by Marvin Kaye
Gregers Vonderjan dreams he is looking down at his dead wife, (Uteka) in the
rain, as he did in Copenhagen that year she died. But in the dream she is not in a
coffin, she is uncovered, and the soil is being thrown onto her vulnerable face.
And he is sorry, because for all his wealth and personal magnitude, and power, he
could not stop this happening to her. When the Island sunrise wakes him at
Bleumaneer, the sorrow does not abate. He wishes now she had lived, and was
here with him. (Nanetta would have eased him elsewhere, as she had often done in
the past. Nanetta had been kind, and warm-blooded enough.) (Why speak of her
as if she, too, were dead?)
Although awake, he does not want to move. He cannot be bothered with it, the
eternal and repetitive affair of getting up, shaving and dressing, breakfasting,
looking at the accounts, the lists the clerk has made, his possessions, which will
shortly be gone.
How has he arrived at this? He had seemed always on a threshold. There is no
time left now. The threshold is that of the exit. It is all over, or soon will be.
Almost all of them had left. The black servants and the white, from the kitchen
and the lower rooms. The white housekeeper, despite her years and her pernickety
adherences to the house. Vonderjan's groom—he had let the last horse out, too,
perhaps taken it with him.
Even the bird had been let out of its cage in Antoinelle's boudoire, and had
flown off.
Stronn stayed, Vonderjan's man. His craggy indifferent face said, So, have
they left?
And the young black woman, Nanetta, she was still there, sitting with Antoinelle
on the balcony, playing cards among the Spanish flowers, her silver and ruby
earrings glittering.
"Why?" said Jeanjacques. But he knew.
"They're superstitious," Vonderjan, dismissive. "This sort of business has
happened before."
It was four in the afternoon. Mornings here were separate. They came in slices,
divided off by sleep. Or else, one slept through them.
"Is that—is the piano still on the terrace? Did someone take it?" said
Jeanjacques, giving away the fact he had been to look, and seen the piano was no
longer there. Had he dreamed it?
"Some of them will have moved it," said Vonderjan. He paced across the
library. The windows stood open. The windows here were open so often,
anything might easily get in.
The Island sweated, and the sky was golden lead.
"Who would move it?" persisted Jeanjacques.
Vonderjan shrugged. He said, "It wasn't any longer worth anything. It had been
in the sea. It must have washed up on the beach. Don't worry about it."
Jeanjacques thought, if he listened carefully, he could hear beaded piano notes,
dripping in narrow streams through the house. He had heard them this morning, as
he lay in bed, awake, somehow unable to get up. (There had seemed no point in
getting up. Whatever would happen would happen, and he might as well lie and
wait for it.) However, a lifetime of frantic early arisings, of hiding in country barns
and thatch, and up chimneys, a lifetime of running away, slowly curdled his guts
and pushed him off the mattress. But by then it was past noon.
"Do they come back?"
"What? What did you say?" asked Vonderjan.
"Your servants. You said, they'd made off before. Presumably they returned."
"Yes. Perhaps."
Birds called raucously (but wordlessly) in the forest, and then grew silent.
"There was something inside that piano," said Vonderjan, "a curiosity. I should
have seen to it last night, when I found it."
"What—what was it?"
"A body. Oh, don't blanch. Here, drink this. Some freakish thing. A monkey,
I'd say. I don't know how it got there, but they'll have been frightened by it."
"But it smelled so sweet. Like roses—"
"Yes, it smelled of flowers. That's a funny thing. Sometimes the dead do smell
like that. Just before the smell changes."
"I never heard of that."
"No. It surprised me years ago, when I encountered it myself."
Something fell through the sky—an hour. And now it was sunset.
Nanetta had put on an apron and cooked food in the kitchen. Antoinette had
not done anything to assist her, although, in her childhood, she had been taught
how to make soups and bake bread, out of a sort of bourgeois pettiness.
In fact, Antoinelle had not even properly dressed herself. Tonight she came to
the meal, which the black woman had meticulously set out, in a dressing robe, tied
about her waist by a brightly coloured scarf. The neckline drooped, showing off
her long neck and the tops of her round, young breasts, and the flimsy improper
thing she wore beneath. Her hair was also undressed, loose, gleaming and rushing
about her with a water-wet sheen.
Stronn, too, came in tonight, to join them, sitting far down the table, and with a
gun across his lap.
"What's that for?" Vonderjan asked him.
"The blacks are saying there's some beast about on the Island. It fell off a boat
and swam ashore."
"You believe them?"
"It's possible, mijnheer, isn't it. I knew of a dog that was thrown from a ship at
Port-au-Roi, and reached Venice."
"Did you, indeed."
Vonderjan looked smart, as always. The pallid topaz shone in his ring, his shirt
was laundered and starched.
The main dish they had consisted of fish, with a kind of ragout, with pieces of
vegetable, and rice.
