Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  Her vision slipped here and there, first to the last passage and then to the first, her eyes trembling with all they had seen away from home.

  It was a day like all the other days. I had need to look up a date for the memoirs I was then writing. I had asked her for the key to the secretary in her room where my letters were put away. . . . Suddenly I saw her become very pale. In an effort that made her lips tremble, she told me that the drawer was empty and that my letters had ceased to exist.

  What did his wife say then?

  After you left, I found myself all alone again in the big house you were forsaking, with no one on whom to lean, without knowing what to do, what to become. . . . I first thought that nothing remained but to die. Yes, truly, I thought that my heart was ceasing to beat. . . . I burned your letters in order to do something. Before destroying them I reread them all, one by one. . . . They were my most precious belonging.

  And he, what did he do then?

  For a solid week I wept.

  Ilona laid her head down on the open book. What did Martin hope for these underlined passages? Did he hope to persuade her not to forget or deform or destroy whatever he had entrusted to her of himself? Did he hope to persuade her of his love though he wasn’t around anymore to confirm it? If she fell asleep where she was, not moving a muscle, without any objection from any part of her body, would her sleep be like a promise to him that she would do no harm, neither to him nor to herself nor to love, and would her promise be sensed by him, enabling him to sleep through the night beside the woman, serenely?

  19

  Every day, the entire day, she wandered the city, walking miles through neighborhoods where she had never been, hoping that when she returned to the apartment the lovers would be gone and she would be alone again, alone with all those beings in her imagination who were waiting to exist, waiting to be given faces, desires, personal trinkets, foibles, failings, aches and pains, waiting to be given voices, sacred silences, waiting to rescue her, their rescuer. But the lovers were always there when she returned, and out in the city, wherever she went, she was afraid that by some trick of fate she would encounter them, they would appear, strolling out from a shop, from a café, and she would be face to face with them, inescapably.

  One day she saw the woman again. It happened in an Italian café not far from her apartment. Ilona was inside, sitting at one of the small round tables and facing the door. She chose to sit facing the door because if she sat with her back to the door the lovers might enter without recognizing her. The place was fragrant with coffee and steamed milk and pastries. The day was warm, the door open, and she began to hear the voices around her after so long a time of hearing only his voice and her own in memory, repeating their last words to each other. Obsession wears itself out or wears out its prey, the self—one and the same, and then the world around begins to make itself known again like a person returning after twenty years away, brimming with his own life. Then the woman was in the doorway, her little boy at her side, the woman she had seen only one evening and who, since then, she saw everywhere.

  The patrons in the café faded away, along with their voices, along with the world. Then the woman saw her, their eyes met, and the wound opened unbearably wide because the woman’s eyes must look into his while they loved, the woman’s eyes were like a stage where all her life went on for him to see. The man who came up beside her wasn’t Martin, but the wound was not to be healed simply because Martin was elsewhere, even if he were never to lie in love again with this woman, even if he were to love a thousand others and forget this one. Ilona saw the man frown when the woman told him she had changed her mind about this café. Only a fraction of a minute had passed, he had locked the car in that time or stopped to glance into a shop window, and what could have caused her in so short a time to refuse to enter this place? He glanced around at the patrons, at Ilona, and found no one to suspect, no one he had seen before and no one to remember.

  When Ilona looked up again they were gone. So close a resemblance between the woman and the man beside her—she saw it clearly now. The man was the brother whom Claud had told her about, a sculptor living in Italy, in Florence, and on his rapid way to fame. They were brother and sister reflecting each other’s beauty. Years later, when Martin and the woman were married and living in Florence, Ilona was to dream of the three, the woman, her brother, and Martin, sitting side by side on a bench in a marble rotunda, the woman between the men, precious to them, protected by their love. They were troubled, they were waiting for a verdict, a parting—Ilona didn’t know what. She was barred from their lives. She saw only that Martin and the woman were holding hands, fingers entwined, she saw that their love was deepened by sorrow, and she tried to pry their fingers apart, waking herself with a harsh cry of despair over herself, over who she had become—desirous denier, scourge.

