When a little later they stood together in the sunny living room, ready to go, they were aware that for the next few hours they would have to restrain their sentiments and emotions. And now that did not seem so difficult. They admired each other’s dress with an intimate joy that made it seem as if there had been no tension between them earlier.
Come, turn around, let me see.
My, this is really something.
Even though in fact they each had reservations about the other’s clothes.
The lines of this suit of yours are completely charming.
Every one of your shoes and handbags is, if I may say so, a real masterpiece.
They were going to have to walk for about ten minutes in their medium-heel shoes.
Given the cool edge of the breeze, they didn’t worry about working up a sweat, so they minded their steps and did not hurry. And exchanged their words circumspectly too.
When they left behind them the last houses on the reserved, elegant Hüttenweg, they were greeted by the mellow summer smell that spreads all across the Mark-Brandenburg Plain with its open sky, wide meadows, low and dense forests, and shallow waters overgrown with cane and sedge.
Countess Imola found, speaking frankly, that Baroness Karla’s toilette was ridiculous, though she had nothing serious against the outfit per se. But she wouldn’t have worn that kind of shoe or carried that sort of handbag, though she appreciated the workmanship and the exceptional quality of the leather. Karla’s high-buttoned dress was of white synthetic silk striped horizontally in light blue, with a round collar; over the dress and made of the same material was a cape, striped vertically with lighter and darker blue, that fastened over the chest with a longish narrow tongue fitted with only five buttons. A sophisticated optical illusion and the buttoning arrangement well emphasized Karla’s breasts, which she had first seen when she was a little girl and would have given a great deal to see again and touch with her fingers. The illusion came from letting the cape fall so that it not only concealed Karla’s too-wide hips but elongated her waist.
The Auenberg girls must have been very proud of their waistlines, which they had inherited from their mother, and they did everything to make their clothes follow this advantageous physical trait. As if in great secrecy, and despite everything, they were building their fragile fate on their dangerous maternal inheritance.
Imola appreciated the fact that this clever little trick with the buttons gave Baroness Karla a fashionable silhouette; a tailor’s clever work, she had to admit; nevertheless, she looked like a dried-out country schoolmarm in it. Only her handbag and the almost mundane shoes testified to her social standing; well, all right, so did her wonderfully fine silk stockings. The shoes and handbag were made of the relatively smooth, not so knobby skin hanging like dewlaps from the lower jaws of alligators; this is the animal’s most vulnerable spot if it takes up a fighting stance when attacked by its mates.
Germans have no sense of how to make an appearance, of how to shine, no doubt about it, she thought, with no small satisfaction.
As for Baroness Karla’s own silent opinion, it was that while her eyes could not get enough of the rich sight of Countess Imola’s toilette, she thought her Hungarian friend was once again somewhat overdressed — not by much, but still.
Hungarians seem to lack moderation or a sense of austerity, she said to herself contentedly, which in us northerners comes strongly and naturally, and so she doesn’t notice how embarrassingly conspicuous she is here, in an essentially rural environment.
Like a bird of paradise, like a peacock.
She was cross with Imola for her tendency to exaggerate, but also proud and enthusiastic, almost like an adolescent girl, because Imola showed with her behavior that she was allowing herself the kind of rebellion that Karla had never permitted herself, notwithstanding her unrestrained inner life and secret adventures. Following the examples of women moving in the highest social circles, Imola wore classically designed clothes and carried accessories made of the finest materials. Severe, comfortable, medium-brown goatskin shoes with fairly stable heels on her narrow feet, a somber, rather dull handbag of the same goatskin along with the finest kid gloves, filigreed at the wrist. These items established the basis of her appearance, giving it weight and seriousness. In truth she was beyond the point of being either under- or overdressed, and Baroness Thum, who lived far from the high life, was mistaken on this score. Imola used airy, light, pale pastel colors to make as graceful and playful an impression as possible, and at the same time she deflected attention from her physical attributes, her bodily irregularities, not with conventional sartorial ideas but with extravagant ones.
To represent one’s family and social class continuously, a person should not display anything that makes her appearance exceptional or peculiar.
Her way of dressing found meaning in the absence of characterization, as it were, and in persistent individuality.
It was all right that she lived at a different level, thought the baroness, rather crossly, but sometimes she ought to tone down her style a bit. But here again the baroness was mistaken. As a lover would be who in the throes of passion demands that the beloved be ever more flawless at every moment, more perfect than perfect.
What intemperance.
Countess Imola, in contrast to Baroness Karla, could not do without at least one expensive piece of jewelry; in summer she saw to it that there would never be more than one.
With magical lightness and no less extravagance, she had pinned on the severely cut English lapel of her peach silk suit a brooch decorated with a real pearl. The pearl was exceptionally large, of a color somewhere between white and gray and including — in certain lights even reflecting — all the hues of the rainbow; it was set on a severe-looking platinum rosette. It came from Le Maître’s Paris workshop. She had a matching platinum ring, also decorated with a similarly expensive pearl, which the gloves concealed, but anyway she did not consider the ring as jewelry.
The baroness could not work at her table in the dissecting room or in the laboratory with all sorts of jewelry on. But she used this argument only as an excuse. In reality, it was physical stinginess that kept her from wearing jewelry.
The Boîte Rouge was the only place where she readily revealed and displayed her splendid anonymity to strangers.
Nothing else, ever.
She was extremely ungenerous with herself.
When she spoke in German, Countess Auenberg thought in German, yet things that might be considered improper occurred to her in Hungarian.
I’d rather marry my dear Mihály quickly, she now thought to herself as she sized up Karla and excused herself. Whatever happens. In the depth of her soul, she feared she might dry up as this other woman had. If she does not act soon. Even if I go crazy because he so resembles those other men. And she laughed in her anticipated great happiness because, regardless of how much she feared Mihály’s brutality and however much she doubted herself, the promise of their future stormy physical encounters proved stronger in her.
An eager and unsuspecting Karla took over part of this feeling along with the laughter or, rather, she received a portion of it, not undeservedly, and laughed along with Imola.