Nanetta had lit the candles, or some of them. Some repeatedly went out.
Vonderjan remarked this was due to something in the atmosphere. The air had a
thick, heavy saltiness, and for once there was no rumbling of thunder, and
constellations showed, massed above the heights, once the light had gone, each
star framed in a peculiar greenish circle.
After Vonderjan's exchange with the man, Stronn, none of them spoke.
Without the storm, there seemed no sound at all, except that now and then,
Jeanjacques heard thin little rills of musical notes.
At last he said, "What is that I can hear?"
Vonderjan was smoking one of his cigars. "What?"
It came again. Was it only in the clerk's head? He did not think so, for the
black girl could plainly hear it, too. And oddly, when Vonderjan did not say
anything else, it was she who said to Jeanjacques, "They hang things on the
trees—to honour gods—wind gods, the gods of darkness."
Jeanjacques said, "But it sounds like a piano."
No one answered. Another candle sighed and died.
And then Antoinelle— laughed.
It was a horrible, terrible laugh. Rilling and tinkling like the bells hung on the
trees of the Island, or like the high notes of any piano. She did it for no apparent
reason, and did not refer to it once she had finished. She should have done, she
should have begged their pardon, as if she had belched raucously.
Vonderjan got up. He went to the doors and opened them on the terrace and
the night.
Where the piano had rested itself against the wall, there was nothing, only
shadow and the disarrangement of the vine, all its flower-cups broken and shed.
"Do you want
some air, Anna?"
Antoinelle rose. She was demure now. She crossed to Vonderjan, and they
moved out onto the terrace. But their walking together was unlike that compulsive,
gliding inevitablility of the earlier time. And, once out in the darkness, they only
walked, loitering up and down.
She is mad, Jeanjacques thought. This was what he had seen in her face. That
she was insane, unhinged and dangerous, her loveliness like vitriol thrown into the
eyes of anyone who looked at her.
Stronn poured himself a brandy. He did not seem unnerved, or particularly en
garde, despite the gun he had lugged in.
But Nanetta stood up. Unhooking the ruby eardrops from her earlobes, she
placed them beside her plate. As she went across the salon to the inner door,
Jeanjacques noted her feet, which had been shod in city shoes, were now bare.
They looked incongruous, those dark velvet paws with their nails of tawny coral,
extending long and narrow from under her light gown; they looked lawless, in a
way nothing of the rest of her did.
When she had gone out, Jeanjacques said to Stronn, "Why is she barefoot?"
"Savages."
Old rage slapped the inside of the clerk's mind, like his mother's hand. Though
miles off, he must react. "Oh," he said sullenly, "barbaric, do you mean? You
think them barbarians, though they've been freed."
Stronn said, "Unchained is what I mean. Wild like the forest. That's what it
means, that word, savage—forest."
Stronn reached across the table and helped himself from Vonderjan's box of
cigars.
On the terrace, the husband and wife walked up and down. The doors stayed
wide open.
Trees rustled below, and were still.
Jeanjacques, too, got up and followed the black woman out, and beyond the
room he found her, still in the passage. She was standing on her bare feet,
listening, with the silver rings in her eyes.
"What can you hear?"
"You hear it, too."
"Why are your feet bare?"
"So I can go back. So I can run away."
Jeanjacques seized her wrist and they stood staring at each other in a mutual
fear, of which each one made up some tiny element, but which otherwise
surrounded them.
"What—" he said.
"Her pillow's red with blood," said Nanetta. "Did you see the hole in her
neck?"
"No."
"No. It closes up like a flower—a flower that eats flies. But she bled. And from
her other place. White bed was red bed with her blood."
He felt sick, but he kept hold of the wand of her wrist.
"There is something."
"You know it, too."
Across the end of the passageway, then, where there was no light, something
heavy and rapid, and yet slow, passed by. It was all darkness, but a fleer of pallor
slid across its teeth. And the head of it one moment turned, and, without eyes, as
it had before, it gazed at them.
The black girl sagged against the wall, and Jeanjacques leaned against and into
her. Both panted harshly. They might have been copulating, as Vonderjan had with
his wife.
Then the passage was free. They felt the passage draw in a breath.
"Was in my room," the girl muttered, "was in my room that is too small
anything so big get through the door. I wake, I see it there."
"But it left you alone."
"It not want me. Want her."
"The white bitch."
"Want her, have her. Eat her alive. Run to the forest," said Nanetta, in the
patois, but now he understood her, "run to the forest." But neither of them moved.
"No, no, please, Gregers. Don't be angry."
The voice is not from the past. Not Uteka's. It comes from a future now
become the present.
"You said you have your courses. When did that prevent you before? I've told
you, I don't mind it."
"No. Not this time."
He lets her go. Lets go of her.
She did not seem anxious, asking him not to be angry. He is not angry.
