The Salzburg Tales (36 page)

“I went to sleep one evening in the field: it was so fine and clear. Have you ever seen the moon rising in the sky? At first the dark turns milky, then it is like light through fine silk! After that, you sleep under a full tide of light and blue currents. I went to sleep, and dreamed that the barge boy stood in front of me on a sunshiny day, dressed in a blue shirt, and that he had a copper skin. He gave me the donkey, which was very small and skinny and had a ragged beard like Ivan Soklow, and took in exchange my two children. Then he cut their heads off and filled a little puddle with blood, and I sat inanely holding the donkey by the tail. ‘Here you are, Maria,' he
said, and gave me back two apples which I put in my dress. Then he took the donkey by the tail and drew it away from me, brandishing a thick corded whip. The farther he went, the larger grew the donkey, until he swelled so much that I thought my head would split with looking at him, and he swallowed me entirely, and I fell and fell, and presently fell into the pool of blood, where I saw my two children drowned at the bottom, but stiff and smiling, like dolls. ‘Ivan,' I cried, but they opened their mouths and yapped, Wap, wap, wap: then they shut their eyes and smiled slyly and sillily at each other, turning to each other, and closing together so that there was nothing left but a loaf of bread.

“Why do I tell you such a foolish dream? When I woke up the moon had sunk towards the other side of the sky: it was gibbous, and dark and reddish as if it had fallen into pestilential air, and the night was going down dully with it. I was frightened. I woke up crying, Ivan, Ivan.

“And yet many a time in these past three years I said to myself, You know, Ivan Soklow is nothing but a seedy, old man: a threadbare pedagogue.

“He said to me, ‘There is more in this city than love. Look at the architecture, look at the windows, there you will see books by fine authors, songs, engravings, works of art. Look at the harbour, there you will see ships, cargoes and cordage. Listen in the church, there you will hear hymns, verses, sermons. Ambition is the secret of happiness, work is the seed of the world: all sprang from work. All women,' he said to me, ‘are ruined by their affections. Love is solitary, art and work are social. In love the most savage part of man shows its face, in art it is masked and its brute strength is chained to the wheel of civilisation. If you deny yourself the gratification of this sense you will have strength for creation: if you waste yourself despairing, you will reach your old age a wastrel. Gratification weakens the fibres, austerity is the master of men! ‘That's what he said to me: I thought it so noble, and wept at him sitting in his single room at nights,
writing his lectures and darning his socks. I thought, he lives alone out of austerity!

“Imagine, France, coming back, I was still something virginal. I was a little ashamed of my two boys, and I was glad of my escape. I thought of George sitting up there drinking vodka with the woman. I had haughty dreams of other kinds, as well. I felt patrician then, ‘These are my jewels! ‘The road stretched behind me: it was a long way from my husband's loins to my love's head, over the round earth.

“On the way I passed two lovers behind a bush: a tarantula crouched over them and she was slowly dropping on to their heads. Then I saw that they were only spiders themselves, with eight legs, or looked like it. At night, chariots drove along the road, drawn by white pigs jewelled and frizzed, with a white peacock sitting in state; and the chariots were lumps of marble and they came from away over the plain and out of the black mountains, with stars snowing in the ears of the peacocks and over the earth: and a hundred golden bees hung about the peacock, and the Pleiades hovered in midair. There was a geometrician in the sky with a triangle and a circle: they hung downwards towards the earth, and I said, ‘Now I know where Faust got his designs from.' I passed by the regions of blackness, past snorting couples and briar bushes; the earth burned under my feet and when I lay down I thought the earth was running in waves under me.”

France said slowly: “Did you dream that then? Or are you dreaming it now?”

“Then or now, what is the difference? When I got near Odessa, I got better. You know, after he spoke to me that day, when I told him I was in love with him, I stayed away from school. Do you know what a city is like to one in an ecstasy of passion?

