The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction

by Naomi Holoch

  The following excerpt, translated here into English for the first time, presents Berthe, Yolande, Hilda, and Annie, who—although from quite different worlds—have rented the cottage Mon Plaisir together. Alide, who is staying with her husband, Kosta, in Mon Repos, another cottage, is the source of much fantasy for Berthe, whose romanticism links her in spirit for the moment to mysterious inhabitants of the moonlit forest—elves who live only in the extreme of delirious joy.

  from LONELY ADVENTURE

  AND it was a sorry sort of pleasure that was to be had in Mon Plaisir. Yolande was provocatively ignoring Berthe and enjoying it too. And Berthe was secretly dreaming of Alide, a dream like a poppy in a wasteland of loneliness. In it, longing became a perverse power struggle that was deeply satisfying. In her fantasy Alide had been deserted and was poor and ill; Berthe reaped a harvest of grateful love. But then she rejected this humiliating harvest again and dreamed that Alide was suddenly seized by an intoxicating obsession. And how did it happen? Quite simply through a kiss, an unexpected kiss in which she felt Berthe very close to her, so that the unknown became powerfully real, warm, young, beautiful, and charming, to be enjoyed again and again, insatiably. She hadn’t yet noticed that the boisterous Yolande was ignoring her, that she had a grudge against her. Berthe’s mental superiority was just a pretence, a system of defenses. In reality Yolande was the one who was superior, because she represented the majority. The majority may be superficial, but it’s still the majority. And it crushed people who were lonely as Berthe was now, wanting to forget that she was a woman and to think about her own sex like a man. No man would look twice at a woman like Berthe; she might be intellectual and have an interesting personality, but in love’s garden she was a wallflower. Yolande went on singing, provocative and crude. Her voice was like a tank crashing through the lunar landscape and thundering over human loves and heartbreak: Somebody stole my gal.

  Sensible Hilda didn’t have any eyes for landscapes nor any ears for tanks. It was a delightful summer evening and Yolande was singing—she thought it was all great fun and it was with a feeling of satisfaction that she set the mugs in a row for tea. In normal life Hilda was in service somewhere. She was the least educated of the four and moreover she was totally uninteresting. She had no problems of any importance. The real world was what she saw with her eyes and she dismissed with scorn anything that was mysterious and unaccountable. The only feelings she really had were reserved for her bad teeth and the thoughtlessness of her mistress; to compensate for these disagreeable things there was the comfort she got from her friend, a captain on the municipal ferry. She was the oldest of the four and in friendship she was easygoing and motherly. Hard work and a willingness to help were in her blood. She made things amazingly comfortable for the others, but you did have to ask her about her teeth and her mistress; she almost never talked about her captain. As for her teeth, just look at them, how smooth and even they were. You’d say there was nothing wrong with them. But the pain they gave her, it was unspeakable! First of all her back teeth had become infected and she’d had them all taken out and now the pain had spread to the front ones as well. How happy she’d be after they’d all been taken out! Oh yes, and her mistress! She’d stand in the kitchen cooking something fancy, and a friend of hers, the same sort of woman, stands there just looking. But Madam is clumsy and drops an egg. It lies there on the tiled floor with its yolk broken like an oval-shaped omelette. “Oh lawks!” they say, Madam and her friend, and then they can’t help laughing. Then she points at it with her dainty hand and says, “Hilda, that’s for you.” Then they really did start whinnying, two ladylike horselaughs, such lively, prissy merriment. As for her ferryboat captain, she didn’t talk about him partly out of a sort of modesty but also because there was so little to say about him. He was a little older than her, which she thought better than the other way round; he had lodgings somewhere. He would stand there on his ferryboat and without as much as a thought he’d dump every problem overboard like so much ballast. “Are you crazy or something?” he always used to say. With typical sailor’s directness he looked everyone, man or woman, straight in the eyes without making any subtle distinctions in his appraisal; he was calm, cool, and self-composed. “Are you crazy?” he’d say to Hilda, and no matter how cross she felt about her mistress it all dwindled into nothing. Hilda was saving money; then she would get married. Lately she’d been living with him, as it’s called. It didn’t make any difference to her, but she had nothing against it either, only she couldn’t understand that there were women who got so excited about it. She could understand however that there were women who did it for money. So by way of frigidity Hilda ended up with a charitable opinion of people. Sometimes she read novels in which the women were beautiful and of noble blood and the men indulged in abstract cravings and passionate kisses on the hand. She herself was much more down-to-earth and so was life. She was fond of Yolande; Annie was sensitive and kindhearted, she was a girl you felt protective toward and wanted to spoil; and Berthe was a bit strange but quite nice all the same. After tea the two latter went for a stroll and Hilda and Yolande had a chat. Yolande said, “You know what I think of Berthe? That she falls for women.” Hilda was standing under the lamp, scrutinizing one of her teeth in a pocket mirror. Would this one start playing her up too? If it had to be pulled, it wouldn’t look too great. Are you crazy, she said, imitating her sailor. What difference did it make if she still had a few teeth or none at all? “What were you saying?” she asked Yolande and looked at her in the same way as the sailor would have done. “That she falls for women.”

