Balthasar's Odyssey (27 page)

I won't press her. I'll let her go on hesitating.

10 January

How delightful those first nights were, when we lay side by side pretending to fall in with the whims of Providence, she acting as if she were mine and me feigning to believe that was so. Now that we love one another we are no longer playing, and the sheets themselves are sad.

If I seem disillusioned it's because Marta has made up her mind and there's nothing I can say to dissuade her. What could I say? That it would be a mistake for her to go and see her husband, when he's living quite nearby and she came on this journey expressly to settle this matter and end her doubts? Yet I'm convinced no good will come of their meeting. If the fellow decided to insist on his rights over his lawful wife no one could gainsay him, not she herself and especially not me.

“What do you mean to say to him?”

“I'll ask him why he went away, why he sent me no news, and if he intends to come back.”

“And if he makes you stay with him?”

“If he was as keen on me as that he wouldn't have left me.”

What sort of answer is that! I shrugged, moved to the other side of the bed, turned my back, and said nothing.

May God's will be done! That's what I keep saying to myself. May His will be done! But I also pray that His will may not be too cruel. It sometimes
is
harsh.

13 January

I roam the streets and the beaches, sometimes alone, often with Maïmoun. We talk about this and that — Sabbataï, the Pope, Amsterdam, Genoa, Venice, the Ottomans. Everything except her. But as soon as I'm back home I forget all our fine words, and don't write anything down. I haven't written a line for three days. A travel journal needs to cover all kinds of preoccupation, and now I've only one. I'm trying to get used to the idea of losing Marta.

She hasn't said anything more since she told me of her decision to go and see her husband. She hasn't mentioned any date, or talked about how she means to get to Chios. Is she still undecided? I don't ask any questions. I don't want her to feel under pressure. Sometimes I talk to her about her father, or Gibelet, or pleasant memories such as our unexpected meeting at the gates of Tripoli, or the night we spent in the house of Abbas the tailor, God bless him!

I no longer take her in my arms at night. Not because
I
think of her as another man's wife again, but because I don't want
her
to feel guilty. I've even thought of going back to sleeping in my own room; I haven't used it for some time. But after thinking it over for a day, I changed my mind. It would have been unforgivably tactless — not the considerate act of a chivalrous lover, but a sort of desertion, which Marta might have seen as an incitement to go back to her “husband” right away.

So I still sleep by her side. I kiss her on the forehead and sometimes hold her hand, but without getting too close to her. I desire her more than ever, but I shan't do anything that might frighten her. I can understand that she should want to see her husband and ask him the questions she's been revolving in her mind for so long. But there's no reason why she should go immediately. He's been living in Chios for years; he's not going to leave there tomorrow. Nor the next day, nor next week, nor next month. So there's no hurry. There are still a few crumbs left on our table before it's cleared.

17 January

Marta spent the evening in her room, weeping and weeping. I went several times and stroked her hair, her brow and the backs of her hands. She didn't say anything, but she didn't draw away.

When we went to bed she was still weeping. I didn't know what to do. Just for something to say I murmured cliches that couldn't possibly be of any comfort, such as “Everything will turn out all right — you'll see!” What else could I say?

Then suddenly she turned to me and cried in a voice that was both angry and piteous:

“Why don't you ask me what I'm crying for?”

There was no reason why I should. I knew why. Or thought I did.

“I'm late!” she said.

Her cheeks were pale as wax, and her eyes round with fright.

It took me endless seconds to grasp what she was trying to tell me.

“You're pregnant?”

I must now look as cadaverous as she did.

“I think so. I'm already a week late.”

“That's too soon to be sure.”

She put her hand on her flat stomach.

“
I
am sure. The child is there.”

“But you said you couldn't have children.”

“That's what I've always been told.”

She stopped crying but was still dazed. Her hand went on feeling her belly. I dried her eyes with my handkerchief, then sat down beside her on the edge of the bed with my arm round her shoulders.

I tried to console her, but I was as distraught as she was. And just as guilty. We'd broken the laws of God and man by living as husband and wife, believing our love-making would have no consequences. Marta's barrenness, which we should have regarded as a misfortune, we saw as a blessing, a promise of impunity.

But the promise wasn't kept. The child is there.

The child. My child. Our child.

I've always dreamed of having an heir, and now Heaven is giving me one, conceived in the womb of the woman I love!

We should both be deliriously happy; this should be the best moment in our whole lives. Shouldn't it? But the world won't let us see it like that. We're supposed to regard the child as a curse, a punishment. To mourn its coming, to look back with regret to the blissful days of infertility.

Well, if that's the world, the sooner it ends the better — that's what I say! May it be destroyed by fire or flood, or the breath of the Beast! Let it be annihilated, engulfed, destroyed!

When Marta, riding beside me last summer in the mountains of Anatolia, told me that not only did she not fear the end of the world, but she was waiting and hoping for it, I didn't understand. Now I understand her rage, and share it.

She's the one that's weakening.

“I must go and find my husband on his island as soon as possible.”

“So that he thinks the child is his?”

She nodded miserably, and stroked my forehead and face.

“But it's mine!”

“Do you want people to call him a bastard?”

“Do you want people to call him the son of a scoundrel?”

“You know it has to be like that. There's nothing we can do about it.”

I'd admired Marta for rebelling against her fate, and couldn't hide my disappointment.

