14
"Auf Wiedersehen, auf Wiedersehen, don't stay away too long...."
Women's voices and the accompanying sax could be heard all the way out into the hallway. Yolanda had the radio turned on loud. The apartment resounded with the noise of primitive syncopation. Every room was brightly lit and in comparative disorder.
"Good evening," I said, looking around me in astonishment. "What's going on here?"
Yolanda lifted her head for a moment—she was kneeling beside an open trunk—then she turned back to what she was doing. "We're leaving," she said.
I looked at the pile of underwear on the bed, the shoes on the carpet, the clothes hangers scattered all over the place and said politely, "So suddenly?"
"Yes."
Yolanda shook back her hair and sat up to reach for a half-empty glass standing beside her. A bottle of cognac stood beside the glass. It too was half-empty. Yolanda drank. She had apparently already drunk quite a bit. Her eyes glittered and her movements weren't as sure as usual. Her hands were trembling a little as she stuck a cigarette in her mouth. I stepped forward to give her a light and at the same time turned the radio down.
"Why are you turning it off?"
"I'm not turning it off. I'm turning it down.'*
She gave me a strange look, then, without another word, went on with her packing.
"Yolanda," I said, "we can't leave."
"We can."
"No, we can V
"And why can't we?"
"They've arrested Lauterbach."
That penetrated. "You didn't get the money?"
"No."
She hesitated, seemingly absorbed in a pair of nylons she was holding in her hand. Suddenly she laid them in the trunk. "So we'll leave without the money."
"No, we won't," I said. "I have different plans."
"That makes no difference to me."
"Yolanda, what's the matter with you?" I said, raising my voice. Outside a sudden storm had blown up. The windows were rattling. It was an old house.
She emptied her glass. "I've had enough of Vienna, that's what's the matter. That's why I'm leaving and you're coming with me."
"Oh no I'm not."
"Very well," she said. The look in her green eyes was cold and hard. "Then you're going to have a lot of explaining to do to the pohce."
Suddenly I felt very tired and bored with the whole thing. Wilma appeared to me fleetingly; I tried to capture the picture, but then it was gone. "You've been drinking, Yolanda."
"Oh yes/'
"Too much."
"I'm not responsible for all of it," she said, gesturing in the direction of the bottle. "I had a visitor."
"Who?"
"Felix."
"Who's that?" For a moment I really couldn't place the name.
"You don't remember Felix?"
"Sorry, but I don't."
"Actually he came to see you." She sat down on the trunk and drew up her legs. Her robe fell open. She sat carelessly, heels turned in, toes out; her stockings were rolled halfway down. She burped softly and I could smell the stale cognac.
"What did he want to talk to me about?" For the first time in weeks my temples ached.
"About Wilma." Yolanda blew a cloud of smoke into the room. The ash on her cigarette grew longer. Now I knew who Felix was. Wilma's boyfriend. The sweetheart of Wilma, the girl I loved. Felix. He had been here.
"When he found out you weren't here, he decided to talk to me."
"About what?"
"About what was worrying him."
"He's worried?"
"Yes." The ash was almost two inches long. "About Wilma." The ash fell on the carpet between Yolanda's legs. She reached for the bottle. So did I. A tug of war with the bottle . . . "You've had enough."
"Not by a long shot." She got the bottle from me and filled her glass until it ran over. As she Hfted it to her mouth, she spilled some more. "Felix was terribly upset because Wilma loves you. He asked my advice and help. I couldn't give him any advice, but I promised to help him."
My headache grew stronger. "You mean to say he actually came here to tell you that Wilma loves me?"
"He's very young, Jimmy. You mustn't be angry. He loves Wilma too."
"So?"
"A lot more than you do." ^ "What did you say?"
"I said, a lot more than you do."
"I don't love Wilma," I said. It hurt me to say it, I hadn't intended to say it. I had the feeling that with those words I had Jost Wilma. Why was I lying?
"Why are you lying?" asked Yolanda. Her lipstick had smeared, she looked slightly bloated and her skin was greasy.
