‘Shall we eat?’
‘Oh, yes. Everything is ready. I have only to make a salad dressing.’
‘No garlic for me, please!’ I shouted, once again to say something.
I can remember as though it happened but the other day how we started our meal rather easily: I told Madeleine about Little Mother, and her wonderful promise on the Bombay beach. ‘You Indians seem full of wonderful gestures,’ she said, without bitterness, but with a certain objectivity.
‘We are a sentimental people,’ I said. ‘We weep for everything.’
‘Yes; so much so that with Tagore’s novels alone you could make a Ganges.’
‘There’s much sorrow in my land, Madeleine, but such beauty between man and man. Even between man and woman,’ I added.
‘Did you hate the Europeans very much when you were there?’ she asked.
‘Hate them? You know the Englishman is more loved in India than foreigner has ever been. We forget evil easily. Naturally we love the good.’
‘So that the pariah may have his separate well, and the woman slave for men.’
This was an unexpected, a new bitterness. She added, as though to hide her thoughts:
‘Georges has been asking me a great deal about India. You know, Rama, he’s a nice fellow, though a little fanatical. Fanatic as he is his Catholicism makes him understand India more than I do, pagan that I am. He would convert the whole of India to the Roman Church, make of India an august gift to the Pope. He can see no salvation otherwise. But there you are, he’s studied Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and he’s also studied Vedanta, and that is more than I have done. He wants to see you very much. When shall we ask him home?’
‘Whenever you like,’ I said, and added somewhat selfconsciously: ‘You know it was I who first discovered him.’
Georges was one of those brilliant young White Russian intellectuals, brought up in the best of European and Orthodox traditions — his father was a well-known critic, belonging to the group round Berdiaev. Georges had joined the Maquis, and had his left arm torn off in some gun battle; thus he walked, with the awkward assurance of a mystic, and taught Latin at the College de Garcons. He read with ease several European languages, and had lately started learning Chinese and Sanskrit. He had come under the influence of the unfortunate Ségond tradition in Aix, but the Maquis and the confusion after led him more and more to visit the Dominicans at St Maximin.
During the Occupation — before Georges joined the Maquis— he had gone to the monastery on a visit; Father Zinobias, the young Austrian monk who took him round, spoke French haltingly, and whenever he hesitated for a word Georges was ready to help him. The Austrian, being quite lost in this southern land, was so happy to meet someone who could speak German with him. A friendship thus casually made grew with the years, and when the Maquisards wanted to hide their ammunition in the region the Dominican Fathers were most helpfuclass="underline" three of them gave their life for it. Georges thus started becoming involved in Catholicism. His father was already a convert to Catholicism and worked at the Theological Seminary in Munich, besides working at the Russian Institute of the university. But Georges, brought up in exile, clung to his Orthodox fold, for in loving his church he felt he was more faithful to his motherland. To him even Mount Athos was part of Russia: for the Slavs it will continue to be so as long as they feel their religion was born on the mountains of the pagan Greeks.
Georges loved his father, the more so as he had lost his mother at an early age, in fact in Russia, and before the exile: his clinging to Orthodoxy had brought no difficulty in the relationship between father and son. They loved each other deeply, and the old man wrote such long and wise letters to his son. It was perhaps an act of loyalty to his father that had made Georges become kinder to Catholicism, and as soon as the Germans had occupied the whole country Georges simply went over to St Maximin and asked for baptism. He spent three weeks in prayer and meditation, and they say he came out a new man. He did not seem to belong to this world.
He took his Agrégation in Latin because it mattered little what he taught. He could just as well have taken a History or Philology Agrégation. The more difficult a thing, the more he liked it: which explains the reasons for his taking up Chinese. But Sanskrit he started learning, I think, truly for the sake of understanding Indian philosophy.
Georges and I had met at the university library. We had heard of each other, or rather he had heard of me; I was more visible, as it were, being an Indian, and being married to a colleague of his from the Women’s College. He came to us with that Slav simplicity and earnestness that makes contact with the Russians so enriching.
‘Yes, I would be happy to see Georges,’ I said.
‘You know he was the first to take me to St Maximin. I have met Father Zenobias,’ she added, somewhat timidly.
I said: ‘I am happy that at last religion is not such a fearful monster for you.’
‘But I’ll always be anti-clerical,’ she insisted.
‘Why, Madeleine, did you think I was going to defend the Pope?’
‘Well, from joint-family to community and from community to Church isn’t such a big leap, is it? I would rather a cowl on your head than an Ave Maria on my lip. I hate the cagots,’ she said, as if to reassure herself of her faith. ‘In fact I think I hate all religions, and would to God man simply lived intelligently.’
‘Intelligence, I suppose, must lead you to Socialism and all that. Or to being fat and a buffoon like Edouard Herriot, or a washerman’s beast like Daladier.’
She nodded and was silent.
‘Or why not Maurice Thorez?’ I persisted.
‘He’s too crude for me,’ she remarked, and went into the kitchen to bring the risotto.
I can remember even today, so clearly, the risotto on our plates: the thyme and the lavender removed and laid on one side, the tomato right in the middle, disembowelled and flat, and when Madeleine had put one spoonful to her mouth, my hand just would not lift. There was a wide area of vivid space all around one, as though some magic circle had been drawn; the night seemed to stand heavy on the world. I said, almost in suffocation:
‘Mado, something has happened.’
She, who was half-filling her spoon with rice, stopped, and said,
‘Yes, something has.’
I was quiet. Then she said, slowly, ‘To whom?’
‘To everything,’ I answered, and laid my spoon down.
I just did not know where I was and what I meant. Madeleine left her spoon in the plate as well, and slowly came nearer me, pushing herself on my lap. She tried to pass her hand through my hair, knowing how much I loved her touch, and she put her face against my skin. She had the Charentaise smell of burnt apple, her smell rising through my nose, almost intoxicant. Her limbs became fervent, and in her pain she thrust her breast against my face, a vocable of God. Lord, how her breath went up and down! Her breast seemed to swell with love, as we say in my own land.
There is in pain something almost physicaclass="underline" the body seems to rise and say for the inarticulate, ‘Here is the speech beyond all speech, the knowledge beyond all knowledge.’ In that moment, for once Madeleine seemed to have intuited womanhood, as if the hair had grown rich and the belly had heaved high; as though the outer turning had slipped back inward, and she saw herself woman. Womanhood has eyes and sees itself in a splendour that man will never know, for his discovery is the outer, hers the inner which widens into a whole world. Childbirth is not the creation of a body; it is for woman, as Madeleine had said, the creation of the world. What she sees she keeps within her womb, as the emperor penguin the egg between its feet; and when the time comes she does not offer you an heir, a son, but her whole regnum of creation.