David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008)

by Irene Nemirovsky

  And Chicago … the small bar, the gramophone with its grating, tinny old-fashioned European Waltz, that feeling of all-consuming hunger as the warm smells from the kitchen wafted towards him. He closed his eyes and pictured in extraordinary detail the shiny, dark face of a black man, drunk or ill, slumped on a bench in the corner, who was hooting plaintively, like an owl. And then … His hands were burning now. He carefully held them flat against the glass, then took them away again, wiggled his fingers, and gently rubbed his hands together.

  “Fool,” he whispered, as if the dead man could hear him, “you fool… Why did you go and do it?”

  GOLDER FUMBLED ABOUT at Marcus’s door for some time before ringing the bell: his thick, cold hands couldn’t find the buzzer and hit the wall instead. When he got inside, he looked around him in a kind of terror, as if he expected to see the dead man laid out, ready to be taken away. But there were only some rolls of black fabric on the floor of the entrance hall and bouquets of flowers on the armchairs; they were tied with purple silk inscribed with gold lettering, and the ribbons were so long and wide they trailed on to the carpet.

  While Golder was standing in the hall, someone rang the bell and delivered an enormous, thick wreath of red chrysanthemums through the half-open door; the servant slipped it over his arm as if it were the handle of a basket.

  “I must send some flowers,” Golder thought.

  Flowers for Marcus… He pictured the heavy face with its grimacing lips, and a bridal bouquet beside it…

  “If you would care to wait for a moment in the drawing room, Sir,” the servant whispered, “Madame is with…” He made a vague, embarrassed gesture. “…with Monsieur, with the body…”

  He held out a chair for Golder and left. In the adjoining room, two voices were talking in a vague, mysterious whisper, as if at prayer; the voices grew gradually louder until Golder could hear them.

  “The hearse decorated with Greek statues and a silver rail, in the Imperial style, with five plumes, with an ebony-panelled, silk-lined casket with eight carved, silver-gilt handles are included in the Superior Class. Then we have the Class A; that comes with a polished mahogany casket.”

  “How much?” a woman’s voice whispered.

  “Twenty thousand two hundred francs with the mahogany casket. Twenty-nine thousand three hundred for the Superior Class.”

  “I don’t think so. I only want to spend five or six thousand. If I had known how much you charged I would have gone elsewhere. The coffin can be made of ordinary oak if it’s covered in large enough draperies…”

  Golder got up abruptly; the voice was immediately lowered, softening once again to a solemn whisper.

  Angrily, Golder grasped his handkerchief between his hands and absent-mindedly twisted and knotted it. “It’s stupid, all this… ” he muttered, “it’s so stupid…”

  He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. There wasn’t any other way. It was stupid, just stupid… Yesterday Marcus was sitting opposite him, shouting, alive, and now… No one even used his name any more. The body… He breathed in the heavy, sickly smell that filled the room. “Is that him, already,” he thought, horrified, “or these awful flowers? Why did he do it?” he muttered to himself in disgust. “Why kill yourself, at his age, over money like some little nobody…” How many times had he lost everything, and like everyone else just picked himself up and started again? That was how it was. “And as for this Teisk business,” he said out loud, vehemently, as if he were imagining himself in Marcus’s place, “he had a hundred to one chance it would come off, especially with Amrum involved, the fool!”

  All sorts of ideas were buzzing angrily around in his mind. “You never know what’s going to happen in business, you have to go with your instincts, change your tactics, try everything you can, but to choose death … How long are they going to make me wait?” he thought with disgust.

  Marcus’s wife came in. Her thin face, with its large, beaklike nose, had the sallow colour of antler-horn; her round, bright eyes glittered beneath her thin eyebrows, which sat very high on her forehead and looked oddly uneven.

  She walked towards Golder with small hurried steps, took his hand, and seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But Golder had a lump in his throat and said nothing.