  Before she went out into the streets she gave them enough time to leave the neighborhood, and then she found the streets as unfamiliar as those in another city. It was as if she belonged nowhere, as if this city, this part of the earth was no longer accessible, as if the earth itself belonged now to the woman and to her brother and to Martin. She got lost deliberately, wandering until evening, afraid to enter the apartment because the lovers, waiting there, would seem more enduring than ever.

  Above the narrow passageway the little green globe was lit, casting a patina over the bank of mailboxes all alike. A letter from her child was waiting for her. Climbing the stairs, she began to read by the light of the large, dim globe that hung above the courtyard, fascinated by the foreign envelope, by the handwriting, like a provincial who has never received a letter in her whole life.

  Dearest Mother,

  First of all I am perfectly well and hope you will tell me you are too. If you ever wake up in the middle of the night, I hope you remember to tell yourself you blessed me, so you can go back to sleep. One night you must have done just that. It was when we got lost, John and I, because he was in so much of a rush to start up into the mountains before the monsoons came. He got careless about the trails, he was in such a hurry, and we ended up high in the mountains but not where we should have been. It was beautiful even though we were lost. We camped on the shore of a Hindu sacred lake. There was a mist over the lake until sunset when the mist lifted and we saw how incredibly blue it was. It’s hard to describe that blue. It was either a deep blue or a light blue, because the lake was so clear and reflective and deep. We were camped in a stone hut and we’d been out of food for three days. We built a fire and got rid of the leeches on us. We took off our clothes and hung them on a pole over the smoke, and the leeches dropped off, and we stood close to the fire and pulled the leeches off each other. That night I thought We’re going to be all right because my mother just woke up and remembered she blessed me. Of course the time was different because of the time zones, but that didn’t matter. The next day we hiked over the pass and weak, weak, weak, we came down through a forest fragrant with vanilla and into a valley covered with mist, where we heard bells and knew we were safe. We came to a hut and two boys were in there and they gave us eggs and yogurt and yak-butter tea. They directed us to their aunt’s house in the village, where we could stay for the night. On our way down to the village we met a hippie washing his clothes in the stream. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Harvey. I’m from New York.” So you see, we weren’t lost anymore.

  When we were up in the mountains we couldn’t see the farther mountains because a mist was over everything, the way it is before the monsoons, but for about five minutes the mist parted and we saw those terribly high peaks far in the distance, and the wind was whipping long snow banners off the tops. We were really high, we had to take slow steps, the oxygen was so thin.

  I am back now in Swayambhu in our little house, two stories, with a view of the Kathmandu valley as the storms blow in. The windows are only latticework and open to the night air, and I burn Chinese mosquito coils to keep the monsters out. Below the window is a water buffalo and I
brush my teeth and spit on his back. He doesn’t seem to mind. I walk around the hill to the springs for our water, which I carry in an earthenware jug. Except Tuesdays when it’s men’s day. Nearby is a Buddhist temple on top of a mount, with the eyes of Buddha painted on the walls. Sacred temple monkeys with crazy faces live in the trees on the mount. The priests wear orange robes and walk around the mount, spinning their prayer wheels. The prayer wheels are silver cylinders and inscribed on them are the words Om Mane Padme Hum, something like that, and the priests say these words as they go around, and the words go up to heaven.

  Mother, you ought to come here. You said it would be like a rite of passage for me and you made it possible for me to come here. You said you weren’t ready yet for your rite of passage. You said you’d have to invent your own. Mother, you are a contrary person, like you used to call me. But I love you with all my heart, whoever you are.

  I guess Martin is back by now, so kiss him for me and ask him how it feels to be a celebrity.

