Women

by Mihail Sebastian

  It was only later that someone pointed it out to me:

  —Oh! regarde les amoureux!

  I’m not in the humor for jokes, especially now, knowing how sadly the whole story would end. But it still makes me laugh today to remember how the pair of them looked there, on the sidewalk, among the streamers and the lights. Émilie and Irimia! They sat together, rigid, serious, a little giddy, a little lost, sometimes gazing into each other’s eyes. They certainly weren’t thinking of anything tender, but the fact that they alone were left at the table out of the whole crowd, neither moving nor talking, united them, at least in our eyes.

  I have to confess that I have an instinctive taste for a little cruelty. Not to the point of inflicting torture, but when I’m having a good time I like to find something to make fun of, to make something the secret object of my petty malice. It’s vulgar, I admit. But that’s the way it is. That evening, I didn’t have to invent a target. It forced itself on me. Anyway, all I did was to be present and amused at a game the others—Mado in particular—would have played even without me: getting Émilie to be Irimia’s lover. Making them girlfriend and boyfriend. They caressed both of them, dropped hints shamelessly, praised Émilie’s beauty and Irimia’s strength. The two were slightly bewildered but remained serious, which made the situation even more ridiculous because they indeed took on the air of a bride and groom. Beyond that, Irimia could make no sense of the chatter around him and looked about pathetically, beseechingly; it pains me to remember it today.

  It would have gone no further and I would have forgotten all about it in the whirlpool of the celebrations had the skies not suddenly begun to pour rain at about midnight. A real summer storm. Hard and fast. In a flash, the little place de la Sorbonne was deserted, tables knocked over, glasses shattered in the rush. Bits of wet streamers flapped about like autumn leaves. We scattered in all directions and it was all I could do to grab Mado and pull her with me toward home, which wasn’t far off. I’d forgotten all about Irimia and Émilie. Nobody who remembers that Fourteenth of July rainstorm would blame me.

  But Irimia later told me in detail everything that happened after I left, and, knowing both him and Émilie well, I don’t think it’s hard to imagine exactly what occurred. Left alone together at the table in the rain, they didn’t know how to say goodbye. They didn’t know each other, they’d never spoken to one another, they weren’t able to talk, and, as a result, they found it hard to get to the point concerning their needs. Taking such a decision was beyond their imagination and power. They were together, were they not? So they had to remain that way, and they set off through the rain without exchanging a word. Her dress was wet and water was pouring off the brim of her hat. He took off his coat and wrapped her in it, pulling her to him, so that they huddled together. He guided her along easily; she hardly came above his waist. They walked like that for hours. I think it’s about ten kilometers to Saint-Ouen, where Émilie lives. They covered the whole distance on foot, dragging themselves through those wet, deserted streets. Dawn was breaking when they reached Émilie’s door.

  How the rest happened, I don’t know. How Irimia went upstairs to her garret, how they fell into one another’s arms, how they collapsed, clothed, on the floor! It was, perhaps, exhaustion catching up with them, as it does with overworked beasts. It was the dizziness of that evening of music, flashing lights and fireworks. It was the republican Fourteenth of July, beating with delayed splendor in their hearts, it was the rain caressing their cheeks and “The Marseillaise” still ringing in their ears, in the background, like a romantic song. Or it was the overriding need to say something. They felt an obscure, elementary kinship, like that of one workhorse for another when they pull the same load, and, as they did not have a language in common, in a moment of intuition they found the simplest way to make themselves heard.

  But why should I get carried away making assumptions? The fact is, next day, toward evening, Irimia knocked on my door. He had a grave, portentous air. He paced about, as though he wanted to say something but didn’t know how to begin. He fiddled with his cap and coughed a few times. Then he just spat it out, the way shy people do when they wander about for an hour with a cup of tea in their hands, not knowing where to set it, and end up just dropping it on the floor.