  “Yes. You weren’t expecting it…” she murmured with a bizarre little high-pitched squeal that sounded like a nervous laugh or stifled sob. “This madness, this humiliation, this scandal … I thank the good Lord for not having given us children. Do you know how he died? In a brothel, on the Rue Chabanais, with whores. As if going bankrupt weren’t enough,” she concluded, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.

  Her sudden movement revealed beneath her black veil an enormous pearl necklace wound three times around her long, wrinkled neck which she jerked about like an old bird of prey.

  “She must be very rich,” thought Golder, “the old crow. It’s always the same story: we kill ourselves working so that ‘the women’ can get richer…” He pictured his own wife quickly hiding her cheque-book whenever he came into the room, as if it were a packet of love letters.

  “Would you like to see him?” she asked.

  An icy wave flooded over Golder; he closed his eyes and replied in a shaky, colourless voice: “Of course, if I …”

  Madame Marcus silently crossed the large drawing room and opened a door, but it led only to another, smaller room, where two women were sewing some black material. Eventually she said, “In here.” Golder could see candles burning dimly. He stood motionless and silent for a moment, then made an effort to speak.

  “Where is he?”

  “Here,” she said, pointing to a bed that was partly hidden beneath a great velvet canopy. “But I had to cover up his face to keep away the flies… The funeral is tomorrow.”

  It was only then that Golder thought he could make out the dead man’s features beneath the sheet. He looked at him for a long time with strange emotion.

  “My God, they’re in such a hurry,” he thought, overwhelmed by a confused feeling of anger and hurt. “Poor Marcus… How helpless we are when we die… It’s disgusting…”

  In the corner of the room stood a large American-style desk with its top open; papers and opened letters were scattered about the floor. “There must be some letters from me in there,” he thought. He spotted a knife lying on the carpet. Its silver blade was all twisted. The drawers had been forced; there were no keys in the locks.

  “He probably wasn’t even dead when she rushed in to see what was left; she couldn’t bear to wait, to try to find the keys…”

  Madame Marcus caught the look on his face, but stared straight at him; all she did was to mutter curtly, “He left nothing.” Then she added more quietly, in a different tone of voice, “I’m on my own.”

  “If I can help in any way…” Golder automatically replied.

  She hesitated for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, “what would you advise me to do with the Houillere shares?”

  “I’ll buy them from you at what they cost,” said Golder. “You do know they’ll never be worth anything? The company went bankrupt. But I’ll also have to take some of these letters. I imagine you expected as much, didn’t you?” he added in a hostile, sarcastic way that she appeared not to notice. She simply nodded and stepped back a bit. Golder began sifting through the papers in the half-empty drawer. But he couldn’t manage to overcome a sudden feeling of sad, bitter indifference. My God, what’s the point of it all, in the end?

  “Why did he do it?” he asked abruptly.

  “I don’t know,” said Madame Marcus.

  “Was it over money? Just money?” He was thinking out loud. “It just isn’t possible. Didn’t he say anything at all before he died?”

  “No. When they brought him back here, he was already unconscious. The bullet was lodged in his lung.”

  “I see,” Golder said with a shudder, “I see.”

  “Later on, he tried to speak, but his mouth w
as full of foam and blood. He only said a few words, just before he died… He was almost peaceful, and I asked him, ‘Why? How could you do such a thing to me?’ He said something I could barely make out…Just one word that he kept repeating: ‘Tired… I was… tired…’ And then he died.”

  “Tired,” thought Golder, who suddenly felt his age bearing down on him, like a heavy weight. “Yes.”

  A VIOLENT STORM was beating down on Paris the day of Marcus’s funeral; everyone was in a hurry to bury the dead man deep within the wet earth and then leave.

  Golder was holding his umbrella in front of his face, but when the coffin went past, balanced on the shoulders of the pallbearers, he stared at it; the black fabric, embroidered with tear-shaped silver drops, had slipped away, revealing the cheap wood and tarnished metal handles. Golder turned sharply away.

