by Marvin Kaye
face, like the terrace, towards the sea.
The brandy was hot.
"All my life," said Vonderjan, sitting down on his own writing table, suddenly
unsolid, his eyes wide and unseeing, "I've had to deal with fucking death. You get
sick of it Sick to death of it."
"Yes."
"I know you saw some things in France."
"I did."
"How do we live with it, eh? Oh, you're a young man. But when you get past
forty, Christ, you feel it, breathing on the back of your neck. Every death you've
seen. And I've seen plenty. My mother, and my wife. I mean, my first wife, Uteka.
A beautiful woman, when I met her. Big, if you know what I mean. White skin and
raven hair, red-gold eyes. A Viking woman."
Jeanjacques was mesmerized, despite everything. He had never heard
Vonderjan expatiate like this, not even in imagination.
They drank more brandy.
Vonderjan said, "She died in my arms."
"I'm sorry—"
"Yes. I wish I could have shot her, like the horses, to stop her suffering. But it
was in Copenhagen, one summer. Her people everywhere. One thing, she hated
sex."
Jeanjacques was shocked despite himself.
"I found other women for that," said Vonderjan, as if, indifferently, to explain.
The bottle was nearly empty. Vonderjan opened a cupboard and took out
another bottle, and a slab of dry, apparently stale bread on a plate. He ripped off
pieces of the bread and ate them.
It was like a curious Communion, bread and wine, flesh, blood. (He offered
none of the bread to Jeanjacques.)
"I wanted," Vonderjan said, perhaps two hours later, as they sat in the hard
stuffed chairs, the light no longer windowpane pure, "a woman who'd take that,
from me. Who'd want me pushed and poured into her, like the sea, like they say a
mermaid wants that. A woman who'd take. I heard of one. I went straight to her. It
was true."
"Don't all women—" Jeanjacques faltered, drunk and heart racing, "take—?"
"No. They give. Give, give, give. They give too bloody much."
Vonderjan was not drunk, and they had consumed two bottles of brandy, and
Vonderjan most of it.
"But she's—she's taken—she's had your luck—" Jeanjacques blurted.
"Luck. I never wanted my luck."
"But you—"
"Wake up. I had it, but who else did? Not Uteka, my wife. Not my wretched
mother. I hate cruelty," Vonderjan said quietly, "And we note, this world's very
cruel. We should punish the world if we could. We should punish God if we
could. Put Him on a cross? Yes. Be damned to this fucking God."
The clerk found he was on the ship, coming to the Island, but he knew he did
not want to be on the Island. Yet, of course, it was now too late to turn back.
Something followed through the water. It was black and shining. A shark, maybe.
When Jeanjacques came to, the day was nearly gone and evening was coming.
His head banged and his heart galloped. The dead horse had possessed it He
wandered out of the study (now empty but for himself) and heard the terrible
sound of a woman, sick-moaning in her death throes: Uteka's ghost But then a
sharp cry came; it was the other one, Vonderjan's second wife, dying in his arms.
As she put up her hair, Nanetta was dunking of whispers. She heard them in
the room, echoes of all the other whispers in the house below.
Black— it's black— not black like a man is black… black as black is black…
Beyond the fringe of palms, the edge of the forest trees stirred, as if something
quite large were prowling about there. Nothing else moved.
She drove a gold hairpin through her coiffure.
He was with her, along the corridor. It had sometimes happened he would walk
up here, in the afternoons. Not for a year, however.
A bird began to shriek its strange stupid warning at the forest's edge, the notes
of which sounded like " J'ai des lits! J'ai des tits!"
Nanetta had dreamed this afternoon, falling asleep in that chair near the
window, that she was walking in the forest, barefoot, as she had done when a
child. Through the trees behind her something crept, shadowing her. It was
noiseless, and the forest also became utterly still with tension and fear. She had
not dared look back, but sometimes, from the rim of her eye, she glimpsed a dark,
pencil-straight shape, that might only have been the ebony trunk of a young tree.
Then, pushing through the leaves and ropes of a wild fig, she saw it, in front of
her not at her back, and woke, flinging herself forward with a choking gasp, so
that she almost fell out of the chair.
It was black, smooth. Perhaps, in the form of a man. Or was it a beast? Were
there eyes? Or a mouth?
In the house, a voice whispered, "Something is in the forest."
A shutter banged without wind.
And outside, the bird screamed, I have beds! I have beds!
The salon: it was sunset and thin wine light was on the rich man's china, and
the Venice glass, what was left of it.
Vonderjan considered the table, idly, smoking, for the meal had been served
and consumed early. He had slept off his brandy in twenty minutes on Anna's bed,
then woken and had her a third time, before they separated.
She had lain there on the sheet, her pale arms firm and damask with the soft
nap of youth.
"I can't get up. I can't stand up."
"Don't get up. Stay where you are," he said. "They can bring you something
on a tray."
