—These fellows are going to do well someday, I mused.
—Maybe, said Arabela, noncommittally. It was plainly all the same to her.
I pressed on stubbornly:
—They’re missing just one thing: you. Up there, on your silk swing, doing nothing, displaying yourself and smiling—you were the poetry in their trapeze act. Their useless flower. Even a director of genius wouldn’t have come up with such an amazing detail.
I said this to probe her or tease her or perhaps just to exercise my old instinct for meanness. But I certainly wasn’t mistaken, and, looking at those photographs, I realized that their act did lack a female presence, just as a ring might lack a gem.
Arabela heard me out, then took my arm and blew me a kiss as if to say reproachfully, Now, let’s be serious and forget all that nonsense.
I don’t really know why all these insignificant details are coming back to me now. I pass the time trying to remember them, the way you might try to reconstitute a game of chess you’d played. Probably they have nothing to do with what happened later and it wasn’t these little incidents that caused us to break up. Rather, it was something simpler and yet harder to explain. Something that bore a striking similarity to how our love began and which might be called an affair, if such an expression could be applied to Arabela, with her childlike mentality.
Many strange things passed us by and we let them go, loving each other on the final day just as we did on the first, in the same gentle state of voluptuousness in which everything felt familiar, like the eternal taste of bread. This can go on for a year or two or ten…Or it can end at any moment. Splitting up? It happened so simply that, if I consider it very honestly, I’d find it more important to talk about the green coat Arabela wore during our first winter together or about her black dress with the yellow collar (the one that made her look much taller and made her skin pale and smooth) than to talk about how we split up.
It was in Geneva, at the beginning of September. We’d gone there to open the entertainment season in the casino’s theater while two hundred paces away, at the League of Nations, Aristide Briand was opening the diplomatic season. That passionate autumn when the project of the United States of Europe was first discussed, in a frivolous celebratory atmosphere, and I’m not exaggerating if I say that Arabela’s presence contributed to it greatly, as it was de rigueur for the foreign ministers to gather at nine, in their boxes, at our concert.
Dazzling mornings by the lake, the fluttering white dresses at Quai Wilson, the reporters besieging the Hotel des Bergues, the photographers lining the streets in the hope of snapping somebody famous…It was idyllic, as idyllic and relaxing as a piece of operetta.
One morning, on the quay, somebody shouted at us from behind. It was a young man who’d just jumped off a passing tram. We were on the lakefront, enjoying watching a group of English girls playing water polo. Arabela was laughing freely, the sun on her face. We turned around in surprise and at first she didn’t recognize Beb, now right next to us and embarrassed by his own overexcitement at seeing her again.
—Well, Beb, said Arabela, without raising her voice. “You’ve changed, Beb: you’re looking well. But you’re still missing a button on your waistcoat. You’ll fix it this evening, won’t you? Do!”
Yes, Beb had certainly changed. He wasn’t as pale as before, and he looked taller and fitter. He wore a gray summer suit, and in that bright September sunlight, there was something extremely juvenile in his surprise and excitement. He explained briefly that he was only in Geneva for a few days, passing through. He had to leave that evening for Montreux, where Sam and Jef were waiting for him: they had an excellent booking.
—Dik? asked Arabela.
—We lost him four months ago in Algiers and haven’t heard from him since.
—And the rest of you?
—Fine. Success, money. Arabela, if only you knew how well we’ve been doing. I told you back then that big things were waiting for us. You remember, back when you left.
He spoke quickly, animatedly, with his hands in his pockets to stop himself from gesticulating, walking half a pace in front of us so that he could look in Arabela’s eyes. He was as giddy as a schoolboy and I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t refrain from asking him, sympathetically, like a friend:
—Tell me the truth, Beb. Do you still love Arabela?
He answered straight back, lifting his chin with a certain haughtiness, but with goodwill:
—Yes!
—You’re talking nonsense, the two of you, said Arabela. “Let’s go and get something to eat.”
Beb took the evening train for Montreux, and we went to do our usual nine o’clock show. I was very relaxed as I put on my suit. It would be nonsense to say I had any kind of presentiment. I sat at the piano and looked at Arabela and told myself, as I did every evening, that she wasn’t beautiful and couldn’t sing, and then accompanied her earthy voice with the same astonishment and profound peace, and it made me so melancholy, like ten slim fingers combing through memory and forgetfulness. After the show we went for a late walk along the quay. A cold wind of uncertain season blew down from the mountain, too hard to be a summer breeze, too gentle to be autumnal.
—It must be good now, up there in our room, said Arabela, leaning on the guardrail, facing the lake, squeezing my arm hard.
We went slowly up the hotel stairway, deliberately dragging out our steps, knowing that a good night awaited us, and indeed we made love then, unhurriedly, attentively, entrusting ourselves to that moment of embrace and listening to the circles of silence expanding about us in the dark.
I think that even the slightest misunderstanding that might still have remained between our bodies must have dissipated then in the closeness of that night. In the darkness, she lay like a little sleepy animal, and her smile was warm. Perhaps that was why I wasn’t shocked the next morning when, as I was waiting for her in the lobby, I saw her coming down the stairs toward me, beckoning me with a wave, and she said, as though asking what time it was:
—What would you say, Stefan, if I ran off with Beb?
—I don’t know, sweetheart. I think it would be complicated, with the theater here. We have a contract…
—I’d sort that out…
—All right! Let’s try then!
I accompanied her to the station after lunch. All she took was a single, small case she could carry by hand. The rest of her things were being sent on. We made small talk until the train came, then we shook hands undramatically, with complete mutual understanding.
—Put your coat on if it gets cold in the evening, Stefan. It gets very cool down on the lakeshore!
It was five, getting on toward evening. I walked into town and bought the papers on the way to see what had happened that morning at the League of Nations. There had been heated debates.
MIHAIL SEBASTIAN was born in Romania in 1907 as Iosif Mendel Hechter. He worked as a lawyer and writer until anti-Semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, he was killed in a road accident in early 1945 as he was crossing the street to teach his first class. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years, was published to great acclaim in the late 1990s. His novel For Two Thousand Years was published in English in 2016.
PHILIP Ó CEALLAIGH is a writer as well as a translator. In 2006 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His two short-story collections, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day, were short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He lives in Bucharest.
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Women Page 13