"Yes," I said. Suddenly I found her repulsive. "Why am I lying? I love Wilma."
"So that's that." She nodded several times; in fact, I thought she was never going to stop. I stretched out a hand for her glass, but she wouldn't let go. "I'll give it back to you," I said. "I just want a swallow."
She let go. The cognac burned and was unpleasantly sweet. I was having diflficulty swallowing. I breathed deep and felt better. Only the headache was still there.
"It was my intention to talk to you about it. It's really quite simple. I fell in love with the girl. Quite a while ago."
"I know," she said calmly.
I began to pace up and down. When my back was turned I could see her in the Venetian mirror hanging on the wall. She could see me too.
"We've got to talk this thing over quietly," I said. "There must be a solution in it for both of us."
"We've got to leave," she said, her lips narrowed.
"Why do we have to leave if, as you say, you've known it all along?"
"We don't have to leave because of Wilma."
"Then why . . ."
"We have to leave for another reason."
"What reason?"
"I can't talk about it."
"Nonsense!" I said. "Why not?"
Now I was standing in front of the mirror, looking at her. I could see that her knees were shaking. She saw that I could see them knocking against each other and closed her robe over them. "I just told you I can't."
"Then you can't expect me to leave with you."
"I'm afraid!" Suddenly she was screaming. "I'm afraid! Can't you understand?"
"No."
"I've got to get away from here. At once! Tonight! And you've got to come with me. Tomorrow it will be too late."
"Too late for what?"
"For everything, you idiot! You fall in love with a pretty girl and think the world will stand still because of it. You don't know what's going on around you!"
"Apparently not. So enlighten me."
"I can't. I've told you I can't. All I can say is that it's a question of life and death. Mine. And yours!"
"You're drunk," I said. "And jealous. That's all."
"You swine!" she screamed and began to cry. Then, with Ughtning speed she bent down and the next thing I knew, her glass was flying at me. It had been blown in one piece and was heavy. I ducked. The glass hit the mirror and smashed it.
"Yolanda!" I cried and sprang at her. But she was quicker. I saw the bottle only in the split second before it hit me on the bridge of my nose. Then it too shattered. A sensation of burning as the alcohol poured over where I was cut, then a blood red curtain falling across my eyes. I staggered forward into her arms.
"Jimmy, my God, what have I done?"
''Give me a handkerchief," I said. I could see nothing.
"Yes, Jimmy, yes. I didn't mean to do it. I'm so afraid, so terribly afraid."
"A handkerchief. Hurry up!"
"Here." She pressed it against the wound.
And then it came. With the speed of Ughtning. It came
as it had come once before—a blinding light, excruciating pain and an endless fall. "Yolanda!" I screamed. "Hold me fast!"
She held me fast, still I fell, deep, deeper than ever before. It was my second serious attack.
15
Pain.
I can't describe it—^the
pain in the hours that followed and in the days after that. There was nothing definable about it, one would have to invent a new word to describe it. But the human being can't find such a word because the pain is inhuman. I was no longer living. I lay there, semi-conscious, somewhere between dreaming and waking. I couldn't hear, I couldn't see, I couldn't think. I ate nothing, drank nothing. I couldn't move. As if I were paralyzed. I lay there and waited for the pain to pass. But it didn't pass. The pain endured.
16
Is it day? Isitnight.^
What time is it? What day? Once I open my eyes. Yolanda is sitting at my bedside.
I recognize her silhouette. A red-rimmed silhouette that dissolves around the edges. I am wearing a bandage. I know because I can feel it She bends over me. "Any better?"
"No."
I don't realize that T haven't said it, that only my lips have moved. I am not better. It looks as if I never will be. Is this the end? And if it is—^why does it take so long? Will this end never end?