  —Hey, I went to bed with Émilie last night…

  I must have looked surprised, because he lowered his eyes, embarrassed. I knew Irimia never lied, but it seemed so abominable that I was wary of believing it. I would have liked to laugh and I even tried.

  —You rake! I said, shaking my finger at him in admiration.

  He smiled briefly, then resumed his previous portentous expression. He sighed. Then, from the depths of his soul, in a tone of such guilt, which I could not have matched even had I killed someone, confessed:

  —And she was a virgin!

  And now, this is where my little portion of guilt begins. Because I knew that Émilie Vignou was a virgin. I also knew that in her world this wasn’t very significant, and that making love was not a matter of tremendous import. Still, enjoying Irimia’s horrified expression, amused by his utter naïveté, I played along. Who knows? Perhaps if at that point I’d taken care to tell Irimia that the matter wasn’t so serious, the story might have ended differently. If I hadn’t, on the contrary, assumed a preoccupied expression, paced about the room, and stared at him reprovingly, as though he were on trial.

  He didn’t even dare to meet my reproachful look. He said, simply:

  —It doesn’t matter. I’ll take her.

  —What do you mean you’ll take her?

  —I’ll take her as my wife!

  I knew he wasn’t joking, but I told myself that it wouldn’t really come to that in the end. I let him leave, had great amusement at his expense afterward and then forgot about it. A week later a fellow student mentioned that Irimia was getting married. I was stunned. I immediately ran about looking for him, hoping to reach him in time to extricate him from his fix. He turned out to be perfectly calm; the calm of one whose conscience is clear. I tried to shake him awake, to make him see what he was doing, to persuade him.

  —You fool, don’t you realize what you’re doing? You’re poor, you have to get a job, you have to go back to your own country. Your parents are waiting there for you!

  —But she was a virgin!

  I told him it didn’t matter in the least, gave him the example of other fellows who had also known “virgins,” and that nothing had befallen them in consequence. I told him that things were a bit different in Paris from how they were in his village. He didn’t want to know. He sat there impassively, as though nothing could penetrate that frowning forehead of his.

  —But she was a virgin!

  That was his verdict, his straitjacketed plowman’s sense of honor, and I saw plainly that he would not be shaken from it. I tried then to persuade Émilie. Not that Irimia’s fate mattered greatly to me, but such a marriage struck me as monstrous. Humanly speaking, the joining together of this giant and that badly wrought, wooden girl was horrible, beastly. What kind of a life could they have together up there in that garret in Saint-Ouen, communicating with sign language, since they had no common tongue, knowing nothing of one another, growling at each other in place of speech and coupling like dumb curs after nightfall? Émilie, a poor, easily suggestible soul, had received Irimia’s proposal without surprise. She didn’t really understand why he was so set on marrying her, but she had no reason to reject him. Then there were her friends, for whom this marriage was a great opportunity for sport. They wasted no time in sowing confusion to the point where nobody could have sorted it out. Faced with a fait accompli, I abandoned my objections. I attended the civil wedding ceremony of Émilie Vignou and Irimia C. Irimia exactly fifteen days later. A handful of the groom’s supporters were present in that room in the town hall of the Fourteenth Arrondissement and an entire legion of shopgirls, all colleagues of Émilie from the basement of her
establishment. They’d come for the fun, but it was a melancholy spectacle. The scene was so absurd it was painful to look at and I don’t recall seeing anybody laughing. The girls were weepy. Only Émilie, on her groom’s rigid arm, had a modest queenly glow and her usual ugliness shone solemnly, like an aura of chastity.

  FOUR

  For a long time I heard no more about them. I’d left Paris in August for a small town in the Midi where I worked as a substitute doctor. I returned late, in November, with tens of thousands of francs and the wife of the doctor I’d substituted for, a pathetic, ugly woman. (But that’s another story…) I had of course split up with Mado by that stage; the relationship had in any case dragged on too long. So I was no longer in contact with anyone who could give me news about Mr. and Mrs. Irimia.

