The Wine of Solitude (20 page)

‘Lili, you mustn’t do that. You shouldn’t play dangerous games, that’s not what real courage is.’

But those words had a meaning she didn’t want to understand. ‘Real courage? Yes, I know: being humble, forgiving. But no, no … you can’t ask me to do that, really, you can’t ask me to do such a thing. First of all, when I decide the game has lasted long enough I’ll stop. But not before I’ve made her suffer. At least a little, and it will always be less than I suffered because of her. Just let her suffer a little …’

She turned round, looked at her mother for a long time, cruelly, screwing up her eyes. ‘What a beautiful night,’ she said. ‘How wonderful it is to be eighteen! Oh, I wouldn’t like to be old, Mama … my poor Mama.’

Bella shuddered; Hélène saw her hands tremble, the hands she hated so much: her nails were still shaped like claws but had lost their strength and brightness over the years. ‘You’ll get old just like everyone else, my girl,’ she said, her voice low and faint, ‘then you’ll see how amusing it is.’

‘Oh, but I still have time on my side,’ Hélène said happily, ‘lots of time …’

Bella stood up and left the room, slamming the door angrily behind her.

When she was alone, Hélène could feel tears welling up in her eyes in spite of herself. ‘So,’ she thought, shrugging
her shoulders, ‘do I feel sorry for her? No, and besides, it’s not my fault that she’s getting old. All she had to do was not take up with a gigolo fifteen years younger than she was. But I, I … I’m just as bad as they are.’

Slowly, gradually, the guilty love grew stronger. It had already set its deep, sinuous roots into the man’s heart before the first fragile flower had started to bloom. It seemed so delicate, so small, that the man thought about it less to admire it than to become intoxicated by its very power. Its perfume was so strong. Yet it would take the slightest gesture, the tiniest effort to pluck it out, to kill it for ever in his soul, and it would all be over. So what did he have to fear? He smiled with defiance and tenderness. ‘Well, then, all right, so it’s the beginning of love. What do I have to fear, at my age? I know that if I let it grow, it will only bring me unhappiness.’ But from the day he called it love, when he consented to acknowledge it existed, he became aware of his own weakness for the first time. Agile, tenacious roots plunged deeper and deeper within him with every passing day. The moment when he finally shuddered and thought ‘That’s enough now, enough, the game is over’ was the very moment when he succumbed, when he got used to being in love, when he cherished his suffering. Then all he could do was wait, wait
for time and disillusionment to destroy the deep-rooted, fragile, deadly flower.

Max had begun to think about Hélène, picturing her face when he was in bed at night, when he felt particularly tired of his ageing mistress and life itself. Just before falling asleep, he liked to close his eyes and imagine Hélène’s face. He wasn’t in love. How absurd! ‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘never again. Love, how ridiculous. Love is a terrible cross to bear. In love with Hélène, with that child?’ He remembered one day in autumn, on the islands in St Petersburg, when he’d been out walking with Bella; he’d noticed how little Hélène was dragging her boots through the mud and looking gloomy. How he’d hated her! Her very presence irritated him. Every time she looked at him, he felt she was spying on him. How many times had he said to Bella, ‘But really, why don’t you dump her in some boarding school so she leaves us in peace?’ That little girl … And now? No, no, he didn’t love her. His imagination was playing tricks on him, it was a whim. Except he enjoyed seeing her so much. And she was the only person in the world he could talk to honestly, as a friend. He thought back to her thin, sun-tanned neck, her face, so young … Young, that was what he found so seductive. He was thirty and Bella … ‘Wooden dolls, lifeless and cold,’ Bella said of younger women. ‘Two a penny …’ True, but older women in love were intense, passionate creatures, and were they so very difficult to find? Sometimes, when he was asleep, some quirk merged the faces of the two women. Sometimes he was holding Hélène tightly in his arms but calling her: ‘Bella, darling Bella …’

Then he would wake up shaking, his heart gripped with disgust and shame, thinking, ‘I don’t love her. I’m playing
at love. I’m amusing myself. It will be over for ever whenever I want …’

Time passed, however, and he could no longer fool himself. ‘My mistress’s daughter,’ he thought with terror and remorse.

Well, so what? It wasn’t unusual.

