by Iris Murdoch
She spoke in a casual sing-song voice as if she had told the story in just those words many times before. She had lifted her hand now and was flashing the diamonds about in the light. She seemed less a victim than a little lost princess telling an ancestral legend in a strange court. Yet I pictured the scene at the frontier, the terrified fleeing children, the father’s wounded hand. It was no legend but a tale of today, an everyday, everyman tale. I began to tell her, to tell them all, that I was sorry.
But now for the second time I saw that she had fled. She had drawn her knees up and thrust them into the crook of Otto’s knees and fallen down beside him. Perhaps the memories had been too much. She closed her eyes and seemed to go instantly to sleep. Otto moved slumbrously at her contact and for a moment the two bodies quivered and shifted in sympathy before settling down conjoined, her head against his neck, her knees within his knees, her hand in his hand. They looked unbearably, cosily conjugal. I stared at them for a while, Adam and Eve, the circle out of which sprang all our woes. I stared at them until they became a mere pattern of lines, a hieroglyph. I covered them with a rug.
7. Two Kinds of Jew
‘So you have discovered the love birds!’
David Levkin was standing at the door. As I moved hastily away from the bed he passed me and pulled the curtains wide apart. It was bright daylight and a sunny morning.
My one thought was to get out of the summer-house as quickly as possible. I shot out of the bedroom door, practically leapt the stairs, and came out into the cool wood where the sun was streaking the birch trunks with a pure and scarcely spotted white. I felt I had waked from a bad dream. I took a few paces down the path.
Someone touched my arm and I found that Levkin was following me. I felt irritated and absurdly guilty at his having discovered me watching the sleeping pair. I walked faster and he still followed a pace or two behind. He touched me again.
‘How did you know about them?’
‘I didn’t know about them. I heard your sister out on the lawn crying and I followed her.’
‘Yes, she goes often at night. She thinks that she is a ghost, to haunt the house. But she is not sad. I think she suits your brother. Is it not so?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ I kept walking on, not looking at him.
‘But it will be to do with you. For you will stay with us now? You will stay and help us?’
‘Go away,’ I said. I loathed his tone of voyeur-like complicity. I wanted to forget Otto and his greasy enchantress, they were no business of mine.
‘They sleep well, don’t they? You could watch them all night. It is the drink I believe. Was my sister long asleep? Do you think she is beautiful?’ He plucked at my sleeve again.
I turned to face him.’ Levkin, I have no wish to discuss with you the affairs of my brother or your sister.’
‘The affair! The affair!’ he said excitedly. ‘And my name is pronounced Lyevkin, Lyevkin. It means “little lion” in Russian, and I am called that. At least you may say it means so, for you see a lion is in Russian lyev …’
I walked on. He followed and then started chattering again. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day, Mr Edmund? A fine clear morning. I love these mornings when I come over to wake them. So beautiful. A philosopher says it is our greatest crime, to ignore the beauty of the world.’
‘Clear off.’
‘May I show you my paintings, Mr Edmund? I work as a stone cutter. But really I am a painter. And you too are a painter –’
I stopped and faced him again. There was something menacing and unpleasant about all this chatter and I wondered if he were putting on some kind of act. I disliked his glee over Otto’s situation and it distantly occurred to me that he might be intending blackmail. Blackmail would be just in the style of Otto’s apprentices.
‘I’d advise you to practise keeping your mouth shut,’ I said. ‘Otherwise you’ll find yourself in trouble. You haven’t been long enough in this country to be able to take any chances. I don’t suppose you’ve even got a British passport.’ I thought it would do no harm to frighten him a little in a vague way. I was alarmed for Otto, and I did not trust that boy with his air of a merry little procurer.
Levkin’s response was surprising. He gave a wild burst of laughter, doubled himself up with glee and then sprang high into the air. ‘See,’ he cried breathlessly, ‘I lev-itate, I lev-itate!’ He paused in his gyrations, viewed my grave face, fell to laughing again and gasped out at last, ‘Whatever did she tell you?’
