Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  “I’m dear to some. I’m dear to my child.”

  “Yes you are.”

  There was no way to ask him to be her comrade again if only for a few minutes, only long enough to assure her that she was not someone who deserved to be left, not untouchable, not like the millions of untouchables, way over on the other side of the world.

  “Ilona?”

  “Can I come over? When it’s daylight, I mean?” Never had she begged for anything from anybody. Unless, without knowing it, she had begged the very air, all her life.

  “So early?”

  “I mean in the morning. I need to tell you something.” She didn’t know yet, herself, what it was she had to tell him.

  He was waiting.

  “I mean when I come. I need to tell you something when I come.”

  He said nothing, reluctantly waiting for that something to be laid upon him.

  “Please tell me how to get there.”

  When it was over she bent her head to the floor, covering her eyes to hide herself away from the woman’s sight of her, from her sight of the woman lying in his bed, her body covered with that shimmer of bliss that had covered her own in the past.

  9

  The long view of Market Street on a Sunday morning, the trolleys few and far between and only two and three people in sight, moving slowly through the heat of yesterday and of the day to come and through pale sunlight not yet reflected on glass and metal, an odd light like that of the first minutes of an eclipse. Waiting on the corner for a trolley that would take her into his neighborhood, she was again a trespasser into other people’s lives, someone who insists upon saying something about the self regardless of the hour.

  The clanging trolley carrying her along was like her own ridiculous will. Unassuming people should always be suspect. Sooner or later, when the time comes, their will takes over, their unanswerable desires take over. She kept her head bent with the shame of this tumult over the end of love. It happened to almost everybody, it was as widespread as other misfortunes, but it was the one to keep quiet about.

  When she stepped down from the trolley it was just as he had described it to her—she was facing west, facing a steep hill, and just as expected her heart was a tyrant terrified of itself. The climb up the hill was as tiring as it would be if the day were already over. At the top of the hill, on a corner, there it was—a gray frame house, small among the houses and apartments that covered the hill.

  Where was the front door? There, at the end of an archway of dusty, flowering shrubbery, and she imagined the woman passing along under this arbor, coming and going.

  “I won’t stay long.” Not long, only long enough to plunge them into everything unanswerable from where it took forever to rise.

  He kissed her on the lips, perhaps to placate her, perhaps to pretend he was glad to see her, unseeing of how his kiss deprived her of him.

  Off in a kitchen he fixed tea while she stayed in the living room by a window, afraid to turn toward the room, immobilized by the presence of the woman for whom the house and all its objects were familiar. The woman was the atmosphere of the house. She wondered if she had forgotten to comb her hair or wash her face. Was there some gray in her hair she’d discover when she got home? If you bow your head for so many years over your endless unknowing, over your imagination that substitutes for knowing, then how surprised you are, when you lift your head, to find yourself older than when you began.

  The interior of this house was to puzzle her memory for years. It was a small house but like a maze where experiments are carried on with animals—a reward somewhere, you had only to find it. She was never to get the scheme of it straight, where one room belonged in relation to another.

  Each waited for the other’s first words, one mind in fear of the other, and the moment she sat down to accept a cup the unspeakable self spoke up. “I can’t be like her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Then she was up and roving, leaving untouched the teacup that the woman drank from. “I can’t be like her, I can’t be serene like her. You told me I was troubled in my soul, you made me feel like I had something you didn’t want to catch, but most of the time I was calm, most of the time we were comrades, most of the time we felt love. If there’s trouble in me, and there is trouble, it’s the nameless kind that’s all right to feel because I’m human and I feel, and it’s not just over me, it’s over so much more than me.”

  Her voice was loud and harsh, a voice not her own and yet her own but never heard before. So many times, people had to bend their heads to hear her, afraid they’d been stricken deaf. Then she heard that voice say something she herself would never say. “Oh I wish I were her!”

  It was shameful, it should never be said and never even thought—the wish to be somebody else. The wish to be that other woman was a betrayal of everyone in her life whose life seemed entrusted to her for safekeeping, even if only in memory, a betrayal of everyone whose life was more precious to her than her own. The wish to be that other, any other, was to abandon them.

  In a corner now, cornered by her own self, she was saying something she couldn’t believe she was saying, so archaic, so demented, so lost was its meaning. “You’re among the blessed ones now, you know.”

  Nobody thought that way anymore, and she waited for his denial that would relieve her of the idea, relieve him and herself of the burden of it. She waited for a small, scoffing, uncomfortable laugh, at least.

  A wind, stirred up by the heat of the days and nights, swept the curtains out over the sills, and a door in another house slammed shut, a distant sound warning of listeners. That voice of hers saying crazy things might be heard by whoever was in the apartment house across the street, by whoever was passing along the sidewalk. He shut the windows and pulled down the white blinds, and went into other rooms to do the same.

  A white glare filled the room now, and she was to remember herself roving through that glare in the heat of the day, trapped by her own self within that house she was never to enter again, within rooms that would puzzle her memory like a maze.

