Fear (4 page)

Her desiccated soul, yearning for human company, was absorbing all the life and enjoyment that it could. Music in the next room tempted her, moving far into her beneath her burning skin. The dancing began, and without knowing how she found herself in the middle of the milling throng. She danced as she had never danced in her life before. The circling eddies of the dance cast all her melancholy out of her, the rhythm infected her limbs, breathing ardent movement into her body. If the music stopped she felt that the silence was painful, the snake of restlessness darted its tongue at her quivering limbs, and she flung herself back into the eddies as if into a bath of cool, soothing water that bore her up. She had never been more than an average dancer before, she was too measured, too thoughtful, too cautious and firm in her movements, but this frenzy of liberated delight did away with all physical inhibitions. A steely band of bashful circumspection that usually held her wildest passions in check now broke apart, and she was out of control, restless, her mind blissfully melting away. She felt arms and hands around her, touching and disappearing again, she sensed the breath of spoken words, the tingling of laughter, music flickering in her blood, her whole body was tense, so tense that the clothes on her back were burning, and she would have liked to tear them all off spontaneously, so that she could dance naked and sense this intoxicating frenzy even deeper inside her.

“Irene, what’s the matter?” She turned around, swaying, laughter in her eyes, still heated from the embrace of her dancing partner. Her husband’s cold, hard look of astonishment struck her to the heart. She was alarmed. Had she danced too wildly? Had her frenzy given anything away?

“What … what do you mean, Fritz?” she stammered, surprised by his suddenly piercing gaze, It seemed to be forcing its way further and further into her, and now she felt it deep inside, close to her heart. She could have cried out aloud beneath that searching, determined gaze.

“How very strange,” he murmured at last. There was a note of sombre amazement in his voice. She dared not ask what he meant. But a shudder ran through her when, as he turned away without another word, she saw his shoulders, broad, wide, strong, vigorous, attracting her gaze to the nape of his neck, which was hard as iron.
Like a murderer’s
, the thought flashed through her mind, a crazy thought, instantly dismissed. Only now, as if she were seeing her own husband for the first time, did she feel with horror that he was powerful and dangerous.

The music began to play again. A gentleman came up to her, and automatically she took his arm. But now everything about her seemed weighty, and the bright melody no longer brought movement into her stiff limbs. A dull heaviness moved down from her heart
towards her feet, every step she took hurt. She had to ask her partner to excuse her. As she stepped back she instinctively looked to see if her husband was near, and jumped in alarm. He was standing directly behind her, as if waiting for her, and once again his penetrating eyes met hers. What did he want? What did he know? She instinctively clutched her dress together at the neck, as if her breasts were bare and she must shield them from him. His silence was as persistent as his gaze.

“Shall we leave now?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes.” His voice sounded harsh and unfriendly. He went ahead. Once again she was looking at the broad, menacing back of his neck. Someone put her fur around her shoulders, but she still felt freezing cold. They drove home in silence, sitting side-by-side.

That night she had an oppressive dream. Some kind of strange, loud music was playing, she saw a brightly lit, high-ceilinged hall, she went in. A crowd of people and many bright colours were mingled in movement. Then a young man whose identity she thought she knew, although she could not entirely place him, made his way to her. He took her arm, and she danced with him. She felt well, she was soft and yielding. A great wave of music bore her up, so that
she no longer felt the floor beneath her feet, and they danced through many halls with golden chandeliers high up in the roof, radiating little flames like stars, while mirrors on wall after wall reflected her own smile again and again to infinity. The dancing grew wilder and wilder, the music more and more urgent. She realised that the young man was pressing closer to her, his hand digging into her bare arm, making her groan with painful pleasure, and now, as her eyes plunged deep into his, she did think she knew him. She thought he was an actor whom she had adored from afar when she was a little girl. Delighted, she was just about to speak his name, but he silenced her soft cry with an ardent kiss. And so, their lips merged together, the two of them burning like a single body in each other’s embrace, they flew through the halls as if borne up on a blissful wind. The walls streamed past, she was no longer conscious of the hovering vault of the ceiling or of the hour, she felt amazingly weightless, all her limbs relaxed. And then, suddenly, someone touched her on the shoulder. She stopped, and the music stopped at the same time, the lights went out, the dark walls moved in on her, and her dancing partner had disappeared. “Give him back, you thief!” shouted that terrible woman, for it was she, making the walls ring with the sound, and she closed ice-cold fingers around Irene’s wrist. She resisted,
hearing herself cry out with a mad shriek of horror, and the two of them wrestled, but the other woman was stronger. She tore off Irene’s pearl necklace, and half her dress with it, leaving her breasts bare and her arms exposed beneath the rags now hanging off her. All of a sudden there were other people around them again, streaming in from all the other halls on a rising tide of noise, staring with derision at her as she stood there half-naked, while the woman screeched: “She stole my beau, she did, that floozie, that adulteress!”

