Instead of extricating herself and pushing him away, she leant back and closed her eyes; her hands groped for a moment in the darkness and then strayed over his hair and his shoulders. He was overcome by a convulsive movement like that of a man sobbing.
“Come now, get up,” she finally whispered. “We can’t stay here. Come with me!”
He stood up, feeling slightly giddy. She took him by the hand and led him up the stairs. They stopped in front of her flat.
“Wait here a moment,” she said.
She took a key out of her handbag and opened the door. After a few moments she reappeared. She had a bunch of keys in her hand.
“Follow me,” she said. They ran up the next flight of stairs and, taking one of the keys from the bunch, she opened the door to an apartment. On the brass plate he read: “Dorfmeister”.
They stepped into an entrance hall. She switched the light on, locked the door and left the key in the lock. She opened the next door, they entered a room that appeared to have been unoccupied for a long time, then they went into a second room, a bedroom, in which the furniture was covered with sheets and the curtains had been taken down. The chandelier, too, was covered by a large, shroudlike sheet, through which the bulbs shone dimly after Marisabelle had pulled the switch. The air was stale and smelt of camphor.
“Where are we?”
“Some relatives of ours live here,” she said. “But they’re not here now. They’re away at the moment.”
They stood in the doorway and looked into the room, which was in semi-darkness and appeared extraordinarily large and bare. He felt for her hands and began to squeeze them. He lifted up her hands and buried his face in them.
She leant against the wall and looked at him. She opened her mouth a couple of times as if to say something.
“Why,” she finally asked, “did you do it?”
He pretended not to hear and smothered the palms of her hands with kisses.
“Why did you do it?” she repeated.
He looked up.
“Do what?” he asked.
In the dim yellow light of the shrouded chandelier her face shimmered like pale, translucent alabaster illuminated from within, and her eyes, unnaturally large, stared out from under her long, glinting eyelashes.
“What?” he asked once more. “What have I done?” And he slowly lowered his face and kissed her on the mouth.
She did not return his kiss. She waited until he had withdrawn his lips from hers, and then said, “Why did you kill that man?”
He didn’t understand at first what she said.
“What?” he asked.
“Why did you kill him?” she repeated.
“Me?” he asked. “Who?”
“Jack Mortimer.”
“Jack Mortimer?”
“Yes.”
“You believe I did it?”
“Yes.”
He straightened up.
“Are you out of your mind?” he yelled.
“Why?” she asked, and contracted her eyebrows.
“Do you think I’d have come to you if I’d actually done it, and what’s more would have told you?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You said you loved me,” she murmured. “Why wouldn’t you have come to me even if you’d actually…”
“You think I’m capable of such a thing?” he cried out.
She looked at him.
“I don’t know,” she finally mumbled, and her eyes assumed a look of uncertainty. “Or,” she continued after a moment, “would you have rather not come to me if you’d done it?”
He was silent for a moment.
“What do you think I’d have done,” she said, “if you’d come to me to say you had killed? Do you think I’d have screamed, woken up the house, reported you?”
“I wouldn’t have come at all,” he stammered.
“No?”
He was silent.
“I told you yesterday,” she said, “that you don’t really love me.”
“Why not?”
She straightened up, went into the room and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Because otherwise,” she said, and brushed her hair back, “you’d have had to come, even if you’d done it. If you loved me, you’d have had to tell me you had done it. If you were prepared to do such a thing, you should have believed I’d be prepared to listen to you.”
There was silence. They looked at each other. Then he slowly went over to her.
As he advanced, she shrank back almost imperceptibly.
He was now no longer the man who’d spoken to her on the street because he’d fallen in love with her, and who could be dismissed because it would be too awkward to exchange more than a few words just because he happened to have a lovely pair of eyes. He was no longer the driver to whom one could say, “I don’t need your car now. Please stop pestering me, especially in front of my house.” He was no longer someone one wouldn’t want to meet again because he was a nonentity from heaven knows where. He was now the one who’d be arrested the next day, and all her reserve, upbringing, status and sense of decorum crumbled into dust before the one who came to her, surrounded with the dreadful halo of crime. She had never imagined that she would actually listen to him, but now that he had come — in the middle of the night, agitated, harassed, pursued, lost — all her inhibitions vanished into thin air and she felt attracted to him.
He came close to her, drew her close and kissed her. Their lips merged. They sank back on the bed, and the darkness threw a veil over their closed eyelids, their fate, and their desperate love for each other.
10
HE WOKE AS THE GREY DAWN was creeping in through the curtainless windows. Marisabelle was still sleeping. He withdrew his left arm from under her without waking her. Then he got out of bed noiselessly. The windows looked out onto a garden. The early light revealed clumps of grey, denuded trees shrouded in mist against a background of damp tiles and dirty chimneys that appeared to protrude from a muddy sea of foam; the stark outlines of polished furniture, mirrors and fittings only emphasized the general gloom of the interior. Stretched out on the bed lay Marisabelle, her pale, mildly resplendent face framed by a mass of dishevelled hair.
It must have been about six o’clock.
He carefully groped around for his things and gathered them up. Then he tried to look Marisabelle in the face. In her sleep she had drawn her eyebrows together as if she were not sleeping at all, but reflecting on something anxiously, though for the rest her face showed that she was indeed asleep. Like all people in the land of Nod she looked remote and indifferent, as if she were dreaming of something intangible and short-lived that she would not recollect on waking.
He wanted to kiss her on the mouth, but decided not to, in case he woke her. Anyway, what would he have said to her if she woke? That the morning had broken, and all was at an end? Everyday thousands of people get up and say, “Adieu, that’s the end.” There’s no need for it. It’s a complete platitude.
He bent over and brought his face close to hers until he could feel her breath. He waited a little, quite motionless. That was their last kiss. Then he left.
He closed the door silently behind him and crossed the entrance hall; the keys were still in the door to the apartment. He opened it, stepped out, and closed the door behind him.
The light was on in the staircase. He had walked down one flight when it suddenly went out. The pale dawn was already trickling in.
Down in the entrance hall the porter had just unlocked the front door, and it was he who had switched off the light. As Sponer approached, the man looked at him in amazement that he was still in the house. Sponer walked past, but suddenly turned round and said, “Is something the matter? Maybe you think I’ve stolen something? Why don’t you report me to the police? Go on, report me. We’ll go together. But just imagine what they’d say if you were to report me simply for spending the night here.” Then his thoughts wandered back to Marisabelle again. He swung around and walked away. In the meantime he had resolved not to go to a police station, give himself up and expose himself to all the bureaucracy. Instead he decided he would return to the Bristol, go up to Mortimer’s room, call the police and await his arrest with a certain degree of dignity. He walked down Alleegasse and came to the municipal gardens where he had spoken to Marisabelle, disturbing, as he approached, a flock of crows which rose cawing from the lawn. Noisy, fast city traffic was at its peak. All the slow-moving carts from the country were gone.