Lilith (39 page)

We often took bicycle trips together (physical exercise was good for her, my innocent colleagues agreed!); but our most constant pleasure was simply wandering in the fields to the north and west of Stonemont, reveling in the open privacy of the meadows, forests, creek valleys and the hot blue summer sky. Lilith loved water, and often we swam together, naked, in the clear creeks of the valleys. This is one of my most agonizing images of those days: Lilith, standing at the stream’s edge to strip off her skirt and blouse, then running out into the pebbly shallows of the creek, the water splashing about her thighs in showers of sunlit crystal. She would clutch her arms about her body, shivering with cold, and bend down slowly in the icy water, the slender curve of her white back sliding into it until her shoulders were submerged; then leap up suddenly, panting with the shock, her body glittering, the tips of her yellow hair drenched and clinging to her throat and shoulders, shouting to me to join her, splashing the shining water toward me in broken brilliant sprays. When I waded out to her, trembling with delight, her small breasts touched me with their cold points, like tines—an exquisite chill which still runs through my blood. I never felt the slightest physical embarrassment with her. She stripped shame from me like a caul. How sweet it was to lie beside her in the sand of the creek shore, our legs half in the cool running water, speaking softly while the sunlight dried our bodies.

“Where do you live? You never told me.”

“Not far from you. Only five or six blocks.”

“Will you show me some day? I want to see your house.”

“Yes. It’s a nice old house. My room is upstairs, under the eaves. I can see the chimney of the Lodge and the tops of the poplars from my window.”

“What is it like? Tell me about your room. What do you have in it?”

“Oh, silly things. Mostly things I put up when I was a boy and never bothered to take down: high-school pennants, my diploma in a frame, a picture of my horse, a model airplane I made once—the only one that ever flew. Things like that. And on the dresser there’s a picture of my mother when she was sixteen. It’s brown and sort of faded, but you can see how beautiful she was. And I have a photograph of my squadron, with all their autographs above their heads.”

“Nothing of mine?”

“No. I was going to hang your scarf on the wall, but then I thought my grandmother might ask me about it; and I don’t want to have to tell anyone about you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t.”

“You tell Dr. Lavrier about me.”

“Yes, I tell Dr. Lavrier.”

“Does that make you sad?”

“It makes me ashamed. It’s the only thing that does, now. I hate pretending to be innocent and honorable—that seems to me to be the only sinful thing we do.”

“You don’t think loving me is sinful?”

“No. If I thought it hurt anyone—if I thought it hurt you, or Dr. Lavrier, or myself—it would seem sinful. But I don’t. I don’t see how it can. I’m not ashamed of loving you; only of having to pretend not to.”

“Then you are still not perfectly happy.”

“Maybe not. But if I’m unhappy, I want to stay this way forever.”

“Can you, Vincent? Do you think you will?”

“I don’t know. I suppose not. I suppose if you want a love that will last forever you have to be in love with sorrow.”

“You are still speaking with the world’s tongue. If you were perfectly happy you wouldn’t believe that. I don’t think you’ve learned my motto yet.”

“I have. I can say it.”

“Say it.”

“‘
Hiara pirlu resh kavawn.
’”

“And what does it mean?”

“‘
If you can read this, you will know I love you.
’” I laid my hand on her closed eyes, looking up into the sky. “Those are beautiful words. I wish it had been God’s motto, when He made the world.”

“No, I’m glad it wasn’t,” she said. “I think if it had been, you would not love me now.”

I picked up a handful of the yellow sand and, opening my fingers, studied the tiny white and brown and scarlet grains with a kind of forgotten yearning.

“What does it say?” she whispered, smiling at me.

“Nothing. Nothing that I can read.”

“But it is beautiful; we enjoy it.”

“No, it wasn’t beautiful before I met you. You make it beautiful. You are all the beauty of the world, and all the joy I have in it.”

I turned toward her, looking for a moment into her eyes. “How do you manage to be always glad? If I take my joy from you, where do you take yours from?”

“From my people, and my nation. They teach me joy.”

