The Misunderstanding

by Irene Nemirovsky

Denise waited.

  How did that poem by Maxim Gorky go?

  To love without being loved,

  To lie in bed without sleeping,

  To wait when no one is coming,

  Three things that leave you dying.

  14

  ‘AND THERE YOU have it, my friend,’ concluded Jean Vendômois, ‘that’s the life I lead … In northern Finland with no communication whatsoever with the outside world, at the edge of the Arctic Circle … It’s the life of a pioneer in Canada a century ago. Nine months of the year, the kind of winter that’s impossible to imagine until you’ve seen it … Snow … whiteness, a crystal-clear sky and the most wonderfully pure air … enormous deep forests slumbering beneath the snow … not a breath of wind, not a sound … just the sleigh bells … three months of summer when the sun never sets …’

  ‘I see,’ murmured Yves, his eyes wide in wonder.

  They had been talking since lunchtime, forgetting even to drink the coffee set in front of them. Pierrot sat between their legs and raised his pointy pink nose towards them with the smiling expression such curly-haired dogs always have. Vendômois was a short, stocky man with intelligent eyes in a hardened, tanned, square face.

  ‘… Just imagine it,’ he said, leaning in towards Yves, ‘imagine … far from Paris, far from the difficult, idiotic way of life we inherited after the war … Out there, you have absolute freedom … And the feeling that what you do with your own two hands is real work, that you’re actually creating something … Listen, three years ago there were only twenty-two horses in my village; now there are a hundred and seventy-five … It’s fantastic … Ah! My dream is to build a railway to link my village with Haparanda; at the moment we have no choice but to move our goods using horses and reindeer … A railway would mean earning a fortune, certain success, do you see?’

  ‘Of course I see,’ exclaimed Yves loudly to his friend, ‘it’s wonderful.’

  ‘Yes, it is wonderful … Oh, Yves, come back with me … What are you going to do here? You’ll stagnate, you’ll get bogged down in some monotonous routine … Do you really think the restricted life of a petty employee in an office is for you? You’d be your own boss over there, Yves … And also, you know, this factory may be nothing at the moment, it’s tiny, but it’s growing, expanding … it’s wonderful to watch it grow every year, like a child … Let me explain … we manufacture matches, as you know … well, those forests are inexhaustible and you can buy them from the government for almost nothing because they need foreign income; those forests can provide all the wood you need, even for the packing cases, you see?’

  He rattled off figures and Yves listened, his eyes shining.

  ‘Five years of hard work and you’ll earn back the fortune you once had … I’m not exaggerating, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  The two friends fell into a long silence.

  ‘How I envy you!’ Yves said at last.

  ‘Well then, come …’

  Yves shrugged his shoulders and didn’t reply.

  Jean Vendômois looked at him more closely. ‘So there’s a woman, is there?’

  ‘Yes, a woman.’

  ‘What do such trifling things matter?’

  ‘She’s the suffering type.’

  ‘Really! You have to put us first.’

  ‘I … I just can’t.’

  ‘So she’s a pretty little creature, a plaything, then?’

  ‘No, she’s a real woman, devoted, sincere and loving … That’s why I can’t …’

  ‘My poor boy, that’s ridiculous …’

  ‘I know it is.’

  ‘Listen,’ Vendômois continued, ‘I’m going to sign a contract with an Englishman in an hour … But if you say “yes”, I’ll send him packing … Just give me your word and I’ll go back there and wait for you …’

  ‘I can’t give you my word.’

  ‘You won’t come then?’

  Yves looked at the fireplace and said nothing.

  Vendômois stood up. ‘Too bad,’ he said with a small sigh. ‘Then I’ll say goodbye, my friend; look after yourself.’

  They gave each other a hug. Yves was pale as a ghost.

  Before leaving, Vendômois added: ‘Listen, if one day things don’t work out … you never know … promise me that you’ll come …’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘All right then … goodbye.’

  Alone again, Yves went back to the fire, knelt down, leaned his head against Pierrot’s and let out a deep sigh, the brief, painful sob of a man, but with no tears.

