when he wasn’t speaking his washed-out eyes also seemed dead, so
dead that the effort he seemed to expend to come back to life when he
next spoke gave his most ordinary sentences a heroic, unhoped-for,
even final quality, which, Malinka observed, commanded attention
and a slightly anxious respect.
Everything about him expressed an artless, loyal good will towards
the servant, and a sincere interest in the story behind every trinket,
in all their special features.
Next he admired the décor and the furniture of the servant’s flat,
the unlikely jumble that somehow created a strange and sophisticated whole, not that she was trying for any such effect. Then he suggested they go out to lunch, if they’d be so kind as
to invite him.
He was exceptionally cheerful. He wasn’t charming, thought
Malinka, not the least bit appealing, with his high voice, his large
pores, his straw-like hair, but so boisterous were his high spirits,
between two bouts of sepulchral blankness, when he simply stood
listening, motionless, all taste for life seeming to drain unimpeded
from his thin, tortured body, so abundant were his high spirits and
so stirring their repeated, miraculous return that Malinka found
herself irresistibly driven to look into that plain face and study it,
disorientated and moved, her hands jittering restlessly.
The servant gave a girlish cry:
“Oh yes, let’s go out to eat!”
She glanced anxiously at Malinka, as if dreading her veto. “Good idea,” said Malinka, not far from tears.
How would she ever make of the servant’s life less bitter a bread? When, at afternoon’s end, they said goodbye to the servant and
started back to the station, she thanked Freddy Moliger for his thoughtfulness towards her mother. He seemed taken aback to be
thanked for behaving, he said shrugging, as he always did. He stiffened a little. Malinka half-felt the wing of an indistinct
fear graze her cheek.
Then he shook his head, and his face went back to its usual
expression, harmless and stagnant, like an animal bled dry in the
gentle darkness of its sleep.
“It was no work at all,” he said amiably. “Your mother’s so nice.” She stopped, breathless. To her own surprise, she had to clutch
Freddy Moliger’s arm to keep from sinking to her knees on the
pavement.
“If you only knew the pain I’ve caused her,” she murmured. “Do
you think that can ever be made up for? Do you?”
But he hadn’t heard, unless he was pretending. As they passed
by a bench where two neighbourhood women sat chatting, women
Malinka knew by sight, having crossed paths with them many times,
she gave them a nod, and he snorted.
“You say hello to that dirt?” he asked, loud enough to be heard.
“Don’t you think we’ve got too many of those people around here?
I’ll tell you what I think: they make me sick.”
He stalked onward, caught up in a rage that covered his cheeks
with red blotches.
Stunned, Malinka scurried mindlessly after him. When she
caught up he gave her a smile, his serenity and good cheer suddenly
restored, and she could feel herself burying the memory of that
moment in a place where she wouldn’t easily find it again, because
the whole thing was simply incomprehensible.
She wanted to remember only Freddy Moliger’s kindness to the
servant, who’d greeted him just as Malinka had hoped: as the emissary of an ardent wish to repent.
*
Before long she suggested that Freddy Moliger move in with her, and he appeared the next day carrying everything he owned in a bag. That evening they made love for the first time.
Although she felt tense, grown unused to pleasure and the search for it, and too lost in thought, she serenely took stock of herself and found she was at ease, found that Freddy Moliger’s body caused her no aversion or sadness, and that at the same time she had no fear of disappointing him, or of being disappointed, whereas, she remembered, her immense, undiminishable love for Richard Rivière never slipped free of her self-imposed duty to live up to his expectations, her furious, consuming desire for self-sacrifice, without which she felt guilty and wicked.
She sensed that Freddy Moliger expected nothing he couldn’t readily give.
When he first saw her trim, long-limbed body, its slender bones invisible beneath her solid flesh, he let out a polite and admiring little cry, but his eyes were indifferent, and Malinka understood that he’d neither hoped nor feared she would have a beautiful body.
Nothing was a problem, nothing wasn’t good enough, and it never occurred to him to think of his body as attractive or not. He was what he was, without bluff or boast, like a plant, like a stone, and beautiful or ugly his body didn’t belong to him, and wasn’t his responsibility.
He was neither an attentive nor a selfish lover, but full of a strangely neutral, almost austere gentleness, and Malinka felt free and at peace. She was still lost in thought, but she was also serene, because Freddy Moliger’s presence never challenged her to prove anything at all, no more the goodness of her soul than the perfection of her body, and because she wasn’t lying to him.
Not that Richard Rivière had ever asked anything of her. But the fact that she’d become entangled in the snare of an endless striving to please did nothing to dispel the muted fear, which she felt even in their happiest days, that the most necessary discipline might be beyond her, and that only that discipline could make the thought of the servant, the bitter bread of her life, tolerable to her. Nor did Freddy Moliger ask her to tell him about herself.
For the first few days after he moved in she could see his gaze drifting over the photos that ornamented the walls and the shelves, of Ladivine, of Marko Berger, of the children, or of Richard Rivière, and no interest or curiosity ever shone in his eyes.
She tried, in a casual, affectionate voice, to bring up her daughter Ladivine. He turned and walked out of the room, with a rudeness that wasn’t like him. Whatever was closest to her, like all talk of emotion, seemed to plunge him into an impatience he objectively recognised, as if it were someone else feeling it, and he walked off as if to get hold of himself, such that Malinka came to see in those abrupt, maddening disappearances a sign of diplomacy rather than boorishness.
She stopped trying to tell him about her daughter and grandchildren, and about her emotions generally.
She sometimes thought, without resentment, that Richard Rivière and Ladivine must have longed terribly to hear what she was feeling or thinking, that towards them she’d always been tender and distant, giddy with an inexpressible love and yet hard to love, and here she was finally finding her voice and Freddy Moliger did not want to hear.