“Chocolate,” he said.
I accepted the chocolate but not the schnapps.
“What else have you got?” I asked.
“Don’t be so impatient,” he said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
I could best believe that love was some sort of rubbish thought up by the romantic geniuses who were now going to start bellowing like cows, or even dying; at least, there is no mention of love in Njal’s Saga, which is nevertheless better than any romantic literature. I had lived for twenty years with the best people in the country, my father and mother, and never heard love mentioned. This couple begat us children, certainly; but not from love; rather, as an element of the simple life of poor people who have no pastimes. On the other hand I had never heard a cross word pass between them all my life—but is that love? I hardly think so. I think love is a pastime amongst sterile folk in towns, and takes the place of the simple life.
There was lived in me a special life over which I had no control, except to an insignificant extent, even though I called it me. Whether I was kissed or not kissed, a person’s mouth was a kiss, or at least half a kiss. “You are an innocent country lump, closely akin to the awfullest crime,” sang the atom poet when he saw me; and he came remarkably close to the truth, for if anything is wicked it is life itself, which goes in its own way in this moist honeycombed vessel called a body. Did I love this deep-voiced, straight, burning man? I did not know. On the other, the one who made my knes go funny? I knew even less. Why ask? At one level a girl loves all men without differentiating them into individuals; she loves the male. And that can be a sign that she loves no male.
“You are wonderful,” he said.
“That’s also what people say who meet in brief accidental embraces for a midnight hour in the middle of the roaring stream of life, and never meet again,” she replied.
“Perhaps that too is true love,” he said.
To walk home alone at night is a disaster, in novels. Some girls confuse the state of being in love and being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man. A girl without a man does not know where she is placed. A man comes up to her one night as she stands preoccupied outside a house, and before she knows it she has gone home with him, where he confides to her everything: nothing. Was that love? No, she has only thrust a gag into the gaping jaws of a ravenous beast which was threatening to tear her apart, a dummy into the mouth of a thirsty unweaned infant: herself. The man was no more than an implement; and if that was wrong, then life itself was indeed the poet-singer’s awfullest crime.
Once some surveyors came from the south to survey waterfalls. One of them was wearing an enormous coat, with his scarf hanging out of his pocket, and he smelled slightly of drink. She was seventeen then. He kissed her in the parlor when she brought him coffee. Why did she go to his tent that night, even though he had whispered it to her? From sheer curiosity. She was of course hot and sweating and flushed all day, from having been kissed at the age of seventeen. His tent was pitched down in the gully beside the stream, and there he stayed on his own for three nights; and she with him. She never said a word to him, and how glad she was that he was married, or else she would perhaps have begun to think about him. Then he left; and as a result of this I first began to think about myself. In reality, he gave me myself, and in return I own him for the rest of my life, despite everything—if I want to.
The other time was a boy I got to know when I was at the girls’ college. First he danced with me for a whole evening, then he wrote me a letter, and finally he whistled outside my window. I sneaked out during the night. We had nowhere to go but we went none the less, for nothing can thwart a boy and a girl. But there is one thing they do not like—that it should be discovered, that it should be spread around; this is ourselves, this we alone know, here is the point where experience ceases to be a story, where the story has no longer any rights. But by good fortune he had to go south after we had met three times, and from then on everything was quiet and no one was afraid in that dangerous place, the girls’ college, where immorality is defined ethically but not chemically.
And that was all that I had lived, a girl long fully grown, until the night I lost the key.
10. I am dismissed
While I was filling the cups at the breakfast table, Madam asked me in a cold courtroom voice, bluntly, and without looking at me: “Where were you last night?”
“At a cell-meeting,” I replied.
First she gave a little gasp, but quickly controlled the twitching of her mouth; she made a squeezed, high-pitched sound and then said with remarkable calm, although her face had gone white: “Just so, indeed. And what matters were on the agenda there, pray?”
“The day-nursery,” I said.
“What day-nursery?”
“We need a day-nursery,” I said.
“Who needs a day-nursery?” she asked.
“I do.”
“And who is to build it?” she asked.
“The public,” I replied.
“The public!” she said. “And what manner of creature is that, pray?”
It was quite remarkable how icily ironical the blessed woman could be, considering how deeply she felt. But she could conceal her feelings no longer.
“Are you so shameless,” she began, “that you can tell me straight to my face that you have been at a cell-meeting; admit it in my own hearing in my own house; announce it at our table, in front of these two innocent children, yes, even go so far as to present Communist demands here at this table, demands that we taxpayers should start subsidizing the debauchery of Communists?”
“Come now, my dear,” her husband interrupted, smiling. “Who is demanding that? Thank the Lord, we subsidize our own debauchery first of all before we start subsidizing the debauchery of others.”
“Yes, is that not typical of you bourgeois political cowards to be always ready to side against your own class? To flourish only in an atmosphere of intrigue, in some morass of deceit? But now it is I who say, Here and no further! I and others like me who have given birth to our children according to the laws of God and man, brought them up on moral principles and created for them a model home—the very idea that we should start to pay for the debauchery of those who want to pull down the houses on our children’s heads!”—and here Madam rose from her chair, shook her fist in my face so that the bracelets rattled, and said, “No thank you! And get out!”
The little girl looked at her mother open-mouthed and had started to clasp her hands, but the little fat one filled his cheeks with air. The master went on eating his porridge, and puckered up his eyes and raised his eyebrows, the way people do at cards so as not to reveal what sort of hand they are holding.
Where could I have thought that I was? Had I imagined that this house was just a hillock that had come into being in the landscape by accident? That here one could talk about things with the frivolity of the poor? Had I imagined that in this house talk of cells was some sort of innocent family whimsy, a refrain one has grown accustomed to hum when the mind is blank? If so, I had made a grave mistake. I was thunderstruck. So hopelessly incapable was I of understanding better folk that I did not even know how to keep a servile tongue in my head. In a flash there appeared before my mind the difference between the two worlds in which we lived, this woman and I; although I was staying under her roof we were such poles apart from one another that it was only with half justification possible to classify us together as human beings; we were both vertebrates, certainly, even mammals, but there all resemblance ended; any human society of which both of us were members was merely an empty phrase. I asked, with a sort of idiotic grimace, if I was to consider myself no longer employed in this household?