'Guests?'
'There have to be guests at a wedding feast,' she said. 'Or don't you want to have the wedding feast here?'
'But we don't know anyone here,' he pointed out feebly.
'They don't have to be people we know. The people at that table, for instance. Maybe they'd act as guests if we invited them.'
'Okay. How many guests do you want to have at your wedding feast?'
'Five,' she answered without hesitation, as if she had made her mind up long ago. 'You're not cross, are you?'
'No, why should I be cross?'
'I bet you had a wedding feast too,' she said. 'Didn't you?'
'I don't remember any more.'
'You don't remember?'
'It was sixteen years ago,' he calculated. 'I was younger than you are now.'
He called the waiter and tried to explain to him what he wanted, while looking at the big table. Three of the men were ordinary country bumpkins. Their tanned, unshaven faces, now ruddy from drink, were the sort he was never able to recall even minutes after seeing them, even though he did not have a particularly bad memory for faces. The soldier was dark-haired and thin almost to the point of gauntness, — with pale cheeks. There were bluish bags under his watery eyes. He was almost too reminiscent of that guy — the one who was now actually her husband. In fact he was reminiscent of all her lovers, to judge from her stories and the crumpled photos she always carried around in her handbag.
Sitting alongside the soldier was a girl whose hair had been recently permed by the local hairdresser. She looked like a sheep that had been given eye make-up and artificial lashes.
He watched the waiter lean over the long table. Then, as if on command, the five heads turned as one towards their table. The strangers' gaze immediately settled on her face and remained there.
He felt her touch his hand.
'Darling,' she said, 'I love you for having come on this honeymoon with me. For the wedding feast we're going to have. And for inviting them all. Look, they're coming over. Don't they look funny!'
The five of them rose from the big table and the soldier fastened his belt with a click. They approached rather hesitantly, wearing the requisite festive grins of guests coming to join the wedding party at table. He noticed that one of the old gaffers had a bluish lump under his right ear (he would forget his face but he would never forget his ear) and the girl had a fine golden chain around her bare neck.
2
The stale greasiness of the cutlet and the taste of the bad wine rose in his throat. That long car journey and now this endless evening in a room which screamed of boredom. He felt totally exhausted.
The three locals — the witnesses to their fake wedding — were endeavouring to pay for the cutlet and the wine with their lives; at least their lives offered in words. The one with the lump under his ear had spent eight years in various prisons, and the other two complemented his account as if they had gone through it all with him themselves.
He tried not to listen to them. He knew the story; it was
always the same, with slight variations. They were the very things he had hoped to avoid for this evening, at least: prisons, watchtowers, floodlights, passageways through barbed-wire. To escape from escaping.
Whenever he was with her he managed to detach himself — in retrospect, at least — from his entire life and everything he had gone through, and just sink into total amnesia, not thinking about his family or his job. He would enter a different order of cause and effect, actions and words. Maybe the overwhelming completeness of his love lay in this absolute detachment from everything he had ever lived by.
She was now dancing with the soldier to the scratchy music the Italian jukebox churned out three whole minutes of for one coin. Without looking, he knew the way she was dancing. And it had gone on too long.
He realized that her dancing had only one purpose, the same purpose as all her other actions. She made love with each of her movements. She made love when she was dancing, when she was eating and when she was walking along the pavement by herself. All her movements were the same. But maybe he was mistaken; maybe it was he who was obsessed.
'Eight years of my life,' the man with the lump said. 'I'll never make up for it at my age.' Glancing at the man, it occurred to him that they could be the same age, but the other man seemed totally immersed in his past. Those eight years had been too great a void not to exert a pull, too much of a gulf. Besides, the day comes for everyone when all that remains is their past, however awful; it alone is real and alive because the future is no longer alive, and without a glimmer of hope. He still had some hope — at that moment his hope was dancing just a few steps away — and could still imagine
tomorrow without a groan of despair. But for how much longer?
For a split second he saw himself. He saw himself sitting here with weary eyes, weighed down by his whole long life, waiting. He still had something to wait for, which was why he was sitting here impatiently, waiting for the girl to finish dancing and come and sit by him.
That was where he differed from the three men sitting at his table: his life had still managed to rouse itself to a final shout before the silence that was already stealing up on him every night. It had given out a final ray before nightfall. He was in love, which was why he was sitting here playing a game, mocking himself and his love, why he was playing her game, although for her it is only a game, all that love, the long aimless journeys, those constant protestations that had the strange attraction of words spoken at the edge of the abyss. For her it was a way of filling the time between morning and evening, between dinner and bed, between the last cigarette and sex.
Anyone could fill that time for her, he knew. For her he was replaceable, utterly replaceable.
He looked at her. She noticed and smiled.
He could see that smile even when he closed his eyes, and her mouth with the broad, slightly protruding upper lip.
He hated her at this moment and longed to push her away from him, get rid of her, rid himself at last of that hope that was no hope, in fact, but instead wearing him out, prolonging the anxiety before the inevitable fall. Rid himself of it and sink into peace at last, reject her, reject life and the future now. But he knew he wouldn't do it.
Love me, he thought to himself wearily, love me still today, at least.
He noticed that the girl who could belong to the soldier was sitting bolt upright at the table, watching the solitary dancing couple. She was not really ugly, but that criminal of a hairdresser had ruined her hair and her face was devoid of any hint of self-assurance. Right now her eyes were full of tears.
He rose, called the waiter over and settled the bill.
The rustics stood up and wished both of them the best of luck, while the soldier stood facing her as when they stopped dancing, just a few paces nearer the table, and gazed at her with the fixed expression of a man with just one thing on his mind.
'Darling,' she said as they went upstairs, 'that was lovely. We had a feast.'
'I'm glad you were satisfied,' he said.
'What shall we do now?'
'We're on our honeymoon, aren't we?' he reminded her.
The beds were old-fashioned and the washbasin boasted two taps, although both of them ran cold.
She stood in front of the mirror removing her hair grips. Her long hair fell a third of the way down her back. He pictured her back naked, as he would soon see it. And with a sudden feeling of relief that the play-acting and the senseless hours of waiting were coming to an end, he went and put his arms around her. 'My beautiful girl,' he said. 'My little fish.'
She lit a cigarette. 'Do you think that soldier is sleeping with the girl?'