“But you invented them,” I said, and, when she smiled at me reproachfully, leaned toward her and kissed her eyes. “I think you are a genius.”

She clasped my head against her breast and after a moment asked gently, “And if my genius were even greater than you thought, would that dismay you? Would you stop loving me?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you should find that my capacity for joy is . . . boundless, would you love me still?”

“Even more; then my love would be boundless, too.”

“Ah, Vincent, you are sweet to me. Now you are speaking as I wish you to.”

She began, as she had promised, to teach me her language. This, which knowing my limitations as a scholar I undertook rather frivolously and more to please her than for any other reason, I ended by pursuing fervently, so fascinated did I become by the grace and vigor of the language itself and by the insight which it gave me into the quality of her mind and imagination. I had expected, in keeping with her personality, to find it rather elaborate and capricious, and was astonished by the formality and dignity of the grammar. It is a very strange fact that I have forgotten almost every word of it now and that every day it fades further from my mind, like the rhymes and conundrums of childhood. I can remember only odd phrases, scraps of verse and a few rules of its syntax, although I do recall its quality perfectly—precise, severe, yet swift and dextrous and, in the delicate austerity of its sounds, delightful to speak. Its greatest originality was in vocabulary—particularly its descriptive adjectives—which was far richer than that of English. There were over forty words for colors, almost as many for varieties of odor, and over a hundred for differing degrees and modes of happiness—as if the sensibility which was its source was infinitely finer than that which produced the English tongue, and required a much greater vocabulary to cover the range of its perceptions. There was only one conjugation, and I remember this remarkable fact about her nouns: they were divided into two categories, not of gender, but of darkness and light, each of which was differently declined. Under the declension of Light came such words as noise, thirst, action, man, survival, war, pride, art and life; and under that of Dark were silence, stillness, woman, peace, humility, perfection. This curious division gave to every noun—unlike most modern languages—a moral rather than a sexual quality, and provided fascinating material for speculation as to the basis of her assignment of a word to either category. (I remember, in this respect, that there were two distinct words for beauty, one connoting perfect beauty and one imperfect; the former being relegated to the Dark declension and the latter to the Light.) Throughout the structure of her grammar there was evidence of this same preoccupation with paradox. All words which had an opposite, for example, were composed of the same letters as the antonym, spelled backward (Paral—Light; Larap—Darkness); and a particularly subtle—and rather bewildering—feature was that for certain literary or liturgical purposes a noun might change its declension—that is, be transferred from the Light to the Dark category—thus altering completely the texture and atmosphere of the prose, as if rays of light had been shot suddenly through a shower of rain, producing rainbows of radiantly invoked meaning. Although I never learned—there was not time!—to solve or practice these finer shades of significance, the study of them became a rich and engrossing adventure which gave me, as I proceeded in it, the faint and thrilling conviction that with the final mastery of her tongue there would come a kind of revelation. How fervent, how increasingly certain, this belief became! She would give me a page of text to take home, and I would pore over it for hours, into the middle of the night, by the open window of my room, feeling, with every scrap of progress in my study, that I had come a step closer toward some consummate understanding which lay within its grave and beautiful complexities. I remember with what delight I succeeded in translating the first verse of her Gospels (it is copied down in my journal so that I can reproduce it here, although I have forgotten the original):

There was Music; and it was entire, eternal, Perfectly Beautiful.

But He said: There must be an Instrument, for it is unfitting that there should be Music and no Instrument.

Therefore He made an Instrument, one as might produce such music; but it was Imperfectly Beautiful.

And I said:
This is profane. How can any Instrument be fitted to Music which is Perfectly Beautiful?
Therefore I swore my Oath, in which is all my Love
: I will unmake this ignoble instrument. In its own music shall this rude harp be consumed, as in a fire.

I took it to her, spelled out tremulously on one of the lined pages of my journal, watching with breathless suspense while she whispered the English words of my rendition. I cannot express how deeply moved I was when she turned toward me, taking my hand and clinging to it silently, her eyes shining.