  Next to him, two men were talking loudly. One of them pointed to the hole being filled in.

  “He came to see me,” Golder could hear one of them saying, “and offered to pay me with a cheque drawn on the French Bank of America in New York, and I was foolish enough to agree. It was the night before he died, Saturday. As soon as I’d heard he’d killed himself, I cabled and only got a reply the following morning. Naturally, he’d cheated me. Insufficient funds. But I’m not going to let it drop, his widow will have to make it good …”

  “Was it for a lot of money?” someone asked.

  “Not to you perhaps, Monsieur Weille, not to you,” the voice replied bitterly, “but to a poor man like me, it was an awful lot of money.”

  Golder looked at him. He was a small, hunched old man, rather shabbily dressed, who stood shaking in the wind, shivering and coughing. As no one said anything, he continued complaining in a low voice. Someone else started laughing.

  “You’d be better off asking the madam at the Rue Chabanais, she’s the one who’s got your money.”

  Behind Golder, two young men were whispering behind an open umbrella: “The thing’s a farce…You know they found him with some little girls? Only thirteen or fourteen years old… It’s absolutely true, and on top ofthat…” He lowered his voice.

  “Who would have guessed he had a taste for that…”

  “Maybe he was just trying to satisfy a secret desire before dying, what do you think?”

  “Trying to hide his predilections more likely …”

  “Do you know why he killed himself?”

  Golder automatically took a few steps forward, then stopped. He looked at the gleaming gravestones, the battered wreaths, whipped by the wind. He vaguely muttered something. The man next to him turned around.

  “What were you saying, Golder?”

  “What a mess, don’t you think?” Golder said, suddenly sounding angry and oddly pained.

  “Yes, when it’s raining, a funeral in Paris is never much fun. But it will happen to all of us one day. Good old Marcus, even on the last day we’ll ever have anything to do with him, he’s arranged for all of us to die of pneumonia. If he can see us now plodding about in the mud, it will make him so happy… He was pretty tough, wasn’t he? By the way, you’ll never guess what I heard yesterday.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I heard that the Alleman Company was going to bail out Mesopotamian Petroleum. Have you heard anything about that? You’d find that interesting, wouldn’t you?”

  He stopped speaking and pointed with satisfaction at the umbrellas that were beginning to move in front of them. “Ah! It’s over at last, about time. Let’s get going…”

  With their collars up, the mourners pushed each other to escape the rain as quickly as possible. Some of them even ran over the graves. Like everyone else, Golder held his open umbrella with both hands and hurried away. The storm was pounding down on the trees and gravestones, beating them with a kind of futile, savage violence.

  “How smug they all look, the lot of them,” Golder thought. “One down, and now there’s one enemy less … And how happy they’ll all be when it’s my turn.”

  They had to stop on the path for a moment to let a procession pass that was going in the opposite direction. Braun, Marcus’s secretary, caught up with Golder.

  “I have some more papers on the Russians and Amrum which will be of interest to you,” he whispered. “Everyone seems to have been stabbing everyone in the back… Not a very nice business, Monsieur Golder.”

  “You think so, young man?” replied Golder, with a sarcastic look on his face. “No, not very nice. Well, bring everything to me at the train station at six o’clock, to the train for Biarritz.”

  “Are you going away, Monsieur Golder?”

  Golder took a cigarette and crushed it between his fingers.

  “Are we going to be here all night, for God’s sake?”

  The line of black cars was still filing past, relentless and slow, blocking the way.

  “Yes, I’m going away.”

  “You’ll have wonderful weather. How is Mademoiselle Joyce? She must be even more beautiful now… You’ll be able to have a rest. You look nervous and tired.”

  “Nervous,” grumbled Golder, suddenly furious, “no, thank God! Where do you get such rubbish? Now Marcus was another story … He was as jittery as a woman … And you can see where it got him…”

  He pushed his way past two undertakers in shiny, dripping hats who were walking in the middle of the path, and fled, cutting through the funeral procession to get outside the gates.

