Visions of Isabelle

by William Bayer

  Traveling the road that day to Meyrin was to reverse her escape of 1897. The closer she drew to the pleasant little town, the more she felt stifled by its charm. Each chalet, each wall, each tree was familiar–she had often walked this way returning from the freedom of Geneva to the prison of Villa Neuve. Her body tensed; what vileness now lay beyond the moat?

  She dismounted, waited for her carriage to go on, then stood alone on the silent road and stared through the gate. The magnificent garden was in ruins. The lawns and paths were confused, the flower beds had gone to seed, and the lattices of bougainvillea were twisted now and overgrown. No one had cleared away the undergrowth or broken up the earth–that ritual of her childhood's springs. The gate had not been painted, and when she entered she heard its hinges grinding rust. Even the little wooden bridge across the moat of darting trout was rotten with decay. Faisandé, she thought, as she wandered toward the house–the garden in its unattended state reminded her of half-putrescent rabbits hanging in Tunisian souks.

  The villa was just as she'd remembered–its proportions perfect and grand. It had a look of deadness, though–all but a few shutters on the upper floor were closed. She sat on the front steps and waited for Augustin. It was here they'd embraced that mad night he'd fled three and a half years before.

  He appeared a while later with baskets of groceries. She searched his face, found little left of his youth and fire. Their reunion was casual, almost embarrassed. She'd expected they'd run to each other's arms, but some new diffidence held them back. After a few exchanges of news, including the fact that Vava had been upstairs all this time and was actually on the verge of death, Augustin burst into a long harangue about shortages of cash, astronomical loans, difficulties settling Old Nathalie's estate and problems that would confuse the sale of Villa Neuve which they must commence, he told her brusquely, the moment Vava died. She felt as though she were talking to a small-time commerçant, not sitting with a dear lost brother amidst the ruins of their youth. During all his talk of money, litigations, wills, she asked herself why she felt no wish to smear kisses about his face.

  "...thank God," he was saying, "for Monsieur Samuel of Vernier. Without him Vava would have starved long ago. I talked to him this morning and he has agreed to loan us whatever we need to get by, even to handle our affairs here, and show the house. It seems Vava's been dependent on his loans for more than a year."

  He stopped suddenly, saw the disappointment in her eyes.

  "You know," he said, chuckling, "it's a good thing I didn't come to meet your train–I'd never have recognized you."

  She smiled a little; he was beginning to sound like himself.

  "Strange to have a reunion here," he said. "With the old man dying, and the garden in a ruin, and Mama and Vladimir and Nicolas gone. It depresses me enormously. I can't wait to leave this place for good."

  Suddenly he took her hand, held it tight, brought it to his lips.

  "I don't know what's the matter with me. I feel strange here. The night I left I thought I'd never come back. And I feel strange with you, too–as if I've disappointed you terribly. I realize, of course, that I'm sounding like an ass."

  "No," she said, "you're just being Augustin. And that will always be fine with me."

  At last an embrace. "I didn't come to meet you–well, it was on purpose. I was afraid."

  "Why?"

  "Of you, your being so grown up. And you are, you know. You're even bigger now. Your shoulders are–magnificent. I could tell by your letters that you'd grown. In each one I could sense it, a step, a leap almost–that your life was changing fast, that you were gaining so much experience, becoming a woman. I knew it would happen once you got away–that you'd be bigger than me–that you'd look at me and find me petty and ridiculous...."

  He turned to her, beaming through his tears. She smiled back as if he were an errant son.

  They talked awhile longer, and when it was dark and time to go inside, she knew he was not the same brother she'd always adored. He'd changed, and, it seemed to her, for the worse.

  Even as they mounted the stairs, she could hear Vava's wheezing cough. From the doorway of his room she saw a shrunken old man lost in a huge bed. His eyes were still ferocious, though hair and beard had lost their gloss. But of all the changes the one that frightened her most was the weakness of his voice. He had cancer of the throat and could no longer bellow. Gone forever was that deep bass growl that was so essential to his vigor. Now he spoke in a grizzly whisper that, when she heard it, made her shrink with chill.

  "I don't give a goddamn for anything anymore," he croaked. "I've wasted my life on stupid things. You children–learn a lesson from a ruined old man: it's better to die young than to live to an old age supported by a grand obsession."

  "Vava, don't talk like that! You're looking for pity and that's contemptible."

  She was surprised at her own harshness, but realized at once that she'd been right. His eyes glowed, first with fury, then with pride.

  "Isabelle, Isabelle–as usual it's you who understand. You're right, child. Now go away, both of you–I want to sleep."

  He held on for two weeks more, but the pain was terrible and he could only find relief with increasing dosages of chloral hydrate. Sometimes, in order not to shriek, which he refused to do out of pride and also because the effort even further inflamed the torment in his throat, he'd distract himself by muttering the old obscenities against the Church, or whispering searing epithets against his numerous enemies, evil corrupt people who'd tried to thwart him at every turn. But his greatest rage was reserved for Young Nathalie, whom he accused of breaking Old Nathalie's heart, and for Nicolas, who, he was convinced, had martyred Vladimir, and whom he held responsible for the torture that had made that sad, beloved boy lose his mind.

