When she opened her eyes she seemed to be emerging from a deep sleep. Jacob was looking at her, his face strangely beautiful outlined in the moonlight. She could feel his penis resting inside her. She smiled.
Years later, when he had to lie on a cold leafy bed from necessity and not from choice, Jacob would remember that night with a poignant melancholy.
A bare month after the Princesse and Violette had left Paris for Denmark, Sylvie woke unusually early. Jacob, shaving in the bathroom, was startled to see her reflected in the mirror. He was equally startled by her words.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ Sylvie said mysteriously. Her hands were folded behind her back as if she were about to give him something. Her hair tumbled from sleep spread across the shoulders of the white girlish nightie she had taken to wearing. She looked again like the slightly gawky schoolgirl Jacob had traced to the convent all those years back.
‘I’m pregnant. Soon I’ll have a little girl to give to you.’
Jacob looked at her in disbelief and then folded her in his arms, forgetting the soap which covered his face. Sylvie giggled. He carried her into the living room and twirled her round and round, before pulling her, protesting, into the bedroom.
That very afternoon, Jacob set about making the arrangements for the wedding. They were married a month later and held a party for a small circle of friends in a Pavillon at the Bois de Boulogne. The setting was Jacob’s tribute to the magic the woods had held.
Sylvie was resplendent in a creamy white suit trimmed with old lace, her sensuality somehow more potent in the demurity of her clothes. Madame Jardine was so pleased at the fact that her favourite son was at last to be wed, that she stilled her disapproval of his choice and behaved with impeccable graciousness. Monsieur Jardine, too, was pleased and aware, where his wife was not, of Sylvie’s magic. The Ezards were there, relieved that Sylvie was settling down at last and no longer their responsibility even nominally. Jacques Brenner, trim and witty as ever, acted as best man and Caroline, appropriately tearful, as bridesmaid. The presence of Princesse Mathilde, statuesquely elegant in a shimmering dark blue frock, was noted by all. She had come to Paris specially for the occasion. Jacob and Sylvie were pleased in equal measure.
She drew Jacob aside in a quiet moment and looking him straight in the eyes said in a throaty voice, ‘I hope you will be happy, my friend.’ He wanted to embrace her in front of everyone and only her slightly stern look held him back.
The chandeliers shone; flowers perfumed the atmosphere; the women’s gowns twirled and lifted rhythmically; laughter and the babble of voices could be heard above the music of the jazz band Jacob had chosen as a special tribute to Sylvie. It was a joyously festive occasion. And one that did not go unnoted in the Paris press. The list of Jacob’s friends and colleagues could have kept any name-dropping cultural columnist happy.
Jacob too was happy, but his happiness was tinged by foreboding. As he looked round the assembled ranks of his friends and family, he saw dotted amongst them a few strained, less familiar faces. Colleagues from Germany, refugees from Hitler’s Nazi state which was bent on the elimination of a people he counted amongst his own. Even Sylvie’s throbbing song - for there she was now radiant on the small stage, flanked by the eloquent musicians - could do nothing to erase the haunted expression of those eyes which focussed only on memories of violence and destruction.
Chapter
Eight
__________
∞
Some women bloom with pregnancy, rapt by the secret life their body enfolds. Sylvie Kowalska, as she still insisted on calling herself, was not one of these. As her body swelled and grew, so did her revulsion for it. The sight of her veined, pendulous breasts, the mound of her belly in her wardrobe mirror filled her with a disgust so acute that it threatened with each passing day to overwhelm her. She studied the signs of change in herself for hours with a fascinated loathing. This heavy, ungainly beast had nothing to do with Sylvie. If a strangers eyes happened to fall upon her in the street, she rushed away certain that their disgust trailed her vile form. She hid herself in darkened cinemas and sat mesmerized while sylph-like movie queens enacted rapturous scenes.
With Jacob, the whole matter was exacerbated. If he so much as touched her or attempted an endearment, nausea engulfed her. How could he love this loathsome creature and still love Sylvie?
