by Lee, Tanith
She received the book from the girl’s slim, mittened hands, and bending, set her kiss like a heavenly bow there on the upturned page.
A kind of wind blew round the street. An ill wind that was composed of several tens of men breathing outward in affront.
Lalage handed the book to the girl, who stood there holding it open like an opened heart. She began to thank the actress, but in that instant, flawlessly as ever sensing the exact timing of her exit, Lalage had turned, and the two minders swept her across the road into her carriage.
The night parted with a clatter of horses’ hoofs. The stage door banged shut.
Alone now, the young girl who had dared ask for the kiss, alone among the lamplit shadows and a massed flock of affronted, wolverine-like silk crows.
Some only glared at her. Others plainly felt more active. They circled in on her. All at once she was surrounded.
And only then did she seem to see, the girl (who could not have been more than sixteen years of age), her predicament.
“Well,” said one of the encircling enemy, “I think she’d better explain herself.”
“Yes, she should. Flouncing about here so late, and no one to accompany her. We might take her for a street woman.”
“No doubt she’s precisely that. Who else among the fair sex would be so bold.”
“No, she’s no whore,” said another, coming over. He was a bigger, darker man, his cloak and hat of better quality, a gaudy, bruised-looking ring on his finger. “I tell you what she is. She’s an unnatural woman.”
“It’s Clavier, the importer,” muttered the men. Clavier was respected in the town.
And at his heels, therefore, any who had hung back now approached. Like a dark sand they slid into place all about her, the young girl still holding her open book like a heart.
Spotlit now by some surreal, non-apparent footlight, she stood at the centre of the dark circling circle. Her eyes were down. She did not move.
“I tell you,” said Clavier, “I’ve noted her type before. Sluts who think they are a sort of man – and that they can get away with it. And not a decent bone in their perverted little bodies. Good for nothing. You heard her, eh, my men, you heard her, didn’t you?” He puffed up bigger, an erection of stern anger. “Another mouth than yours,” he aped her loudly, if inaccurately, so all might hear, “pressed over and over to your kiss.”
“What a bitch,” someone said.
“She deserves anything we might do to her,” said another.
“Filthy little creature.”
Clavier pressed right in and stood large over the poor young girl.
“You should be punished,” he said. “And who would care if you were?”
At that the girl raised her eyes. They were luminous and met his with a wild abandon.
“One would care,” she cried.
“And who’s that?” asked Clavier, settling himself, his hairy ringed hands already flexing to seize either her book or her flesh.
“My father,” said the girl. She spoke now clear as a bell.
“Her father! Her father would thank us, I believe, for ridding him of this horror.”
But Clavier’s small eyes had been caught by the girl’s eyes. He was thinking all manner of thoughts about her now, and mostly with his body.
She said, “My father, monsieur, is very sick. My father, monsieur, is dying.”
“Of shame, no doubt, at having such a dirty daughter.”
“No, monsieur. He is dying of old age and hard work and poverty. The doctor has told me, in three days or less, my father that I love so, the only man I ever have loved, will be dead.”
“Oh dear,” derided Clavier.
But now another man laid his hand on Clavier’s arm. “Let her go on.” After all, the young girl had spoken of love and loyalty to a man. Yes, let her go on.
“Why else,” said the girl, defiant, throwing back her head to look at them all, “do you think I found the courage to come to this theatre night after night, not understanding a word of the play and shocked by it, enduring too insults from men on every side, only to watch the great actress Lalage? It was for my father, gentlemen. My father loves her so. And he was too ill to come, so I came, each night, and each night I went home from the theatre, and described to him every move and gesture of Lalage. Oh, if you could have seen his poor sick sad face light up like a warm window with joy – just from hearing of her.”
“Clavier,” said the man who had touched his arm, “we have made a mistake here.”
The girl said, with arrogance now, proudly and fiercely, “And for whom now do you think I asked that kiss? Whose poor dying lips are they that will be applied to that kiss, over and over? It is for my father.”
“Dear God,” said Clavier. He had gone pale, seeing he had not only made an ass of himself, but also done himself, even business-wise perhaps, quite a bit of harm.
The other man declared, “Mademoiselle, we owe you a thousand apologies. You are brave and good, one in a million, mademoiselle. Is there any man here would not value such a loyal and magnificent daughter?”
They acquiesced, bowing their heads now, humbled.
For she was a proper woman, as God had made her, putting their sex before her own, serving her father despite her own timidity. What a wife she would make – what a mistress.
Clavier said, “Let me find you a cab, mademoiselle, to see you safe home.”
She cast him a look, the virtuous girl. “Thank you. I will not accept anything from you.”
They drew sheepishly aside to let her by. Deeply embarrassed, horrified. Not one of them would not draw parallels thereafter among his own female kin. Not one would not be dissatisfied with himself. As for Clavier, two months more and he would leave the town and go abroad. So much for him.
To help her father. She had risked it all. In pure and sweet and proper love. Their champion, and they had tried to dishonor her. For shame!
She ran, heart throbbing, blood bounding, the girl, all the way back to the ramshackle tenement where she lived.
