She looked up at me in astonishment and her hand folded up the letter in a rapid, robot-like motion.
“Did you forget something?” she asked, obviously uneasy.
Feeling an anxiety I didn’t quite understand, I said, “I was in my mother’s room, and as I was leaving her I saw you reading this letter, and I thought it was for me.”
She got up from where she’d been sitting and backed toward the dressing table. She was clearly trying to keep her emotions under control. However, her eyes betrayed the profound, unexpected effect my sudden appearance had had on her.
Letting forth a terse, dry laugh that did nothing to conceal her distress, she said, “It isn’t a letter. It’s just some comments I wrote down relating to my work at school.”
A fear came over me that numbed my joints. She may have been telling the truth. However, her distress was catching, and I too had begun to feel a strange sort of fear, as though some unnamed, ominous presence was gathering on my already cloudy horizon. What reason would she have to lie? Yet I was certain that I’d seen a letter in her hand! I feared acting too suspicious lest she be in the right and I find myself in an embarrassing position that I could well do without.
Even so, I couldn’t help but say, “But I saw a letter in your hand.”
My statement came out sounding bad to me, and I felt I hadn’t chosen my words well, since they expressed obvious suspicion.
I looked at her apprehensively, waiting for her to show me the paper irritably as she shot me a look of disdain and reproach. However, she was struggling with other sorts of feelings.
As if she were overwhelmed with some unnamed emotion, she turned her back to me, saying, “I told you it was comments having to do with my schoolwork.”
Then suddenly I saw her tear it up, walk over to the window and throw it out. The move she made came so unexpectedly, I froze in place as if I’d been paralyzed. She turned to face me with a show of nonchalance. Furious and desperate, I felt as though a huge wall had collapsed on top of my life and buried it beneath its rubble. My eyes were being opened — after the delusions of blindness — to ugly realities. After all, what but ugly realities would provoke such distress and such clever deceit?
Mad with rage, I screamed, “You’re lying! You said it was a paper with comments relating to your schoolwork, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was a letter! I saw it myself! And you tore it up to hide something shameful from me!”
The blood drained out of her face, leaving it deathly pale. However, she didn’t appear willing to give up without a desperate defense.
“You’re wrong,” she mumbled, “and you’re not being fair. It wasn’t a letter!”
By now I was seething with rage, and pain and despair were pounding on my head like a hammer.
“Why did you tear it up, then?” I cried. “Why did you panic? Talk to me! I’ve got to know the truth! I’m going down to the street to pick up the pieces.”
I rushed distraughtly over to the window and looked down into the street, where I saw the narrow blind alley that separated the back of our building from the church garden. The minute I looked out, I despaired, since it was obvious that the wind had carried the bits of paper over into the churchyard. The world looked black to me, and it seemed as though she had emerged from a world of demons dancing in a stream of fire. How was I going to extract the truth from her lips? I turned around and found her standing where she’d been before, with all the life drained out of her face and a look of terror and consternation in her eyes. My heart went cold and I shot her a long, hard look.
“It was a letter,” I insisted angrily, “and I won’t back down until you’ve confessed everything to me.”
She stepped back with a groan and leaned on the wardrobe mirror.
Then in a plaintive voice she said, “I beg you not to think ill of me. There’s nothing at all for you to be angry or suspicious about. Please, don’t look at me that way!”
However, I went on looking at her sternly and cruelly, my soul yearning to know the truth. It was either deliverance, or death. Lord! I thought. I’m having a nightmare! Could I ever have conceived of taking such a stance toward her in anything but a nightmare?
Then she said breathlessly, “Don’t look at me that way! I really did make a mistake, but it’s your fault that I made it! You took me by surprise, and I got flustered. Then I fell into a needless lie.”
Lord, how I needed to be delivered. How badly I longed for a drop of rain to wet my parched being.
“It was a letter,” I said in consternation.
“Yes, it was!” she rejoined hurriedly. “It had seemed trivial to me until you got suspicious over it. You got an angry look on your face, thinking that this trivial thing was something serious, so I tried to get out of the situation by lying. And then what happened, happened.”
More confused than ever now, I asked her, “If it was a letter, then who sent it?”
“I don’t know.”
Sighing in exasperation, I said, “What sorts of riddles are these?”
Getting over her fright little by little and heartened by the fact that my anger had abated, she said hopefully, “Let me tell you the story of this ill-fated letter in a nutshell. I received it at school this morning, and I was shocked, since I’m not used to getting letters from anybody. When I opened it I found that it was unsigned and that all it was was shameless nonsense. So it had been written by some vulgar person! I was really angry at first, but after that I didn’t let it bother me. I decided to keep it so that I could show it to you, since I thought I’d let it be a surprise that would give you a good laugh. But after you came home I changed my mind, since I was afraid it would cause you needless offense. So I hid it from you until I thought you’d left the house, then I got it out of my purse and reread it. I’d been intending to tear it up, but you took me by surprise when I was reading it. I realized the delicate position I was in, and it wasn’t possible anymore for me to admit the truth. So, as I told you before, I fell into a lie, but I’m being punished for it in a way I don’t deserve.”
I listened to her with my undivided attention. However, when she came to the end of her story, I stood motionless and ambivalent. I feared the potential consequences of the madness that had overtaken me, yet it wasn’t easy simply to believe her and let it go. I was in the grip of a deadly uncertainty. I prayed for God to deliver me from it, and to grant me the insight I needed to penetrate to the depths of this lovely soul that seemed to have been made to torment me.
Worn out with thinking and indecision, I said, half to myself, “Who sent it?”
As if the question had pained her, she looked down, her brow furrowed, and said, “I told you it was anonymous.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I exclaimed.
With a pained, miserable look on her face, she stamped her foot on the floor and said, “Are you accusing me of lying, Kamil, after I’ve told you the truth? I can’t take this!”
Pained by her distress, I said, “I mean, what good would it do the person to send you the letter if he didn’t give any indication of his identity? Had he sent you a letter previous to this one?”