“I walked round for three days to find out the things he told me of. I dragged myself from door to door. Perhaps one of the days was a Sunday. The curtains were drawn and the windows closed. I swung from one door-handle to another, and passed my gluey, arachnid, tentacular fingers along the glass and walls. The city was
silent with thousands of little houses and shutters, and thousands of side-streets running darkly downhill among the ashpans: people passed me silently at high speed, and I always thought ‘Is it he? ‘That is what I saw in the city. A boy bicycling, a child playing on the doorstep looked at me with Ivan Soklow's old face: I stopped constantly with my heart in my mouth, until I got too tired with seeing the same face so often. Then he passed me by laughing in the air, in hair, ear, eye, lifting my skirt with the rustle, there, passing, invisible, saturnine, unconscious of me, all and none. I went home late to bed at night and got up early in the morning. I went to the library and read for days on end, until I could not see the book, or in a maze of words I read certain phrases which seemed written in letters of fire, written in my entrails with letters of fire: fancies and dancing of invisible feet wafted my attention into the dark. I thought I would become famous and people would say in the end, ‘Under the influence of Ivan Soklow, philosopher, Maria learned all the sciences,' like Henrietta Hertz. Then, you know, his mother died: he went into the country for the funeral, and in the holidays I married George, in despair, to escape my fatal passion. At seventeen one is ignorant and harassed.

“Last night I went out of my aunt's house and over to the college where they were giving the evening lectures. I walked along the terrace and looked down at the city: the old, salt smell came up there, the crushed tufts of grass smelled familiar, the lights swung on the cordage in the harbour, and in the town, and tugs were bringing down the lighters, just the same. I leaned against the gate where the weather-worn old stone from the college was thrown down to be carted away, and I listened against the wall, under the windows, to a lecturer speaking in class. It was Ivan—I thought it was Soklow speaking. I listened: yes, the accents seemed fresher, but the words were the same, the sentiments and delivery were the same. I laughed to myself. ‘In three years you have really come to believe that he is old, old as he said,' I thought, ‘but with those ideas he remains constantly the friend and solace of youth.' When the class came out I went and
sat in the cloisters and waited to see him, but when the lecturer came out, talking seriously with serious young girl students, it was not he, but a much younger man, a new teacher, very like. I said to one of the girls: ‘Who is that? ‘She rolled her eyes. ‘Don't you know Vladimir Segal, the new lecturer? He's the rage of the University!'

“I went to his pension early this morning with little Ivan. A bent, yellow, spectacled maid let me in. There he sat at his table, reading a popular scientific monthly, making little modem annotations on his old lectures in their faded ink.

“‘Good morning, Mr Soklow!'

“‘Good morning: what can I do for you?' He had forgotten.

“I said: ‘You don't remember—Maria, Maria Bakinov? I was in your classes of Russian Literature!'

“He adjusted his glasses and looked at me. ‘Ah, yes; Maria, of course. Let me see, what year, what year now? ‘

“I said sadly: ‘Four years ago.'

“Then he remembered. ‘I am so pleased to see you. Is your husband working in Odessa now? I see you have a fine child there.'

“There he sat; his glasses sat on his nose, he had ink on his temple, his hair was thin, but not thinner than before, he had not yet taken off his slippers, he had not washed. His skin was dark, dry, porous and mean. He squinted a bit in his left eye. He had been eating an orange, the window was shut and there was a stale smell in the room. He had on an old wool dressing-gown on which he was embroidering a design over a moth hole, while reading snatches from the magazine. The green dressing-gown was covered with such designs in bright wools, trees, birds, ships, flowers, children under trees.

“No, it was not that either, but he did not stand up to greet me. He looked over his darning through his spectacles, and not a gleam of cheer or change came into his face. You see, I had cherished a heroic dream: I thought I did a fine thing and bound another warm and cultivated heart to mine. But no, I saw it was nothing but an incident: perhaps someone else had made him a declaration in the meantime, some green young girl like me. Then I remembered that
when Mazzini was in London, the women made him declarations: I was disgusted, women are canaille, I thought. But it was the stale smell in the room.

“He said: ‘What is the dear little boy's name, Mrs Weibel?'

“I said slowly: ‘Ivan: called after you.'

“He flushed and said: ‘Really, no, you're joking!'

“I told him I had another baby still at the breast, and that I had left George my husband and walked all the way back to see him.

“He looked embarrassed and ran his fingers through his papers. ‘How imprudent! Even if there was a provocation, you have a duty to the man you married, Mrs Weibel! And then, your two children, you owe it to them to give them a good start in life, your husband is an educated man. How do you propose to support them? ‘

“I was angry, I said: ‘You must not speak about my children: you understand nothing at all, I see.'