  ‘My boy, my good little boy,’ he whispered, his face buried in Pierrot’s fluffy coat, ‘Oh! How wonderful it would be … Just imagine: living free, surrounded by nature, in the snow, in enormous deep forests, hunting, working, a healthy sort of work that uses the body as well as the mind, freedom … I’d take you with me … Oh! Peaceful evenings in a house made of wood, silence, the moon above the snow, the stars that Jean described, larger and more brilliant than ours … Work that leaves my arms aching with exhaustion, but with a free, happy heart … What a dream, my good little boy!’

  He noticed some small photographs on the carpet that Vendômois had shown him; he’d either forgotten them or left them there on purpose. He picked them up. He saw the plains, wooden huts, lightweight sleighs pulled by reindeer, pine forests, clear, round lakes reflecting the birch trees …

  He looked at them for a long time, then threw them on to the fire.

  ‘Denise, my darling Denise,’ he sighed, ‘you’ll never know what I’m sacrificing for you.’

  15

  WHEN YVES ARRIVED at Denise’s over an hour late, he found her huddled in a corner by the window, sobbing. At first he was frightened.

  ‘My God, Denise, what’s wrong? Has something happened?’

  She gestured that it wasn’t that, unable to speak. He wanted to take her in his arms. But she pushed him away, her arms tense and stiff with rage.

  ‘… You’re selfish, selfish … Here I am mad with worry, imagining heavens knows what, something awful, an accident … But no, you walk in without even deigning to apologise, without a word …’

  ‘You’ve hardly given me time to say anything,’ he pointed out coldly, his eyes suddenly hardening.

  ‘Be quiet, leave me alone, you’re horrible, cowardly, cruel … you have no right, do you hear? No right to make me suffer like this …’

  She could barely speak.

  He took a step towards the door. ‘Denise, I think you may be going mad … I’ll come back when you’re not so upset. Goodbye.’

  She let out a sound like a wounded animal in pain: ‘Yves, Yves, don’t leave me … don’t go, Yves …’

  She clutched at him madly with her trembling hands, hung on to his clothes, his arms, his neck; he grabbed her and held her so tightly against him that his embrace was more like an act of violence than a caress. Little by little she calmed down; the wild beating of her heart grew still; she raised her small sad face to him: it was covered in tears, contorted, deathly pale.

  ‘Yves …’

  Then quietly, shyly, she begged him: ‘You forgive me, don’t you?’

  He gave a slight shrug and looked at her with a strange expression, a combination of pity, tenderness and scorn.

  They sat down very close to one another on the divan, in a dimly lit corner; in the fireplace, reddish, silvery embers sent off sparks every now and then that burst into bright flames before quickly dying out.

  Denise rested her head against Yves’s chest and felt a wonderful sense of relief, the kind of relaxed, voluptuous languor that sets in after a woman has been crying hysterically. From time to time a sob shook her whole body before slowly subsiding, like a swell after a great storm; her heart, so heavy just a while ago, seemed lighter now, like a block of ice that has melted leaving a wispy coat of salty water that moistened the corners of her eyes.

  Surreptitiously, she watched Yves.

  He was silent, overwhelmed,
grave.

  ‘You must never, ever do that again, Denise, do you understand?’ he said quietly.

  Some of her former bitterness stirred in Denise’s unhappy heart.

  ‘Where were you before?’ she asked in a tone of voice that was almost hateful. ‘Why didn’t you come sooner?’

  ‘I was with a friend,’ he replied, in a deliberately cold, detached tone of voice.

  She didn’t dare say ‘I don’t believe you’, but he could not help noticing the bitter, hard pinching of her lips. He stiffened and moved imperceptibly away from her. A kind of muted hostility was rising up between them. She could sense it; she wanted to ward it off, like an evil spell, with kisses, caresses; but he sat there tense, his mouth closed, his hands motionless.