Flying up the stairs, she flung wide the door.
Dancing, she spun about the mean little room, holding out the book.
No father raised his feeble hand. There was no father.
Only the girl, bending now in turn, like a drinking snake, to kiss her first hungry, greedy kiss, on the rose-red printing of Lalage.
“I lied.”
Youth
Ne Que V’on Desir
Judas Garbah
Love is not idleness
—Le Cler.
In a way, this reminds me of one of my sister’s stories. I mean Esther, not Anna. In fact I never mentioned my sisters to him – which is odd, perhaps, as I often complain about my sisters to others, especially to strangers. And already I have started to talk about them, Anna, and Esther. So enough of that.
There was a train going, oh, it doesn’t matter at all. The important thing was the snow, which had become the world, outside the train. On black lines ruled across this snow, the train was running to its destination, which would take several days and nights. Huge columns of black smoke poured up from the funnel of the black train, and red cinders blew by on the wind of the train. Everything else was the snow, banks and slopes of it rising to a sky the same color, which was a sort of white but not really white at all. Now and then you saw a forest. It seemed to come close to look, then, repulsed or bored, draw away. And there were wolves, but if I tell you there were, you’ll say, oh, he would have to put wolves in here. Well, I tell you, they were red wolves. When the train stopped, or slowed, you heard them howling, that unholy and thrilling sound. I never saw them. Perhaps they didn’t exist then, only the voices left behind.
I’d been given a berth, but it was an old train. The berth was magnificent, everything set in mahogany, the bed, the wash-stand. It had a Turkish rug, and plum-green curtains at the window. There were oil lamps, each held up by a little naked brass nymph.
The first day and ni
ght I lay in the bed-place and slept. It had been tiring for me where I’d been, and I’d had no proper sleep for a week. After that I woke up, and all the rattling of the train had become a part of my bones, and I thought, I won’t sleep again for the rest of the journey. Which was more or less correct. I washed, wobblingly shaved, and changed my clothes, then went out and along the swaying rattling corridor to find the dining-car. In some of the sitting-compartments, they had pulled the blinds down. It was about ten in the morning, but I could hear bottles and laughter, and someone singing to a guitar. What dismal fun.
When I reached the dining-car, breakfast was long over, but they were starting on lunch. I suppose if you breakfast at five or six, by ten you might want something.
A huge woman, the mistress of the dining section, came sailing up to me. She was like the Spirit of Eating. Her hair was roped round and round her head, and she had a fat pasty face with stony eyes in it. Once she had been young and beautiful, you glimpsed this girl, coiled up tight inside her like a fossil, asleep for ever.
She took me instantly, without any requests or arguments from me, to a table. She plumped me in, snapped her fingers. At once there was a boy in uniform, who put a bottle of blue vodka before me and a thumb glass.
The Spirit of Eating saluted me. I asked if she spoke French. She said she did, but her “Ooow, monsew,” showed me too how she would speak it! Then she heaved away to see to a trickle of other passengers who were wandering in.
The meal began to arrive quickly, but with great slowness between the courses. Rolls and white butter, salt, and bottles of water. Then the wine I had asked for, very yellow and sour. After almost an hour more, a bowl of potato soup. Three quarters of an hour later, pancakes, very heavy. Then eggs. Then a winter salad. All with long intervals. My watch had been broken in the last city, when my lover (Georges), tried to hurl me down the stairs. But a man along the car kept announcing to us all the time. First twelve, then one, then two o’clock.
The Spirit of Eating presided over us all. The timid diners, under her commanding guidance, the vodka, wine and champagne, had become fulsome, and noisy.
Seeing me smoking, she came and presented to me an open box of long, dark cigarettes, with a silver band on each one.
Although I knew I wouldn’t sleep again on the train, I by now wanted to go back to my berth. I was worn out from the food, and the landscape; the snow, the forests creeping up and slinking away again.
When I rose, dizzy with alcohol and the lurching of the car, I saw too it was already becoming twilight. The same tint as the wine, the lamps had been lit. It was an afternoon for the mythic nursery fire, some nanny reading a story over a stodgy English tea.
Passing the Spirit of Eating, I bowed, and thanked her.
She smiled. She seemed pleased with me.
Just as I got to the door, between all the tables with their spotted white cloths, a man was going out in front of me. I can only describe it in that way. He was not coming in, yet was suddenly there, although I had not seen him either in the car, or leaving it. Obviously there was nothing uncanny in that. I’d simply not been paying much attention to the passengers, except to wish they’d shut up.
Georges had said to me, after the episode with the stairs, “You’ll be straight from my bed into another’s. That’s all you’re worth.” As if he were addressing some poor whore from the market alleys. I had been too scared of him at this point to feel either affronted or acknowledging.
“Excuse me,” the man in the corridor said, in a peculiarly accented French. Perhaps he guessed – or had overheard my request to the woman.
I said, not in French, to catch him out, “Take your time, please.”
What he had been doing was pausing, just into the corridor, to light one of the dark cigarettes the Spirit of Eating had awarded.
