It is done, the course of events has escaped me, I was looking at Lol: Tatiana's expression is hard now. Things are not going the way she would have liked. She has just discovered it: Lol is keeping something to herself. And is there not, in the room, between one and the other of us, something akin to a clandestine traffic, an odor of that poison she fears above all else when she is present, an understanding from which she is excluded?
"Something's happening in this house, Lol," she says with a forced smile. "Or is that only my impression? Is it possible you could be expecting someone you're afraid of, so late at night? Why are you keeping us here like this?"
"Someone who would be coming to see you alone," says Peter Beugner. He laughs.
"Oh! that's hardly likely," Lol says.
She has that mocking air that Tatiana no longer finds funny. No. Again I'm mistaken. Tatiana is completely in the dark.
"Actually, if you must leave, please do. It's just that I would have enjoyed having your company a bit longer tonight."
"You're keeping something from us, Lol," Tatiana says.
"Even if Lol were to reveal this secret to us," Peter Beugner says, "it might not be the secret she thinks it is, in spite of what she thinks, it might be different from . . ."
I hear myself saying:
"Stop it!"
Tatiana remains unruffled. Again I'm mistaken. Tatiana says:
"It's so late, things are getting all mixed up. You'll have to forgive him. Tell us something, Lol."
Lol Stein is resting, it would appear, resting for a moment from the exertion of a victory which might have been too easily won. One thing of which I am certain is the price of that victory: the retreat of clarity. For anyone except us, her eyes would seem to be too bright, too gay.
She says, without addressing anyone in particular:
"It's because I'm happy."
She flushes. She laughs. The word amuses her.
"Anyway, now you can leave," she adds.
"Can't you tell us why?" Tatiana asks.
"It wouldn't make any sense, it would be pointless."
Tatiana is tapping her foot.
"Still," she says, "tell us something, just a word or two about this happiness."
"A few days ago I met someone," Lol says. "My happiness stems from that encounter."
Tatiana gets to her feet. Peter Beugner gets up in turn. They both go over to Lol.
"Ah! so that's it," Tatiana says, "so that's it."
She has just had a brush with terror, which terror I cannot say, but her smile is the smile of a convalescent. She almost shouts:
"Be careful, Lol, oh, Lol, watch your step!"
Lol also gets up. Directly facing her, behind Tatiana, is Jack Hold, me. He was mistaken, he is thinking. He's not the one Lol Stein is looking for. She is looking for someone else. Lol says:
"Nothing about that affair of mine when I was young bothers me. Even if I had to go through it again, it wouldn't bother me."
"Be careful, be careful, Lol."
Tatiana turns around to Jack Hold.
"Are you coming?"
Jack Hold says:
"No."
Tatiana looks at both of them, first one then the other.
"My, my," she says, "you mean to say you intend to keep Lol Stein's happiness company?"
SHE COMES BACK from seeing the Beugners to the door. She comes in, slowly, and leans against the French doors. With bowed head, her hands behind her gripping the curtains, she remains there. I feel I am going to fall. I can sense my body growing weak, some sort of level is rising, drowning the blood, my heart is of silt, goes soft, turns to sludge, is going to sleep. Who could she have met in my place?
"So, what about that encounter?"
The poor woman in her black dress is thin and bowed. She lifts her hand, calls to me.
"Ah! Jack Hold, I was sure you had guessed."
She steels herself for a violent outburst. For all hell to break loose.
"Tell me anyway, do."
"Tell you what?"
"Who it is."
"It's you, you, Jack Hold. I met you seven days ago, at first when you were alone, then later when you were with a woman. I followed you to the Forest Hotel."
I had a moment of fear. I wanted to return to Tatiana, to be in the street.
"Why?"
She lets go of the curtains, straightens up, comes toward me.
"I picked you."
She is coming, looking, this is the first time we have been close to each other. She is white, stark white. She kisses me on the mouth. I give her nothing in return. I was too frightened, I can't yet. She anticipated that impossibility. I am in the night of Town Beach. It is all over. There, nothing is given to Lol Stein. She takes. I still feel like running away.