  Then she whispered: ‘Yves, do you love me? Tell me you love me … You mean so much to me. Say something, talk to me …’

  He remained stubbornly silent. She had the impression of desperately throwing herself against a locked door, beating it in vain with her painful head, like a sad little bird in a room with no light; and still she said over and over again with the awkward, terrible obstinacy of a woman: ‘Say something, talk to me …’

  Finally, he replied: ‘I don’t know what to say, Denise, my darling Denise; give me calm, peace, affection … I need to feel your hands on my face, on my heart; I need your sweet, youthful voice laughing beside me … But I can’t, I don’t know how to talk of love … Think of how many years I have been silent … Don’t force me to tell beautiful lies … I don’t want to … I’m tired … Give me peace … I need peace …’

  ‘But I do need to hear all those things,’ she said, incensed. ‘I do need to be told I’m the most beautiful, the most precious and the only woman in your life. I need to hear those words, even if I know they are lies … I do …’

  ‘I can’t give you what you’re asking of me. It’s not my fault, Denise. Perhaps I’m as lacking in feelings as I am in money, I don’t know … But I am giving you everything I am capable of giving …’

  ‘That’s not very much … and meanwhile, I’m suffering,’ she said softly.

  ‘Well,’ he sighed, gently pushing her away, ‘then let’s end it.’

  A sudden icy chill swept through her. ‘Do you really mean that?’

  ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘I’d prefer a thousand times over to be unhappy because of you than to lose you, you know that very well …’

  Silently, she placed her warm cheek next to his. ‘You’re selfish,’ she whispered sadly, but with no anger.

  ‘You’re selfish,’ he replied with a strange little weary sigh.

  And they sat there without speaking, holding each other, he looking far off into the distance, she looking at him.

  16

  YVES OPENED HIS bedroom door and, before closing it again, he called out towards the dim recesses of the servant’s pantry, as he did every evening: ‘Run my bath, please, Jeanne,’ he said, sounding exhausted, ‘… quickly …’

  Then he dropped down into the nearest armchair.

  He had a bath every evening because he didn’t have time to take one before leaving for the office. At eight o’clock in the morning he had to make do with a hasty wash with cold water, shivering in the badly heated bathroom, while beyond the window the ugly grey light of day began to shroud the trees, the sky and the endless rooftops. After four years, Yves still could not get used to the shudder he felt when he woke up, the slight sickness and the nervous desire to yawn and stretch out: it reminded him of nights in the trenches when the alarm sounded, bringing him to his feet at dead of night, violently breaking into his dreams. For the rest of the day he felt a vague unease, exhaustion; he would long for the moment when he could relax and finally sink his weary body into the deep bath, full of warm, scented water, just as young boys who are confined in school all day imagine being at home in the evening with the lamp lit, a steaming soup tureen on the table, surrounded by their family. Along with the dust accumulated during the day, he felt he was shedding his tiredness, his bad mood, his worries and the whole physical and mental atmosphere of the office he hated so much.

  Today, in fact, his routine work seemed more especially painful than usual: like a highly strung woman, he felt the weather tyrannise him with its overwhelming power. It had been drizzling since morning: a dull, light rain fell slowly, splashing against the windows with a mean, insistent sound that set your teeth on edge. And as soon as Yves looked up, he saw the dark, muddy streets; sad people hunched under glistening umbrellas, rushing about like a herd of animals pursued by an invisible hunter; large neon signs flashed in the darkened skies. Around five o’clock it stopped raining; a ribbon of pink appeared on the horizon; for a moment the damp streets reflected its light and shone like amethysts; but when the green-shaded lamps in the office were switched on, outside it was suddenly night. The click-clack of typewriters, the smell of ink … sharp pains in their hunched backs and necks, stinging eyes … columns of figures in rows, getting longer and longer … a pile of letters that never seemed to dwindle, like the sack of gold belonging to the kobolds in German legend, the sack you were condemned to empty and refill endlessly, for a thousand years, then another thousand years, for having caught the ancient Rhine playing with the golden sparkles on the waves at sunset … these faces around him, always the same, conscientious employees bent over their work … he simply couldn’t understand how his job, that for his subordinate would have been a dream come true – a desk near the window that came with a salary of two thousand five hundred francs a month – was for him a mixture of boarding school and prison.

  At the next desk, Moses was going over some figures, reading them with eager eyes, the way a man in love might read a letter from his mistress. He was the stereotype of a rich young Jew, elegant, with a long nose set in a pale, delicate face. Whether he was tidying up the minutes of the most recent AGM, keeping a record of the rise of the British pound or the fall in the sugar cane market in Haiti, Moses attacked his work with prodigious attention and enthusiastic intensity. Yves envied him and he remembered what his boss had told him once – he was also Jewish, but of old stock, with a dark-grey beard and a nose that was almost unseemly: ‘My dear Harteloup, what you’re lacking is a drop, a very tiny drop of our blood …’

  Yves recalled the gesture of his soft, hairy hand, and his Germanic accent: ‘… A trop, a ferry tiny trop …’

  He smiled, but not happily.