  Your blessed child,

  Antonia

  On the landing she finished reading the letter by the light from the evening sky and then it seemed that the same light, the same hour lay over the entire world, just as it had seemed on those summer evenings when she had taken the deepening blue as a promise that someday she would find herself far away from the stucco bungalow. For a moment now the earth was hers to know, even as it was known to everyone to whom the earth with all its wonders appeared to belong. A child out in the world can do that for you, can bring you to belong in the world yourself. With the key in the lock, with her hand on the key, she bowed her head against the door that she must open.

  20

  Like Martin’s place by the ocean, this cottage on the sand trembled with resonance from the deep waters at its doorstep. She felt it at once. If the ocean were to rise up suddenly, a level rising with no warning, or if it were to come thundering over, the way Claud had described it that night of the party, not much of a house would be lost. Years after her year in that little house it was washed out to sea, the first house to go because it was the farthest out, and no trace was left, no fragments were swept up against the other houses built on sand. High tides, high winds, the winds piling up the water, a full moon at its closest point to earth, a point called perigee, and the earth at its closest approach to the sun—all forces joined together to sweep it away.

  Claud carried in her possessions from his car. Offering the cottage to her for the year his former wife was to be away, he had described Ilona’s move as a step into the world, but anyone who had ever roamed the world or crossed an ocean would laugh at the distance she’d come, only twenty miles north from the city, around the same mountain whose one side at night was ornamented with lights and whose side facing the sea was densely dark.

  Wandering the small rooms through the horizontal light from the setting sun, she knew she had chosen to come to this place so that the constant presence of the lovers in her being, as implacable as figures in a dream and who would demolish her if she stayed any longer in that dream, might be overcome by the reality of the ocean. And she knew that her fear of the night ocean was to wake her even on calm nights and that she would switch on a lamp by her bed and lie in light for a little while. Lamplight in the middle of the night always seemed to emanate from the other side of the earth, come from elsewhere to keep her safe.

  Claud came into the bedroom where she was sitting on the floor, glancing through the record albums she had found in the closet. The music was opera, the faces of the celebrated singers on the covers like masks laden with cosmetics and fate.

  “She thinks she’s an opera singer,” he said. “I mean she is an opera singer but she’s usually in the chorus. Once in a while she gets to sing a few words by herself. She likes it out here, she strolls along the sand singing above the din and everybody thinks she’s crazy. Her voice isn’t beautiful enough to compensate for everything that’s wrong in her life. I wish it were.”

  The bedroom was almost bare, the bed not quite a full bed, too narrow for a husband also but just right for a lover, a night or two. On the chest of drawers was a framed snapshot of Claud at the age of twenty or so—barefoot on a lawn, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans.

  “Some of my stuff is here,” he said. “There’s a little bit of me under the bed. When I left I thought if my valuables were under there it would be like I was there, and if she had a lover in her bed, I could hear them. She’d like that.”

  From under the bed he pulled out the same sort of grocery box she’d found in her brother’s room, the universal grocery box, and the grating sound of sand came along with it. He sat down on the floor beside her and brought up a pair of bronze-plated baby shoes.

  “They don’t do this anymore,” he said, weighing the shoes in one hand. “It’s like I died at the age of one.”

  A wristwatch, the crystal badly scratched, his initials and the year of his graduation from high school engraved on the back. A battered book next.

  “The name of the kid in here is Diamond. He sleeps in a stable loft and he has spells of delirium, and every time he’s delirious he goes off in the arms of the north wind, who’s a great big woman. That’s the way I remember it, but it might not be that way.” Over the inside of the cover, a drawing of a marvelously large woman, her hair flowing and rippling across the sky, and in her arms a very small, very thin boy. “She carries him off on excursions and the last time she doesn’t bring him back. See, here’s my name in the properly rounded letters, and my age. Claud McCormack, nine years old. This stuff, this watch, this book, these adorable shoes, I found in my mother’s garage. The rest of the stuff, I’m to blame.”

  Up from the box a blue shirt, mottled with sweat and fuel oil. A pair of unwashed gray socks, holes in the toes and heels. A black wallet, split along the seams, and another wallet, yellow leather embossed with the Aztec calendar. A jockstrap. A half-smoked cigarette in an empty box of matches.

