The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  the eclipse

  He who bears the brand of Cain shall rule the earth.

  George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

  Who then will come to my help? Who then will come to my help ? she kept repeating when you found yourselves alone at her house. The evening was wet and chilly with fog. She was pacing up and down, reeling as if drunk and shading her face with one hand. At times she sat down on the chair, knees tightly joined, wrung her hands and at times raised them and sank her face into her palms. You stared at her feeling empty, trying to tell yourself her reiterated question wasn’t addressed to you. You weren’t among those who could help her; so, you told yourself, you’d better stand aloof. Of course she cried and moaned and her despair offended your dignity. She knew perfectly well you couldn’t help her. She might be telling herself you’d made the mistake together, then why the hell was she the only one being punished. And then, without warning, she confronted you, exploded in a torrent of harsh words ratcheted up from the bottom of her fury and shouted at you without restraint. How could you possibly want her to trust this quack with such revolting hands? At a mere glance she’d found herself seized with unbearable terror and disgust. Quite simply, if he had come nearer by even one step she’d have started to yell and she’d rather be dead than touched by him. As for you, you had no consideration for what she felt. The proof was you’d rushed into a deal with him as if you had but one purpose: push her to her death. And if her brother learned not only she’d got pregnant while still a student without being married but also she’d had an abortion, for sure he’d make mincemeat of her. And the atrocious pain she’d suffer by going through that then? Maybe the pain would spread to all her blood vessels, give her palpitations and in the end her heart would stop beating. Well, she’d made up her mind: she’d decided she’d better be dead. If it was too bleak, if it was too tormenting, she’d kill herself. The more she spoke the more intense she became. You tried to circumnavigate the subject by raising the urgent problem of the moment, which was money. Where were you going to find the money, given that neither she nor you had any other income than your pocket money? And you undertook to soothe her, to have her calm down, but she raised her voice all the more, saying she didn’t want to listen, didn’t want to know anything any longer. You don’t like shouting like that. There’s nothing you hate more than someone unable to control oneself. The night was darkening and the fog seemed to thicken so that the road lighting was bluish and blurred. But for you it was a night of frustration you’ve long left far behind you, a restless night during which you didn’t sleep a wink, during which you did nothing but heave long sighs, during which you did nothing but chain smoke so that the ashtray was overflowing, a night every minute of which was torment, every hour interminable. The virulent disease which had been brewing for months was erupting in ultimate symptoms and you had to hastily gather the scattered shards of your courage to fight against it. You heard the footsteps of catastrophe getting closer step by step with assurance while you crawled on the ground like a dog, examining its every movement with fright. Here came the time of the decisive confrontation, a muffled, furious hand-to-hand combat. Your body was covering with big drops of sweat in the darkness of eternal night, in the solitude and desolation of the wasteland of your life. You were forced to get out while you still could. That Nartaya would bear the brunt of the consequences, who would argue with that? What you had to do was to oblige her to get an abortion. You reckoned it was her duty to do so. She had to be sacrificed. Your face was deathly pale, the face of a young monster, the face of a murderer. You made a superhuman effort to control yourself, to remove the block of anger the size of the whole world that crushed your chest and you told her it was no use her wasting time crying like that because no matter what she must get an abortion. Didn’t she know that all women, when it becomes imperative for them to abort, go through it? And you went back to the previous topic by telling her that what worried you was the money. You didn’t want her to know you already had some from your friends. You wanted to be a hero in her eyes, hoping that, seduced by your resourcefulness, she’d tell herself one day, once the crisis was over, When he took me to have an abortion it was he who spent the most. But she seemed to be paying absolutely no attention to what you were saying, as if it was all meaningless. She was paralysed by the acute sting of her terror, for she interrupted you to say she was afraid, afraid, she was afraid, the mere thought of it made her shiver. Hearing this, you heaved a long sigh and swore. For fuck’s sake! You’re as thick as two short planks, you told her coolly. You were sitting on either side of the dinner table. Her doltish face annoyed you; her mulish eyes got on your nerves. You cursed her no end in the stupefied silence while she went on sobbing as if she’d never stop. You turned away and looked through the window. Everything in your field of vision was but void and deathly silence as usual. You looked at the house where you lived. Right then, all the windows were closed, their hooks limp along the walls. In that old dwelling so