I was bewildered. ‘Well, she told me how you had come here –’
‘Oh, which one, which one! I can hardly bear it!’ He held his stomach for laughter.
‘What do you mean, which one?’
‘Which story was it this time? The story of swimming the river, or the story of the aeroplane, or the story of the tunnel –’
‘She said you came through a forest –’
‘And our poor old father’s hand was hit by machine-gun bullets so that he never played the piano again and died of a broken heart?’
‘Well, yes –’
‘And the rings, did she show you her rings, how they were diamonds my father got for us?’
‘Yes –’
‘Oh, how funny she is! She tells so many different stories and they are all false. That one is just now her favourite. She read it in the newspaper, about the poor man’s hand. No, no, Mr Edmund. We are not such romantic people. My poor sister is a little fanciful I’m afraid. Our father is not a pianist, he is a merchant of furs, and he did not die of a broken heart but is very much alive and making his money still, and we were not born in Leningrad or wherever she said, we were born in Golders Green. And as for those rings, they are rings of glass which she has bought for a few shillings. So you see how wrong you are to threaten me, Mr Edmund, for I am as British as you are – and indeed I mean no harm as you will see when you know me better and we become friends.’
‘I doubt if that will happen,’ I said. ‘But do I understand you – your sister – perhaps imagines that all those things happened –?’
‘Yes, she is a little – not crazy quite, but as I say, fanciful, she imagines, yes. She has what we call Polizeiangst. She thinks always she is persecuted. Did she tell you of the little men in this wood who are watching her? No? She is so troubled by being a Jew. She suffers it all the time, and all what is happening in all the world to Jews she thinks that it is happening to her.’
‘Poor child,’ I said. I recalled the waxen face and the staring eyes. Yes, a little mad perhaps. Another victim of a wicked world. I let Levkin lead me along a path that led away from the house and went by a roundabout way to the workshop.
‘She is a witch, though,’ said Levkin. ‘A rusalka as they are called in Russia. She has a sort of death in her. And she is fallen, oh, fallen ever since she is very young. She has had many many men. That is what Lord Otto likes. That she is crazed and that she is a prostitute. And she likes him because he is a monster and a nun. But I should not talk like that about my master, should I?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘and now –’ In fact I was interested in what he had said and extremely haunted by the tattered image of the poor deranged girl. I could indeed understand what might fascinate Otto here.
‘You see there are two kinds of Jews,’ Levkin went on, walking very close just behind me. ‘There are the Jews that suffer and the Jews that succeed, the dark Jews and the light Jews. She is a dark Jew. I am a light Jew. I will work, I will succeed. I will succeed in art, or else in business, perhaps in art business. I will earn enormous money. I will not remember. I will not remember anything. She is all memory – she remembers so much, she remembers the memories that are not her own. She thinks she is the other ones, the ones that suffer and die. So she will suffer, so she will die young, I do fear it. But I will leave all that. I will levitate myself in the world. I will live in the world of light.’
‘How long has this been going on, with my brother?’
‘Oh, lo
ng, months and months, since we are here.’
‘Does anyone know except you?’
‘Wait, wait, Mr Edmund. Do not walk so fast. No, no one knows, no one but me.’
‘Well, keep it so,’ I said. ‘Good day.’
We had now reached the edge of the garden and I turned from him quickly across the lawn. The sun had dried the dew. The worms were gone. I felt disturbed, exhilarated. I wanted to think about what had happened to me. Yet of course it was no business of mine. I did not belong here, I was going away soon, perhaps that very day – and with that I suddenly remembered Flora. I looked at my watch and could hardly believe my eyes. It was after ten o’clock. I began to run towards the house.
It was suddenly incomprehensible to me that I could have simply forgotten my rendezvous with the child. I had been, when I went to bed last night, so full of it, I could think of nothing else. Yet somehow the weird night scene, the crazy princess and the delinquent Levkin’s chatter had so seduced and absorbed my imagination that what was most important had gone quite out of my head. I ran into the house.
Flora’s room was my old room. I ran to it with pounding steps, shaking the place. Surely she must still be there waiting. I knocked quickly and opened the door.