She didn’t know where to hide or which way to look, for the people were crowding in closer and closer, women looking at her with inquisitive eyes, hissing at her, grasping at her naked body, and now that her reeling gaze looked around for help she suddenly saw her husband standing motionless in the dark frame of the doorway, his right hand concealed behind his back. She screamed and ran away from him, ran through room after room, and the crowd, greedy for sensation, raced along after her. She felt more and more of her dress slip off, she could hardly clutch at it now. Then a door swung open ahead of her, eagerly she rushed down the stairs to save herself, but the terrible woman was waiting at the bottom of the staircase in her woollen skirt, with her claw-like hands outstretched. Irene swerved aside and ran out into the open air, but the other woman came after her, and so they both
chased through the night down long, silent streets, and the street lights, grinning, bent down to greet them. She could hear the woman’s wooden clogs clattering along behind her, but whenever she reached a street corner the woman was there already, leaping out at her, and it was the same again at the next corner, she lay in wait beyond all the houses both to right and to left, always there, terrifyingly multiplied. There was no overtaking her, she always went on ahead and was there first, reaching out for Irene, who felt her knees begin to fail her. At last she saw the house where she lived and raced up to it, but as she wrenched the door open there stood her husband with a knife in his hand, his piercing gaze bent on her. “Where have you been?” he asked in sombre tones. “Nowhere,” she heard herself say, and already she heard the woman’s shrill laughter at her side. “I seen it! I seen it all!” screeched the grinning woman, who was suddenly there with her, laughing like a lunatic. And her husband raised the knife.

“Help!” she cried out. “Help!”

She was staring up, and her horrified eyes met her husband’s. What … what was all this? She was in her own room, and the ceiling lamp was on, casting a pale light. She was at home in her bed, she had only been dreaming. But why was her husband sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her as if she were an invalid? Who had put the light on, why was he sitting
there so rigid and motionless, staring at her so gravely? A shiver of horror ran through her once, and then again. Instinctively, she looked at his hand. No, there was no knife in it. Slowly, the drowsiness of sleep wore off, and so did the images it had brought like glaring flashes of lightning. She must have been dreaming, she must have called out in her dream and woken him. But why was he looking at her with such a serious, penetrating, implacably grave expression?

She tried to smile. “What … what is it? Why are you looking at me like that? I think I’ve been having a nightmare.”

“Yes, you called out in a loud voice. I could hear it in the other room.”

What did I call out, what did I give away, she thought, trembling, what does he know? She hardly dared to look up at him again. But he was gazing gravely down at her with a strange composure.

“What is it, Irene? There’s something the matter with you. You’ve been so different for the last few days, as if you had a fever, nervous, distracted, and now you cry out for help in your sleep.”

She tried to smile again. “No,” he persisted. “You mustn’t keep anything from me. Is there something on your mind, is anything troubling you? The whole household has noticed how you’ve changed. You ought to trust me, Irene.”