  It wasn’t until he was in the car that he remembered he hadn’t paid his respects to the widow. “Oh, she can go to hell!” He tried in vain to light his cigarette, but the rain had soaked it, so he spat the crushed tobacco out of the window. He huddled in the corner and closed his eyes as the car pulled away.

  GOLDER DINED QUICKLY, drank some of the heavy Burgundy he liked, then smoked for a while in the corridor. A woman bumped into him as she passed by and smiled, but he looked away, indifferent. She was one of those little sluts from Biarritz… She disappeared. He went back into his compartment.

  “I’m going to sleep well tonight,” he thought. He suddenly felt exhausted; his legs were heavy and painful. He raised the blind and looked out blankly at the rain streaming down the dark windows. The drops of water ran into each other forming little, wind-whipped rivers, like tears… He undressed, got into bed, and buried his face deep in the pillow. He had never felt so exhausted. He stretched his arms out with difficulty; they were stiff, heavy … The berth was narrow… even narrower than usual, it seemed. “A bad choice of compartment, of course … the idiots,” he thought vaguely. He could feel his bodyjolt as the wheels beneath him revolved with a heart-rending screech. The heat was suffocating. He turned over his pillow, then turned it again; he was burning up. He punched it down with his fist, angrily. It was so hot… It would be better to open the window. But the wind was blowing furiously. In a flash, all the letters and newspapers on the table flew into the air. He swore, closed the window again, pulled the blind down, switched off the light.

  The air was heavy and smelled of coal mixed with a faint odour of eau de toilette. It made him feel sick. Instinctively, he tried to breathe more deeply, as if to force the heavy air into his lungs, but they rejected it, could not absorb it; it remained in his throat, choking him, like trying to force food into a nauseous stomach… He kept coughing. It was irritating… Worst of all, it was preventing him from sleeping. “And I’m so terribly tired,” he murmured, as if complaining to some invisible companion.

  He turned on to his back, then rolled slowly over on to his side again, pushing himself up on his elbows. He gave a deliberate, hard cough in an attempt to shrug off the unbearable feeling of heaviness high in his chest, in his throat. It didn’t work; he felt even worse. He yawned with difficulty, but a sharp spasm turned the yawn into a painful fit of choking. He stretched his neck, moistened his lips. Perhaps his head was too low? He reached for his overcoat, rolled it up, slipped it under the pillow, then pulled himself into a sitting position. It was worse. His
lungs felt as if they were swelling up. And… it was strange … He had pains… yes, pains in his chest, in his shoulder, around his heart… Suddenly a shiver ran down his spine. “What’s happening?” he whispered anxiously. Then he said bravely, “No, it’s nothing, it will stop. It’s nothing…” and he realised he was talking out loud, talking to himself. He braced himself, put all his effort into inhaling deeply, but it was no use. He couldn’t breathe. He felt an invisible weight crushing his chest. He threw off the covers, the sheet, opened his nightshirt. “What’s going on?” he panted. “What’s wrong with me?” The thick, black darkness bore down on him like a stone. That’s what was suffocating him, yes, that was it… He reached out his shaking hand to turn on the light, but it fumbled along the wall in the dark, trying in vain to find the little lamp set in the wall above the bed. He sighed angrily, shuddered. The pain in his shoulder was becoming sharper, more insistent… Cunningly lying in wait, he thought, pacing about somewhere deep inside his body, in the very core of his being, in his heart, waiting for him to make the slightest movement and then it would strike. Slowly he lowered his arm; it was as if he was forcing it down. Just wait… don’t move. Whatever happens, don’t move … He was breathing more and more heavily and quickly. The air entered his lungs with a strange, grotesque sound, like steam hissing from the lid of a cauldron; and when he breathed out, his entire chest began to convulse, filled with a hoarse, choked wheezing, like a moan, like a death-rattle.