"But what is it you want?"
She doesn't know.
"I want . . ." she says.
She falls silent, looks at my mouth. And then here we are, staring into each other's eyes. Despotically, irresistibly, she wants.
"Why?"
She shakes her head, murmurs my name.
"Jack Hold."
Lol's virginity uttering that name! Who, except her, Lol Stein, the so-called Lol Stein, had noticed the inconsistency of the belief in that person so named. A dazzling discovery of the name the others have abandoned, have failed to recognize, which was invisible, an inanity shared by all the men of South Tahla, as much a part of myself as the course of my blood through my veins. She has plucked me, taken me from the nest. For the first time my name, pronounced, names nothing.
"Lola Stein."
"Yes."
From somewhere beyond the burned-out ruins of her being, she greets me with a smile. Her choice implies no preference. I am the man from South Tahla she has decided to follow. Here we are, bound together inextricably. Our emptiness grows. We repeat our names to each other.
I move closer to this body. I want to touch it. First with my hands, then with my lips.
I've become awkward. Just as my hands touch Lol, the memory of an unknown man, now dead, comes back to me: he will serve as the eternal Richardson, the man from Town Beach, we will be mingled with him, willy-nilly, all together, we shall no longer be able to recognize one from the other, neither before, nor after, nor during, we shall lose sight of one another, forget our names, in this way we shall die for having forgotten—piece by piece, moment by moment, name by name—death. Paths open up. Her mouth opens upon mine. Her open hand, resting upon my arm, heralds a future both varied and unique, a radiant, harmonious hand whose fingers are bent, broken, as light as a feather and, for me, as new as a flower.
Her body is tall and beautiful, very straight, made taut by her constant effort to efface herself, a constant conformity to a certain mode of conduct learned when she was a child, the body of a grown-up schoolgirl. But her gentle humility is inscribed in her face, in every gesture of her hand when her fingers touch some object, or when they touch my hand.
"There are times when your eyes are such a bright blue. How fair you are."
Lol's hair has the same flower-like texture as her hands. Dazzled, she agrees with me.
"You're right."
Beneath her partly lowered eyelids, her eyes are shining. I shall have to get used to the rarified air in the vicinity of these tiny blue planets which attract, ensnare my gaze, until it is helpless.
"You were just coming out of a cinema. It was last Thursday. Do you remember how hot it was? You were holding your suitcoat in your hand."
I listen. The violin sounds keep slipping in between the words, repeating certain passages, then going on.
"You weren't even aware of it, you didn't know what to do with yourself. You had just emerged from that dark aisle in the cinema, where you had gone by yourself to kill a little time. You had plenty of time that day. Once out on the boulevard, you stared at all the women passing by."
"You're absolutely wrong!"
"Maybe I am," Lol cried.
Her voice
is once again low-pitched and calm, the way it doubtless used to be when she was young, but it is still faint and solemnly slow. Without any urging from me she moves into my arms, her eyes closed, waiting for something else that is about to happen, that has to happen, her body already revealing that the solemn celebration is close at hand. Here it is, spoken almost in a whisper:
"The woman who arrived on the square where all the buses meet was Tatiana Karl."
I don't answer her.
"It was Tatiana. You're a man who sooner or later was bound to be drawn to her. I knew that."
Her eyelids are covered with fine droplets of perspiration. I kiss her closed eyes, they move beneath my lips, her eyes are hidden. I let her go. I leave her. I move to the opposite end of the room. She remains where she is. I want to find out something.
"You're sure it isn't because I look like Michael Richardson?"
"No, that's not the reason," Lol says. "Anyway you don't. No," she drags out her words, "I don't know what it is."
The sound of the violin ceases. We stop talking. It starts in again.
"The light went on in your room, and I saw Tatiana walk in front of the light. She was naked beneath her black hair."