The little desk-table was laid neatly for breakfast with two plates and several bowls of fruit: apples, bananas, oranges, apricots. There was also bread, butter, Swiss cherry jam, and a big jug of milk. Flora had laid it all out with loving care. But she herself was gone. I came in more slowly. There was a note propped up on the table. I waited and you did not come. F. I sat down heavily on the bed, utterly horrified with myself.
I looked up and saw someone looking at me. ‘Oh, Maggie – she’s gone. You say she looked for me everywhere? The bus, just before ten, of course.’
The Italian girl looked at me with the distant air of a servant and a familiar, with an unsmiling impersonal reticence. The grave undemanding face, the anonymous black dress, the trailing bun of hair: nothing could be more unlike the place where my imagination had just been roaming. She came forward and began to put Flora’s little breakfast on to the tray. I slunk from the room.
8. Otto Confesses
‘I dreamt last night,’ said Otto, ‘that there was a sort of big snake in the house. I could hear it slithering from room to room after me, and I was running to get to the telephone. I closed the last door against it, and tried to telephone the police. But the dial was full of insects, and wherever I put my finger there were quantities of beetles and woodlice and I couldn’t dial properly without crushing them. So I didn’t dial, and then this snake –’
‘Where’s Flora gone?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Otto. ‘Has she gone? I imagine she’s gone back to college. She’s so casual with us now, she just comes and goes as she pleases. You’d better ask Isabel. In my dream, the woodlice were the kind that roll up, and –’
‘Otto, last night –’
‘Yes, I know. David told me.’
I had searched for Flora in vain. I had taken the next bus to the railway station, I had telephoned the college, the hostel where she usually stayed, I had even asked for Mr Hopgood, but no one at the other end seemed to have heard of him. In fact, I had little hope of tracing her: she had run away, she would hide. She had said that she would do what I told her, she had asked me to look after her: and at the crucial moment I had allowed my mind to be too full of other things. It seemed to me that I had undergone some sort of dubious enchantment, I had been, almost as if purposely, captured by magicians. Yet I knew this was but a false excuse. If my heart and mind had been sufficiently full of Flora and her needs I could not possibly have forgotten to look at the time. I knew too that the scene in the summer-house had excited me extremely. I was affected by some old sense of the connexion of Otto’s life with mine, a sense of our being, though so dissimilar, identical. I but too perfectly understood the attraction to which my brother had succumbed. I felt pity, and yet I also felt myself degraded, tarnished.
It was also now clear that I could not go away. I was a prisoner of the situation. Earlier in the day, wandering in a state of aimless lassitude, I had been sharply tempted to depart. Flora was gone, Isabel was lying down and would see no one, Otto was still immured in the summer-house. I felt awkward, alien, excluded. There was nothing I could do for these people. Yet, ardently as I desired to go, and even as I advised myself to return to my simple world before something worse should happen to me, I knew I could not. It was my duty to stay: that harsh word riveted me to the spot. But it was not only that. I realized with alarm that I wanted to stay. I was becoming myself a part of the machine.
It was then that I decided I must speak to Otto about last night. The brother and the sister would probably have told him of my apparition. But I felt that I must, if I was in any honesty to remain, have it out with him myself. I decided this in some trepidation, for I knew how sudden and how violent Otto’s rages could be. I had of course no intention of telling him anything about Flora. I could not even decide to speak of that to Isabel. I kept wandering about and visiting the workshop until Otto appeared there, very dishevelled, about five o’clock. I conjectured how he had spent the afternoon. I found that I could not help being curious, though I disliked the curiosity and hoped it would not be too evident to him.
I had come in to find Otto opening a bottle of whisky. He had filled a glass jug with water from the water butt and was gloomily inspecting the brownish liquid in which various small animals were swimming round. He carefully poured some of the water into a glass, trying to retain the animals in the jug. It was not easy. He then filled the glass up with whisky and sat down on a bale of packing straw. The bale sank abruptly in the middle, leaving Otto sitting almost on the ground, lying back cradled in the straw. He looked helpless, like an enormous baby. I sat down on some blocks of Westmorland slate.
