The freighter was making its way through the unstable element, cleaving the green seas. How many similar freighters and handsome steel submarines lay at the bottom? No one seemed to care… Daria was traveling on her last passport, her last money; outside every law, very possibly pursued, free, free! — but distraught. The last passport, as authentic as it was fake, delivered by her liaison officer, would within weeks be transformed (if it were not already) into a pass into deadly traps. The last dollars were barely sufficient to cover the expenses of this complicated journey, and would run out in three months. If she failed to locate D on the other side of the Atlantic, there was one final resort: a painless injection. Reassuring thought. Because, you see, there’s the philosophical “why live” and the concrete why (and how to) live; there’s the hunted individual, his unfailing will to live, his goals, infinitely greater than himself, his impasse at the end of a barren wasteland, his solitude there, the impossibility of scraping a hundred dollars together… Though not afraid of nothingness in itself, Daria felt unsettled by its approach, for she was delighting in being alive ever since the high seas had filled her lungs with bracing salt air and her senses and mind with an immense, intelligible poem. Suicide is often an act of vitality, and even — if it is not the result of neurosis — the act of a person who is powerfully attached to life. Eminent psychologists might dispute this, but only because they know nothing of the scientific experience of their colleagues who committed suicide in the ghettos… Daria clung to this argument, because she felt attached to too many things.
In a word, she was happy. The frenzied weeks of preparation, the lies she was forced to sow around her, the masks she had to wear, the sleepless nights, the crises of conscience in which true conscience played no part — usurped as it was by fear and a childish docility — all this was blown away by the sea air. She couldn’t stop smiling. Mr. Winifred, a businessman from Oslo, complimented her on her eyes: “They have the very hue of water at the crest of a wave…” “You’re being rather poetical,” she replied inanely, with a pointless laugh that made her look fifteen years younger — younger by one shipwrecked revolution, several descents into hell, and a universal war. Mr. Winifred said there was a poetry of destiny in business; that he had begun to write a play when he was twenty, that he would visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Was it Shakespearian, your early drama?” “No… Closer to Ibsen.” He relished the opportunity to pronounce, for the benefit of the traveler with the eyes (that was it! Ibsen eyes!), a roster of potent names: Brancusi, Archipenko, Chagall, Henry Moore — the very latest in ultramodern moderns, and you’ll never guess the sums they go for! Mr. Winifred confided that, thanks to the war, art was acquiring new value. “I dare say it is,” exclaimed Daria warmly, “a profound value of creation and reconciliation…” Mr. Winifred listened distractedly to things said by women. He was listening to himself. Pillaging had given rise to a black market of minor masterpieces; under the auspices of this trade, the production of forgeries registered an unexpected increase; and some forgeries are themselves masterpieces! The Latin American market lapped up everything indiscriminately, for newly acquired or expanded wealth appreciates old masters and dependable moderns. Mr. Winifred, a specialist in the minerals trade, was expanding for pleasure his collection of mostly religious works from Eastern Europe. Under the Nazi occupation, old families were forced to sell their heirlooms, while representatives of the Great Reich conducted a roaring trade in the spoils of confiscation. Knowledgeable dealers combed the terrain from the mouth of the Danube to the Baltic, swiping the aristocracy’s every precious icon, seventeenth-century portrait, landscape, and battle scene. The treasures of the old worlds are being carried away in the deluge, to the profit of the quick-witted denizens of the new world — a thought that made Mr. Winifred smile slyly, for he was of the new world, and nothing if not quick-witted.
Mr. Ostrowieczki joined them from the bar, and the three of them leaned their elbows on the iron rail over the heavy, lava-slow seas. Mr. Ostrowieczki, an engineer on a government mission, had a broad, pale, fleshy face, a shaved scalp in the Russian style, a taciturn disposition, and pearl-gray irises so pale that they sometimes seemed white. Daria disliked him and he ignored her, preferring to flirt (like a bear in a tweed jacket) with a member of the Women’s Corps of an army that had covered itself in glory. The notion of the wealth of the old and new worlds merging under the pressure of merciless events provoked in him laughter more sarcastic than porcine. His tiny pearly pupils contemplated the waves as he said — congenially, for he too was half drunk — ”Ha! Ha! Lots of artworks will be drowned, not that it matters to me. It’s only old art perishing…” Daria felt a secret jolt. “What do you mean?” she demanded point-blank. “Old feudal art, old religious art, old bourgeois art… I am an engineer, Madame, and for me there’s nothing more beautiful than a turbine.” Daria threw him a sharp look which unsettled him. “The wind is coming up,” he went on, “how about something to warm us up, below?” Daria acquiesced. The technocrat’s bare, high cranium preoccupied her. She was all too familiar with this summary ideology, these doctrines set in polished stone — invented during the age of Einsteinean relativity! Mr. Ostrowieczki avoided speaking to her again, wisely, for she would have found him out. In the mess, they played gramophone records while the sunset glowed through the window frames like a memory of horizons set on fire.
How easy it had become not to question herself about anything without blaming herself for egotism! The vastness of the waves filled the terrestrial half of space; the rocking of the world lulled the soul into a sleepy sense of liberation… Daria mingled sociably, to the point where a lady drew her aside and prayed to be allowed to divine the secrets of her palm. Its lines spelled a shattered destiny (hardly difficult to read, in the palms of our time!). “Ah, my dear! If only you would dare speak to me openly! And you could, I assure you, for I understand every sin, every crime…”
“Do you see many crimes in my hand?” Daria asked curiously.
“Heavens, no! I didn’t say that! I didn’t say anything of the sort, now did I?”
The lady was a young fifty, reading a Charlotte Brontë novel; she was petite, carefully made up, decorated with several ribbons of merit; she was on her way to join her husband, a civil servant posted in the West Indies. (There are dozens of islands in the West Indies, however the lady didn’t name hers.)