  But I saw them one Sunday in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the animals. They were holding hands, the way the soldiers and housemaids do in the Cişmigiu Gardens in Bucharest, a sad reminder for me in that Parisian park of our down-at-heel neighborhoods back home. They stopped in the middle of a group of children in front of the elephant pen. From his overcoat pocket, Irimia took out a piece of bread wrapped in paper. He unwrapped it and shared it with the giant beasts.

  He cooed to them in Romanian:

  —Come on, that’s a nice fellow!

  Each time an elephant’s trunk passed between the bars and swayed in the air, then came down toward Irimia, Émilie jumped with fright and tried to pull him away, but he stood there calmly. He was having a good time with the animals and they seemed to accept him. I held back from them, not wishing to disturb this peaceful scene. But I saw them again three months later, in tragic circumstances. I’m used to death and have had occasion to close the eyes of the dead in those white-painted hospital wards where I spent my youth, while thinking of other things besides the bodies decomposing there, in front of me. What do you expect? It’s professional detachment, and leaves no room for the fear of the end. But Émilie’s death shook me badly. It was barbaric.

  One day in March, Irimia came looking for me at the hotel, asking me to find a bed in my ward for Émilie, who was pregnant and would soon give birth.

  —All right, Irimia. But is that what you really need now? Kids? Why didn’t you take care of it when there was time?

  Irimia seemed not to understand. He looked at me, confused, and when he understood that I was talking about an abortion made the sign of the cross automatically. I wasn’t involved with obstetrics at Trousseau, but I told Irimia that I’d make arrangements through the management and try to get the necessary bed. And indeed, it was sorted out within two days. The intern in maternity was a friend of mine and promised to take good care of Émilie. As for myself, when I wasn’t on duty and had a break from my own patients I went across to ward 18, to lend a hand.

  I was certain from the moment I brought Émilie in that she would not leave there alive. I had never seen such a pregnancy. It wasn’t abnormal, clinically speaking; her vital signs were fine and she was a good patient. But her entire body was misshapen. An enormous belly, her limbs heavy and projecting stiffly from her body. Her breathing was labored and sometimes her eyes rolled upward in their sockets, like a goose that’s been force-fed. That lumpy body that creaked like an unoiled pulley. That asymmetrical body, without the reflexes required to carry within it another body, a child! It was an absurdity, a physical impossibility. Émilie—for whom picking up a glass of water and setting it down in a different place was a balancing act—now had to give birth to a child! Her rigid body would have had to yield to the infant’s struggling within, to surrender to its blind wormlike writhing.

  It was butchery. She lay like an overturned barrel. If she could have twisted about she might have suffered less, and might have made it, possibly. But no, she lay rigid in the bed and looked up at us from there with anxious, beseeching eyes, like a drowning dog. From time to time she screamed and her howls could be heard from afar, through the main wards, just as the lowing of slaughtered cattle must be heard in abattoirs. We considered getting the forceps ready but the head doctor, whom I’d brought to the patient’s bedside, would not permit it. He said she was finished in any case. It went on for three days and nights. Irimia, whom I wanted to send away, remained there by his wife’s bed throughout and stubbornly resisted my entreaties. I’d never seen such determination. He sat still, saying nothing, not even sighing, looking sometimes at me and sometimes at Émilie and waiting.

  On the third night, at three a.m., she gave birth to a baby girl. Irimia took her from my hands. He brought her close to a light, gazed at her, then gave her to one of the nurses and went away to get some sleep. When I returned next day to the hospital, he was at Émilie’s bedside. She was in agony. She’d been hemorrhaging badly from early morning and septicemia had set in. She was snoring. Seeing me, Irimia put his finger to his lips to tell me to be quiet.

  —She’s on the mend now, he said. She’s made it through.

  I didn’t have the courage to reply. Misinterpreting the grave look on my face, he continued:

  —That thing she’s doing with her mouth? It’s nothing: it’s just a tic. Then, unable to contain his pride at being a father: “A little girl? What do you say to that? Have you seen what a beauty she is? Come see her.” And he dragged me after him, into a nearby ward.