“Expectant mothers are said to draw courage from their unborn children, but yours makes you timid.”

She moved away from me.

“I'm not brave enough for you? I'm going back to a man who no longer loves me, who'll insult me and beat me and keep me shut up for the rest of my life, and all so that my child shouldn't be called a bastard — and you call
me
timid?”

Perhaps I shouldn't have criticised her, but I meant every word I said. She says she's about to sacrifice herself? Self-sacrifice can have as much to do with cowardice as with courage. Pure courage consists of confronting the world, defending oneself inch by inch against attack, and dying on one's feet. The best that can be said of just exposing oneself to blows is that it's an honourable rout.

Why should I accept that the woman I've started to love should go and live with a scoundrel, taking with her the child we've engendered together, a child that she'd given up hoping for and that I have given her? Why? Because a drunken priest in Gibelet once laid his hands on her head and mumbled three ritual sentences?

To hell with men's laws, their mumbo-jumbo, their chasubles and their ceremonies!

Monday, 18 January 1666

I've just told Maïmoun everything, and he agrees with Marta and thinks I'm wrong. He listens to what I say, but he doesn't really take it in. All he can say is, “That's the way things are!”

He says it would be madness to let her carry the child and give birth anywhere else but in her husband's house: according to him she might die of anguish and shame. She'll grow more frantic every day; I mustn't try to hold her back any longer.

To make it less painful for me, he says he's sure she'll come back to me one day, before long. “Heaven often sends misfortunes to those who don't deserve them, but sometimes, too, it sends them to those who do,” he promises, screwing up his eyes as if to make out the real meaning of things. By this he means that Marta's husband might suffer the fate that brigands deserve, that reality might catch up with rumour, and that then the future mother of my child would be a widow again … But I know all that. Of course anything may happen. But wouldn't it be despicable to live in hopes of a rival's death, praying to Heaven every day to have him drowned or hanged? A man younger than I am, what's more! No, that's not how I aim to spend my future.

I argue and struggle, but I know the battle is lost in advance. Marta won't dare let her pregnancy grow obvious under my roof; her only thought is to go and conceal her wrongdoing in the bed of a husband she hates; and I can't make her stay with me against her will. She never stops weeping, and seems to get thinner and more wasted by the hour.

So what is there for me to hope for? That when she meets her husband she'll decide for some reason or other not to stay with him? Or that he won't want her? I suppose I could offer him money to have their marriage annulled, alleging that it was never consummated. He's keen on money. If I offered him enough we could all come away from his house together — Marta, our child and myself.

There I go — making up fairy stories, just to give myself some reason, however flimsy, to go on living. Lying to yourself is sometimes the only way to get through your troubles.

19 January

During the night Marta told me she was leaving tomorrow for Chios. I said I'd go with her, and promised not to interfere in any way between her and her husband: I'd just hang around so that she could call upon me if necessary. She agreed to this, though she made me promise again, twice, not to do anything unless she expressly asked me to. If her husband suspected what has happened between us, she said, he'd cut her throat before she had time to cross the threshold.

There are two ways of getting to Chios from here. By road to the end of the peninsula, after which it's scarcely an hour's trip by barge to the town of Chios. Or by sea all the way. Hatem, after making extensive inquiries at Marta's request, advises the latter route. You have to allow a day for the voyage if there's a fair wind; otherwise two.

My clerk will come with us, and I even thought of taking my nephews along too. Didn't I promise my sister Patience I'd keep them with me all the time? But after weighing the pros and cons I decided they'd better stay on in Smyrna. The matter we have to settle in Chios is a delicate one, and I'm afraid one or the other of them might charge in and spoil everything if they were there. Perhaps I'd have changed my mind if they'd insisted. But neither of them made any objection, which I must say surprised and rather worried me. I've asked Maïmoun to watch over them like a father until I'm back.

How long I'll stay on the island I don't know. A few days? Two or three weeks? We'll see. Will Marta come back with me? I still hope so. To return with her to “our” house in Smyrna already seems to me the most wonderful thing that could happen to me, while I'm still there now, and can still look around at the walls and doors, the carpets and furniture as I write.

Maïmoun told me that when I get back he plans to set out on a long journey that will take him to Rome, Paris and of course Amsterdam, among other places. He looks forward to telling me more about it when I'm more in the mood to listen. But shall I really be so when I get back from Chios?

He'd like me to go with him on his journey. I'll see. For the moment I haven't the heart to contemplate any such project. My only dream at present is to go to Chios with Marta, and to come back from there with her.

22 January

To approach Chios from the sea and watch the coast-line, the mountains beyond, and the innumerable mills in between gradually emerge, ought to lighten a traveller's heart like some gradually bestowed reward. For most people the island is a promised land, a foretaste of Heaven. But I'm travelling out of necessity, not for pleasure, and all I can think of is getting away again as soon as possible.

Marta was silent throughout the crossing, and deliberately avoided catching my eye. Hatem tried to cheer me up by telling me a tale he'd heard the day before yesterday in the harbour at Smyrna. Apparently there's a convent some way inland on the island of Chios inhabited by some very strange nuns. Travellers may be accommodated there as guests, as in many religious houses, but here the hospitality is of a very special kind. It's said that during the night the nuns slip into the visitors' beds and bestow on them favours far in excess of what is required by the precept of loving one's neighbour.