While my eyes showed me the rescued lizard, my brain was working like a needlessly overheated engine driven by a steam of emotions, with its gears, belts, pistons, and levers dredging up from the depth of the soul everything that was similar to the image in the eyes, everything that could hurt as only a deep childhood hurt can; it wasn't exhaustion that made me cry, and not the impending danger, but the sense of helplessness I felt in the face of so much human filth.
And at that moment I already knew who it was that looked back at me so familiarly in the figure of the inspector, and I also knew that with my loud, racking sobs I was mourning my one and only dead, my only love, the only person untouched by this filth; it was she I was mourning, it was she I was coughing up, the one woman I cannot talk about.
I felt hot, was soaked with tears, shivered in the misery of my cold body, my limbs seemed to be melting away, and then, without knowing why, I had to look up.
Who possesses the divine ability to distinguish the separate times within a single second; yet in who, if not in us humans, do these divine distinctions of time, reduced to the thinness of a hair, weave their gossamer thread?
Yes, it was she, the face of my one and only, whom I saw standing there in the doorway, silent and reproachful, all in black, veiled, one hand still on the door handle ready to shut the door behind her; I wondered why she was dressed in black, she was dead, she couldn't be mourning herself! though in the fraction of the next second I realized it wasn't she but Fräulein Stollberg in the doorway.
And how strange it was that in this immeasurable space of time the terrible pain yielded to an even more intense throb, a pain caused by a loss that was final and eternal, and the Fräulein could see only the twitch of my face that was not meant for her.
She lifted her veil, slipped her gloved hand back into her muff, and waited, hesitantly, not quite sure how one conducted oneself in this situation; her face was pale, like marble, smooth and untouchable; I suppose it was some shock that made her look like that, quite alien and distasteful to me, yet I could see my own pain reflected in her face, perhaps in the timid, exceptionally fragile smile that hovered around her lips and that I also felt around my own mouth.
I had last seen her a few hours earlier in that tumultuous scene when we all rushed out into the corridor, alarmed by the raving screams of a chambermaid, and she, along with the others, ran toward the wide-open door of our friend Gyllenborg's suite, though at that point not knowing, not understanding yet what had happened, she seemed to be enjoying the noisy confusion.
Now her tiny smile served to alleviate her pain, to make it less humiliating; I could see on her face that her cruel little games were over and done with, and a far greater act of cruelty was to follow; the smile was meant to offset this next act but only made it more painful, the shame of it did, the same shame I felt at having to smile, at realizing that I could still smile, and that a smile was perhaps longer lasting than death itself, which of course was still not my own death.
Carrying in her smile the shadows of her offended, proud, humble, and beautiful cruelty, she hurried toward me, and I received her with much the same smile; but in me the weight of that smile was such that I was unable to rise, whereupon she suddenly yanked her hands out of her muff and, letting the fine fur piece drop to the floor, sank both her gloved hands into my hair and face.
"My dear friend!"
The whisper issued from her throat like a choked sob, and shameful though it may be to admit, the touch of her hand gave me painful pleasure.
A sharp pang that finds joy in pain — maybe that is what must have made me spring up from my chair, the terrifying joy of my shame; my face slid along her lacy dress, then up, face touching face, her hard, cool lips grazing my tear-soaked skin; she was searching for something, hesitantly but irresistibly, and she had to find it quickly, and I was also looking for something on the untouchable smoothness of her face, clumsily, greedily, and the moment her lips found mine, in that fraction of a second when I felt the cool outline of her lips, that gentle fold of flesh, that alluring, curved shape, and she, too, found something similar; then, without parting her lips, she let her head sink to my shoulder; though the withdrawal was deliberate, she threw her arms around me and held me tight, so that we wouldn't feel what we both felt: the taste of the dead man's mouth on our lips; without him it was impossible for us to make contact.
We stood like this for a long time, with our arms pressing our bodies against each other's chest, loins, thighs, or at least it seemed like a very long time; and if just a moment earlier pain sought release in tender touches and tiny kisses, in our quickly flaring and immediately fading sensual energy, then this furious but insensate pressing and squeezing was a way of sharing a pain that found its way into our grief and our guilt, a pain that would not let us eject the dead man, we let him squeeze in between us.
It seems we needed just enough time for my body, feverish from sobbing, to warm up her cold one, because then, with her head still on my shoulder, in a very different, sly, conspiratorial, and rather inappropriate tone of voice, she whispered: