By the time he was sitting at one of the small tables, he was feeling less sympathetic. How like his father, to embarrass him in front of all these people. He did not know most of them, of course, but sitting next to the door—surely that was General Schrader, whom he had seen once in a parade commemorating Sylvanian liberation from the Turks, and he was almost certain that the woman with the ridiculously long feathers in her hat was the wife of someone important. Hadn’t he seen her sitting on the platform at his graduation?
General Schrader had risen. There was a woman joining him, a woman so striking that Rudolf could not help staring at her. She was wearing a green dress, a dress of almost poisonous green. A green cowl of the same material framed her face, a pale face with a bright red mouth, so vivid that Rudolf thought, I’ve never seen anything so alive.
But she did not stop at the general’s table. Instead, she walked across the room in his direction. At every second or third table she stopped. Men rose and bowed, women either turned their heads, refusing to look at her, or kissed her on both cheeks. In her wake, she left whispers, until the café sounded like a forest of falling leaves.
“So nice to see you again, Countess,” Rudolf heard her say, and the woman with the feathered hat responded, “Good God! Can it really be you, come back from the dead to steal our husbands? Where did I leave mine? Oh my, I’m going to have a heart attack any minute. My dear, where have you been?”
A long, lean man sitting in a corner rose, kissed her hands, and said, “You’ll sit to me again, won’t you?”
“That’s Friedrich, the painter,” said Karl. “I’ve never seen him talk to anyone since I started coming here four years ago. I’ll bet you four kroners that she’s a film actress from Germany.”
“I don’t think so,” said Gustav. “I think—”
And then she was at their table.
“You must be Rudolf’s friends,” she said. “It was so nice to meet you. Must you be leaving so soon?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so,”said Gustav, hastily rising.“Come on, Karl. I’m sure Rudolf wants some privacy.”
And then he was alone with her, or as alone as one can be in Agneta’s, with a roomful of people trying, surreptitious, to see whom she was speaking with.
“Hello, Rudolf,” she said. “Thank you for being prompt. Could you order me some coffee? And light me a cigarette. I haven’t had a cigarette in—it must be twenty years now. I’ve made a list of the people you’ll need to meet. You can tell me which ones you’ve met already.” She waited, looking at him from beneath long black lashes. Her eyes were still green, but somehow they had acquired depth, like a forest pool. “My coffee?”
“Yes, of course,” said Rudolf. He gestured for the waiter and suddenly realized that his palms were damp.
The party had lasted long past midnight. The Crown Prince himself had been there. The guest list had also included the Prime Minister; General Schrader; the countess of the feathered hat, this time in a tiara; the painter Friedrich; the French ambassador, Anita Dak, the principal dancer from the Ballet Russes,which was staging Copélia in Karelstad; a professor of mathematics in a shabby coat, invited because he had just been inducted into the National Academy; young men in the government who talked about the situation in Germany between dances; young men in finance who talked about whether the kroner was going up or down, seeming not to care which as long as they were buying or selling at the right times; mothers dragging girls who danced with the young men, awkwardly aware of their newly upswept hair and bare shoulders, then went back to giggling in corners of the ballroom. At first Rudolf had felt out of place, intimidated, although as the future Baron Arnheim he certainly had a right to be there, should probably have been there all along rather than smoking in cafés with Karl and Gustav. But it did not matter. He was escorting The Pearl.
She walked beside him down the darkened street,her white furs clasped around her. She had not wanted to take a cab. “It’s not far,” she had said. “I want to see the night, and the moon.” It shone above the housetops, swimming among the clouds.
“Here it is,” she said. It had been three weeks since he had met her at Agneta’s, and he had never yet seen where she lived, the apartment that his father was paying for. He had wanted to, but had not, somehow, wanted to ask. He still did not know, exactly, how to talk to her.
“Could I—could I come up?” he asked.
For a moment, she did not answer. Then, “All right,” she said.
Her apartment was larger than the one he shared with Karl and Gustav, and luxuriously furnished. He recognized a table, a sofa, even some paintings from Malo, and suddenly realized that his mother must have sent them. His father might have paid for an apartment, but he could never have furnished one.
She turned on a lamp, but the corners of the room remained in shadow. She shone in the darkness like a pale moon.
“You made me dance with every girl at the party, but you wouldn’t dance with me,” he said.
“That wasn’t the point,” she said. “How did you like the French ambassador’s daughter? Charlotte De Grasse—she’s nineteen, charming, and an heiress.”
“I want to dance with you,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment. He could not tell what she was thinking. Then she went to the gramophone and put on a record: a waltz.
Nervously, he took her in his arms. She was wearing something gray, like cobwebs, and her eyes had become gray as well. A scent enveloped him, the perfume that Karl had been unable to place.
“You’re exquisite,” he said, then realized how stupid that had sounded.
“Don’t fall for me,” she said. And then, almost as though he did not know what he was doing, he started to dance with her in his arms, around and around and around.
She sat on the edge of the bed. In the morning light coming through the windows, her robe was the color of milk. She had washed her face. Once again she looked like the woman that Rudolf had seen near Malo: thin, but now paler and more tired, with blue shadows under her eyes. Older than she had looked last night. It was just after dawn; the birds in the park had been singing for an hour.
“This is who I am, Rudolf,” she said. “Beneath the evening gowns and cosmetics. Do you understand?”
He pulled her to him by the lapel of her robe, then slipped it off her shoulder. He kissed her skin there, then on her collarbone and her neck. The scent still clung around her, as though it were not a perfume but an exhalation of her flesh. “I don’t care,” he said.
“No,” she said, sounding sad. “I didn’t think you would.”
Last night, he had touched her carefully, hungrily. At times he had thought, She is delicate, I must be very gentle. At times he had thought, I would like to devour her. Her fingers had traveled over him, and he had thought they were like feathers, so soft. At times he had shuddered, thinking, They are like spiders. She is the one who will devour me. He had looked down into her eyes and wondered if he would drown, and wanted to drown, and had at times felt, with terror and ecstasy, as though he were drowning and could no longer breathe. Finally, when he lay spent and she kissed him on the mouth, he had thought, It is like being kissed by a flower.
He pulled her down beside him and kissed her, insistently.
“Rudolf,” she said. “The French ambassador’s daughter—”
“Can go to hell,” he said. And a part of him noticed, gratified, that this time she touched him as hungrily as he had touched her. Afterward, he lay with his head just beneath her breasts, moving as she breathed, his fingers stroking the skin of her stomach.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “Soon, I’ll have to return to Dobromir. Once you have a position and are engaged, you won’t need me anymore, and then I’ll go.”
He raised himself upon his elbow. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would you want to go back to there, to that hovel? And why should I marry anyone? I want to be with you.”
“I told you not to fall for me.” She sighed. “The first time I
came to Karelstad, all I wanted was to dress in silk, wear high heels, smoke cigarettes. Motorcars! Champagne! The lights of the city at night, so much more exciting than the moon and stars. The theater, playing a part. It allowed me to be something other than myself. And then the men bringing me flowers, white fox furs, diamonds to wear around my neck, like drops of water turned to stone. Many, many men, Rudolf.”
Frowning, he turned his head. “I don’t want to hear about them.”
She stroked his hair. “But I became sick. Very, very sick. I had to go back, live among the trees, drink water from the stream. If I stay here much longer, I’ll become sick again.”
“How can you know that?” he said.
He turned to look at her, and saw a tear slide from the corner of her eye. He pulled himself up until he lay beside her and kissed it away. “All right then, I’ll come to Malo. I’ll live in that hovel of yours, or if you don’t want me to, I’ll visit every day. At least we can see each other.”
She smiled, although her eyes still had the brightness of unshed tears. “Now you’re being ridiculous. Don’t you realize what Malo is? It’s been there, the forest and the fields, for a thousand years. The barons of Malo have cared for that land, and you must care for it, as your son must care for it after you. If I thought you would abandon Malo, I would leave today, knowing that my time here in Karelstad, with you, had served no purpose. Tell me now, Rudolf. Will you abandon Malo?”