“Is is correct?” I asked.

“Oh, Vincent, it’s beautiful. It is a great gift to understand and to translate, so perfectly. Almost a poet’s gift. Do you feel closer to me now?”

“Yes,” I said, my heart burning with fantastic pride.

By my intense application I developed very quickly a command of her language which, though somewhat halting, was sufficient to allow simple spoken exchanges between us; and this was a source of exquisite pleasure to me. What a sense of private, inviolable communion it gave us to wander in the sunlight on the hillsides, calling out to each other our discoveries of wildflowers, pretty stones or orioles in the rippling chiaroscuro phrases, dappled with alternate consonant and vowel sounds, like the passage of swallows through an arbor. Why have I forgotten them so soon? I remember only this fragment of a ballad that she often sang—one of the oldest, she said, in her literature:

Tomáslar, Tomáslar, Irian?
Iría, bar dolán shalár . . .
True Thomas, True Thomas, do you follow?
I follow, although the way be wild . . .

I knew many, then, however; and loved to sing with her. She would droop her head, her hanging hair glowing with an incandescent brilliance in the sunlight, gazing sorrowfully at her laced hands while her soft voice wandered by plaintive half tones over the rueful verses.

Once, in the shadow of an oak to which we had run for shelter in a sudden dazzling shower of sunlit rain, she paused, crouching against the gray bole and stretching out her hand to touch my own, her face transformed.

“What is it?” I said.

“Hush! Listen—do you hear it?”

“No, I don’t hear anything.”

“The music! Can’t you hear the music? Oh, listen! It’s my people, singing.”

I bent my head breathlessly, watching her eyes, which were intensely bright and seemed to plead with me to hear it, too.

“They’re singing in your presence! Oh, Vincent, I think they are almost ready to reveal themselves to you!”

I felt a swift cold spray of delight run through my nerves and stood motionless with weird anticipation.

“You don’t hear them? They’re there—among those boulders—Alman and Roth and Trygg. They’re dressed in silver.”

“Do you see them?”

“Yes. Not clearly, because there is so much shadow. But they’re there.”

I moved my head toward the place she indicated with quick involuntary caution; and it was this movement, I think, which wakened me into a state of shocked dismay—this absurdly stealthy, credulous maneuver, seeking with my eyes the imaginary creatures of her fantasy, which I suddenly discovered myself performing. There was a strange willful innocence about it which I found disgusting; and in a wave of startled indignation I said severely, “I don’t hear anything. There isn’t anything to hear.”

“Oh, you will soon, Vincent! I’m sure of it. They would not sing in your presence if they didn’t mean you to hear them.”

The quiet confidence with which she said these words—the very modesty of her conviction—increased unpleasantly the obscure alarm by which I had been touched, and it was with difficulty, and no very great success, that I concealed my discomposure from her for the rest of the afternoon. She was not impatient or critical of my mood, however, seeming to interpret it as one of appropriate gravity at so distinguished an advent, and pressing my hand, when we parted in her room, with an unusual, benedictory-like caress.

“You frowned. Didn’t you like the way I touched you?”

“Yes.”

“You mustn’t lie to me.”

“I don’t know; it seemed . . . possessive.”

“And you don’t like possessive love?”

“No.”

“Why, Vincent?”

“Because . . . my grandfather loves that way.”

“I think all love is a possession,” she said.

Whatever dismay I felt at this occurrence was overwhelmed—like my guilt, my sense of shame, my every misgiving—by the constant delight of her company, the wild, bewildering joy of her favors, the brilliance of her mind—all things, I was now willing to confess, which I could no longer live without. If I had been inclined to condemn my credulity as wanton or fatuous, I was able to condone it by reminding myself that in a world where most dreams are of money, power or personal glory, it is very easy to forgive—even to prefer—a dream which is of a noble, gentle, imaginary race of men, of song, wisdom and delight; and equally easy to forgive—even to love—the maker of such a dream, a graceful, generous, joyful creature who spoke with so true and original a tongue amid the babel of the world.