She does not move, her eyes staring out into the garden, waiting. She has just said that Tatiana is naked beneath her dark hair. That sentence is the last to have been uttered. I hear: "naked beneath her dark hair, naked, naked, dark hair." The last two words especially strike with a strange and equal intensity. It's true that Tatiana was as Lol has just described her, naked beneath her dark hair. She was that way in the locked room, for her lover. The intensity of the sentence suddenly increases, the air around it has been rent, the sentence explodes, it blows the meaning apart. I hear it with a deafening roar, and I fail to understand it, I no longer even understand that it means nothing.
Lol is still far from me, rooted to the floor, still turned toward the garden, unblinking.
The nudity of Tatiana, already naked, intensifies into an overexposed image which makes it increasingly impossible to make any sense whatsoever out of it.
The void is statue. The pedestal is there: the sentence. The void is Tatiana naked beneath her dark hair, the fact. It is transformed, poured out lavishly, the fact no longer contains the fact, Tatiana emerges from herself, spills through the open windows out over the town, the roads, mire, liquid, tide of nudity. Here she is, Tatiana Karl, suddenly naked beneath her hair, between Lol Stein and me. The sentence has just faded away, I can no longer hear any sound, only silence, the sentence is dead at Lol's feet, Tatiana is back in her place. I reach out and touch, like a blind man I touch and fail to recognize anything I have already touched. Lol is waiting for me to recognize something, not that I be attuned to her vision but that I no longer be afraid of Tatiana. I am no longer afraid. There are two of us, now, beholding Tatiana naked beneath her dark hair. Blindly, I say:
"An extraordinary lay, Tatiana."
There was a movement of her head. Lol's tone is one I have never heard from her before, shrill and plaintive. The wild animal removed from its forest home sleeps, dreams of the equator of its birth, trembles in its sleep, its dream of sunlight, weeps.
"The best, the best one of them all, right?"
I say:
"The best."
I go to Lol Stein. I kiss her, lick her, breathe in the odor that is Lol, kiss her teeth. She does not move. She has grown beautiful. She says:
"What an amazing coincidence."
I do not reply. Again I leave her, standing there far from me, in the middle of the living room. She does not even seem to realize that I have moved away from her. Again I say:
"I'm going to leave Tatiana Karl."
She sinks to the floor without a word, and assumes a posture of infinite supplication.
"Please, I beg of you, implore you, don't leave her!"
I rush back over to her, lift her to her feet. Anyone else might have been fooled completely. There was not the slightest trace of pain on her face, which was beaming with confidence.
"What?"
"Please, I beg of you."
"Tell me why."
She says:
"I don't want you to."
We are locked in together somewhere. Every echo dies. I am beginning to understand, by slow degrees, inchingly slow. I see walls, smooth, offering nothing to grasp, they were not there a short while before, they have just risen around us. If someone offered to save me, I would not even know what he was talking about. My ignorance itself is locked in. Lol is standing before me, again she is begging, suddenly I am weary of translating what she is saying.
"I won't leave Tatiana Karl."
"Good. You're supposed to see her again."
"Next Tuesday."
The violin stops. It withdraws, leaving behind it open craters of immediate memory. I am frightened, appalled by all other people but Lol.
"And you? When will I see you?"
She tells me Wednesday, sets a time and place.
I don't return home. Nothing is open in town. So I walk to the Beugners' house and go in by the garden gate. There is a light in Tatiana's window. I knock on the window. She is used to my knock. She dresses quickly. By now it's three in the morning. She is at great pains not to make any noise, although I am certain Peter Beugner knows exactly what is going on. But she's the one who insists on acting as though our affair were some great secret. She thinks that in South Tahla she passes for a dutiful and faithful wife. She intends to keep her reputation intact.
"But what about Tuesday?" she asks.
"Tuesday too."
I parked the car a fair distance from the gate. We drive past the Beugners' house with our lights out, then head for the Forest Hotel. In the car, Tatiana asks:
"How was Lol after we went home?"
