At that moment there was a knock at the door. In came Xheladin, Marie’s fiancé. His demeanor, unlike everyone else’s, was so placid that Aleks glanced at him sternly as if to say, “Are you living on the moon? Haven’t you heard about the qorrfirman yet?”
Very soon, even before the table had been set, they were all to learn the reason for Xheladin’s serenity, or rather, his contained satisfaction. (He wasn’t in a state of elation, of course, but set against their own quaking fear his quiet ease made him appear almost joyous.) Very soon they all heard what lay behind the future son-in-law’s state of mind. Not only was he apprised of the decree, he knew rather more about it than any of them, for the simple reason that he had been summoned by his bosses two days before, and had been told he had been appointed a member of the central commission entrusted with the implementation of the qorrfirman.
Xheladin’s words precipitated a sudden change in the domestic atmosphere. There was a sense of relief, accompanied by admiration for a son-in-law who had been given such a demanding job. But that wasn’t the main thing. The overriding emotion came from thinking — even if only vaguely for the time being — that as they now had their own man inside the citadel, at the heart of the machine, in the very lair of evil, then said evil would automatically be directed elsewhere.
Outright admiration could be read not only in the eyes of Marie but in those of her mother, her sister-in-law, and even her brother, who up till then had stayed aloof, heaven knows why, from his sister’s fiancé.
Glad to have brought about a new mood, Xheladin relaxed and warmed up. An irresistible wave of good humor swept over the dinner table. The distant roll of the crier’s drum now seemed to come from another planet.
Aleks’s face was the only one that clouded over from time to time, as if darkened by a passing shadow. He stared at Xheladin as if he were trying to make out what was going on in the depths of his being, under his skin, down in the marrow of his bones. And it was just when he had given him a stare of that kind that he put his hand on the younger man’s arm and said: “I hope that when you’re there you’ll manage to keep clean. .”
“What was that?” Xheladin said, imperceptibly drawing his hand away. “What did you mean to say?”
His face had suddenly turned icy and alert.
“Nothing, nothing,” Aleks said with a smile, patting the young man on the shoulder. “Nothing, my boy. Maybe well talk about it again some other time.”
Aleks was visibly sorry to have said what he had said, and for the remainder of the meal you could see he was trying to make up for his blunder. Merriness returned, and maybe it was precisely because people were not paying attention amid the good cheer that Marie and her fiancé, instead of going out on the verandah, where they were granted the right of whispering sweet nothings in private, quietly went up the stairs leading to the girl’s bedroom.
Had the witnesses really not noticed, or did they only pretend not to have seen? Who knows? Maybe the mother and the sister-in-law really didn’t see it, since they were busy clearing the table. The brother, who was barely able to stand, had already gone up to his bedroom. As for the father. . he had probably not seen them doing it, unless — and this was the most plausible hypothesis, after those days of anxiety, and especially because he did not want to get snapped at after the recent incident at the dinner table — unless he had turned a blind eye and pretended not to see them. In any case, weren’t they going to be husband and wife in six weeks’ time?
The town crier’s drum kept on rolling in the distance, giving as it were a new note to all life’s ups and downs. . Against this background noise, Marie put up no resistance to her fiancé’s kisses, then she let him undress her and take possession of her as lord and master of the palpitating center of her being. It all happened in complete silence, when in a brief instant pain and searing pleasure fought for ascendancy, each yielding to the other in turn. But unlike what her sister-in-law had told her, she didn’t find the pain unbearable. Whereas the pleasure seemed to her without bounds.
A week later, when it all happened again (they had agreed he would come in without attracting attention, taking advantage of the fact that her parents had to go to a funeral), there was no pain at all, and the pleasure reached an intensity beyond words.
That was how Marie had come to believe she had nothing more to learn from her sister-in-law about the secrets of married life. She waited with feverish impatience for her fiancé to come, but this last week the only two times he had been able to visit (his work for that terrible commission was taking up all his time), they had not had an opportunity to be alone. So she waited for Sunday, when he would come for lunch as was his custom now, knowing intuitively that the miracle would occur once again. She and her sister-in-law had dealt with the morning housework, but whereas the latter expected they would then sit back in a corner and chat for a while, Marie, who wanted to take refuge in her bedroom to prepare herself for impending joy, said she had some kind of a migraine and went upstairs on her own.
She walked up and down for a while, then stood to look at the street along which her fiancé would presumably come, then her eyes lighted on the chest containing her wedding trousseau. In it, among scores of pieces of clothing, bed linen, and embroidery that had been collected over the years, lay a dozen pieces of underwear made of silk as ethereal as smoke trapped in a glass. . Good heavens, why had she not thought before of giving him that surprise?
Previously, the sight of her sister-in-law’s undergarments hanging out to dry over the stove had stirred awkward feelings and made her eyes cloud over. It had happened for the first time when she discovered the elementary secrets of married life. Such flimsy, delicate lingerie — the closest witnesses to the act of love and the fiery embrace of two bodies — seemed to her to be laden with mystery. They seemed especially charged in comparison to her own cold and lifeless undergarments, all neatly folded at the bottom of the trunk, as if entombed, still waiting to be brought to life. .
She walked slowly toward the trunk, opened it, gazed at its contents, and began to go through the perfectly ordered and pristine pieces. There they lay, virginal and cold. . Yes, she was going to try on every one of these diaphanous garments, each in turn, and she would baptize them, sanctify them, impregnate them with the warmth and the smell and the stains and the juices and the groans of love.
She quickly disrobed and, flushed with excitement, began trying them on in front of the mirror. She wanted to choose the very finest for that day. The sky-blue pair? No, that other off-white one would be better. She had broad thighs, and when she made a slightly awkward movement her pudenda showed through. Marie sat on the kilim in front of the mirror with her legs slightly apart. Under the silk the lips of her vulva were half-revealed and she swallowed the saliva that raging desire brought to her mouth. Disconnected thoughts that seemed to come from outside raced through her mind. So that was the way into her body… Its porch ought to be pretty. She would decorate it with almond-flower lace, just as people decorated their thresholds with pots of flowering plants.. Had her sister-in-law not told her that she had heard that women’s sexual organs were as different from each other as their faces? Marie was sure hers was beautiful, and if it was, then why should he refrain from looking at it?
She got up; she took off one pair of panties to try on another, and then she heard a creak. She turned around in terror, but the door was well bolted, and she immediately calmed down.
She tried on most of her underwear, but came back in the end to the off-white pair. She put them on, then slipped on her dress, and then sat down on the shaggy blanket on the divan, lost in thought. Each time she moved, the silk transmitted a soft, rustling reminder of its presence.