Rebuffed, Vonderjan is, to his own amazement, almost relieved.
"Draw the curtains round your bed, Anna. And shut your window."
"Yes, Gregers."
He looks, and sees her for the first time tonight, how she is dressed, or not
dressed.
"Why did you come down like that?"
"I was hot… does it matter?"
"A whore in the brothel would put on something like that." The crudeness of
his language startles him. (Justus?) He checks. "I'm sorry, Anna. You meant
nothing. But don't dress like that in front of the others."
"Nanetta, do you mean?"
"I mean, of course, Stronn. And the Frenchman."
Her neck, drooping, is the neck of a lily drenched by rain. He cannot see the
mark of the bite.
"I've displeased you."
Antoinelle can remember her subservient mother (the mother who later threw
her out to her aunt's house) fawning in this way on her father. (Who also threw her
out.)
But Vonderjan seems uninterested now. He stands looking instead down the
corridor.
Then he takes a step. Then he halts and says, "Go along to your room, Anna.
Shut the door."
"Yes, Gregers."
In all their time together, they have never spoken in this way, in such platitudes,
ciphers. Those things used freely by others.
He thinks he has seen something at the turn of the corridor. But when he goes
to that junction, nothing is there. And then he thinks, of course, what could be
there?
By then her door is shut.
Alone, he walks to his own rooms, and goes in.
The Island is alive tonight. Full of stirrings and displacements.
He takes up a bottle of Hollands, and pours a triple measure.
Beyond the window, the green-ringed eyes of the stars stare down at
Bleumaneer, as if afraid.
When she was a child, a little girl, Antoinette had sometimes longed to go to
bed, in order to be alone with her fantasies, which (then) were perhaps
"ingenuous." Or perhaps not.
She had lain curled up, pretending to sleep, imagining that she had found a
fairy creature in the garden of her parents' house.
The fairy was always in some difficulty, and she must rescue it—perhaps from
drowning in the birdbath, where sparrows had attacked it. Bearing it indoors, she
would care for it, washing it in a teacup, powdering it lightly with scented dust
stolen from her mother's box, dressing it in bits of lace, tied at the waist with
strands of brightly coloured embroidery silk. Since it was seen naked in the
teacup, it revealed it was neither male nor female, lacking both breasts and penis
(she did not grossly investigate it further), although otherwise it appeared a fullgrown specimen of its kind. But then, at that time, Antoinelle had never seen either
the genital apparatus of a man or the mammalia of an adult woman.
The fairy, kept in secret, was dependent totally upon Antoinelle. She would
feed it on crumbs of cake and fruit. It drank from her chocolate in the morning. It
would sleep on her pillow. She caressed it, with always a mounting sense of
urgency, not knowing where the caresses could lead—and indeed they never led
to anything. Its wings sh
e did not touch. (She had been told, the wings of moths
and butterflies were fragile.)
Beyond Antoinelle's life, all Europe had been at war with itself. Invasion, battle,
death, these swept by the carefully closed doors of her parents' house, and by
Antoinelle entirely. Through a combination of conspiracy and luck, she learned
nothing of it, but no doubt those who protected her so assiduously reinforced the
walls of Antoinelle's self-involvement. Such lids were shut down on her, what else
was she to do but make music with herself— play with herself…
Sometimes in her fantasies, Antoinelle and the fairy quarrelled. Afterwards they
would be reconciled, and the fairy would hover, kissing Antoinelle on the lips.
Sometimes the fairy got inside her nightdress, tickling her all over until she thought
she would die. Sometimes she tickled the fairy in turn with a goose feather,
reducing it to spasms identifiable (probably) only as hysteria.
It never flew away.
Yet, as her own body ripened and formed, Antoinelle began to lose interest in
the fairy. Instead, she had strange waking dreams of a flesh-and-blood soldier she
had once glimpsed under the window, who, in her picturings, had to save her—
not from any of the wild armies then at large—but from an escaped bear… and
later came the prototypes of Justus, who kissed her until she swooned.
Now Antoinelle had gone back to her clandestine youth. Alone in the room, its
door shut, she blew out the lamp. She threw wide her window. Standing in the
darkness, she pulled off her garments and tossed them down.
The heat of the night was like damp velvet. The tips of her breasts rose like
tight buds that wished to open.
Her husband was old. She was young. She felt her youngness, and
remembered her childhood with an inappropriate nostalgia.
Vonderjan had thought something might get in at the window. She sensed this
might be true.
Antoinelle imagined that something climbed slowly up the creeper.
She began to tremble, and went and lay down on her bed.
She lay on her back, her hands lying lightly over her breasts, her legs a little
apart.
Perhaps after all Vonderjan might ignore her denials and come in. She would let
him. Yes, after all she had stopped menstruating. She would not mind his being
here. He liked so much to do things to her, to render her helpless, gasping and