He wore a greatcoat, rather like mine – the train was not warm. His had a collar of lush fur. He was slim, might even be thin inside the coat. His manicured hands were expensive but ringless. His blond hair was as luxurious as the fur and also, like the fur, rather long. He had those eyes, a type of grey, the kind one wants to lick to bring out their color more, though it’s already enough. The nose, and bones, were aristocratic, and the mouth savage. A mouth not to be shared with anyone. So you wanted the damn thing.
Outside from the nothingness of the snow, wolves howled even over the train’s rattle. But the wolf was on the train.
Now the cigarette was alight, and he lounged back, as if to let me pass. Although I was no fatter than he, the way was narrow and I could only do it by brushing against him. So I brushed.
When I was doing it, he made himself bulkier. Our bodies slid one on another. He said, “Wait, just one moment.” Then, “C’est charmantt.”
Like the Spirit of Eating, his French was different. I didn’t wait, as he said, but moved on. His eyes had blotted their after-image on my sight, like too-bright lamps, and I saw them as I went on down the corridor, floating in front of me.
I unlocked the door of my berth, and went in.
Once there, of course, a madness of boredom rushed over me. I paced the small space. I washed my hands, brushed my teeth. (Anna would have approved.) I leaned at the window glaring at the snow on snow on snow, as the song has it.
I had brought books, but the motion of the train made the print giddy and tiresome. I was drunk, wasn’t I? I’d sleep again.
So I lay on the berth bed for an hour and had hallucinations, that is, constant half lapses into sleep when I saw bowls gliding through the air, and once a dark shape like a dog leaping across me.
Someone knocked loudly on my door.
It might be the man to examine the tickets once again, for we had passed a station somewhere and stopped for a second, or half an hour. But I knew it was not he. It was the blond being from the dining-car.
I opened the door. A huge German towered before me, muffled to the lips and eyes in scarves. He had a basket full of chocolate things, beasts in shining paper, boxes of Swiss chocolate flowers.
“Something for journey?”
“Thank you, no.”
“You like the chocolate? For present. For lady you love.”
“I have no lady I love.”
He laughed heartily. “Fine young man like you. Come, come. Buy her this rabbit—”
Squeamishly I saw he would go on bullying until I gave in, so bought the chocolate rabbit, an awful grinning thing. I visualized my lady-love, in little frilly knickers, cruelly biting off the rabbit’s ears, and serve the sickly bloody thing right.
But my purchase wasn’t enough; it only encouraged him. “Look, look,” he burbled, pulling from voluminous inner recesses – his guts for all I knew – reams of silk stockings, and lace gloves.
“Go away,” I said. “She doesn’t like such things.”
“Not like? A lady not like—”
Someone spoke behind the German, in German. I thought the sentence was obscene, but was not sure. The Chocolate German didn’t seem angered or distressed. He nodded. “Jah, jah.” And took himself off, brushing thoroughly past the other who had spoken, so I knew before he was revealed who it would be.
“It seems I rescue you,” said the blond wolf.
“Yes. And what are you selling?”
“What would you like?”
“Two days off the journey.”
He tipped back his fine head and laughed. He had a throat for strangling, bruising. Irresistible, all of him, probably,
“Let me come in and see your lovely room,” he said. I stood there. He said, now in his curious French, “I am in the sitting compartments. I sleep, sitting up, like those dead people, I forget who. And one man sings all night. A wonderful voice. I thought at first, what luck. Now I want to kill him, or make him dumb.”
I took some moments after he had ended, going over the French, sorting out what he had really said from its idiosyncrasies. The bastard was informing me he wanted to come in and share my sleeper because he couldn’
t afford one and was uncomfortable elsewhere. That then, the price.
I handed him the rabbit.
“I bought this for my lady.”
“Wouldn’t she like it? Oh. But you don’t have a lady, surely. Unless they married you off very young.”
“Well,” I said, “you have the rabbit. Eat the ears first.”
“I always,” he said coolly, “first bite the head right off, to be merciful.”
The look in his grey eyes was like an electric shock. I hoped he wasn’t going to do it, eat the rabbit in front of me as he described. The horrible eroticism of it was overwhelming enough, just verbalized.
Of course, I should shut the door. I hadn’t, and now, balancing the rabbit lightly, he drew out a bottle of the blue vodka, which I had been told long ago was purified by seething over coals.
“Half an hour,” he said. “You might like me.”
“I dislike you already.”
“How passionate. Splendid.”
The train gave a sort of shudder and flung us almost together, then apart. It had slowed suddenly and now stopped.
Through the window in the corridor, I saw we drew into another station. There was no platform, and beyond the wooden buildings, most of which were sheds, the snow went on. It showed such a dearth, such a rift in God’s imagination, the snow. He had lost interest, quickly and carelessly spread it, and not bothered to enhance the picture.
By the tracks were the peasants of the region, who had swarthy, cold-blackened faces and hats of fur. They were grouped about a bonfire, which sent up thick smoke, like the stove-pipes of the sheds, and the smoke-stack of the train itself. A flock of geese were in a pen; a cow was being milked, the hot liquid steaming blue.
“Oh, go on,” he said.