She had long since insisted on a separate bedroom. By the time she entered the seventh month of her pregnancy, she barred him from her room altogether. Her condition seemed to have taken on an unending permanence. There was no thought of a child at the climax of the process, only the constant presence of this horrendous other which was herself. Jacob was at the root of all this, the perpetrator of the evil which had overtaken her. He embodied all her self-loathing. She couldn’t bear the sight of him.
Feeling trapped, Jacob confided his worries to his friend Jacques Brenner. They were having dinner in the restaurant on the second floor of the Tour Eiffel. Below them Paris floated in a sea of twinkling lights as if it were still a world capital of pleasure. But the rival pavilions of the great world exhibition of 1937, ominously visible, were a reminder of something else. Atop the German pavilion a giant eagle proclaimed the glories of National Socialism. Directly opposite it, a bulky statue of a heroic pair, vaunted the glories of Communism. The sight of these vying presences did nothing to ease Jacob’s mood.
‘I’m at my wits’ end, Jacques. I really don’t know what to do.’
Jacques shook his head in mock dismay.‘And I had hoped that by bringing you up here, I’d raise you above your cares.’
‘It’s not a joke, Jacques.’ Jacob pushed his plate away brusquely and reached for a cigarette. ‘I sense things might be better if I weren’t with her. But I’m afraid to leave, afraid she might do something to herself.’
‘If only you had been like me, you need never have confronted all these problems of female fecundity.’ Jacques smiled wickedly, refusing to be drawn into his friend’s gloom.
‘We can’t all be like you,’ Jacob said with a touch of venom. ‘Otherwise human kind would soon be extinct. Either by sexual or political proclivity.’ He had still not forgiven Jacques his brief flirtation with Fascism some years back. Jacques had then been enthralled by the image of strong blond youths marching in unison towards a superhuman future.
‘Touché, oh venerable Dr. Jardine.’ Jacques drained his glass. ‘So, what is to be done about this grotesque Sylvie who hates you, hates herself and will probably hate the bouncing baby who pops out of her? If it ever does.’
‘Jacques!’ the single syllable tumbled out reproachfully from Jacob’s lips, just as the stiff mustachioed waiter came to clear their plates. Jacob pushed back his chair and asked for the bill. ‘Remind me to have dinner with you again sometime when I’m faced by a crisis.’
‘Sit down, old chap. I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re so damnably gloomy of late, so serious, so full of insoluble dilemmas. It’s this reek of humanity. I can’t bear it. Sit down.’ Jacques suddenly turned intent, unlaughing eyes on him. ‘I’m probably just jealous, you know.’ He puffed reflectively on his cigarette for a moment.
Jacob sat back in his chair and gazed down on the sinuous river, the flicker of lights it reflected. Jacques was right. Over these last months he had turned into an old bore. He felt oppressed. Oppressed as much by the general situation as the one at home.
Jacques interrupted his thoughts. ‘You know. I can put myself in Sylvie’s skin,’ he shuddered. ‘It’s not a very happy place. One minute, you’re the glamorous Gloria Swanson. No one can keep their hands or eyes off you. The next you’re this bloated pouch. It makes you think you’ve died.’
‘It’s not like that. It’s wonderful, natural…’ Jacob stopped himself.
‘Natural?’ Jacques caught him up on it. ‘Did I hear Jacob Jardine, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, correctly. Natural? Next you’ll be saying normal. What’s natural about any of us? Have you exam
ined your dreams lately? Been to your hospital?’
‘Yes, yes, of course, you’re right,’ Jacob conceded to him, and wondered whether he had been trying to fit Sylvie into an unsuitable mould.
‘Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea. You know how we’ve always agreed that Sylvie is a consummate actress, never so much herself as when she’s playing a grand part. Never so happy as when she’s in front of a transfixed audience.’
Jacob nodded, vaguely remembering a distant conversation.
‘Well, all we have to do is coach her into a new part. That’s it. I should have thought of it before,’ Jacques leapt up with all the alacrity of a man bent on a racing hunch. He took a set of keys from his pocket and dropped them on the table. ‘You stay at my place for the next few days. Otherwise you’ll just be in the way. Use my clothes. And only come when I call you.’