comfortable at a time like this you should’ve isolated yourself with a good book which would’ve taken you into a far-flung reverie, at times bursting into happier laughter than that of a child listening to a funny story, at times with tears in your eyes unbeknownst, more afflicted than a cypress above a weedy graveyard, at times putting the book down and sighing and gazing into space, and at other times still forgetting yourself by reading aloud, and you’d wish there were someone by your side with whom to chat or quarrel, why not, or else you’d fancy a night spent bent over your homework or some schoolbook in a cone of lamplight. Well, those musings were at odds like Eden and Gehenna with the situation you were ineluctably confronted with. So that, instead, you started to recall those days when you woke up at dawn to revise lessons you’d vaguely understood the previous evening. There were lots of things that reduced you to the state of a retarded child, in particular maths – logs and antilogs, square roots, ensembles, the almost incomprehensible combinations of sine and cosine, interpolations and sundry other poppycock. But that was so much better, and you cursed the night when, sex driven, treading furtively, you’d gone up to her. You started to recall those days of the cold season when you woke up in the suffused light of dawn with clear, sharp ideas, lit a fire in front of the house and swot up. At times you walked around the fire for the heat to penetrate on all sides. Those people who happened to walk by and see you would greet you with praise in their voices. They must be telling themselves that that young fellow had a bright future ahead of him and, remembering their own youth, would sigh over their defunct past. Sometimes you sat still, looking focused, reciting this or that lesson to yourself aloud. Thinking about all this, how much you’d have liked to be a good boy again! But it was no longer possible, as you’d got a silly goose pregnant. You tried to turn round to confront the truth that coolly threatened you, even though by then your hope was dimming before your very eyes. The silly goose you’d got pregnant sat before you with dark thoughts and a shattered heart. Nartaya, when she saw you didn’t pay attention to her plight, started to threaten you, a behaviour she hadn’t shown in a long time. She was really scared, she insisted. To go see the doctor was out of the question. She expressed herself forcefully. She was to go back to her parents’ and commit suicide there. You looked at her and said in an even tone of voice that if she dared to speak again like this or show herself this weak, well then you’d have nothing else to say to her. She’d have to solve her problem by herself. She could reveal her relationship with you there and then and she could drop her studies and her future to go back home and kill herself. You expressed yourself without any lingering tenderness and with such obvious sincerity she couldn’t withhold her fury. She said you were a vile and vicious bastard the likes of whom she’d never met. It was a complete waste of time to love you, to strive all the time to make you happy and to lower herself to serve you like a slave. And then were you mad or what talking to her like that? Then she stretched out her arm across the table, grabbed you by the shoulder and sho
ok you violently, which triggered in you a kind of total panic you fail to understand even now. Once more you were losing much strength trying to take it calmly. But she seemed unaware of how much and for how long you’d been controlling yourself. What’s the matter with you? she asked in an inquisitorial tone. Or is it you’ve really decided to stop speaking any longer? Then don’t come around claiming it’s me who is heartless. I’m going to tell Daen at least, she threatened. She begged you to listen to her, after which she proclaimed she’d taken an irrevocable decision about what she was going to do. As far as she was concerned, she now saw everything in black. She’d never known such intense darkness in her life, it felt utterly scary. Her voice then took the dead boring tone of a whining plea. To have a woman abort was frightening. Had you ever thought about a woman’s delicate feelings? Why didn’t you try to think of ways to avoid that? Wasn’t there any other method then? And oh! how worried she was about the little life growing in her! Was it its fault? Not at all. Not in the least. Why wouldn’t it be given a chance to see the light of day like all the other children? It was its right, wasn’t it? Let it cry, laugh, wriggle, crawl and walk and run and sing. Pure life is a child’s life… You looked away, disgusted, recollecting vaguely how impressed she’d been by whiteness, her dream to become a nun, an ascetic at that, and her childish heart drawn to children. Damn it! you swore between your teeth, almost crazy with worry. The waves of oppression swept through you one after the other, crushing to a point you’d never have imagined. You looked away, looked at the dim blurred masses of the various buildings built to last, the rows of pines along the road stretching their tops into the sky, the serene stars projecting scanty light, the increasingly black night. From somewhere, maybe the jungle mass or the mountain, nightbird songs answered one another as if emitting signals. To hear her evoking the child in her belly made you shiver. Maybe she spoke about it because of the fear that was hers or else out of a suddenly surfaced maternal instinct, or both. You felt like you were being nailed on