‘Yes, David told me,’ said Otto thoughtfully, staring at his muddy drink. He sighed and drank some. ‘The trouble about becoming an alcoholic is that ordinary states of consciousness are simply a torment. I suppose that is being an alcoholic. You keep off it, Ed.’
‘I do.’ I decided to let him pursue the matter if he wanted to. I could see him debating, looking at me, looking back to his drink. The long woollen pants emerging from his trousers camouflaged his dusty boots. His dirty shirt was open at the neck, revealing the familiar vests. Isabel must long ago have ceased to interest herself in his wardrobe.
‘So you saw my malin genie’.
‘Yes.’ I could think of no comment on her. She had fascinated me. But there was little point in telling Otto that. I added, ‘Levkin said – no one knows.’
‘He exaggerates as usual,’ said Otto. ‘Isabel knows something is up, I suppose. I think Isabel just tries not to think about me. So she doesn’t bother about the details. And the Italian girl must know, she’s not an idiot. Flora doesn’t, of course, thank God, she’s been away.’
‘Did Lydia know?’ I suddenly could not imagine Lydia tolerating anything of the sort; and the curious pain which the discovery had given me changed into a mourning for her. She was gone indeed.
‘No –’ said Otto slowly. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I did try very hard to stop. I can’t explain this thing to you Ed. You probably think I’m mad. But it’s like nothing I’ve ever known. I’ve never had a really complete absolutely perfect physical relation with a woman before. You may think I’m a poor fish for that, but it’s the truth.’
I had myself never had anything approaching a perfect physical relationship with a woman, but I was not going to tell Otto that. ‘And this is – very good?’
‘It’s a miracle. It’s completely changed me. My whole body. I know I look like the wreck of the Hesperus, but I feel radiant, as if I had an angelic body. While with Isabel – well, Isabel always made me feel I was disgusting. With her I was disgusting, I was a pig, I felt unclean. With Elsa – everything I am and do is beautiful. Oh, I can’t explain. But –’
&nbs
p; ‘But you feel guilt?’
‘I suppose that’s it,’ said Otto dubiously. ‘After all, we are puritans.’ He drank up the whisky and floundered in the straw trying to reach the bottle. I passed it to him. ‘Passion is its own excuse. At first there wasn’t any time for guilt, any place for such a thought. And I made her so happy. I was on my knees with gratitude every day. It seemed so good, so human. But then when Lydia got very ill –’
‘It was more painful to – deceive?’
‘Not just that. I deceived everyone cheerfully at the start. No, it was deeper. I could not go on making love when Lydia was dying. I felt I wanted to disown my body. It was a dreadful sort of physical torment. Oh, Ed, you were lucky not to see Lydia dying. She didn’t want to, you know.’
I preferred not to think of this. ‘So you tried to break things off?’
‘With Elsa, yes. And it wasn’t only Lydia. Of course I was scared stiff of Flora finding out, it could do her such awful damage. But it was Isabel too in a funny way. I know Isabel and I ought never to have got married, we’re about as unsuited to each other as two people could possibly be. But Isabel’s stuck by me, in her way. She’s got a sort of – brave dignity. I don’t know if you understand me. Lydia was such hell to her. And this thing has become such a mess; and if one starts thinking in terms of the future, it has no future.’
‘You wouldn’t think of marrying Elsa?’
‘Good God no!’ said Otto violently. ‘I want with Elsa just that. And it’s not just lust, it’s good, it’s beautiful, for both of us, it’s something in the truth. I’d always really felt sex was wrong – but not with her. I feel I’m in that way, in the truth for the first time in my life. I married Isabel with a hundred lies in me, and it’s been worse since. This thing with Elsa was like a sort of redemption, a wonderful return to the beginning. But you see it’s no good, it’s doomed. There’s no place for it, I can’t go on living it, it’s not eternal, it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. There isn’t anywhere for me to go with Elsa, there’s no road. And as soon as I realized that I felt I ought to stop it. I expect you think I’m simply justifying a piece of bestiality –’