  Perhaps the old brute was right? It upset him that he couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened that day; his weary mind was obsessed by them, like a silly tune that you can’t get out of your head, or fragments of a nightmare that linger on when you’re still half asleep.

  Nervously he cracked his knuckles and muttered: ‘… Bloody life …’

  Then he called out, annoyed: ‘Jeanne, come on now, is that bath ready?’

  Jeanne padded into the room; she was slightly deaf so she came closer whenever anyone spoke to her. She had a face like a weasel and the tired, vacant, resigned expression of a working-class woman. ‘Did you want me, Monsieur?’

  ‘My bath.’

  ‘But, Monsieur … Monsieur knows very well that the gas boiler broke down this morning …’

  ‘You mean you didn’t call the repair man?’

  ‘But I did, Monsieur.’

  ‘Well?

  ‘Well, he didn’t come, Monsieur.’

  Yves was about to start shouting abuse at her for being so stupid – he was hardly a patient man – but the sight of her calm, apathetic face made him feel ashamed. All he did was make a vague, weary gesture.

  ‘All right then … fill up a tub for me … why did you let the fire go out?’

  ‘I forgot,’ she mumbled, kneeling down with difficulty to blow on the damp logs that were smoking but refused to burn.

  ‘There’s hardly any wood left,’ she pointed out. ‘Monsieur didn’t leave me any money.’

 
; ‘All right, all right,’ he snapped.

  He made do with two pails of water that Jeanne heated up in the kitchen; then he slipped on his pyjamas and sat down near the fireplace to have his lonely supper; Pierre lay at his feet, sleeping and panting quietly as he dreamed.

  He ate his badly cooked soft-boiled eggs and a slice of galantine, then drank the glass of Montrachet that Jeanne brought him. She warned him that it was the last bottle and then he went up to bed. In the empty apartment, the clock sounded like a beating heart. Yves recalled how, when he was a very young man, he loved the peace and quiet of deserted rooms. That was a time when solitude intoxicated him like a powerful, bitter liqueur; but now, being alone aroused a vague feeling in him that resembled fear; in spite of himself, he sometimes imagined falling ill in the middle of the night, choking, gasping for breath, calling for help – in vain, since Jeanne would be fast asleep on the sixth floor. He was ashamed of his cowardice, yet he shivered involuntarily as he watched the darkness gathering in the corners of the room and the folds of the curtains. At such moments he truly understood why people got married … to have ‘that something’, a presence, the sound of skirts rustling, someone to whom you can tell insignificant things, someone you can scold for no apparent reason when you’re in a bad mood, someone who is there when you are silent.

  It was strange, though, that at such moments he never thought of Denise … To him, this affair was quite simply exhausting. He had to be tender, loving, passionate on cue; despite his worries over the thousand small everyday problems that plagued him like flies on a hot day, he had to whisper sweet nothings, smile, caress her. Even when he was suffering with a terrible migraine, he had to keep talking to avoid seeing Denise’s anxious eyes, to block out her endless sad little questions: ‘What’s wrong? What are you thinking about? You love me, don’t you?’ She was a pretty young woman, kind and charming, made to laugh, to be happy, to love, not someone he would confide in about his endless sordid little problems. And besides, a mistress can always console a man in the throes of some lofty romantic anguish, he thought, but she wouldn’t be able to stand it for long if she had to listen to her lover saying: ‘Well, I need to find three hundred francs to pay my taxes. Jeanne forgot to get the boiler repaired again. The furniture is all dusty; the lace curtains are torn … I ought to replace the silk fabric on the armchair; it’s starting to fray. But I don’t have the time … I don’t even have time to buy underwear, bedlinen, socks …’ So he said nothing, or spoke of insignificant things, or even whispered those sweet nothings that weren’t exactly lies, but which, because he felt obliged to say them, left him feeling dead with exhaustion …