  Isabelle and Augustin stood on either side of the bed and listened as he railed on; it seemed only just that this strange, vicious, maniacal man who had formed their youths should have an audience as he slipped away. It occurred to Isabelle as she stared down at his tortured face, all creased by years of drunkenness and rancor, that if it weren't for him she'd have been brought up to wear dresses and petticoats, to make dainty small talk and serve elegant tea. Thank God, she thought, for the devil that possessed him; without it I'd now be everything I despise.

  Even if most of what he'd done in his long and grievous life had been informed by hate, the real motive was probably some twisted kind of love. Even the wretched incident with the Christmas tree–he had probably meant less to hurt her mother than to cry out with terror at having to live with a loss of faith. And for all his pounding on the table, all the flasks of vodka he'd flung against the walls, his vile epithets against religion, she'd emerged with a deep and unshakable faith that God was great and had willed her future and that to what had been written she would happily submit. I was destined, she thought, to find Islam, even after he tried for twenty years to beat out of me any longing for belief. She forgave him then, at the very moment that in his phantom wheezing voice he began again to cough out oaths.

  On May 15, he could stand it no longer. He begged them to help him put an end to his pain. They did not quarrel with him; no false sentiment told them to resist. Together they prepared him a mortal dose of chloral hydrate, and by sunset he was dead after a painless sleep.

  He left them everything, but even in his will he referred to Isabelle simply as the daughter of Nathalie De Moerder. Was it out of malice that he withheld recognition even at the end? She didn't think so. Probably some obscure principle was involved–perhaps it was part of some compact with her mother, and, perhaps, too, some other man had been responsible for her birth. It didn't matter–Vava had been her father in everything but name–and, she decided, he'd wanted to spare her the sentimental tears he so abhorred. She chose to think this anyway, and when she read a special letter of instructions that accompanied the will, she grinned in the same admiring way she'd done at Bône when he'd ordered her to shoot herself or jump fro
m the terrace wall.

  "There should be no ridiculous expenditures," he wrote, "charged to the estate on account of my demise. The simplest pine wood coffin will do perfectly well, and everything should be managed so that the whole affair is cut-rate. For example, my body can be taken to the cemetery in a fourth-class hearse...."

  She and Augustin began at once to look for ways to liquidate the estate. They advertised the villa for sale, but within a month a representative of the Russian legation arrived with members of the Swiss police. They sealed up the house, informing the heirs that Trophimovsky's will was now in contest. He had a wife and children still alive in Russia, and still resentful at his desertion thirty years before. They'd learned of his death and wanted the property for themselves.

  Samuel, the notary from Vernier who had lent so much to Vava in the preceding year, promised to handle the legal aspects of the case, since both Isabelle and Augustin were anxious to go away. They gave him power of attorney and received in turn a thousand francs apiece, enough for Isabelle to get back to Tunis and live awhile until a settlement could be arranged.

  She spent her last day in the garden, exhilarated by its wild state. All the neat rows had given way to chaos, indigenous plants were crowding out the tropical exotics, and it was clear that within a year all of Vava's work would be permanently destroyed.

  It seemed to her that in its ruin the garden at last had come alive. Nature was reestablishing its order, more real, more beautiful than the compelled order of Vava's deranged mind. And just as the garden at last was free to become itself, so now, she felt, was she.

  There was nothing to hold her anymore–no obligations, no sense of guilt to keep her from the life she craved. Physically she'd escaped two years before. Now, with the ruin of her family–the deaths of her mother, Vladimir and Trophimovsky, the disappearances of Nicolas and Young Nathalie, the shriveling up of Augustin–her bondage was broken, and she was free.

  There was a trip she'd been planning for over a year. She would make it now, into the Sahara, across the sand.

  PART TWO

  "If the strangeness of my life were the result of snobbishness or posing then people could say: "Yes, she got what she deserved." But no one has ever lived more from day to day or more by chance than I. It's been an inexorable chain of events that has brought me to where I am–not anything I did myself."

  Isabelle Eberhardt

  Mes Journaliers,

  February 9,1901

  THE DUNES

  On the morning of July 8, 1899, Isabelle Eberhardt, dressed as a young Arab male, made her way to the railway station at Place Mongi Bali in Tunis and boarded a rickety passenger car attached to a troop train bound for Constantine. For hours she stared out the windows, oblivious to the people who moved in and out of her compartment. Sometimes she fastened her eyes onto a hut or a horse or the mosque of a distant town, but mostly she focused on a single spot on the glass, letting the passing countryside blur before her eyes.

  She spent two days like this, sometimes slipping into sleep, eating fruit and bread she bought in half somnambulant states from vendors who herded each time the train stopped. At Constantine, where she had to wait two hours for a connection, the station smelled of the smoke of coal. She went to a café outside, drank cup after cup of coffee, furiously smoked cigarettes, and allowed a boy to shine her red leather boots.

  The train for Batna did not leave until dark. The seats in the first-class compartment were covered with stained brown velvet, and the kerosene lamps, which hung from a wire, coated the ceiling near their smokestacks with a carbon crust. Every once in a while the train would stop in the middle of nowhere, and she would hear cries, the banging of hammers against the track, and see men walking outside swinging lanterns from their arms.

  The next morning she boarded a coach bound for the oasis of Biskra, and began to scribble impressions in her notebook. She arrived late in the afternoon, checked into the Hotel Caid, then went to the Arab Bureau where she requested an interview with the commandant of the region.

  When, finally, she was shown into his office, Lieutenant Colonel Fridel met her with a cold and curious stare.

  "I have no intention," he said,"of dealing with a servant. If Mademoiselle Eberhardt is serious about wanting to travel farther south, she will have to appear here herself."

  "But I am Mademoiselle Eberhardt!"

  "You are Mademoiselle Eberhardt?"

  She nodded, and when some younger officers in the room began to laugh, Fridel glared about.

  "Mademoiselle," he said, "I assume you have your reasons for appearing here in such repulsive garb. I won't ask you what they are. I am sure that no amount of explanation will ever make them explicable to me. But I must have an explanation of your request to travel. This area, as you know, is a military zone."

  "I'm a writer, making a study of the local customs."

  "A good pretext for a Methodist!"

  She squinted with curiosity. "What?"

  "One of those spying missionaries. One of those goddamn British troublemakers..."

  "Colonel, I'm Russian. Look at my papers. And I happen to be Moslem, too."

  The officers exchanged glances, but Fridel did not seem to hear.

  "Can't stand Methodists–going to get rid of them all."

  His face, now, was creased with rage. He snorted his words and pounded his fist upon the desk.

  "This is absurd!"

  He stared at her quizzically. "You're not a spy, you say?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "Very well. I'll consider your request. But, so help me, if I catch one whiff you've been making trouble, if you dare preach one particle of a sermon, then, young lady, you'll be sent back in irons to Constantine with an escort of my most rapacious legionnaires!"

  More laughter from the officers as Fridel thumped his desk. Isabelle was dismissed.

  An hour later at her hotel a boy told her there was a French officer waiting downstairs. She spotted him immediately–one of the captains who'd been lounging around Fridel's office at the end of the day–blond, proud, with a well-trimmed, haughty moustache, and narrow, hooded, demonic eyes.

  When he saw her he snapped his heels.

  "édouard De Susbielle," he said. "The colonel has signed your permit."

  He handed her a paper bearing an angry slashing signature and a red stamp.

  "Thank you."

  "Not at all, Mademoiselle. And please forgive the colonel. Few European ladies come to these parts. The old man has forgotten how to act with a woman of quality."

  "Your function, I gather, is to make his apologies."

  "It seemed an appropriate mission."

  She didn't like him very much as he stood there eyeing when her, and was wondering how to get rid of him when he grinned again.

  "Have you eaten?"

  She shook her head.

  "Would you care to dine with me?"

  "All right."

  They moved into the dining room of the hotel.

  There came a point during dinner when she was not so certain about her dislike. He treated her with deference, asked her all sorts of questions about the latest happenings in Europe, and confessed that it had been almost a year since he'd dined with a European woman alone. She intrigued him, he told her–there was something forceful in her personality, something adventurous that he could respect.

  "My first impression," he said, "was that you were foolish to present yourself in Arab clothes. But I liked the way you stood up to the colonel. He's insane about Methodists, and became rather insulting toward the end."

  She waved her hand with scorn.

  "I know all about his sort. I've been corresponding for years with a captain who's served here a long time."

  "Really? Perhaps I know him. What's his name?"

  She was about to say "Eugène Letord" when she stopped herself and smiled.

  "The letters were confidential."

  "Of course. But you must understand that there are basica
lly two types of officers: the ones who do their duty and represent France in the proper way, and the sniveling ones who fall all over the Arabs, fraternize, even take them as wives."

  "I prefer the sniveling ones."

  He bowed his head. "Bien touché."

  He tried various other tactics during the meal, was clearly bent on her seduction. But there was such a divergence of views that no matter in which direction he thrust he could not get close to her heart. Finally he threw up his hands.

  "I like you. You're obviously an intelligent woman, and you know who you are, which is more than I can say for most members of your sex."

  He twisted a bit in his seat, watching her closely, hoping his compliment might crack her hard defense. But she thought him sly, and was about to tell him so when he struck again.

  "I'd like to help you. I'm leading a convoy tomorrow to Touggourt. If you're interested you could ride along. You'd be under my protection, of course. All I ask in return is that you dine with me each evening on the road, so that we can further express our disagreements and continue this evening's stimulating dialogue."

  Suddenly she was won. Touggourt! When she'd started from Tunis she'd harbored a vague plan to go as far as Ouargla. But already it was clear she'd miscalculated about the time of year. It was madness to travel the Sahara in July. August would be even hotter, more brutal. She'd come on a hope that she'd somehow fall into something, find some situation where she could fit. Who could have guessed that this stiff and pompous young man, who represented everything she loathed, would take an interest in her, find her notions "stimulating," desire her company?