“He answered pacifically: ‘Don't get angry, my dear young woman. I was really talking about the matter as a man of the world. I think of these things more philosophically than you naturally would. You are a wife and a mother: Nature herself imposes duties with those functions, Mrs Weibel: it is a social and philosophical problem now, not personal. The individual in having children immolates himself.'

“‘Ah,' I said furious, quite beside myself, ‘you regard my journey here as a philosophical problem?'

“He said, nettled: ‘Really, my dear imprudent child, what can I do for you? Did I ask you to come? I thought you had long ago got over that girlish fancy for me: I am an old anchorite, you know!'

“Just then someone called out in the yard. He opened the window: there stood the ugly, black-dressed maid who had opened the door to me, quarrelling with her husband, an angry old man of sixty or so: he was about thirty years older than his wife, I think. Their child, an ill-favoured sick child of three years, played on the brick garden path and waved his hand when he saw Ivan at the window. ‘Ivan, Ivan,' he cried: Ivan chortled and waved back. Do
you know what I saw? I saw it was Ivan's child: no-one but a jealous observer would have known, but I knew, and the child's eye was slightly crossed, too.

“‘There you are,' he said, ‘another example. They are very unhappy, poor girl. He shouts at her, and is suspicious of her, and she answers him very amicably, she takes it philosophically: I told her to take it philosophically, and remember her duty. Nothing is perfect.'

“‘You think nothing is perfect,' I said to him very calmly. He stood there, sweaty in his old green wool gown, and the rank marguerites in the vase, put there by the maid, I don't doubt, stank up in my nose. ‘Some miserable lives will be perfect when they can crawl with the worms and roots under-earth!' And with that I put my child out into the passage. He straightened a bit, and the scholastic chords vibrated in his skinny throat. He thought I meant my suicide! Then he changed his mind: his eyes went greenish, he swallowed down the foolish presumption that I meant to do him violence, but he stood away from me. His treadmill mind, spun off the wheel, only thought of violence.

“‘I understand women,' he said, and clucked. ‘So you came back to see me? ‘

“He moved towards me with two shuffling steps. How odd he looked with his white face and thin streaked hair, in his dressing-gown! Even the little flush, the little queasy notion that crossed his mind, did not alter his muscles: he was embalmed, I suppose, years ago.

“‘And I understand,' I said loudly, ‘how you take children philosophically.' I gathered up his blankets and sheets and threw them back over the footrail, laughing and saying: ‘Why doesn't the husband send his wife earlier to her household tasks? ‘

“‘His face darkened, that dark skin, he showed his teeth, he seized the bed-clothes and threw them back into place again. I laughed: how comically people behave! He said: ‘Go away! Go away immediately! I did not invite you to stay!'

“I laughed at him and caught hold of the broken cord of the window that looks into the yard: it had fallen down again. The sun
was just coming through. I felt warmed by the sun and by his misery: I felt so young, my last sentimental illusion had just died, knocked on the head by a brick. I sang him the song they sing at weddings. It is nothing: there is nothing in it. Then I started to cross the room to kiss him. It was my right after coming so far: besides, my heart had melted, singing about lovers. But he had been standing there as pale as a sheet, stockstill, and the staleness of the room, and his old papers, rose up about him. I was irritated, and I said, ‘So I was to love you with love of the head? And she? So, in the sublimation of human passion the soul finds salvation, ambition takes wings?'

“He said to me bitterly, ‘I see you have remained only a child: you believe in impulses that have only a minute's significance: you are unable to understand misery, which has left no marks on your face, although it has clawed you. It is all one to you. This afternoon the sun will shine and you will have forgotten all this and will laugh like your child. You come back here dressed in picturesque folly and indulgence: if you had come in crape, you might have saved my old life. I am an outcast, you must understand that: the ridiculous pedagogue, sterile and skinny. I only love someone who is depressed, cynical, ruined, downtrodden, miserable and shoddy, like her. That's why I loved her in my coarse way. I didn't have your fine passions. You are right, that is my son: he is stupid, he will be like me, a skinny pedagogue, like his mother, downtrodden and reviled. That elf-child is the whole product of my life. You spoke the truth just now, but without intelligence. Death is the consummation of life: death is terrifying to the grandest soul, in death all men are equal, though not in birth.'