the cross of absolute dead-end. You resisted, nailed to the spot like one bewitched. Nartaya’s voice came to you as if from afar. She wouldn’t allow the child to die. She felt it was her duty to protect it. Shut up! you told her with a hoarse voice; I’m telling you to shut up so shut up! Shut up! Shut up! which took her breath away for a while before she started again to speak as if under the spell of her own dream, saying her mother had told her that before giving birth to her, she, her mother, had very nearly died because of her, and even if it hadn’t been as serious as that of course, the end result had been that her mother had taken a long time to get well, but that didn’t prevent her from loving her daughter very much, and she went on talking a load of rubbish as if she was out of her mind, saying she waited for the day she’d see the little wrinkled face of the child in her belly, she’d like to hear it wail, see its shining black eyes, observe the motions of its teeny hands and teeny feet and how she was going to feed it the milk of her breast. To be a mother was hard but the reward was obvious. And that’s when she said, as someone who, long lost in the dark, suddenly sees the light, Let’s run away together! Let’s leave everything behind. Let whatever must happen happen. But we must run away. – Run away just like that? you exclaimed like a simpleton. I’ve been thinking about it too, you told her. – You’ve been thinking about it too? she asked. – Of course, you answered. – Oh! she exclaimed or something to that effect, oh! how glad I am we’re thinking alike! she said, then she sort of half-smiled. It must’ve been her first smile since the day she learned she was pregnant, and the way she was contemplating you right then was of a desperate soul imploring a divine idol. To run away together was no big deal, you undertook to explain to her, your head giving you hell as you sought arguments and words to win her over. But if we run away together, it means we drop out of school and then what are we going to do to earn a living without education credentials? And furthermore, once the child is born (you didn’t say our child out of fear and shame and also because you weren’t man enough), responsibilities will pile up: a little insatiable mouth to be fed at all times, a frail and delicate body prone to all sorts of diseases and when you think about it, it’s much more frightening than during delivery and already by then she’d be heavy and slow, would find it difficult to eat, wouldn’t be able to move about without taking all kinds of precautions, as for sleep let’s not talk about it, and then the visits to the doctor to monitor the pregnancy and then the cost of medicine and besides, good lord, neither she nor you would know which medicine treats what or prevents what. When it was time to give birth, she’d have to suffer so much she’d faint. Sure, some women give birth without a hitch but others call out their mummies like babies, some have to have their belly cut open to get the baby out, others die, and where are we going to find the money to pay for the hospital? Where are we going to find enough to buy a cradle, a blanket, milk? It’s a matter of life and death, you know, darling, it isn’t like playing with a doll. And it’s not all: if the baby really lives, it means we’ll find ourselves living in hell. What’s a baby? A baby is a weird creature that cries when it’s eaten too much, cries when it’s too hungry, a little too warm and it cries, a little too cold and it cries, sometimes burps, sometimes hiccups, sometimes can’t piddle, can’t do a pooh. And even some of those babies that are thought to be in good health, at the very least they have thrush, so they refuse food, won’t eat, won’t sleep. At the very least, a baby will have the symptoms of parasitic infection: big head, bulging tummy, lean bottom. Some are even worse, those having regular epileptic fits. Rearing a baby elephant is more satisfying than bringing up a kid. How long would the two of you bear such a condition, wizened with destitution and grown old prematurely, she might do some laundry or sewing for rare customers, you might be hired as a day labourer in a rubber plantation, a grader in an unprofitable mine or a crewman on an unlucky fishing boat, surviving in some cramped hovel without tap water, without electricity, among garbage, din and creepy-crawlies? No, you protested, you weren’t looking at the world in a negative way. If you took flight to live together, you might at best become eventually a local authority clerk or a caretaker in a primary school and she at best would upgrade from washerwoman to costermonger. The more you talked the more a certain vision of the future sharpened and grew alive in your imagination. You could see yourself as a grownup beaten by life going back home in the evening bone-tired and drunk on the local hooch and she sitting in front of the lopsided house with a leaking roof busy grilling meatballs or squids on a charcoal brazier in billows of smoke, with bloated legs, greasy morose face ablaze, embattled hair turning tawny, spouting a ceaseless flood of vituperations at two or three snotty, grimy, ragged, stubborn sequels to your wandering sperm now wallowing in the dust with some toy taken off a rubbish heap and when they squabbled and snivelled their infuriated mother snubbing them with You brazen curs, good for nothing like your father, everyone of you!