"Bread," she said, "I want soft warm bread, and some soup. And a glass of
wine."
"Stay there," he agreed again. "I'll soon be back."
"Come back quickly," she said. And she held out the slender, strong white
arms, all the rest of her flung there and limp as a broken snake.
So he went back and slid his hand gently into her, teasing her, and she writhed
on the point of his fingers, the way a doll would, should you put your hand up its
skirt.
"Is that so nice? Are you sure you like it?"
"Don't stop."
Vonderjan had thought he meant only to tantalize, perhaps to fulfill, but in the
end he unbuttoned himself, the buttons he had only just done up, and put himself
into her again, finishing both of them with swift hard thrusts.
So, she had not been in to dine. And he sat here, ready for her again, quite
ready. But he was used to that. He had, after all, stored all that, during his years
with Uteka, who, so womanly in other ways, had loved to be held and petted like a
child, and nothing more. Vonderjan had partly unavoidably felt that the disease,
which invaded her body, had somehow been given entrance to it because of this
omitting vacancy, which she had not been able to allow him to fill —as night
rushed to engulf the sky once vacated by a sun.
This evening the clerk looked very sallow, and had not eaten much. (Vonderjan
had forgotten the effect brandy could have.) The black woman was definitely
frightened. There was a type of magic going on, some ancient fear -ritual that
unknown forces had stirred up among the people on the Island. It did not interest
Vonderjan very much, nothing much did, now.
He spoke to the clerk, congratulating him
on the efficiency of his lists and his
evaluation, and the arrangements that had been postulated, when next the ship
came to the Island.
Jeanjacques rallied. He said, "The one thing I couldn't locate, sir, was a piano."
"Piano?" Puzzled, Vonderjan looked at him.
"I had understood you to say your wife—that she had a piano—"
"Oh, I ordered one for her years ago. It never arrived. It was stolen, I suppose,
or lost overboard, and they never admitted to it. Yes, I recall it now, a pianoforte.
But the heat here would soon have ruined it, anyway."
The candles abruptly flickered, for no reason. The light was going, night
rushing in.
Suddenly something, a huge impenetrable shadow, ran by the window.
The woman, Nanetta, screamed. The housekeeper sat with her eyes almost
starting out of her head. Jeanjacques cursed. " What was that?"
As it had run by, fleet, leaping, a mouth gaped a hundred teeth—like the mouth
of a shark breaking from the ocean. Or had they mistaken that?
Did it have eyes, the great black animal which had run by the window?
Surely it had eyes—
Vonderjan had stood up, and now he pulled a stick from a vase against the
wall—as another man might pick up an umbrella, or a poker—and he was opening
wide the doors, so the women shrank together and away.
The light of day was gone. The sky was blushing to black. Nothing was there.
Vonderjan called peremptorily into the darkness. To Jeanjacques the call
sounded meaningless, gibberish, something like Hooh! Hoouah! Vonderjan was
not afraid, possibly not even disconcerted or intrigued.
Nothing moved. Then, below, lights broke out on the open space, a servant
shouted shrilly in the patois.
Vonderjan shouted down, saying it was nothing. "Go back inside." He turned
and looked at the two women and the man in the salon. "Some animal." He
banged the doors shut.
"It—looked like a lion," Jeanjacques stammered. But no. It had been like a
shark, a fish, which bounded on two or three legs, and stooping low.
The servants must have seen it, too. Alarmed and alerted, they were still
disturbed, and generally calling out now. Another woman screamed, and then there
was the crash of glass.
"Fools," said Vonderjan, without any expression or contempt. He nodded at
the housekeeper. "Go and tell them I say it's all right."
The woman dithered, then scurried away—by the house door, avoiding the
terrace. Nanetta, too, had stood up, and her eyes had their silver rings. They, more
even than the thing which ran across the window, terrified Jeanjacques.
"What was it? Was it a wild pig?" asked the clerk, aware he sounded like a
scared child.
"A pig. What pig? No. Where could it go?"
"Has it climbed up the wall?" Jeanjacques rasped.
The black woman began to speak the patois in a singsong, and the hair crawled
on Jeanjacques's scalp.
"Tell her to stop it, can't you?"
"Be quiet, Nanetta," said Vonderjan.
She was silent.
They stood there.
Outside the closed windows, in the closed dark, the disturbed noises below
were dying off.
Had it had eyes? Where had it gone to?
Jeanjacques remembered a story of Paris, how the guillotine would leave its
station by night, and patrol the streets, searching for yet more blood. And during a
siege of antique Rome, a giant phantom wolf had stalked the seven hills, tearing
out the throats of citizens. These things were not real, even though they had been
witnessed and attested, even though evidence and bodies were left in their wake.
And, although unreal, yet they existed. They grew, such things, out of the material
of the rational world, as maggots appeared spontaneously in a corpse, or fungus
formed on damp.
