“You are free,” he repeated. “The rest doesn’t matter. ”
“Anyway, I had to teU you. For my own sake.”
“Yes.”
Neither of them questioned the necessity of her teU- ing ^m. He suddenly wanted to get up: lying thus, with her sitting on his bed, like a sick man being nursed by her. But why should he? Everything was so futile. He continued nevertheless to look at her, to discover that she could make him suffer. For months, whether he looked at her or not, he had ceased to see her; certain expressions, at times. Their love, so often hurt, uniting them like a sick child, the common meaning of their life and their death, the carnal understanding between them, nothing of all that existed before the fatality which discolors the forms with which our eyes are saturated. “Do I love her less than I think I do?” he thought. No. Even at this moment he was sure that if she were to die he would no longer serve his cause with hope, but with despair, as though he himself were dead. Nothing, however, prevailed against the discoloration of that face buried in the depth of their common life as in mist, as in the earth. He remembered a friend who had had to watch the disintegration of the mind of the woman he loved, paralyzed for months; it seemed to him that he was watching May die thus, watching the form of his happiness absurdly disappear like a cloud absorbed by the gray sky. As though she had died twice — from the effect of time, and from what she was telling ^m.
She got up, went to the window. She walked briskly in spite of her fatigue. Choosing, through mingled fear and sentimental delicacy, to say nothing more of what she had just told him, since he would not talk, and wishing to escape this conversation from which she felt none the less they would not escape, she tried to express her tenderness by saying whatever came into her mind, and appealed instinctively to an animism of which he was fond: in front of the window, one of the trees of Mars had opened out during the night; the light from the room fell on its leaves that were stil curled, a delicate green against the dark background:
“It has hidden its leaves in its trunk during the day," she said, “and is bringing them out tonight while no one sees it."
She seemed to be talking to herself, but how could Kyo have mistaken the tone of her voice?
“You might have picked another day," he said none the less between his teeth.
He saw himself in the mirror, also, leaning on his el- bow-his face so Japanese between the white sheets. “If I were not a half-breed. " He was making an intense effon to push back the hateful or base thoughts all too ready to justify and feed his anger. And he gazed at her-gazed at her as though her face should have recovered, by the suffering it was inflicting, all the life it had lost.
“But, Kyo, it’s precisely today that it had no importance. and. "
She was going to add: “he wanted it so badly." In the face of death it mattered so little. But she said merely:
“. I also may die tomorrow. '’
So much the better. Kyo was suffering from the most hu^miliating pain: that which one despises oneself for feeling. In reality she was free to sleep with whom she pleased. Why, then, this suffering to which he claimed no right, but which so insistently claimed a right to him?
“When you realized that I.. was fond of you, Kyo, you asked me one day, not seriously-just a trifle perhaps-if I thought I would be willing to go to prison with you, and I answered you that I didn’t know-that the difficult thing no doubt was to stay there. You thought I would, none the less, since you were fond of me too. Why not think so now?
“It’s always the same ones who go to prison. Katov would go, even if he did not love deeply. He would go for the idea he has of life, of himself. It’s not for someone else that one goes to prison.
“Kyo, what masculine ideas …
He was thinking.
“And yet/’ he said, “to love those who are capable of doing just that, to be loved by them perhaps, what more can one ask of love? What madness to ask them for accounts besides?.. Even if they do it for their … morality. ”
“It’s not for morality/’ she said slowly. “For morality, I would surely be incapable of it.
“But” (he was speaking slowly too) “this love did not prevent you from going to bed with that fellow, at the same time that you were thinking-you just said so-it would. annoy me?
“Kyo, I’m going to tell you something strange, and which is true just the same … up until five minutes ago I thought it wouldn’t matter to you. Perhaps it suited me to think so.. There are urges, especially when one is so neai death (it’s the death of others that
I’m used to, Kyo.), that have nothing to do with love. .”
Yet jealousy persisted, all the more obscure because the sexual desire she aroused in him rested on affection. His eyes shut, still leaning on his elbow, he was trying- wretchedly-to understand. He heard only May’s oppressed breathing and the scratching of the dog’s paws. His wound was caused, first of all (there would, alas! be other reasons: he felt them lying in wait inside him like his comrades behind those doors that were stiU closed) by his feeling that the man who had just had intercourse with her (after all, I can’t call him her lover!) must despise her. He was an old ch^ of May’s, Kyo scarcely knew him. But he knew the fundamental misogyny of almost all men. “The idea that having had interco^e with her, because he has had intercourse with her, he can say of her: ‘That little bitch’ makes me want to knock him down. Can it be that one is never jealous except because of what one supposes the other supposes? Wretched humanity. ” For May, sexual intercourse did not in any sense signify an emotional surrender. That fellow would have to learn it. If he went to bed with her, that was that, but he must not imagine that he possessed her. “I’m getting maudlin. ” But he could not help himself, and that was not the essential, he knew. The essential, what agonized him, was that he was sud~ denly separated from her, not by hatred-although there was hatred in him-not by jealousy (or was jealousy precisely this?) but by a feeling that had no name, as destructive as time or death: he could not find her again. He opened his eyes; this familiar athletic body, with its averted profile: an elongated eye, starting at the temple, sunk between the exposed forehead and the cheek-bone- a human being. Who was she? A woman who had just had intercourse with a man? But was she not also the one who tolerated his weaknesses, his afflictions, his outbursts of irritation, the one who had helped him nurse his wounded comrades, watched with him over his dead friends?. The sweetness of her voice, which lingered in the air.. One does not forget what one wishes. And now this body was being invested with the poignant mystery of a familiar person suddenly transformed-the mystery one feels before a mute, blind, or mad being. And she was a woman. Not a kind of man. Something else.
She was getting away from him completely. And, because of that perhaps, the fierce craving for an intense contact with her blinded him, for a contact, no matter what kind-even one that might lead to fright, screams, blows. He got up, went over to her. He knew he was in a state of crisis, that tomorrow perhaps he would no longer understand anything of what he was feeling now, but he was before her as before a death-bed; and as towards a death-bed, instinct threw him towards her: to touch, to feel, to hold back those who are leaving you, to cling to them. She was looking at him with an intense anxiety; he had stopped two paces from her. The revelation of what he wanted finally flashed upon him; to lie with her, to find refuge in her body against this frenzy in which he was losing her entirely; they did not have to know each other when they were using all their strength to hold each other in a tight embrace.
She suddenly turned round: someone had rung. Too soon for Katov. Was the insurrection discovered? What they had said, felt, loved, hated, was brutally submerged. The bell rang again. He took his revolver from under his pillow, crossed the garden, went to open in his pajamas: it was not Katov, it was Clappique, still in his diner- jacket. They stood in the garden.