  “My last cigarette.”

  A dozen and more ballpoint pens in a bundle, bound around with a rubber band. A mailbox, the kind that hangs on a wall, its coat of green paint flaked away. A red toothbrush, bristles flattened.

  “All this junk, I’ve been saving it with a purpose in mind. It’s for that librarian who used to beg me for mementos of my life. Unless he’s forgotten how he used to desire me. Some university library—Sore Neck, Nebraska, or Hang Dog, Georgia, I can’t remember which. Anybody who’s ever got one paltry word in print hears from him. He wants to embalm the writer’s spirit. That’s his word, embalm, not mine. You’ve sent him something?”

  “I need it myself.”

  “Ilona, send him something. It might be the only way you’ll be remembered. He stashes it away—manuscripts, underwear, prostheses, bounced checks, pisspots, empty bottles of sleeping pills, empty bottles of booze, condoms, he stashes it all away in a sort of a tomb. No earwigs, no moths, no maggots, no mice, no rats, nothing ravenous. And think of it, Ilona—every hundred years your stuff gets set out on a revolving shelf in a glass case and round and round you go. I can’t see how he can promise us that hundred years slot. Writers proliferate like rabbits. We’ll be lucky to get on that merry-go-round every seven thousand years. What do you think, do you think seven thousand years from now when this junk goes around, along with my one novel and my picture on it, some beautiful girl will fall in love with me? Maybe by that time girls will have three eyes, but it won’t matter how she looks as long as she falls in love with me. Like Anna for Dostoevski, only seven thousand years too late. Not just in love with my soul, but me, me, driving her wild in bed.”

  A pair of shoes, a grayed, rundown pair of canvas shoes, the shoestrings knotted together.

  “They’re not mine. I’ll let him think they’re mine. They belonged to a friend of mine, a fairly decent poet. The son of a bitch stepped out of these shoes and over the edge of a cliff, up in Mendocino. A couple of guys fishing on the rocks found his body. I was liv
ing on my boat at Fort Bragg and I went over to the cliff and found his shoes.”

  Swiftly he bent his head away, then he got up and drew her up. “Ilona, come to bed with me. Come in under with me.”

  That longing for another lover, that longing she confessed to herself reluctantly because the desire was like a betrayal of Martin, because it was an accusation that she was the deserter, that longing for a lover who would bring her to the bliss she imagined for those other lovers, who would take her down into that deep communion with all lovers, now that longing confessed itself to this man.

  It was night when they lay apart. The ocean was louder. The sound of a breaking wave began at one end of the beach and traveled its length, and before the sound reached the other end another wave began to break. There was no silence between the waves.

  “At night,” he said, “I’ll tell you how it is out there at night. Out there the clouds pile up on the horizon like that wave I told you about and I figure that’s just what it is and everybody else has got the message over their crackly radios and they’re already climbing the nearest mountain with their loved ones. But me, I’m sticking it out, smoking my dope, singing at the top of my voice. I can’t keep a tune like my wife but I sing anyway. I sing what my father used to sing when he was shaving in the morning. ‘Throw out the lifeline, someone is drifting away.’ Or I sing, ‘Kansas City, here I come, they got some crazy little women there and I’m gonna get me one.’ The cabin’s a mess, my bunk stinks like I pulled up a drowned man and hoped to revive him by warming him up, but I’m singing away. Some nights I’m so high I tend to neglect the rules of the road. The other night a freighter passed so close I saw the guy up in the pilot house, I saw him so close I’d recognize him in a crowd if I was ever to be in a crowd again. They don’t see you way down there, your running lights are the farthest stars in the universe. Ilona,” kissing her brow, “I’ll tell you a dream. Not mine but my friend’s, the one who stepped off the cliff. He used to go out on the boat with me, he used to help me out. One morning he comes up on deck—I’d been on watch while he slept—and he says, ‘Oh, you still here?’ And he told me he dreamed he woke up and came up on deck and I’m not there. Morning clear and brilliant, without me.”