Her smile frightened him. She seemed, suddenly, kind and sad and implacable. “If I don’t, how long do we have?”
“I promised your father that I would stay until your wedding day. But you must not delay it, you must not put off taking the position I’ve found for you. You must not try for more than I can give.”
“Damn my father,” he said. “All right, then. I’ll do as I’m told, like a good boy. And if I’m good, what do I get, now? Today?”
She wrapped her arms around him, and suddenly he felt a constriction in his chest, a sudden stopping of the heart he had felt only when seeing a serpent in his path or listening to Brahms. He could not breathe again. He wondered why anyone had thought breathing was important.
“You know,” said Karl, “I would probably kill you if it would make her look at me.”
They were sitting in the park. Karl and Rudolf were smoking cigarettes. Gustav was smoking a pipe.
“How you can stand that foul stench…” said Rudolf.
“It’s no worse than Karl’s French cigarettes,” said Gustav. “Good Turkish tobacco, that’s what this is.”
Rudolf knocked ash off the tip of his cigarette. “Well, it smells like you’re smoking manure.”
“He doesn’t want to stink for The Pearl,” said Karl. “Rudolf, I hope you enjoyed my announcement of your probable demise.”
“If she would look at you, but she won’t,” said Rudolf. He had spent the night with her. He spent every night with her now, knowing and yet refusing to believe that his time with her was coming to an end. Several months ago, he had shared with Karl and Gustav every detail of his frustratingly slow and not at all certain conquest of Kati. But he had told them nothing about the nights he had spent with The Pearl. Karl had hinted several times that he would like to know more. Gustav had stayed silent.
“Why is that, do you think?” asked Karl. “While your face is pleasant enough, you’re not exactly the Crown Prince, and my uncle is a minister. Hell, I may even be a minister myself someday.”
“Because she’s a Fair Lady,” said Gustav.
“A what?” asked Karl.
“My grandmother told me about them, once when I had the measles and had to stay home from school. You really don’t know about the Fair Ladies?”
Karl blew cigarette smoke through his nose in a contemptuous sort of way. “Why should I?”
“Because they’re dangerous,” said Gustav. “They live in the forest, inside trees or at the bottoms of pools, and when they see a woodsman or a hunter, maybe, they beckon to him, and he goes to dance with them. He dances with the Fair Ladies until he’s skin and bone, or maybe a hundred years have passed and all his friends and relatives are dead, or he promises to give the Fair Ladies anything they want, even the heart out of his chest or his first male child. I tell you, Fair Ladies are dangerous.”
“And imaginary,” said Karl.
“Ask my grandmother. One of her nephews was taken away by a Fair Lady. She had him for three days, and when she returned him, there were things missing from his house. All of his mother’s clothes, some jewelry that had been sitting on her dresser, phonograph records. He said that had been the price of his return—he had promised them to the Fair Lady.”
“Sounds like a thief, not a fairy,” said Karl.
“Fairies are imaginary. Fair Ladies are real. How else do you explain the fact that when she comes into the room, you actually, unbelievably, shut up?” Gustav put his pipe into his mouth, inhaled, and blew out a smoke ring. “I think she’s getting ready to steal our Rudi away. What do you think she’ll want, Rudi? The heart out of your chest?”
“Well, Rudi, what do you think? Is she a Fair Lady?” asked Karl. “You haven’t said anything for a while.”
“She’s found me a job,” said Rudolf. “I’m going to be secretary to the Prime Minister.”
“Hell!” said Karl. And then, “Bloody hell!”
“And I’m supposed to marry someone named Charlotte. She’s the French ambassador’s daughter. As soon as I’m married, she says, she’s going to go back to Malo.” He threw his cigarette on the path and ground it out, savagely, with his boot heel.
He wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t going to marry Charlotte.