17
The pain has spread away from my head like something growing. Sometimes I get the impression that my head isn't hurting any more at all, as if it were already dead, its veins and organs withered away like the sick branch of a tree. These are times when aU hell breaks loose in my right leg, or in my breast or in the fingers of one hand. These are, of course, all signs of the final exhaustion and erosion of my nervous system which can no longer keep pace with the exertion of these days. The communications system of my body is in total disarray, all reflexes and reactions are confused. Only one thing remains in sovereign command: the pain. On the third day—^Yolanda told me the time later—^I am able to write one word on a pad she holds for me. She reads the word. I watch her anxiously. Then she nods and rises to leave while I close my eyes in expectation of the precious miracle. The word I wrote was morphine.
I didn't get it right away. It wasn't easy to get morphine without a prescription. Yolanda tried everywhere. She went to the most disreputable places, into the darkest suburban alleyways on the other side of the Danube. She dealt with pimps, smugglers, sailors and bloated barmaids. I lay on my bed, almost unconscious, and waited for her to come back. I still couldn't talk, but even in my semiconscious state the cruel fact penetrated that Yolanda couldn't go to a doctor, that I couldn't be taken to a hospital, that every medical assistance was denied me if I was not prepared to betray myself and be arrested and indicted.
That I hadn't thought of when T had embarked on this adventure. Now I realized it. Now I knew that countless anonymous criminal investigators in various countries were waiting patiently for the day when a man would turn up who was in unbearable pain and needed help. For this man with a brain tumor they were waiting. They could wait. They had time. And they were not in pain.
Yolanda was pale and exhausted when she got home that night. "Tomorrow," she told me immediately. Her lips were trembling. "We get it tomorrow."
I closed my eyes for a moment to convey, to her that I understood.
"The man who is going to give it to us will be here at ten."
I groped for the pad and wrote, *T don't want that."
"I can't help it," she said hoarsely. "He insists on it."
I wrote, "Why?"
238
"That's his condition," she replied. Her lips were trembling as if she had a chill. "It's the only way we can get it."
I couldn't understand why this had to be, but I said nothing. Then I was astonished to see Yolanda sobbing hysterically. I would have liked to calm her, but I still found it difficult to move; speaking was quite impossible. So there was nothing I could do but watch her cry my pillow wet as she hysterically opened and closed her hands to make fists of tiiem. She had never cried before, and I felt uneasy about it. What was wrong? Had her nerves capitulated? Or was it my affair with Wilma? She lay beside me, crying softly, and it penetrated quite clearly into my otherwise befogged consciousness.
On the following morning due probably to insufficient nourishment and the now rapidly progressing deterioration of my body functions, I found I was beginning to see and hear with difficulty. But I was able to notice that at about nine, Yolanda drank a full glass of cognac. She did it as secretively as she could and thought I couldn't see her because she was in the next room. But I could see her in a piece of the broken mirror, still stuck in its frame. She was leaning against the window, staring out into the street, and I saw her double up as she swallowed such an enormous quantity of alcohol. Then she went into the bathroom and cleaned her teeth.
During the following hours she went to the bathroom again, and once more after that, each time after having gone into the other room to drink. She was wearing a high-necked blue dress, and when she came back to me and sat down beside me on my bed, I was aghast to see that she had powdered her face chalk white and made up her mouth a screaming red so that it looked like a hideous, gaping wound. Her eyes were sunken in their painted blue hollows. She looked like a ghost. Like a clown who had just died. I tried to smile, but she remained serious.
"Is he surely coming?" I wrote on my pad.
"Surely," she said without looking at me.
He came. On time. When the doorbell rang, Yolanda rose stiffly like a marionette.
"It's your fault," she said passionately, her eyes holding mine. "It's all your fault. I wanted to leave. Now it's too late," and with that she left me and walked out into the foyer.
I couldn't imagine what she meant. T had no idea what she was talking about, and for the first time it occurred to me that perhaps she was going crazy. A lot of her recent behavior indicated it. Then she came back into the room; a man was walking behind her. He smiled amiably and raised his left hand in greeting when he saw me. In his right hand he carried a small package. "HeUo, hello, Mr. Chandler!" he said.
It was Mordstein,
19
I stared at him. My tortured brain groped for a thousand thoughts and was unable to grasp any of them.