  When he came back into the room where she waited in her corner, he had an answer for her. “Maybe I am among the blessed.”

  At the front door she had seen at a glance that his face was mute, a mask concealing his life from her, and she had avoided glancing at him again. But now she looked to see if he were agreeing with her only because he hadn’t heard it right. She had wanted him not to agree with her. Nobody was blessed and nobody abandoned. The world wasn’t like that.

  “Maybe I belong where I was before.”

  Where was that? Was it where he had thought he was when he was with her? Was it among all those in the dark?

  Though the room was between them, he was too near. A door was open to another room and she went in. A bed covered with a sea-blue spread. A bureau with two silver candlesticks, the white candles burned low. On a chair a woman’s silk kimono, pale green and amber and garnet, mingling in exquisite harmony, the woman’s own colors. Tonight he would recover from this day. She left the room the moment she entered it.

  In the doorway she was caught by him and embraced, and in his body against hers she felt that same ebbing away of his strength, that same bafflement over a woman’s coercive need of him just as on that night his wife had gone into the waves at his doorstep, and she longed to embrace him and protect him from herself, the enigma that was herself.

  “Sit down with me,” he begged.

  She went with him to the couch but she would not sit down with him. An unbending will had taken possession of her body. She stood above him, and he drew her between his knees and bowed his head against her. Someone years ago had seen in her some goodness of heart, even some beauty of spirit, and only now was she remembering. Was it this man? And had he told her not in words so much as in his embrace of her?

  “My heart wakes me all night long,” she told him.

  “My heart wakes me too.”

  She hadn’t expected t
hat.

  “Nobody but you makes me cry,” he said.

  What did that mean? If she had come to be told that, yes, she was a good person, yes, comprehending of the lovers despite the trouble she was giving them, if she had come to be told this, was he telling her that her striving to be wise was enough to make him weep, so futile was that striving?

  She broke away. Flowering plants, ferns in humid air—a conservatory? No, it was only a small room next to the kitchen. A bare table, a mug of cold coffee, a few crumbs. The windowpanes were rattling in the warm wind and a fly was crawling along the sills and tapping against the hot glass. It was really a modest kind of house. But when the woman sat here at this table, the flow of morning sun, patterned with the shadows of leaves, must appear like a lovely scarf floating around her, and he would paint her as Bonnard would have painted her, her hair ablaze with sun, and summer fruit on the table. Back in his rooms by the ocean the walls had glowed with museum prints—portraits of women who had mesmerized the artists years ago, centuries ago, and when he had lain asleep beside her those women had seemed to be the women in his dreams or all icons of one woman.

  A door led to the backyard, and Martin stepped out into the wind and the sun. She watched him through the window as he knelt to set a plant upright. One sundown, out on the cold stretch of beach, they had come upon a shorebird whose wings were covered with oil. A few days before, fuel oil spilled from a tanker and hundreds of birds were dying. He had knelt and clasped the bird in his strong, gentle hands though it pecked at his hands with its long sharp beak, and they had taken it to a bird refuge to be cleansed. Watching him kneeling now to attend to a living thing, she saw how he could be mesmerized by a woman’s desire for more of life, for him, and by his own desire for more life.

  The boughs of a tree in the next yard hung over the high fence between the yards, and she sat down in their shadows that were swept back and forth across the grass. She was always surprised by gardens in the city. This one was a tangle of dry grass, tomato plants, and geraniums. From over the fence drifted the sweet, lulling music of glass windchimes hanging from a branch. Years back, in her neighborhood of bungalows on the edge of Los Angeles, glass windchimes hung on the front porch of a bungalow where something violent had gone on, the nature of it kept from her, a child. The bungalow was empty, no one lived there after that, but the windchimes went on tinkling, stirred by the slightest breeze.

  Martin sat down beside her in the confusion of sun and shade, and stroked her hands. “Your hands are beautiful.” They were not, the knuckles and fanlike bones too visible. Some caresses of hers that had conveyed to him her sight of beauty in his own being—he might mean that.

  “Who are the ones you say are blessed?”—his voice carried away by the wind and back again.

  “I just suppose they are”—her voice her own again. “You have to see that my mind isn’t altogether gone.”

  “Who do you suppose they are?”

  She lay down on the coarse, dry grass. “Nobody is.”

  But something comic about his request for simple answers freed her to consider who they might be. Once again she let herself believe that simple answers were always hovering around and she had only to catch one on the wing.

  “Explorers, I guess. Where nobody’s been before, each one in his chosen territory. Even though they go so high or so deep they can’t breathe anymore. They might be.”

  She didn’t know what she was talking about and she didn’t want to look up and see his listening face. She could see only his shirt and how the shadows and sun moved across it in quick succession.

  “Go on.”

  “I guess great singers.” They would do as well as any.

  “Could you speak a little louder?”

  “I said great singers.”

  “I heard that so far.”

  “Say a great soprano, and the audience stands up and applauds for a long time, and you’re standing up with the rest and as the applause goes on and on you notice you’ve got tears in your eyes. Say you’re up in the balcony and you can see the rest of the audience below and you can see the little figure on the stage, and her head is bowed.”