He had to tell her. Go to her and say, “Come away with me. If you don’t want to stay in Karelstad, we’ll go to Berlin or Vienna. I’ll work to support us, and if you do get sick—why should you get sick when you’re with me? but if you do—I’ll find the best doctors to treat you. At Vienna they have the best medical school in Europe. Don’t you see that I can’t live without you?”
What had Gustav said? That Fair Ladies were dangerous. Well, she had taken the heart out of his chest, all right.
“Be happy, Rudolf,” she had said to him. And, “Tomorrow is your wedding day. I will not see you again, after tonight.” He had made love to her fiercely, angrily. And when he stood for the last time in the hallway, she had cupped his cheek with her hand, kissed him as tenderly as a mother kisses a child, and said “Goodbye.” Then, she had closed the door.
But here he was, standing in the street across from her apartment building. He would cross the street, go up the stairs to her apartment, knock on her door, bang on it if she refused to open, and tell her that he wasn’t going to go through with it.
“What are you doing here, young Arnheim?” He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to see the painter Friedrich standing beside him. “I passed Szent Benedek’s on my way here and saw the wedding guests going in. You don’t want to disappoint them, do you? If you run, you can be there in ten minutes. So go already.” He waved his hand, as though shooing a fly.
“I can’t,” said Rudolf. “I have to see her, talk to her.”
“To say what, exactly? That you’re in love with her, that you want to spend the rest of your life with her? Don’t you think she’s heard it all before?”
“I don’t care. This is different. She loves me too, I know she does.”
The painter put his hands in his pockets. He looked down at the pavement, then spoke slowly. “It’s possible. She’s capable of love, although you wouldn’t know it from the stories people tell, sitting around their fires in the winter, in places like Lilafurod and Gretz. I’m going to tell you a story of my own. It will take five minutes, which will give you ten minutes to get there, just in time for the wedding.
“Once upon a time, there were three young men as stupid, if that is possible, as you and your friends. Their names were Péter Andrassyi, Morek Arnheim, and Herman Schrader. Andrassyi w
as a count, and he was rich enough to buy himself a mistress, the fabulous Pearl of great price, who had just finished a successful run as Juliet at the National Theater. The famously irascible theater critic Mor Benjamin wrote that no other actress could die as convincingly as she could. She had been sitting for me—I had painted the posters for the play, and I asked her to sit for another project of mine, a small painting of a sylph standing naked by a stream, reflected in the water. Twice a week she would come to my studio, and I would paint her—naked, as I said. Have you ever seen a case of tuberculosis? No? Well, that’s what it was like. She just started wasting away. I asked her what was wrong, what she was eating. She said she was well enough, that she didn’t want to talk about it. But when she started coughing up blood, or whatever she has in those veins of hers, she told me. Her kind—they don’t belong here, and if they stay too long, they sicken and then die. I went to Andrassyi’s apartment. I told him about her condition, about what I had seen and what he must have noticed himself. Do you know what he said to me? That I shouldn’t stick my nose into what was not my business, that I had always been jealous of him and simply wanted her for my own. He would not let her go, and as long as he wanted her, as long as he told her that he could not live without her, she would not leave Karelstad. I argued with her! How I argued. But she said, “He loves me. You know what I am, Friedrich. My nature binds me to him, more strongly than any of your legal ties. It isn’t in the stories, is it, that we can be so caught?”
“I thought Gustav was joking,” said Rudolf. “Do you mean that she’s really—”
“Quiet, pup,” said Friedrich. “I only have three more minutes to finish my story. So, I challenged him to a duel. It was stupid—he was an excellent shot and I was a poor one, but I was young and in love with her myself, although in a different way than he was. Artists aren’t quite human either, you know. They also love differently. Schrader was his second. Arnheim, your father, was mine. I had no friend of my own to second me, and I knew that your father was an honorable, if intolerably boring, man. We met in the park at dawn, when there would be no observers. Andrassyi should have shot me—I should have died that day, but the luck that rewards all fools was with me, and he missed. I, who had never before hit a target, shot him dead. I was brought before a judge, but what could he do? There were two witnesses to swear that we had agreed on the place, the time, the weapons—Andrassyi had even shot first.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 25