… A scene as intense and banal would be terribly sad and frightening, you concluded. If we ran away that would just about be our life, no doubt, but what would be the meaning of it? What about happiness in all that? What would have happened to happiness? The hand-tomouth existence of the lowly classes, only fools make it their ideal. And you went back to talking about studies, saying it’d be the first thing to go by the board. You reiterated that, as far as you were concerned, school was a first-class detention centre as she herself knew very well, but looked at from a grownup’s point of view it wasn’t worth being discarded, especially in her case, as she’d be done with it in merely one year, and in your own case it had been years and years you’d endured it so that in two or three months’ time you’d be done with it for good. Let her try not to go to school for a few days, you challenged her, and she’d see how slowly time crawled. She’d let herself drift into daydreams, and if she had nothing to do and nowhere to go she’d be thoroughly depressed and before long she’d be fed up with everything and would spend her time feeling blue and sighing and telling herself ceasel
essly right now her friends are in such or such a course, right now it’s the midday break, and so on. Just give it a bit of a thought. Just look at the matter a bit closer. If she chose to abscond with you that’d be at once the end of the future for one and each of us. That’s why she had to consent to go and see the doctor. You ended on a long exhalation, wiped the sweat off your forehead and waited for her to consent. You too were thinking of running away, but from an altogether different standpoint than Nartaya’s, and your idea, which it was totally out of the question to reveal to her, was that you were going to run away alone. Where to, that wasn’t quite clear yet – maybe Phuket, Phang-nga, Trang or Krabi, so many towns as had fishing harbours. In any fishing harbour you’d no doubt find work given your past experience. Phuket should probably be your first objective, as it was the place you knew best and the people you’d met there must still be around, or else you’d hitchhike at random, taking on jobs here and there for the initial purpose of making it to Bangkok. You’d spent a whole eternity in that damn military camp that was such a pain in the arse and you were fed up with it to the back teeth. Hadn’t you raved enough about how it’d be to enlist on a ship which would crisscross all the oceans of the globe, testing your fate through heavy work, demented deepsea breakers, brawls, Homeric booze-ups, one-day loves with foreign hookers on the game in the harbours, and how it’d be if you owned a sturdy motorbike and went up and down the world the hard way, swallowing cheap readymade dishes, sitting alone by a camp fire on starstudded nights in front of your rough canvas tent, smoking acrid cigarettes and drinking bitter coffee in a tin cup and on the move as soon as the sun showed, fickle in love and impervious to friendship? That was life with wind-borne feet. That was freedom. Freedom? How many in this world really possess it? Let’s drink to it until there isn’t a drop of alcohol left anywhere. You seriously dreamed of only one thing at that time, and that was to run away from Nartaya, but that dream was perturbed by the thought that the discarded Nartaya would be left to her fate, which, for the moralityencumbered being that you were after all, would be a cruel and selfish behaviour. All things considered you still had a measure of goddamn moral sense. All bastards have a measure of good in them. But the best was not to run away. You’d run away to nowhere if only Nartaya ran away on her own. If she wishes to leave, don’t mind me, let her go all alone wherever she wants. Maybe she’d do it, actually, including killing herself. The only thing you asked from her was not to tell San or Daen why she was running away and why she was killing herself, that was all. Your blood bubbled with the urge to clear off straight to the horizon. The only thing you asked was for her to leave you or for you to leave her or for the two of you to leave each other, that was all. She no longer had any significance for you. A woman you’d enjoyed possessing to your fill was a woman of no value to you any longer. The sexual curiosity you’d had for her was satisfied. Her secret antrum had been found and thoroughly marked out in its every corner. Your duty as surveyor had thus come to an end. She was to become a domain under reservation for someone else who’d be free to plant his seeds in it, breed cattle on it or take advantage of it in one way or another. But not you: your duty was to travel after the secrets of as many women as you could find. At that age, you carried everywhere at groin level the ideal of the young male with a moronic face: only the man able to chuck woman upon woman is a real man. But what if she did flee or kill herself for good? You had the impression of falling off a cliff, not out of a sense of guilt or shame but out of a sense of self-preservation. Obviously the reasons for her suicide would be investigated and it wouldn’t be long before you were suspected of being involved in her death in one way or another and you’d end up making a full confession. And actually, if she did run away, you couldn’t stay either. Your idea of fleeing wasn’t practical. It’d be your last resort if all other options proved unworkable. If you were still around after she’d disappeared, San wouldn’t fail to question you about what you knew about her and her intentions. And you think a mule like you would be able to keep his cards close to his