  No answer, no comment. He must be giving it serious thought.

  “Or say a great composer. What if you’d heard Beethoven play the piano, his own music? A friend of his said that his bearing was masterfully quiet, noble, and beautiful. You’d feel you were in the presence of someone blessed, wouldn’t you?”

  “I hear,” he said.

  “But if he was blessed he didn’t know it. In one of his bad times he wrote to a friend ‘A man may not voluntarily part with his life so long as a good deed remains for him to perform.’ Maybe he didn’t know his good deed was his music. Or maybe he knew it but not all the time.”

  She glanced up to see him nod because she knew he wasn’t going to do more than nod.

  After a while, “Who else?”

  Who else? Who else? The number had to be small.

  “I missed that one.”

  “No, I said nothing.” Lost as it was out there in the wind, her voice wanted to retreat still farther to its usual refuge that was silence.

  “Maybe those desert fathers. They stayed in their caves, they starved themselves. When one of them was given a gift of sweet grapes, he passed it on. It went all around and came back to the giver, not one grape missing. They wanted nothing, they wanted nobody around but God. Maybe they were blessed. Or maybe they just wanted to be. I don’t know. I never tried to name any before.”

  “Go on anyway.”

  Go on anyway. “Would you say those persons who give their lives for others? The ones who spend their whole lives that way because it is their life. Even though they die for others, even though they’re executed or assassinated. Would you say they are?”

  No answer. Only a waiting silence.

  “A while ago I was looking at a book about the Spanish architect, Antonio Gaudí. Could he be one?”

  Almost impatiently, “How do I know?”

  “Everybody loved him. The whole country. He was like a saintly child, he was so deeply religious. One evening he was on his way home from the cathedral he’d designed and he was struck down by a trolley car and he lay there in the street, an old man in old clothes, and nobody knew who he was, and no taxi driver would take him to the hospital. They thought he was just a derelict. Somebody got him to a hospital and he was put in the paupers’ ward, where he died. By then friends had gone in search of him and then everybody knew who he was, this poor old man with snow-white hair, and cries of sorrow went up all over Spain.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Astronomers?”

  “You’re the one who’s picking.”

  “Astronomers, I guess. Like Galileo, like Copernicus. Can you imagine how they felt? Their heads filled with those great aerial charts? The planets spinning around the sun in there? When you see their portraits all you see is their faces, but when you think about what was going on inside their heads, they must have felt blessed, don’t you think so?”

  The rough grass against her face was suddenly unbearable. “I remember something Michelangelo said about human beauty, how it seemed to him that God revealed his beauty that way and so it’s an outward sign of spiritual beauty. No matter that I know for sure it’s not so, it seems so. It seems true because it’s so simple and because Michelangelo said it. But isn’t it a terrible blindness to everyone else in the world?” She sat up. “No, I can’t anymore. I don’t know who is blessed or who isn’t. It’s a waste.”

  “No great writers? The long dead ones?”

  “They could be.”

  “They wouldn’t agree they were blessed.”

  “No, I guess they wouldn’t agree. I remember an old German book of pictures of the death masks of great artists and composers and writers from all over Europe, and the faces of the composers and the sculptors seemed serene, as if they were on their way to Paradise, but the faces of the writers were tormented.” />
  She brought her knees up and bent her head to them, closing her eyes, wanting not to see him. It was absurd, this pursuit of something always elusive—an answer to why there was so much light around the few, even centuries after they were last seen on earth, and why the rest went down in the dark.

  “Ilona?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Do you think they were blessed?”

  “Maybe everybody thought they were just because they tried to rescue people—us, everybody—from oblivion. Maybe the rescue was an ordeal for them because they knew in their hearts it wouldn’t work after all. I remember about Chekhov, his long, long journey across Russia and Siberia to that island, Sakhalin, where the czars sent convicts. He was tubercular, he was already coughing blood, but he made that journey—floods, awful rains, cold—to record what went on there, who they were. He wrote that the street noise there was the clanking of leg irons.”

  Silence. Then, “No more?”

  At last, and against the most resistance. “Lovers. In the beginning.”

  “Ilona, where do you come from?”

  He began to stroke her hair consolingly as if she were a lunatic quieted down, and she wished she had kept her cumbrous delusion from this man who no longer cared to hear even the lighter ones.

  10

  The blinds changed from sunstruck white to mauve to gray. A streetlamp on the corner came on and the blinds changed to silver. In those hours the woman he loved now, the woman who resembled those portraits on the walls of night, back in his basement rooms by the ocean, seemed to be wandering the street, away and near again, and some moments so far away she might be lost out there forever. The kimono had been put away, he had slipped it away without her seeing how. Instead of a lessening of desire for him because she had become less, she felt desire as intense as in the beginning of their time together, a desire that was like the desire for life that flares up and takes possession in moments of danger.

  They slept, and when she woke she was certain it was late, almost midnight. It was only evening. Seven, by the clock on the bureau. Martin was awake, lying on his back, very still.