  For a second Hilda looked unsure of herself, as though she’d been caught off balance. She had heard of this sort of thing, but then it was men with each other. And then there was the question of whether there really was such a thing or whether it was just a perversion, or if you should feel sorry for people like that or just despise them. What a problem! But what was Yolande trying to say by it? She thought of Berthe a moment and then without more ado just like her sailor she dumped the problem overboard like ballast: “Are you crazy?”

  Annie with her beautiful curls was walking on Berthe’s right-hand side. She looked so timorous and fragile as she walked, like a sister elf who’d forgotten how to feel joy and so had been banished from the company. What was the matter with the girl? Her hair curled transparently round her temples and fell in thick ringlets far down her neck. In profile her nose was small and straight and her mouth had a sorrowful-looking curve. Perhaps Annie really did have the soul of an elf. Goodness and joy might have flourished there, like playful moths freed from a cocoon of timidity by the moonlit charms of a summer night. Not any human goodness or human joy then—no, goodness quite simply as a charming game and joy as a reason for living.

  The moon hung there huge and dreamy in the firmament, penetrating the woods with its splendid and perilous light. In moonlight the world is more itself than ever, an eternal and essential world unaffected by everything that had gone on around it age after age. In the wood there were timeless paths with tree roots looking like ancient reptiles and suddenly here and there, like the incarnation of an evil spirit, there was a toad, like a miniature crocodile trapped in the moonbeams. The bushes were motionless and pale in their melancholy splendor; they have a soul, that’s for sure, but who sees it in the daytime? And the same is true of trees; during the day they are beautiful, but under the moonlight they are heavy with dreams, full of the knowledge of how badly they miss this paradise at day. The spirit of the elves sails in everyone who surrenders to this world of moonlight. Either they want to die because they feel so unhappy—because elves only live by the grace of heaps of goodness and heaps of joy—or else they’re so happy they fancy they’re immortal. Eyes become mad or else poetic, mouths are cold with loneliness or else they burn with need, unsatisfied; that is why those who are unhappy are so immensely unhappy while the happy ones are so insatiably happy. And it’s this feeling of never enough and never too much that makes t
he elves dance till they’re delirious and makes lunar-minded human children hang themselves from trees that are heavy with dreams or utter stammering invocations that sound like nonsense during the day.