Before Jacob could stop him, he was off. Half way across the crowded room, he called back, ‘If any of my undesirable friends turn up, just send them away.’ Then to the delight of the assembled diners, he added, ‘And get yourself a woman.’
Jacob found a mass of curious eyes focussed on him. He was tempted to laugh.
Jacques’s apartment on the Rue des Saint Pères just a short distance from the bustle of St Germain des Près suited Jacob’s mood perfectly. The rooms had a surprising austerity. What furniture there was had been selected and placed with a connoisseur’s eye, but the overall impression was of strict sobriety. Only the Oriental prints which hung here and there spoke of Jacques’s love of the fantastical. Jacob breathed freely in this atmosphere of serene order.
Jacob had recently given over his consulting room apartment to three German refugees. That, together with the facT that in the last months, Sylvie had all but made his home uninhabitable for him, meant there was no place he could call distinctly his own. In Jacques’s apartment, he gave himself up to the thoughts which had been preoccupying him. He was only disturbed once. A young man in naval uniform appeared at the door, looked at him curiously, timidly asked for Jacques and then dashed away.
On his third morning in Jacques’s flat, Jacob woke with a clear sense of purpose. He rapidly donned a borrowed shirt, his dark suit, and set off for the hospital. Once there he marched straight to his chief’s office and waited to see him.
‘What can I do for you, Dr. Jardine,’ old Vaillancourt wiped his spectacles carefully before placing them on his eyes and peering at the younger man.
‘I have come to give my notice,’ Jacob stated flatly.
‘Just like that, no reasons?’ Lustreless eyes suddenly held a twinkle.
‘I wish to move to a another hospital, a general neurological ward. Of course, I shall wait until you have found a replacement.’
‘Of course,’ the old man said dryly. ‘And may I so much as ask for a reason?’
‘Let’s just call it the times.’ Jacob looked at his watch, nodded brusquely and turned away. He was not prepared to be engaged in a long argumentative conversation. He had made up his mind.
With determined strides, he walked down the long grey-green corridor towards his first ward. The women’s long-term ward. As the door’s swung open he was, for a moment, overwhelmed by the cacophony of pained sound which burst upon him. Murmurs, shrieks, irascible mutterings, groans, unstoppable monologues, an inferno of competing instruments in an out-of-tune orchestra. Grey faces in indistinguishable grey gowns, some unmoving, their eyes focussed on a minuscule speck of dirt in a barred window or wall; others rocking, prancing, moving hands, feet, heads in abruptly repeated gestures.
As always Jacob took a deep breath and focussed his gaze on a single individual. With one in perspective, the picture fell into place, the orchestra took on its own atonal harmony. The ward nurse came up to him. They exchanged a few words. His round had begun.
There were over fifty women in the ward. As he made his ways amongst the beds where the patients lay in their variable states of insulin-induced catatonia, others tugged at him, tried to hug him, kiss him. One vilified him continually, accusing him of having abused her, impregnated her. Another complained of the noise her five invisible children were making and smacked him hard.
The three nurses who surrounded him tried to make the patients keep their distance. Jacob went to the end of the ward and sat down in his customary chair. Everyday, he sat here for an hour, sometimes two, and as the patients got used to his presence, they lost their fear of him. Some of the manic behaviour would quieten down. A few would come to talk to him in the coded riddles he gradually came to understand.
Eighteen months ago he had fought hard to establish a smaller special space in which ten of the more withdrawn patients could convene daily with two nurses and himself. He had noticed that these patients were acutely aware of the smallest details of their environment and responded to it. To go to the new room, they dressed in ordinary clothes, wore stockings, even make-up. In this smaller, less hostile, therapeutic space, as he called it, they placed magazines, a small cooker, paints. The women began to talk to one another, to the nurses, to him. They were seen as individuals and became such. Within a year, six of the patients had left hospital. Five of them were now back. The new Chief had closed the space. It required too high a concentration of staff. He preferred insulin treatment. Jacob was deeply suspicious of it.
