‘Ah, how charming you are!’ exclaimed the beard very quickly. Perhaps he was afraid that his wife might say it. Notwithstanding, he could not prevent her from smiling.
I would willingly have said to her: ‘I love you, Madame.’
She began to talk as if she were quite alone.
‘I could never live in Russia. I need the asphalt of the boulevards, a terrasse in the Bois de Boulogne, the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix.’
She fell silent as suddenly as she had begun. It was as if she had spilled a shower of fragrant glittering objects before me. It was for me to pick them up, to admire, to praise.
I looked at her for some minutes after she had stopped speaking. I remained expectant of further glories. I was really waiting for her voice. It was deep, penetrating and shrewd.
‘One can’t live anywhere as well as in Paris,’ began the secretary again. ‘I myself am a Belgian, so this is no local patriotism.’
‘You are from Paris?’ I asked the lady.
‘From Paris; we would like to visit the petroleum fields this afternoon,’ she said quickly.
‘If you have no objection, I’ll accompany you.’
‘Then I would prefer to work and not go until tomorrow morning,’ spoke the beard.
Before our appointment I ate in the vegetarian restaurant, as I was not hungry. Also, money was running out. My wages were not due for ten days. I was afraid that the lady might require a carriage — I might just be able to pay for it. But what if she asked for more? If she suddenly wanted to eat? I could hardly expect to be repaid by the secretary.
I ate without appetite. At half-past two I was standing in the scorching sunlight in front of the station.
After twenty minutes she arrived in a carriage, alone.
‘You will have to travel just with me,’ she said. ‘We have decided to leave Monsieur de V. with my husband. He wants to wander around in the town and is afraid that he won’t make himself understood.’
We sat among street-vendors, workers, half-veiled Mohammedan women, homeless boys, lame beggars, hawkers, white confectioners who sold oriental sweetmeats. I pointed out the drilling towers to her.
‘How tedious,’ she said.
We arrived at Sabuntschi.
I said: ‘There’s no point in looking at the town. It would be too tiring, it’s hot. We must wait for the next train. We’ll go back.’
We travelled back.
When we got out in Baku we were ashamed of ourselves. After some minutes we looked at each other simultaneously and laughed.
We drank soda-water in a small booth, buzzing with flies; a nauseating fly-paper hung at the window.
I became very hot though I drank water incessantly. I had nothing to say, the silence was even more oppressive than the heat. But she sat there, unaffected by the heat, the dust, the filth which surrounded us, and only occasionally repelled a fly.
‘I love you,’ I said — and, although I was already quite red from the heat, became even redder.
She nodded.
I kissed her hand. The soda-water seller regarded me with malice. We left.
I walked with her through the Asiatic old town. It was still broad daylight. I cursed it.
We wandered about for two hours. I was afraid that she would get tired or that we might encounter her husband and the secretary. We reached the sea for no special reason. We sat on the quay, I kissed her hand repeatedly.
Everyone looked at us. A few acquaintances greeted me.
Night fell quickly. We went into a small hotel; the owner, a Levantine Jew, recognized me. He thinks I am a man of influence and is probably glad to know something intimate about me. He has probably promised himself to make use of his secret sometime.
It was dark, we felt the bed, we could not see it.
‘Something’s stinging me,’ she said later.
But we did not turn on the light.
I kissed her, her finger pointed now here, now there, her skin glowed in the dark, I pursued her dancing finger with trembling lips.
She got into a carriage, she will return tomorrow morning with her husband and the secretary. She will say goodbye. They are travelling to the Crimea, and then from Odessa to Marseilles.
I am writing this two hours after having made love to her. It seems to me that I must write it down so that tomorrow I shall still know that it really happened.
Alja has just gone to bed.
I don’t love her any more. I find the quiet curiosity with which she has received me for months artful. She receives my love as a silent person submits to the tipsy or talkative …
They came next day to say goodbye to Tunda.
‘I purposely detained Monsieur de V. yesterday,’ said the lawyer. ‘I am convinced that one cannot show two persons as much as one. According to what my wife told me yesterday, you must have seen a great many interesting things.’
The lawyer really resembled a dwarf, though no longer the harmless kind standing on a green lawn but one dwelling among sinister rocks.
They made their farewells like strangers. ‘Here,’ said the lady before she left, giving Tunda a piece of paper with her address.
He did not read it till an hour had passed.
From that day on, Tunda realized that there was nothing left for him to do in Baku. The women we encounter excite our imagination rather than our hearts. We love the world they represent and the destiny they mark out for us.
What remained from the foreign woman’s visit was her remark about the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix. Tunda thought of the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix as he looked out his old papers.
It was an open order, Number 253, with a round stamp, signed by Kreidl, Colonel, made out by Sergeant Palpiter. The yellow paper, frayed in its creases, had become a sort of sacrament; it was smooth, it felt like tallow and had the slipperiness of candles. Its purport was unmistakable. It stated that First Lieutenant Franz Tunda was to proceed to Lemberg for kitting out.
Had he not been taken prisoner a day later, this official journey would have become a small furtive spree to Vienna.
The name Franz Tunda stood there so large, so strong, so meticulously recorded, that it almost emerged from the surface of the document to assume a life of its own.
Names have their own kind of vitality, as do clothes. Tunda, who had been Baranowicz for several years, saw the real Tunda emerge from the document.
Next to the open order lay Irene’s photograph. The pasteboard was crumpled, the portrait faded. It showed Irene in a dark, high-necked dress, a serious dress of the kind one puts on when being photographed for a warrior in the field. The expression was still lively, flirtatious and shrewd, an accomplished blending of natural talent and the retoucher’s art.
While Tunda was looking at the picture he was thinking of the shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix.
X
One day there appeared at the Austrian Consulate in Moscow a stranger in a black leather jacket, in frayed shoes, with a stubbly beard on a brown and craggy face, with an old fur cap which looked older than it was because outside the first warm March sun was shining. The sunlight fell through two wide windows on the brown wooden barrier behind which sat an official; it shone on coloured brochures for the spas of Salzburg and the Tyrol. The stranger spoke with a faultless official dialect, the dialect of the Austrian better class which even tolerates many High German words if they are spoken melodiously, and at a distance sounds like a kind of nasal Italian. This dialect supported and confirmed the stranger’s story better than any document would have done. And this story needed some confirmation, since it sounded improbable.