He moved a little closer to her, and she felt his fingers on her bare arm, caressing it. There was a strange light in his eyes. She was overcome by a longing to cast herself on his firm body, cling to him, confess everything and never let him go until he had forgiven her now, this very moment, now that he had seen her suffering.

But the pale light was shining down from the ceiling, illuminating her face, and she was ashamed. She felt afraid to say anything.

“Don’t worry, Fritz.” She tried to smile again, although she was still shivering all the way down to her bare toes. “I’m only feeling a little nervous strain. It will pass off.”

The hand holding hers was quickly withdrawn. She felt afraid, now that she looked at him, pale in the glassy light, his forehead clouded by the shadow of dark thoughts. Slowly, he stood up.

“I don’t know why, but these last few days I’ve felt as if you had something to tell me. Something that concerns only you and me. We are alone now, Irene.”

She lay there motionless, as if hypnotised by that grave, veiled glance. How good, she felt, everything could be now, she had only to say two words, two little words—forgive me. And he wouldn’t ask what for. But why was the light on, that forthright, bold, light listening to them? She felt she could have said it in the dark, but in the light her strength failed her.

“So there’s nothing, really nothing that you want to tell me?”

It was a terrible temptation! How soft his voice was! She had never heard him speak like that before. But the light hanging from the ceiling, that yellow, avid light!

She shook herself. “What can you be thinking of?” she laughed, and was seized by alarm again at hearing her own shrill tone of voice. “If I’m not sleeping well, does that mean I’m keeping secrets from you? Maybe even having some kind of adventure?”

Once more she shivered. How false, how insincere those words sounded. She was horrified by herself, right to the marrow of her bones, and instinctively she looked away from him.

“Well—good night, then.” He spoke curtly now, in an entirely different, sharp voice. It sounded like a threat, or black and dangerous mockery.

Then he put out the light. She saw his pale shape disappear through the doorway, soundless, wan, a nocturnal ghost, and when the door closed she felt as if the lid of a coffin were coming down. The whole world, she felt, was dead and hollow except for her own heart, beating loud and frantically against her breast in her rigid body, bringing her pain and more pain every time it beat.

Next day, when they were sitting at lunch together—the children had just been quarrelling, and it was quite difficult to make them calm down—the maid brought in a letter. For Madam, she said, and the messenger was waiting for an answer. Surprised, she saw unfamiliar handwriting on the envelope, and quickly opened it, only to suddenly turn pale when she read the first words. All at once she jumped up from the table. She was even more alarmed when she saw, from the evident surprise of the rest of the family, how thoughtlessly revealing her impetuous movement had been.

The letter was short. Just three brief lines: ‘
Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once
.’ No signature, no date in the obviously disguised handwriting, only that cruelly urgent command! Irene hurried to her room to get the money, but she had mislaid the key to her money box. Frantically, she flung open all her drawers, rattling the contents about until at last she found it. She put the banknotes into an envelope with trembling fingers, and herself gave them to the messenger waiting at the door. She did it all mindlessly, as if under hypnosis, without even considering the possibility of hesitating. And then—hardly two minutes after leaving the dining room—she was back with her family again.

There was silence. She sat down with a shrinking sense of uneasiness, and was just trying to think of some excuse in a hurry when—and her hand shook
so much that although she had picked up her glass she had to put it down again in haste—she realised, to her horror, that she had left the letter lying open beside her plate. Just one small movement, and her husband could have picked it up. Maybe a glance would have been enough to read the large, unformed characters in which those few lines were written. Words failed her. Surreptitiously, she crumpled up the note, but now, as she put it in her pocket and looked up, she met her husband’s eyes bent severely on her. It was a penetrating, stern and painful glance. She had never known him to look like that before. Only now, during these last few days, had he suddenly made her feel distrustful with such an expression on his face. It shook her to the core, and she was unable to parry it. A glance like that had paralysed her in the middle of dancing, and he had watched over her sleep last night with the same look, his eyes gleaming like the blade of a knife.