chest? After a few tricks, threats and entreaties, you’d end up spilling the beans and that’d be the end of your beautiful youth. If by then she wasn’t dead, they’d come to fetch you and engagement would follow and after engagement marriage would follow, indispensable to give face to the female side in conformity with honest folk’s tradition. And you started to think again about what would happen during the investigation, which probably would be carried out military style as you were confessing, which would mean slaps on the face until your mouth was full of blood. The guilty must be punished. Daen would be hopping mad at you and no doubt, as your guardian, he’d be the one to administer your well-deserved punishment. Scenes of soldiers’ punishments were familiar to you: steeped in mud or rolled in dust, they were made to run, crawl, squat, squat jump, spin around dozens of times until they were all dazed and staggered under the burning sun and all along they were forced to shout Battalion where are you? I’m going too or even ordered to do odd things such as alternately kiss their left boot fifty times and their right boot fifty times or jump and bite their own ear fifty times, get on with it! or run, run until I (the instructor) fall dead tired, or even had one half of their cranium shaved off or were shaved from left ear to right ear and from forehead to nape so as to form a cross at the top of the head. You were as terrified of Daen as Nartaya was terrified of San and you were as terrified of San as you were of Daen. Marriage! You had yet to do so many a damn thing in your life and you were to find yourself married, a husband and a father? The pain in your whole cranium was excruciating. When you saw that she remained silent, you started to speak again: it was absolutely necessary for her to go see the doctor as soon as possible but if she kept insisting on having it her way, it was as if she and you were going to be skinned alive. One day or another the secret would be out. But when? And how much anguish would you have to go through before that frightening day came about? Maybe we’ll end up begging for it to come, being unable to stand the wait, and when that day comes, what terrible events will take place and how long will it be before they’ve taken their course? Having come to this point, you suddenly interrupted yourself, thinking of San’s reputation for cruelty. He was one of those who’d taken part in the scandalous case of the red drums in Patalung20 and when he’d been affected there permanently, he’d lost no time gathering the most beautiful record of heads or ears taken off the enemy, which was the height of sophistication among the military in those times of political uncertainty and ghastly expedients. You were very tired, tired as you hadn’t been in a long time, and you spoke to her gently. Think it over, please do. You’d never wanted her to be confronted with the pain all women are afraid of, but there was no longer any choice. That’s when you noticed her face too was covered with sweat, a drizzle of droplets above her lips and on her forehead – do you remember? – and she kept wiping sweat off her palms. It was a night of numbing cold that was truly suffocating. It was an awful night. Not only for you but for Nartaya also. She’d let tension grow in her. Worry gnawed at her heart and made her lose all self-control. She was a woman and one hardly worldly at that. Your suffering compared to hers was like a grain of sand and a dune. You knew she was a good person, with a soft heart and pure dreams. Ah yes! She’d once told you she wanted to remain a virgin all her life. She’d invited you to go with her to take part in the Asalha Puja21 candle procession at the temple closest to the military camp. She partook with the feeling of following tradition rather than out of deep interest in the Buddha’s teachings. There was a crowd milling around the small prayer pavilion, holding candles whose flames flattened under the gusts of the monsoon wind. The eighth-month moon now showed brightly, now hid behind a veil, as clouds dictated. A volley of bats looped the loops at tree level. The crickets made a racket in the dimness of the clumps of flowering shrubs. The icy breath of the temple, cool wind and wet air gave the event an august and sacred atmosphere. You stole glances at her serene face and eyes feverish with uns
hakable faith and you were full of secret love and longing, as at the time you had yet to sleep with her. And it was that evening she told you I don’t know, but when I go to the temple it does me good and My mother had me give alms to the monks as soon as I was able to walk, you know; she told me I didn’t quite manage to hold the ladle and she had to guide my hand, and you interrupted her by pointing out that temple and monks had no meaning for someone like you who got condoms for some cocky novices who claimed to be newly defrocked when they went to the brothel, someone who was often high from smoking joints as you competed with young monks, someone who was almost growing roots playing rummy morning, noon and night in the company of more or less doddery monks some of whom were even happy to cheat, and you added that only fools still went to temples and bowed to monks. You realised you were losing any chance to make her change her mind and drag her to get an abortion. A young girl bent on religion that had grown up in allegedly respectable customs and traditions – why did you have to meet such a girl, damn it, you swore inwardly, revolted. And look at that: she