  Émilie died toward evening on the following day. I don’t know who closed her eyes. We buried her one bright, sunny morning at the end of March. It was warm and I went out without my overcoat, smiling in that white spring light. On the way there, flower girls were setting out little bouquets of lilies of the valley for a franc each and I bought them all up in memory of Émilie. Irimia wore his formal black coat, the same one he’d worn nine months earlier at his wedding. Mado was in a corner of the cemetery, as I’d never seen her before, looking distraught and crying like a child, convulsively, and when she spotted me from afar she smiled at me through her tears. She was a nice, sentimental sort of girl.

  ONE

  Your sudden declaration yesterday both surprised and troubled me. I wasn’t expecting it, believe me. I was certain that things were clear-cut and unambiguous between us and on those occasions when I leaned on your shoulder (though this gesture always infuriates Andrei) I did it in a friendly, whimsical fashion, almost without realizing I was doing it, just like so many other gestures of familiarity.

  So why have you turned out like the rest of them? Allow me to reprimand you. You deserve it and I’ll also enjoy administering it. And don’t for a second interpret my silence and my abrupt exit from the ball as the indignation of an outraged woman. I’m old already, though you don’t want to believe that, and I’ve heard the words you spoke last night so many times before—in other circumstances, perhaps in other variants—that such an occurrence no longer strikes me as curious and I take it with a lighthearted shrug. Yes, lighthearted.

  So don’t curse me for having frowned at you yesterday. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just think our wonderful friendship could have done without this accident and that your loving me or wishing to love me or thinking you love me is an unnecessary complication in a relationship which I value and for a long time believed possible. Look, you’ve done such a job of messing things up that I wonder if it’s prudent to tell you I was fond of you and always looked forward tremendously to your visits. You’re an idiot—that’s what you are!

  Yesterday, when you’d finished talking, I suddenly felt that something was over, had got too complicated, and it annoyed me so much I felt I could no longer stay in that ballroom and I asked Andrei to take me home, though I knew this would bother him, as he’d been deep in conversation with Suzy Ioaniu and was probably hoping to dance the night away with her. (It only occurred to me later that Andrei might have thought I was making a jealous scene by leaving early, thereby indirectly flattering Suzy, which of course upset me, but it was too late to fix that and in the end it didn’t really matter anyway. To tell the tr
uth, tearing them apart might even have given me some satisfaction.)

  Now, let’s be straight with each other, like two sensible people. The Brailowski concert is on at the Atheneum on Monday evening and, as neither of us would miss it (at least I hope you won’t be so foolish), we’ll see each other there. Well, I don’t want us to be afraid to shake hands, or to be glancing sideways at each other, or having awkward conversations about the weather, with the feeling that we have a secret. On the contrary. At the end of the concert I want you, just as before, to offer to see me home. I think I’ll be on my own because, as you know, Andrei doesn’t like music and in any case on Monday evening he’ll be at Suzy’s, rehearsing a sketch for the revue for Prince Mircea in which he, Andrei, plays the king of tango.

  It’s hard, perhaps, to explain ourselves and I wonder if I have the courage to write this letter to the end, but I can’t, I truly can’t, burden my already overcomplicated life with yet another secret, yet another strange situation. In my little world, you are the only man I can speak freely with and I don’t plan to lose that. Sometimes I—accustomed as I am to the little lies I and others tell—have a longing for sincerity that brings me to tears. I feel smothered by all the little compromises my life is made of and it makes me want to fight back—uselessly, foolishly—by telling once and for all the truth, the whole truth, holding nothing back, indifferent to whatever might happen next. Sometimes, toward evening, when you came and had tea with me, I didn’t plan to speak to you about it. But you’re a logical gentleman and your replies put me off. You know, if at times I seized the chance to offer you the box of cigarettes or the plate with cookies, though you already had a cigarette and some cakes, I performed these useless gestures in order to change the subject or resist the temptation to.