garrison in Fez.

In particular it has been reported that you made reference to certain erotic episodes in her life of which you could have no first-hand knowledge, and made other vicious slanders, among them that my late friend was a "drunkard, an addict, and a syphilitic" and that "she slept with most of the Foreign Legion."

I find such statements insupportable. Mademoiselle Eberhardt was a person of the highest moral character, she was a devout Moslem, and her activities during the time of the border war in the Sud-Oranais were of inestimable value to France. She was one of the great personages of her time, and any imputation to the contrary, by you or anyone else, must be considered an intolerable lie.

It is possible that the reports to me of your comments have been incorrect. I sincerely request, sir, that you affirm this in writing, or else be prepared to meet me on the field of honor.

With my most distinguished sentiments,
Major Eugène Letord

"Everything in my childhood and adolescence prepared me for the fact that peace and good fortune would have no place in my life–that I would be doomed to a maddening struggle, and would become, if you like, a scapegoat, bearing the burden of all the injustices and misfortunes that hurled my family to ruin."

Isabelle Eberhardt

Mes Journaliers,

January 18, 1900

N
athalie De Moerder was the illegitimate daughter of a German Lutheran named Eberhardt and a Russian Jew named Korff–a fact unsuspected by her husband, General Paul De Moerder of the Imperial Russian army, until several years after they were married. In the early 1870s, Madame De Moerder ran away from her home in St. Petersburg with her three children–Nicolas, Nathalie and Vladimir–and their tutor, a former parish priest named Alexandre Trophimovsky. A fourth child, Augustin, was born in 1872, and he, too, bore the De Moerder name. In Geneva, on February 17, 1877, a fifth child was born–sired by Trophimovsky...or perhaps by someone else. She was named Isabelle Eberhardt.

S
pring of 1888 in Meyrin–a town outside Geneva. The sun shines brightly upon the tropical plants, the cacti and bamboo, rubber trees and miniature palms that grow, bloom and perfume the air in the garden of the Villa Neuve. Two children, a teen-age boy and a girl eleven years old, wield axes against a pile of logs. They chop for a while, then sit down together to rest. A dog barks, another answers from far away, and then a distant scream rends the air.

In the villa, a vast, high-ceilinged, noble-looking house, sobs and cruel laughter echo through the rooms. Vladimir, a boy of twenty, lies upstairs on his unmade bed, his arms rigid by his sides, his bare feet extended between the brass rods of the baseboard, and turned so that his legs are locked in place. He stares at the ceiling with crossed eyes and listens to the sounds below. At each scream he winces; at each sob moisture gathers in his eyes; at each trail of laughter he curves his mouth into a sarcastic smile.

After a while these contortions take on a pattern of their own. He begins to twitch, to vibrate his head, and then to arch it back so that the tendons made hard in his neck pulse with his rapidly beating heart. When he can stand this no longer, when perspiration has risen upon his whole body and matted his long blond hair to his forehead so that it nearly covers his eyes, he springs up, grasps a violin off the floor, and begins to play rapid, high-pitched scales. He swoons with his music, presses down his bow as hard as he can, bends back and forth like a Slavic gypsy. Still, no matter how rapidly or piercingly he plays, he cannot blot out the cries and wails that fill the house, and have filled it for as long as he can remember.

In the garden Augustin and Isabelle hear Vladimir's fiddling, try to find his rhythm so that they may fit their chopping to his beat. They cannot succeed; their axes become embedded in the wood and must be wrenched free. Still chips fly about, and after a quarter of an hour Isabelle has produced more firewood than her brother.

The scene in the drawing room has only begun. The black and white squares of the marble floor provide an arena for the combatants who pace about. The room is spacious, luxurious, flooded with light that pours in through a row of glass doors on one side, but it is furnished with junk: a table made of a single unfinished plank supported by wooden packing crates and covered with stains of food and paint, the cheapest overstuffed chairs bought in secondhand shops from the estates of retired British civil servants, an old black and green Turkish samovar set upon a battered steamer trunk. Everywhere there are piles of mildewed books. A legless piano crouches in a cobwebbed corner. Gardening tools, hoes, rakes, picks, shears and ceramic pots clutter a section of the floor, and a paint-spattered ladder leans against a wall where may be seen an extraordinary sight.

This is a vast disjointed mural, crudely but passionately painted–the work of a lunatic perhaps, or a child in a rage. Figures are superimposed, perspective is distorted, limbs turn the wrong way at vital joints. Colors clash and run together. Mistakes have been stricken out rather than erased. The mural depicts a grotesque crucifixion in which a diabolic Christ wails in ecstasy upon a bejeweled cross, surrounded by sneering saints and wild dogs with lascivious tongues who look up at Jesus or else out of the mural and into the room.

Various monetary symbols–signs for dollars, rubles, sterling, francs–are emblazoned upon the foreheads of popes whose villainies are listed in angrily painted slogans that curl about their heads:
"CHRIST THE DEVIL"; "PETER THE BETRAYER"; "OPPRESSOR POPES IN LEAGUE WITH ROYAL DOGS"; "THE GREEDY CHURCH STEALS FROM THE HUNGRY POOR."
To one side, covering part of two walls, is a gigantic woman with a beatific face who holds a saw-toothed sickle and threatens to sweep away all these villains with a single swipe. This avenger is labeled
The Revolution
.

If anything is more bizarre than the contents of the painting, it is the anger impacted within–an anger that shows in the way it spills off its wall, turns corners, makes no distinction between wall and ceiling, wall and floor, extends onto the marble mantelpiece, is smeared across several panes of window glass, attacks mirrors and even the nearby furniture, running across the velvet of the chairs, incorporating an ancient Russian icon that leans against a trunk, then spills out of the fireplace and onto the hearth where, one can imagine on a winter day, flaming logs would provide a blazing inferno, which in league with the avenging revolution in the corner, would threaten all organized religion with an enormous
auto-da-fe
.

Alexandre Trophimovsky, affectionately known as "Vava," a huge, bear-like man with mercilessly piercing eyes, a thick black beard, wild locks of graying hair, is the author of this stupendous mural and also of the violent scenes that take place in this room. His stepdaughter, Nathalie De Moerder, has just announced to him her intention of marrying an apprentice watchmaker in Geneva. These two move around the room–Vava with the swagger of a village priest, young Nathalie, like a trapped and flustered bird, awkward, alighting here and there, placing all her weight on one foot, then on the other. Madame Nathalie Eberhardt De Moerder, or "Old Nathalie" as she is sometimes called, sits watching her daughter and her lover from a filthy brown velvet chair, her sweet-natured eyes pouring parallel rivers of tears. Young Nathalie and Vava have been hurling insults at a tempo that exceeds the feverish fiddling of Vladimir. All three ignore his music: it is merely background, part of the blend of barking dogs and twittering birds that fills in the spaces between their cries.

"Disgusting pig!"

"Bitch in heat!"

"Monster!"

"Whore!"

"Drunken goat!"

"Shrew! Witch!"

To Isabelle and Augustin the exchange in the drawing room which wafts to them garbled, in the garden below the house is but the prelude to a climax which they know, in time, will be punctuated by flung bottles, kicked vases, even threats of suicide and murder in the form of frozen gestures with rakes and shears.

Augustin flings his ax away, Isabelle sets hers down, and together they creep toward the house to share the drama–the only thing that relieves the boredom of life at Villa Neuve.

"You want to keep me here–locked up! You'll do anything to ruin my life!"