The black woman had been keeping quiet. Now she made a tiny sound.
They turned their heads.
Beyond the windows—dark blotted dark, night on night.
"It's there."
A second time Vonderjan flung open the doors, and light flooded, by some
trick of reflection in their glass, out across the place beyond.
It crouches by the wall, where yestereve the man carnally had his wife, where a
creeper grows, partly rent away by their movements.
"In God's sight," Vonderjan says, startled finally, but not afraid.
He walks out, straight out, and they see the beast by the wall does not move,
either to attack him or to flee.
Jeanjacques can smell roses, honeysuckle. The wine glass drops out of his
hand.
Antoinelle dreams, now.
She is back in the house of her aunt, where no one would allow her to speak,
or to play the piano. But she has slunk down in the dead of night, into the sittingroom, and rebelliously lifted the piano's lid.
A wonderful sweet smell comes up from the keys, and she strokes them a
moment, soundlessly. They feel… like skin. The skin of a man, over muscle,
young, hard, smooth. Is it Justus she feels? (She knows this is very childish. Even
her sexuality, although perhaps she does not know this, has the wanton ravening
quality of the child's single-minded demands.)
There is a shell the inclement aunt keeps on top of the piano, along with some
small framed miniatures of ugly relatives.
Antoinelle lifts the shell, and puts it to her ear, listens to hear the sound of the
sea. But instead, she hears a piano playing, softly and far off.
The music, Antoinette thinks, is a piece by Rameau, for the harpsichord,
transposed.
She looks at the keys. She has not touched them, or not enough to make them
sound.
Rameau's music dies away.
Antoinelle finds she is playing four single notes on the keys, she does not
know why, neither the notes, nor the word they spell, mean anything to her.
And then, even in the piano-dream, she is aware her husband, Gregers
Vonderjan, is in the bed with her, lying behind her, although in her dream she is
standing upright.
They would not let her speak or play the piano—they would not let her have
what she must have, or make the sounds that she must make…
Now she is a piano.
He fingers her keys, gentle, next a little rough, next sensually, next with the
crepitation of a feather. And, at each caress, she sounds, Antoinelle, who is a
piano, a different note.
His hands are over her breasts. (In the dream, too, she realizes, she has come
into the room naked.) His fingers are on her naked breasts, fondling and
describing, itching the buds at their centres. Antoinelle is being played. She gives
off, note by note and chord by chord, her music.
Still cupping, circling her breasts with his hungry hands, somehow his scalding
tongue is on her spine. He is licking up and up the keys of her vertebrae, through
her silk-thin skin.
Standing upright, he is pressed behind her. While lying in the bed, he has rolled
her over, crushing her breasts into his hands beneath her, lying on her back, his
weight keeping her pinned, breathless.
And now he is entering her body, his penis like a tower on fire.
She spreads, opens, melts, dissolves for him. No matter how large, and h
e is
now enormous, she will make way, then grip fierce and terrible upon him, her
toothless springy lower mouth biting and cramming itself full of him, as if never to
let go.
They are swimming strongly together for the shore.
How piercing the pleasure at her core, all through her now, the hammers hitting
with a golden quake on every nerve-string.
And then, like a beast (a cat? a lion?), he has caught her by the throat, one side
of her neck.
As with the other entry, at her sex, her body gives way to allow him room.
And, as at the very first, her virgin's cry of pain changes almost at once into a wail
of delight.
Antoinelle begins to come (to enter, to arrive).
Huge thick rollers of deliciousness, purple and crimson, dark and blazing,
tumble rhythmically as dense waves upwards, from her spine's base to the
windowed dome of her skull.
Glorious starvation couples with feasting, itching with rubbing, constricting,
bursting, with implosion, the architecture of her pelvis rocks, punches, roaring,
and spinning in eating movements and swallowing gulps—
If only this sensation might last and last.
It lasts. It lasts.
Antoinelle is burning bright. She is changing into stars. Her stars explode and
shatter. There are greater stars she can make. She is going to make them. She does
so. And greater. Still she is coming, entering, arriving.
She has screamed. She has screamed until she no longer has any breath. Now
she screams silently. Her nails gouge the bed-sheets. She feels the blood of her
virginity falling drop by drop. She is the shell and her blood her sounding sea, and
the sea is rising up and another mouth, the mouth of night, is taking it all, and she
is made of silver for the night which devours her, and this will never end.
And then she screams again, a terrible divine scream, dredged independently
up from the depths of her concerto of ecstasy. And vaguely, as she flies crucified
on the wings of the storm, she knows the body upon her body (its teeth in her
throat) is not the body of Vonderjan, and that the fire-filled hands upon her
breasts, the flaming stem within her, are black, not as black is black, but black as
outer space, which she is filling now with her millions of wheeling, howling stars.
7