  Berthe was unhappy, but not so much so that all that remained for her was to hang herself from some inviting overhanging branch. She was still able to talk about it. She walked beside Annie, who looked very beautiful in the moonlight. Besides, she was the owner of a heart that was rich and languishing. Her dream about Alide had not yet been shattered on the shores of reality, and walking beside her was a girl who was beautiful and delicate and who listened to everything she said, with a gentle passivity. So the spirit of the elves that sailed in Berthe did no more than rouse the unhappy girl to words; melancholy and sorrowful, but only words. She said: “I’ve such great expectations of life yet it’s never given me anything. Why is life so poor when you deserve so much from it? From the moment I realized that I really existed, I prepared myself, because I wanted to think and understand things and to feel love. I deliberately tried to improve myself and to make myself more beautiful. I criticized others too, because I saw how few people took the trouble to do so! I notice that more and more. Soon I’ll see through all the masks like a clairvoyant, and I won’t even waste my time hoping anymore. Then I won’t even dream any longer that there are people who are beautiful. But I could always have known I was condemned to a loneliness that would never end but would only get worse. What’s the point of it all? I’m often frightened I won’t be able to stand it all my life. Sometimes I also think that I have a destiny that I’m a human being whose situation is particularly difficult, and that this makes me someone special, that I have a destiny. If I put up with it courageously and without complaining, I’ll find out what it was all for. But then again I suddenly realize that all I’m doing is waiting, and that I’m just not the type to be a martyr, all I do is look at every new face, as though it’s come specially for me.”

  The moonlight was more than glorious now. The wood opened up, becoming what it was completely, a paradise where elves danced in delirious joy and sang with enraptured voices in a frequency far higher than that of everyday human joy. A paradise where happiness resounded and anyone who was unhappy was banished and barbarously invited, in the manner of fairyland, to go and hang himself.

  …

  And that’s what Annie told her then: “Berthe you know so much,” and she walked next to her, looking delicate and humble, watching Berthe with her doelike eyes. “If you didn’t feel unhappy,” she said, “I’d dare to be happy myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can tell you everything. Everything.”

  And she looked at Berthe again. Everything, Berthe thought, oh dear, she doesn’t even know what telling is, let alone everything. And Berthe was right: Annie had had so little love in her life and had been rejected so often that she had no idea of all the things that could go on in her mind, let alone talk about them. Berthe however was a free-born traveler in the domain of desires and reflection. Encouragingly she linked arms with Annie, as though it was only now that they’d started their walk; after all, on her own she was like a child gone astray on this road that was dark and deserted like a dead-end trail, while together with her she was a happy young woman on the royal road of fantasy. And that’s how the elves saw the two of them as they walked on. But they didn’t go with them, however much they approved of the timid joy of the one and the tender encouragements of the other. Because what mattered just then was Mon Repos. And in Mon Repos a duel was going on between dream and delusions. Elves are not brave enough for something like that; they play in the eternal woods and are romantic, like children. As long as a battle still has something of a tournament about it, they’ll consider it, but when it starts getting serious and people are assassinated they flee the scene frightened and outraged, only returning when the combatants lie still; being corpses means they are innocent once more and belong to eternity. Suddenly then there wasn’t an elf to be seen anywhere, not on the road nor in the woodlands around. There was however a light shining in Mon Repos, a light of an ethereal brilliance like a vision. “Alide said she had a headache, but she’s still up,” Berthe whispered.