But this disagreement was not, he reminded himself now as he left the ward, why he had decided to change tack. It was what was going on outside the psychiatric world, not inside it, that had determined him. Everywhere, in the press, in countless pamphlets and books, in cafés, salons and over family dinner tables, the polemical battle was being waged. Strident anti-semitic voices proclaimed the need for cleansing France, called in militaristic fervour for the rule of the strong, invoked the Nazi example, a narrow patriotism and a narrower moral rectitude. The liberal premises of the Republic were under attack as well as the toleration and freedoms it enshrined. Jacob’s nightmares told him it was but a short step from the peak of polemic to the pitched battle.
He made his way downstairs to the short stay ward, that shifting sand where the city night had deposited its array of human flotsam and jetsam. There they were, the police force’s pickings, a few unmanageable prostitutes, old clochards suffering from alcoholic dementia; a woman clutching a bundle to her breast and weeping inchoately.
Three of the ward’s staff were clustered around a young soldier who was retching violently. Jacob walked over to them and listened to the medical student’s terse report. The youth had been brought in by a fellow soldier who had stopped him from ramming himself repeatedly against a brick wall. He had purportedly been eating iron filings, nuts, bolts for the last weeks. X-rays confirmed the fact.
‘Before he started retching,’ the student murmured to Jacob, ‘he told us quite calmly that he had turned himself into the strong soldier the army required. He was going to be a man of iron.’
A grim smile hovered over Jacob’s lips. ‘To be a man of iron.’ The words played through him. The perfect case for this day of decision. Why else was he leaving the slow and long-term battles of his chosen profession? Why else was he reimmersing himself in the flesh and bone of physical medicine, but to prepare himself for the men of iron? To cope with the wounds the men of iron made and suffered. It was what the times demanded.
That night under some obscure impulse Jacob wrote of his decision to Princesse Mathilde. He also wrote to his father. He, at least, would be pleased by Jacob’s change of course.
The next morning the telephone rang early. ‘Jacob,’ Jacques’s voice at the other end of the line was excited. ‘Tonight’s the night. Nine o’clock. Not before. See you,’ he rang off, enjoying the drama of his terse announcement.
Jacob arrived at his apartment on the Ile St Louis with all the trepidation of a stranger making his first visit. Reaching for his keys he hesitated and instead rang the doorbell. Jacques opened the door and welcomed him in, excitement visible in every movement of his long, loose frame.
‘Come in, come in. Everyone’s already here.’
Before Jacob could question him, Jacques ushered him into the living room where a small, lively party of some ten people was gathered. There were two or three of Sylvie’s friends from her club circle, two black men he didn’t recognize, the painter Michel, and Caroline, who with Sylvie’s pregnancy had been increasingly at her side and now greeted him a trifle nervously. Amy, the American woman he hadn’t seen for some time was there too, and he wondered whether she had come with Michel. He went to speak to her. A maid he didn’t recognize poured wine liberally into proffered glasses and passed round a tray of tiny canapés. Sylvie was nowhere to be seen.
No sooner was Jacob served than Jacques called for everyone’s attention. ‘As some of you know, we’ve invited you here tonight for a rather special occasion. Sylvie Kowalska is, shall we say, trying on a new voice,’ Jacques smiled endearingly.
Caroline started to clap loudly and the others followed.
From the end of the hall, Jacob heard the sound of a trumpet and a cornet. All eyes turned to watch two black tuxedoed men emerge, their horns wailing. After a moment Sylvie followed. Jacob was riveted. She was almost unrecognizable. From top to toe, she was clothed in a voluminous sequined gown which exaggerated her girth, but somehow cloaked the cause of it. Her hair was all but covered in a theatrical tiara from which pearl droplets hung.
It was, Jacob thought, in the most execrably garish taste. It repelled him. But the drama was undeniable. Sylvie’s stance was heavy, solid, each foot planted firmly on the ground. A devouring shade of lipstick exaggerated her mouth. And when she opened her lips, a contralto more deeply pitched than anything he had ever heard from her, emerged. Her voice, raucous, bitter, moving, complained, merged with the moan of the trumpet, in a song which was also speech.
Memory and Desire Page 19