‘It’s almost inevitable,’ he thought. ‘it … happens all the time. Bella will never forgive us. She’s not a mother, not Bella, she’s wholly and ferociously a woman. Well, then, so she won’t forgive us, I don’t really give a damn. After all, I gave her my best years. Isn’t that enough? I gave up my mother, my family, my youth for her …’

He had loved her so much, this woman who, even then, wasn’t young or beautiful. But she knew how to give pleasure. He recalled the angry scenes with his mother, his sisters’ tears. They had tried everything (such clumsy attempts!) to tear him away from ‘that woman’. He could still remember the tone of his mother’s voice as she said, ‘She doesn’t love you. She just wanted to get revenge on me, take you away from me. You poor boy. She was nothing,
a mere nobody
,’ she would say in English, bitterly, finding some consolation in being able to speak that language fluently, unlike Bella who had undoubtedly only learned it from some lover she once had: ‘She’s so smug now, smug because she took my son away from me; that woman I refused to receive, not because she was poor, thank God! I’m above anything like that. But because she behaved like a slut. That viper! She took my son! Do you think she did it for any other reason? Believe me, my boy, women don’t love a man for himself but as a weapon against another woman.’

‘Yes,’ Max mused, ‘she was right …’

He was old enough, however, to realise that love was rarely pure and simple at the beginning. At first, Bella had wanted to take her revenge on Madame Safronov. But later she had loved him as faithfully as a woman like her was capable of loving. What he hadn’t known was that his youth and his excessive passion satisfied in her a sensual need for love that was full of danger, a kind of love that one of her former lovers had kindled in her heart.

‘She wanted me to live and breathe only because of her. I’m all alone in the world now, with her …’

He felt his solitude as pain, a feeling of suffocation that was almost physical. ‘I haven’t a single friend, apart from Hélène. To Bella, relationships, simple human relationships, family ties, friendships, companionship, don’t exist. A friend, a family, a home, I miss all those things and will miss them for ever, as long as I stay with her.’ He sometimes thought of leaving her. But life without the Karols seemed impossible to him. He had no one but them. He felt tied to them as much by his desire for pleasure as by simple human habit. He feared an even more bitter feeling of solitude, one that was irreversible. Sometimes he would go for days on end without answering the telephone or replying to Bella’s messages. But he was too often bored in this foreign country, with no friends, no profession. He had brought a fortune from Russia that was neither great enough to allow him expensive distractions nor small enough to make him feel he needed to work for a living. He wanted to see Hélène again. He went back. He watched her coming and going, running and jumping with an elegant lightness given wings by her extreme youth; it seemed almost impossible to keep her on the ground.

‘How young you are, my God,’ he whispered with astonishment, bitterness and envious despair. ‘You’re so young!’

He took her hand, secretly pressed it against his cheek with a shy, innocent gesture.

One June day the Karols were having lunch at Max’s house. They were all about to leave for Biarritz. Max lived in a modest, quiet little apartment in a peaceful street in Passy; it was almost like living in the countryside. A storm was brewing over Paris; the sky was covered in copper-coloured wisps of cloud that slowly moved closer together to form a blanket of pink mist that parted every so often to reveal a dazzling ray of light.

When lunch was over, Max went out to buy a small suitcase he needed. Hélène picked up a book.

Karol stared nostalgically at some invisible point in the distance. His fingers were never still; he snapped them loudly and rhythmically, like castanets. Hélène realised that he was imagining the gaming table at the club. He finally stood up and sighed. ‘I didn’t have time to shave. I’ll be back in half an hour …’

‘But Boris,’ his wife cried, ‘we’re leaving as soon as Max gets back! Come on, you know if you go out you won’t come back until tonight.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Boris Karol and his face lit up with that mischievous smile Hélène loved so much. ‘Here, my darling,’ he said, slipping some money into his wife’s hand, ‘you have just enough time to buy yourself that new hat you wanted.’

She softened.

‘Let’s go downstairs together.’

Hélène was alone. A gentle breeze rustled the branches of
a nearby tree; the stormy sun appeared, lighting up the leaves that strained in the wind. The clouds got darker, blocking out the light, the tree swayed and creaked as the wind ripped off the young June leaves, still so green and delicate.

