She said that I had never loved her. After all, I did that for love, a love that embraced and assimilated her. She takes me for a madman. If only it were true! I wish I could believe it. How can I explain to her — or is it possible to explain to a person who has been stabbed why it was necessary? Why a loving hand thrust in the knife? I was not lying to her when I said that she is my life. Only mine, mine and hers. We could have turned our backs on all the world and been satisfied with each other.
He bent over, pressing his fingers into his eyelids until he felt a radiating pain and saw red spots. He muttered, “I had to. I had to.”
He stiffened with alarm for her. He counted the stages of their advancing intimacy; he remembered the other man who had hung with bound hands in a raked-up fire as his hair sizzled in the flames. But enemies had done that. Today he himself, whom she so loved…A hundred times worse. And if in that hour, pushed to the very edge of despair, she saw no relief except in oblivion?
He raised his head defiantly and stood up. Bumping against his chair and pushing it away, he ran to the telephone. He dialed her number at the hotel. She was in her room; he breathed more easily as he heard, after the rattle, the click of the receiver as it was raised.
“Margit,” he whispered into the forbidding silence. “Margit.” He had to beg. “Can I see you?”
“What for?” He heard a voice in which there was no longer any hope.
“I want to tell you…”
“I’ve heard everything.”
And a sound like the click of scissors. She had hung up.
He went back to his chair. Her words, gestures, decisions repeated themselves and though he explained and clarified them to himself time after time, he was afraid. Her pain was greater than his; it was holding her at bay like an animal, engulfing her in a thickening wave of darkness. Hopelessness. He understood. She had stopped waiting. He realized with terror that she had not been exaggerating when she whispered, “Why didn’t you kill me?”
It was impossible, impossible to explain. What did it matter that he had also reached the depths of despair? Suffering does not unite. It pushes people apart, awakens aversion even to loved ones. Something about it embarrasses, makes one wish to hide it, like sickness.
He hated himself because he could think and act so coolly, even adjust his tie with a deft motion and remember to lock the door. The startled watchman rose abruptly from the veranda steps and stood at attention as a concealed cigarette glimmered in his left hand. The girl nestled by the balustrade like a young animal, half-disappearing into the cascade of climbing plants so he would not notice her. He pretended not to, but he knew very well that they had been sitting together, embracing. He did not envy them. He enjoyed indulging their happiness, which again, thanks to his intervention, had a future.
He drove the car out as if he were in a trance, involuntarily — as if he were dozing behind the wheel. He went into the hall. At the reception desk they knew him. Yes, Miss Ward had asked for her bill; she was leaving. They had gotten her a ticket from Air India. She had given an order to be wakened at five; before six there was a plane to Bombay. She was upstairs now. A moment ago she had asked not to receive calls from the city. They knew everything; they knew more than he did. He hesitated, reassured by all these directives of hers and what they indicated. And he could still come unexpectedly, and suddenly all these measures, these preparations to decamp, would be unnecessary.
He did not dare go upstairs. The inquisitive looks of the staff who had seen them so many times…He could not bear the garishly lit hall. The big reel with slides: the red fortified walls of Fatehpur Sikri, the white marble domes of the Taj Mahal, the blue ocean and the placid tilting palms, like the long necks of birds, that reminded him of the places where he had been with Margit. He turned his eyes away and saw them even under his closed eyelids. He escaped to the car and huddled in a corner of it. It seemed to him that she was beside him, keeping watch just a step away.
He peered at the hotel windows: some blazed gold and rose, others were dim and colorless. He gazed at them until he realized that he was looking for the window of her old room. Now she would have another one, and he did not know which. She ought to know I’m here, he thought. Or perhaps she was calling him now, again and again, and he was nearby but unable to hear, in the metal body of the automobile as in a crustacean’s shell, shrouded in the shadows of the trees.
In the wavering glow of the streetlights he saw a small band of men passing by — a pair of Englishmen trailed by a Hindu in an enormous turban who was chattering incantations, muttering that today was an exceptionally propitious day for omens, that the stars were revealing the fates of people. But the Englishmen knew what awaited them; what they were already certain of was enough. He gave up hope and turned to the drive leading to the hotel. He peered at Istvan and called softly, “Sahib.”
But seeing that Terey was sitting with his eyes closed, he did not dare rouse him. He walked slowly away, disappointed.
Events take their inevitable course, exposing the logic of connections. Even Grace had only accelerated their course.
Was it precisely for Margit that fate had brought him to India? He was immovable in the conviction that he had been born for this test, had matured for it through the years. They had come to each other from two extremes of the globe, led unerringly so that…It had to happen as it did. Any other choice would have been a denial of the truth. Had he known from the beginning how he must proceed, though he had not wanted to admit it to himself and had delayed, had put off the fatal hour?
It was not at the moment when he had stammered out “I don’t want—” but earlier, much earlier, that he had doomed her and himself. He had reached the decision in anguish, always resisting, dragged step by step.
Then by the sea at midnight, when he felt that there was no appeal from the verdict, and she slept with her face pressed into her bent arm and he heard in her breathing a quiet choking like the smothered echo of recent crying, he had needed to be alone. Alone. He had waited until her breathing grew soft and regular. He had extricated himself from the mosquito netting. The stairs of the veranda creaked. Under his toes there was the cool, grainy sand. The wide beach slept in the dark; the sky with knots of stars hung like netting flung unevenly above it. The ocean rushed onto the sloping shore and streams of water flowed down, scouring millions of shells. A ridge of dredged-up seaweed, parched by the sun and black during the day, teemed with a shining powder of alien life.
He moved as if without volition, slipping over the tilting dunes, walking in the beam of the lighthouse — the lowest of the stars, set aglow by human hands.
He was only a step from the sea. All his senses were attuned to the vast surging and subsiding of the water, the exhalations of salt and decaying plants. The breeze ruffled the hair on his chest and blew around his legs. He felt a light warning chill. At the water’s edge, where the hard-packed ground was licked clean by the tides, he stopped. Foam died away at his feet with a hiss like a stifled sigh.
The world. A vision of the world: a writhing mass of suffering. Terrified creatures murdered by bestial toil and hardship. What was his despair compared to that abyss of pain and misery?
It seemed to him that he was hearing a remote swelling wail, but it was only the calls of distant tugboats signaling to each other. So many die at this hour. They don’t live to see the dawn. A heartfelt tear of crystallized grief. They can do nothing more. To the last breath they are disturbed by the certainty that they could have accomplished more; they are pained by the enormity of good left undone.