“Yes, you did, you were talking about crimes.”
“Oh dear, I didn’t really mean that at all… You’re so nice, so reserved, so silent…”
“Are those the marks of criminality? Or of capital sins?”
“Perhaps,” the lady replied. “To each his marks… Look at that black bird, there, following the ship… Isn’t it romantic?”
A solitary bird alone in the middle of the ocean was “romantic” indeed. For the second time, Daria felt pangs of foreboding; but then dismissed them, charmed by the gentle rocking of the waves and rediscovering through it a love for all things, a deliverance. Daria pushed her anxieties aside. “We’ll see when we arrive.” Everything was simple, in reality; the little social menagerie on board, elementary; Daria did not think she was being followed.
She had to keep moving to economize her dollars. The American cities she glimpsed might well have struck her with awe, had she not settled into a contented torpor, with no other lucidity than the practical — tensed toward the goal… This giant civilization, these vertical cities where the pedestrian feels insignificant, sees himself numberless, suddenly realizes that the real world is his and that nothing is his since he himself is nothing… An atom is all and nothing in the universe; these crowds, so well dressed, so busy, so cheerful, so callous… Atoms are unaware of themselves and unaware of each other, even in the densest steel… Daria kept moving. Mr. Winifred said hello to her on Broadway; hours later, Mr. Ostrowieczki was standing ten feet from her in the subway, though he did not see her. These chance collisions of atoms were enough to make her tremble. The traveler took obsessive precautions, vanished into elevators, fled, alone, quickstep down corridors on sixtieth floors and at one point looked down on the prodigious stalagmite city from a rooftop terrace: this was the wide gateway to a continent into which all of unfortunate Europe would pour if it could… The sky and the sea were as gray as tears. If the shaved head of Mr. Ostrowieczki had chosen that moment to appear on her crag of reinforced concrete, Daria would have vaulted the parapet and dropped into the vast human emptiness. Alone among the rain-swept pedestrians, she felt herself buoyed by an enthusiasm that was stronger than despair. The power of mankind rivaled that of the ocean. All that was needed was to heal mankind…
She saw plains, the empire of wheat; at the smallest bus terminals, the restrooms were luxuriously clean; the newspapers ran to forty pages, offering comfort-enhancing gadgets at bargain prices (sums which elsewhere would represent years of toil or self-denial), the opulence of standardized apparel, the hum of classified ads alongside detailed reports on the famines and massacres which were the dreary staple of other continents… That this could appear normal, acceptable to one who had just changed hemispheres, was disconcerting; but no more mysterious, perhaps, than the physical well-being of a people emerging from the home where someone very dear, someone very great, someone irreplaceable has just died after a long and painful agony… Or was it evidence of total absurdity? Of the irreparable disequilibrium of our souls thirsty for justice, fairness, kindness — concepts alien to the gyrations of oceans and planets? But would there be oceans and planets without equilibrium, necessary rhythm, and musical harmony? What would intelligence, what would pity be, divorced from the quest for a luminous equilibrium expressed by the stars themselves, the structure of molecules, the graceful proportions of a bridge flung over a river? Several times, on buses racing along sleek highways, laundry flapping from the upper stories of tenements, Daria had to hold herself in to keep from laughing and crying, inconceivably happy, suppressing her angry distress, and finding within herself only a childish answer: “They’re alive! Alive! It’s splendid how millions of people are alive while…”
All she had to pin her hopes on were two addresses in the United States. If both of these spider threads broke, what then? Then nothing! Having preserved them in her mind for years, she now fretted over the accuracy of her recall until one morning her memory was a blank. It was only to tease herself, for they were also written down: in code in a notebook and plain but scrambled in the double sole of a shoe. The first, in Brooklyn, had already been ruled out — a wisp of smoke long since dispelled into the steaming plumes of New York. She was all the more happy, if the state of tragic, spellbound euphoria in which she moved could be called happiness. “I consent to my disappearance…” No one needs me over here, I very nearly no longer need myself. To disappear in a world where nothing could disappear, where a suicide’s gunshot was equal in insignificance to the striking of a match, to disappear into this outpouring of plethoric energy might be a bitter outcome, yet not altogether desperate.
None of this slowed her down. The second address led Daria to a small town in Virginia and to a white colonnaded porch that reminded her of the dachas of small Russian landowners in the old days, in Chekhov’s time. She pressed the bell as blithely as a gambler throwing the dice for the last time, nearly certain of losing, having lost everything. A colored butler let her into a vestibule which was overbright, overdecorated, apparently purposeless. The thread is about to break, everything is meaningless. Daria inquired after a certain lady, but instead of answering her: “Nothing left for you but suicide, Ma’am, in approximately four weeks…” the black man inquired, “Are you expected, Ma’am? Whom shall I announce?”
I’m completely unexpected and don’t announce anyone! “Just a minute,” Daria said. She got out her notebook, wrote “D sent me,” and slipped the page into an envelope. “Please give this to the lady of the house…” Good domestics never betray surprise. A woman with over-dyed red hair received her immediately in a small sitting room cluttered with cushions and floral arrangements. Visibly flustered, she was crumpling Daria’s note in one hand while the other plucked nervously at the blue beads of her necklace. Her pupils were enlarged by as if by fright.
“What do you want from me? Who are you?”
“Please forgive my turning up like this… There’s no danger.”
“And who is this D? I don’t know any D.”
What a stupid lie, Daria nearly said aloud. You must know several names beginning with D… Just stupidity. “You’re my prisoner,” Daria thought spitefully, for she hated the cushions, the bouquets, the showy lampshade… The woman tore up the envelope and its contents, brushing the pieces into an ashtray. “You’d be wiser to burn them,” Daria advised hypocritically. Her hostess was pink and blowsy, a shapely little gourmande.
“If you didn’t know D, you wouldn’t have invited me in. There’s nothing to fear, at least not from me… You’ve got his instructions. All I need is his address.”
“This is ridiculous! It’s a mistake! Who are you?”
Daria, as if looking for something, opened the leather-bound book she held pressed against her bag: Leaves of Grass.
“Ah,” her hostess said, her face clearing, “you’re reading Whitman?”
Never, perhaps nowhere, did the poet of “Salut au Monde!” ever dispel such dark suspicions as he did then. The two women looked at each other simply. “Actually, I’ve been out of touch with him for years…” said the red-haired lady. “Take this down. He’s in Mexico… Throw the address away when you’ve memorized it…”
The spider’s thread had held against the storms of earth and history! “I don’t have to write it down,” said Daria, “my memory is good.” She tried to spark a contact. “So is yours, I dare say…” — meaning, we are alike somewhere, we know what no one can know or understand without having ventured down certain dark pathways…