The key turned in the lock and Max came in. He wasn’t surprised to find the house empty. He knew what the Karols were like. He waited. At around four o’clock Karol, whom no one had expected to see before evening, arrived at the house. He slammed the door angrily.

‘My wife isn’t back yet? I told her to wait for me in the car. When I came out she was gone. That’s so like her. She made me give my word that I wouldn’t stay at the club for more than half an hour and, just when my luck was beginning to change, she disappears.’

‘But my poor friend,’ said Max, his voice weary, ‘it’s after four o’clock. She must have waited for you for two and a half hours. You have to admit that …’

Karol wasn’t listening; he was shaking with impatience, watching the door; his eyes shone, but with a sad, passionate, gloomy look. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘what a shame. Just when my luck was starting to change …’

He paced up and down the room.

‘I’m going back to the club,’ he said at last, forcing himself to laugh. ‘I’ll be back in a flash.’

‘It’s going to rain, Papa,’ cried Hélène, ‘and you don’t have a raincoat. Wait a moment, take an umbrella, you were coughing so much yesterday …’

‘Don’t make a fuss,’ he shouted happily as he disappeared. ‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘Where’s the other one now?’ said Max, shaking with annoyance. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock.’

Hélène started to laugh. ‘My dear Max. Haven’t you learned by now? We’ll leave this evening, or in the middle of the night, or tomorrow, or next week. What’s the difference? Will it be any better or different from being here?’

He didn’t reply. They were alone. The clock ticked. Far off in the distance thunder rumbled in the skies with the deep, soft sound of a bird cooing.

The telephone rang. Max answered it.

‘Hello, yes, it’s me …’

Hélène recognised her mother’s voice.

‘He came back and then went out again,’ Max said. ‘No,’ he continued, hesitating, ‘she’s not here either. I’m going out. I can see the trip is off. Let’s go tomorrow.’

He hung up and stood there, gloomy and silent.

Hélène looked at him and smiled. ‘Telling lies, my little Max?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he replied. ‘Let’s just have a moment’s peace for once.’

The first heavy, large drops of rain pattered against the windows. It was dark outside now. Hélène shuddered. ‘It’s so cold all of a sudden, for June. It must be hailing …’

‘Let’s close the shutters,’ he said.

With the shutters and curtains closed, and a small lamp switched on in the darkness, the little room felt peaceful and friendly.

‘Come on, let’s have something to eat.’

They put some water on to boil. Hélène set the table. She walked over to a pink vase that had carnations in it. ‘Max, you haven’t even taken off the metal bands from the florist, you bad boy. The rust will kill your flowers.’

She cut off some of the stems, changed the water,
maliciously enjoying the look of pleasure that spread across Max’s face.

‘I need a woman here,’ he said innocently.

Rainwater flowed down the empty street. In the next room the blinds were open and they could see shining, light sprays of water swirling over the pavement in the wind.

Max closed the door. There wasn’t a single sound now. He sat down at her feet. ‘Wait, don’t move, let me help you, let me serve you. Would you like some tea? There’s a cake left from breakfast. You can have it. Please have it.’

Humble and attentive, he watched her as she ate, his amorous eyes fixed on her white teeth that shone between her lips. The profound stillness held them in a kind of sweet, silent spell.

‘I find you so attractive,’ he said finally, so quietly that he had to say it again before she could understand his words. He was trembling.

‘At last,’ she mused, mocking herself as much as him. ‘Here it is. The moment I’ve waited for so long.’

How had she managed it? She remembered the hills in Finland, when the slightest push sent the sleigh flying off into space. She had set everything in motion the first time she’d smiled at him on the boat, when she’d spoken to him without letting him see how much she hated him, and after that moment her persistent presence had affected him so quickly, so imperceptibly, that he’d felt the kind of intangible enchantment that grows between a man and a woman who are constantly together even though they aren’t related.

Gently, she stroked his face; she felt a friendly, vague sense of pity for him; she was so strong, so serene, so sure of her power; but then she frowned and pulled her hand away.
Wishing to see him tremble and look up at her with an expression of fear and submission, she said, ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Hélène,’ he said quickly, his voice hoarse, ‘I love you, I want to marry you. I love you, my darling Hélène …’

‘What are you saying?’