“Yes, I’ll take you,” she said.
Nile drove. The sun whitened his face. She was able to examine him in profile as he looked ahead.
“Are we on the right road?” he asked.
“Yes.”
His skin was pale. His uncombed hair was splitting at the ends. It was also thinning, which pleased her somehow, as if he had been ill and she would see him regain his strength.
A half-mile from the house she was suddenly shocked to see the land dug out. They were erecting apartments, the shape of a huge foundation was clear, the yellow construction machines lay abandoned in late afternoon.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“What?”
“Look what they’re doing.”
The trees, the few old houses had been swept away, there was only bare, ruined earth. She almost wept. Somehow it could never have happened when Nedra was there—not that she would have prevented it, but her departure, in a sense, was the knell. Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
The shadow of change lay across everything. Her first view of the house from a place on the road she knew well—the chimneys above the trees, the line of the roof—brought a feeling of sadness as if it were doomed. It seemed empty, it seemed still. The rabbits that fled before Hadji—had they really been fleeing, they veered so rapidly, they leapt, they vanished into air—all gone.
They parked in the driveway. It was after five. No one was there. Nile stood looking at the house, the trees, the terraced lawn. “This is where you grew up?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder,” he said.
They walked to the pony shed; bits of straw were still scattered there. They sat in the conservatory with its gravel floor. The sun was setting fire to the glass. She went to get some wine.
“How did you ever manage to rise above all this?” he asked. “I don’t know.”
“It’s a mystery. What a life you’ve had. It’s so superior. I mean, I could mention a dozen things, but it’s manifest.” He spoke sincerely. His breath was a little bad.
“Laurence lived here,” she said.
“Laurence…”
“A rabbit.”
The sunlight fell like cymbals through the flats of glass. In the still air, a faint aroma of wine. The distant memory of the rabbit—his blackness, his long, rodent’s teeth—seemed to come upon her like a flush.
“Have you ever known any rabbits?” she asked.
“Periodically,” he said. “There seems to be no pattern. I worked in a laboratory once. There was this big, Belgian hare, her name was Judy. Could she bite!”
“Yes, they do that.”
“I had to wear my overcoat.”
“Laurence used to bite.”
“Everything does,” he said. “What became of Laurence?”
“He died. It was in the winter. It was very sad. You know how it is when animals are sick, you want so much to do something for them. We put him in a bed of straw and covered him, but in the morning he was gone.”
“He ran away?”
“He was in a corner, sort of fallen over. His eyes were open, but he was already stiff; it was as if he were made of wire. We buried him in the garden. He was bigger than we thought, we kept having to make a bigger hole. His fur was still warm. I threw the dirt on him with my bare hands. I cried, we were both crying, and I said, Oh, God, accept him, Thy rabbit…”
She had wept in the garden, in the cold. They had found a smooth gray stone and started to carve it, but it was never finished; it was there still, hidden in weeds. LAU…
“Your sister—what’s her name again?”
“She’s changed her name.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, her name is Danny, but she’s changed it to Karen.”
“Karen?”
“It’s a long story. She’s with someone who thinks that should be her name.”
“I see.”
“Well…” Franca shrugged. “That’s not the only thing. That’s minor. She pierced her ears for him.”
“I see.”
“Whatever he says…”
Nile nodded as if he understood. He was dazzled by this glimpse of immolation, the acts of this sister stunned him. He could not imagine them, he was bewildered, as if by light. The more powerful the need to know, the more difficult to ask. He wanted to say something. In rooms above his head, hallways, by curtained windows, these girls had passed their adolescence. Questions about it drenched him; whatever he knew was useless compared to this.
“I see,” he murmured.
4
DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist’s wax, the organ has been gutted.
Viri did not have the spirit to do anything about it. He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older. Alma still came three times a week to clean and dust. He left her forty dollars in an envelope each Friday, but seldom saw her. It was as if something terrible—blindness or the loss of a limb, something without recourse—had happened. No amount of sympathy could overcome it, no distraction make it fade.
At the theater one night he saw a revival of Ibsen’s The Master Builder. The ceiling lights faded, the stage poured forth its spell. It was like an accusation. Suddenly his life, an architect’s life as in the play, seemed exposed. He was ashamed at his smallness, his grayness, his resignation. When on the stage, Solness first talked to his mistress and bookkeeper, when he first whispered to her, Viri felt the blood leave his face, felt people staring as if he had given an involuntary cry.
When Solness, in that first scene alone with her at last, called her fiercely and she answered, frightened, ‘Yes?’ When he said, ‘Come here!’ And she came. He said, ‘Closer!’ And she obeyed, asking, ‘What do you want of me?’ Viri was devastated; his heart shattered, for a moment it gave way.
And when Solness said—all of this at the beginning before there was a chance to be prepared for it, there was no way to have been prepared—‘I can’t be without you, do you understand? I’ve got to have you close to me every day.’ And, trembling, she moaned, ‘Oh, God! God!’ And sank down murmuring how good he was to her, how unbelievably good. Her name—he could not believe it—lay printed in his lap: Kaja.
That was only the beginning. As it went on, as Viri sat through acts he slowly lost his power to resist, the play became that thing most dangerous of alclass="underline" an unforgettable example, unforgettable and false. Caught by its strength, by phrases that pierced him like arrows, by a story the end of which was already written, the lines stored in the actors’ brains in the exact order in which they were to come forth—and yet he could never dare to try and imagine them—he was like a child, a young boy overhearing behind a door a voice he was not meant to hear, a statement that would crush him for life.
He looked at the other faces, those at an angle in front of him, faces uplifted, lit by the performance. He was so completely helpless, so unable to answer, to argue, to even imagine a world that did not move subject to the energy he saw before him, that it seemed he was free; he could listen, observe, it needed no effort. He traveled endlessly, a hundred times farther than the play, he lived his own life backwards and forwards, he lived their lives, he entered into fantasy with women sitting three rows away.
Afterwards, with everyone leaving, he stood at the entrance, intelligent, composed, as the audience vanished rapidly, fading into the night. It seemed that truth was swimming by in all these people with destinations, these men and women wed to each other, bound up in tedium and ordinary trials. He had always been one of them, though he denied it; now he was one no longer.