"Rational."
WHEN I WENT to the window of the room in the Forest Hotel, where I was waiting for Tatiana Karl, on Tuesday at the appointed hour, dusk was just descending, and when I thought I could discern, between the hotel and the foot of the hill, a gray form, a woman about whose grayish blondness there could be no doubt whatsoever, I had a violent reaction, although I had been prepared for any eventuality, a very violent reaction I could not immediately define, something between terror and disbelief, horror and pleasure, and I was tempted by turn to cry out some warning, offer help, thrust her away forever, or involve myself forever with Lol Stein in all her complexities, fall in love with her. I stifled a cry, prayed to God for help, I ran out of the room, retraced my steps, paced the floor like a caged animal, too much alone to love or not to love, sick, sick of my frightful inability to admit what was happening.
Then my emotion abated to some slight degree, it contracted, and I was able to contain it. This moment coincided with the one when I discovered that she too must have been able to see me.
I'm lying. I did not move from the window, my worst fears confirmed, fighting back the tears.
SUDDENLY THE BLONDNESS was different than before, it moved then came to rest. I had the feeling she must have become aware that I had discovered her presence.
So we both looked at each other, or so I believed. For how long?
At my wit's end, I turned my head away, toward the right side of the rye field where she was not. From that direction, Tatiana, in a black suit, was arriving. She paid the taxi and started walking slowly past the alder trees.
Without knocking, she gently opened the door to the room. I asked her to come over and join me for a minute at the window. Tatiana came. I showed her the field of rye and the hill beyond. I was standing behind her. Thus it was that I showed her to Tatiana.
"We never look at the view. From this side of the hotel it's really quite beautiful."
Tatiana saw nothing, she returned to the other side of the room.
"No, it's a depressing view."
She called me.
"Come, there's nothing to see."
Without so much as the slightest preliminary caress, Jack H
old came over to Tatiana Karl.
Jack Hold possessed Tatiana Karl, ruthlessly. She offered no resistance, said nothing, refused no demand, marveled at the intensity of his passion.
Their pleasure was great, and mutual.
That moment when Lol was completely forgotten, that extended flash, in the unvarying time of her watchful wait, Lol wanted that moment to be, without harboring the slightest hope of perceiving it. It was.
Holding her in a tight embrace, Jack Hold could not bring himself to move away from Tatiana Karl. He talked to her. Tatiana Karl was not quite certain for whom the words which Jack Hold said to her were intended. She was under no illusion whatsoever that they were addressed to her, nor did she believe they were meant for some other woman who, that day, was absent, but thought rather that, through them, he was unburdening his heart. But why this rather than some other time? Tatiana sought the answer by thinking back on their affair.
"Tatiana, you're my life, my life, Tatiana."
That day, Tatiana listened to her lover's wild words, at first simply pleased and happy, as always, to be a vaguely defined woman in the arms of a man.
"Tatiana, I love you, I love you, Tatiana."
Tatiana acquiesced, in a comforting, maternally tender voice:
"Yes. I'm here. Here beside you."
At first simply pleased and happy, as always, to see how free someone could be with her, then, suddenly, taken aback by the pernicious intention of the words.
"Tatiana, my sister, Tatiana."
To hear that, to imagine what he might say if she were not Tatiana, ah! sweet words!
"How can I do even more to you, Tatiana?"
We must have been there for at least an hour now, all three of us, an hour since she had seen us appear in turn in the frame of the window, that mirror which reflected nothing and before which she must have shivered with delight to feel as excluded as she wished to be.
"Maybe, without realizing it . . ." Tatiana said, "maybe you and I . . ."
It was dark at last.
Again Jack Hold began, with ever increasing difficulty, to take Tatiana Karl. At one point, he spoke constantly to some other woman who could not see, who could not hear, and with whom, in intimate contact, he strangely seemed to find himself.
The Ravishing of Lol Stein Page 8