cares for nothing but that child in her belly. It keeps quiet, it doesn’t move yet, is it asleep or is it awake? Oh, how she’d like to know! And does it already feed through the – what do you call it? – the unbiblical cord? It is the cause, of course, why she hasn’t had much appetite for days and days. No doubt about it: that little life growing within her is, among other things, what makes her waste away and, by the way, is it a girl or a boy? But never mind: girl or boy, she loves it anyway. She then smiled as if daydreaming, with the air of someone who sometimes likes to talk about what she loves with someone she thinks understands her – clearly the smile of the mentally retarded. And such an attitude from her, vile smile included, made you all the more frightened and agitated when you remembered you were the father of the child in her evil belly. Neither then nor since have you thought of yourself as a father, as if it were a taboo of the imagination (even now that you lay burdened with pain and in a state akin to death in this deserted house). To be a father was like being condemned to death or even worse. You’d lose your mind for sure if a brat, the end product of your sperm factory, raised its little arms making as if wanting to kiss you and called you daddy or asked this, asked that, wanted this, demanded that, or climbed to sit on your knees to comb your hair, a toddler who’d often put his shoes on the wrong feet and wonder which is the left one and which the right, a bairn who’d have shoes but wouldn’t wear them but put on instead those, enormous, of a grownup and walk dragging his feet and tottering so that sometimes he’d fall, hurt himself in the lip and yell, fucking annoying, some nippers puny and sickly like rat pups and others mischievous like infant monkeys, some brats who, when their fathers are away for several days, greet them back with Hey, old man, where the hell you been? or when they’re punished or furious not to get what they want curse them with You jerk! All children are tyrants. And while you were reflecting on rejection, she was thinking of herself as a mother. You moron! Ancestral cretin! More stupid than the first amphibious animal in the world! What rotten luck her thoughts were stuck over that! It was the end of everything for you. The only thing left for you to do was to proclaim your defeat officially and raise high above your head the white flag of surrender and, damn it, the confrontation scene was bloody clear that would have Daen and San and Nartaya and you in a charged and changing atmosphere like the sky before a storm, confessions ringing out, swearwords, shouts, yells, sobs, loaded questions, interjections of stupor followed by exclamation marks the size of temple pillars, and then the calm and anxiety that endure, the shame of having been exposed, conscience that sporadically shows its ugly face, and as soundtrack the hiding given for pedagogical ends on a background of personal belongings which take the rap or are sent flying – oh yes, damn it, bloody clear! Her life and yours shackled to death by the very hands of Daen and San… Afterwards, you’d have to endure going on with the classes, as before long you’d be through with your studies. As for Nartaya she’d have to give hers up when her belly bulged enough to attract the suspicions of all the selfrighteous bastards of both sexes at school for at least two terms before resuming them once she’d recovered from delivery and hired someone to take care of the baby. And she like you would have to yet again borrow money from Daen and from San (Daen who’s always helped you in everything even though there’s no blood link whatever between the two of you), pitiful baby lambs always under the crook of your shepherds, leading a very basic life with nothing brave or noble you could claim and be proud of. For you, that was out of the question! No one with a gist of common sense would tolerate this kind of situation. And then irrepressible ire seized you. Your face writhed as if you were about to cry, your eyebrows knitted and your eyes closed under a sudden shot of pain, you felt as if immured in a dim, cramped cell devoid of any window, shackled like a convict. The star of hope had become the star of despair and it did nothing but shovel its bitter light into your avid mouth. In that dark, tight cell you started cursing, imploring, groaning in distress and harming yourself in many ways. You were delirious in the darkness and silence. All your attempts had failed. But were you going to accept to collapse and raise your hand to cover your face out of despair just like that? You started all over again with a raspy, discordant voice. You said slowly If you consider the pluses and minuses you’ll no doubt come to change your mind. But surely it isn’t clever to waste time like this. As soon as we’ve got enough money, we must go and see the doctor together. Haven’t I told you over and over that the only problem right now is money? It isn’t a matter of going or not going. Believe me. And we must go there on the day the doctor said. You know perfectly well that the more you wait the more dangerous it is. You know this much better than I do, actually. She stared at you and kept on staring so long you couldn’t help getting puzzled. So, it’s agreed, isn’t it? You spoke in an even tone even though you wanted to shout at her. Her hideously red, swollen eyes were open wide and big tears rolled out of them slowly, and she murmured almost without moving her lips You’ve got the heart and mind of an animal.