Now Yolanda was standing behind Mordstein, her white face as if carved out of stone. Mordstein sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. "You must be surprised to see me here."
I nodded.
"Can't you speak?'^
I shook my head.
"Pam?"
I nodded again.
The answer seemed to satisfy him. He crossed his legs and took a cigarette case out of his pocket. "It won't bother you if I smoke?" he asked, smiling. This time I
didn't move; all T could do was stare at him. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth, turned sUghtly. "A light, please?"
Like a sonmambulist, Yolanda picked up a cigarette lighter from a nearby table and hghted his cigarette. The hand that was holdmg the lighter trembled so that she had to support it with the other.
"Thank you,'' said Mordstem, smilmg up at her, but her eyes, looking down at him, were dead.
He turned his attention to me again. "To get to the point which I know must be uppermost in your mind—^I have the morphine with me."
I let out a deep breath, like a sigh.
"You're happy about tiiat, I see."
I nodded.
"Here it is," he went on in his genial voice as he opened the little package he had brought with him and took out of it a box of ampules. "And I didn't forget the syringe," he said and laid that on the bed, too. "The doctor who sold me the stuff showed me how to give the injection. I'm as good as a nurse," and he laughed heartily as he held the syringe up to the light.
What was the meaning of all this? What was Mordstein doing here? Who was he really? What did Yolanda know about him? What did he know about Yolanda? These were the questions, or I should say scraps of questions, that now tortured me. I waited in great apprehension for what was to come next. Because it was quite clear to me that a great deal still lay ahead.
"Do you want me to give you an injection right away?" Mordstein asked.
I nodded.
"You're in terrible pain, aren't you?"
I nodded again. What the hel
l was he driving at? He knew I was in agony.
"And you realize that morphine is the only thing that can relieve your pain."
Nod.
''This morphine," he said slowly. "My morphine."
Nod.
Then I thought T understood. I took my pad and scribbled on it, "Of course I'll pay."
He read what I had written and laughed again. "I'll say you'll pay, Mr. Chandler."
I had to close my eyes. Suddenly I could no longer see the syringe or the ampules. The pain flowed over me in hot waves, stronger than ever. I forced my eyes open. He was still holding the syringe in front of my face. I must have expressed such animal greed and despair that it was more than Yolanda could bear. "For heaven's sake, get on with it," she told him tersely.
He turned slowly. "Be quiet, dear," he said without raising his voice. And now her face expressed such fear, such humiliation and clear-cut submission as I had never seen on a human face before. She walked over to the window. Her shoulders were shaking. She was crying again. It was then that I grasped the major aspect of what had confused me before. With his next words, Mordstein revealed the rest. "Forgive the interruption, Mr. Chandler,'* he said politely. "Sometimes my wife takes too much upon herself." After which there was silence, a silence that filled the room. We stared at each other for a long time, Mordstein and I. Then he said, "Yes," and nodded. "Yolanda is my wife. Didn't you know?"
20
No. I hadn't known.
I had thought I knew a lot, in fact everything, but one always made mistakes. And this was something I really should have thought of. It was so simple, right from the
start, that it should have been obvious to me. And it explained everything—^Yolanda's behavior in Munich, her disappearance, Mordstein's offer to help me, finding Yo-landa in the sleeping car, her fear in Vienna, her tears. Yes, it explained everything. Only I hadn't known it.
"To be precise," Mordstein went on, "I should say that Yolanda was my wife. Two years ago she divorced me. But except for that, and in the real sense of the word, if you know what I mean, she is still my wife. That is to say—right now she is, in this most decisive moment."
He turned to look at her, but all he could see was her back. It seemed to suffice. "We have so much in common, Mr. Chandler, so much that—^let me see, how shall I put it—that binds us together. One never completely disassociates oneself from somebody one has once loved. And that's the way it is with us. Especially with Yolanda. You mustn't hold it against her, Mr. Chandler." He leaned forward because he had heard me groan. "What did you say?"
I Confess Page 21