  She fell silent. They stood there motionless, Berthe and Annie, retreating into the shadow of a tree. No, Alide mustn’t see that they were both witnesses. Nor must Kosta. Suddenly Kosta and Alide appeared on the terrace; Alide was running away, as though she couldn’t take any more and Kosta followed, imploring her. Kosta went and stood next to her by the balustrade, forcing her to look at him, launching on a passionate whispered plea. It really was Kosta, though he was not supposed to be back till tomorrow. The two girls from Mon Plaisir stood there motionless sunk in darkness. They were watching a theater that was so sad and exciting that they couldn’t keep their eyes off it. Later on everything they saw would become even more enormous in their memories; Mon Repos lit up like a mysterious palace, and Kosta and Alide, distraught and despairing like two human children clinging to their fate. As they lurked in the shadow of the tree the two girls from Mon Plaisir felt their hearts pounding and their lips turn cold. In this open duel between Alide’s delusions and Kosta’s dream they were witnessing the end of a time of happiness. Here were two people who clung to each other in a movement that oscillated between love and murder, two faces that stared at each other hesitating between nostalgia and dread, as though they suddenly saw something hideous in each other’s eyes that had once been beautiful and adorable. They saw the passionately whispered conversation, an antiphon of confessions, pleas, and entreaties. And this conversation seemed to make both of them, already separated or estranged from each other by a catastrophe, still more lonesome. And suddenly there was an anguished and furious embrace that at once confirmed and denied the catastrophe. It was an embrace as though to save them both from falling. An embrace where they stood motionless, body to body and cheek to cheek, without however kissing each other. Berthe seized Annie’s hand and led her back into the woods. Tentatively they looked for a path without noticing whether it led back to Mon Plaisir. Tentatively they fled, Annie holding Berthe’s hand, like children who all unaware had accidentally seen inside of the palace of the terrible giant who ate human beings. Annie’s hand was chill and Berthe’s clasped hers firmly as though saving her life. Their escape was both riotous and light-footed like the elves a minute ago. Only when they were safe did they come to a halt. And now they were no longer children who had just seen the terrible giant, or elves in flight, but were once again two girls trying to find their way back home, one of them timid, the other with a somber languishing look on her face.

  Translated by Donald Gardner

  Christa Winsloe

  The Child Manuela (1934) by the German author Christa Winsloe prefigures the death of the spirit that would ensue with the victory of Nazism. Winsloe (1888–1944), born in Darmstadt, Germany, into a military family, rebelled against a harsh repressive education, going on to live a life of social and sexual nonconformity. In this novel, her most well known, a young girl suffering the loss of her mother and neglected by her militaristic and self-indulgent father refuses the soul-numbing constraints of a Prussian boarding school.

  This selection presents Manuela, or Lela as she is called, triumphant on the school stage as a male hero. Success, however, can only have meaning if it is ratified by Fräulein von Bernburg, a compassionate, responsive teacher who also finds herself caught in the school’s determination to cleanse itself of such “hysterical devotion.”

  from THE CHILD MANUELA

  XII

  UNREMARKED, Fräulein von Bernburg slipped into her place again among the audience. People were laughing at poor Marga, who had had to take the part of Orosman at a moment’s notice and was finding it far from easy to balance the turban on her head and read Voltaire’s none too simple lines at the same time. Everybody was giggling. But then Lela appeared upon the stage. The girl was as if transformed. The moment she appeared the stage see
med to shrink. She more than filled it; she filled the hall; she seemed to fill the entire building. Profound silence settled on the audience. Her somber voice carried far, without apparent strain, even when she spoke low—perhaps then most of all. Her force, her sincerity, her warmth, gripped every person in the darkened auditorium. The Head was already uneasy. Even Bunny was twisting in her seat as if something were happening in defiance of the regulations. But what could have gone wrong? Should Mademoiselle perhaps have chosen a different play?

  The children followed Manuela’s slightest movement; their eyes hung on her as if spellbound. Secretly they squeezed one another’s hands. Manuela was surpassing herself. One believed every word she said, one suffered with her, one sacrificed oneself when she did, rose to her heights of nobility and courage … and finally burst into tears with her because poor Edelgard lay dead on the stage, pierced by the sword of the jealous Orosman.

  When the curtain fell a ripple ran through the hall. Forgetting all their good manners the children rioted. The Headmistress applauded benevolently. Mademoiselle Oeuillet bowed modestly. But from the audience there came a roar: “Manuela, Manuela! Brava! Brava! ….” and chairs scraped and hands clapped—and Lela, tottering on her feet, with one arm round Edelgard and the other round Marga, made her bow, very grave and very pale. Anxiously she sought Fräulein von Bernburg’s eye … and caught it. Unlike the others, Fräulein von Bernburg did not send her a smile. As if she were thinking of something very serious, her gaze met and rested in Lela’s.