“The best way to go about it will be to do as we did with the ring,” I suggested. “You choose the things you want to keep, then we’ll invite three antique dealers to come and make estimates, first separately, then free for all, and may the best man win.”
“I hope that one day I shall have the opportunity to show my gratitude,” Miss Alvaro replied. “There’s just one thing—” She hesitated. “No, I’m sure it’s not necessary to remind you again not to mention this business at the boarding house.”
I managed not to for about a week. Then Olschansky confronted me: “You’re fraternizing with the Alvaro filly. Don’t bother to deny it; my information is irrefutable. You meet her in town; you’ve been observed several times. Why should you deny it? She’s not that ugly, no cause for shame. Or do you want to shut me out? That’s not very nice between friends.”
I was obliged to tell him the truth, if only to avoid compromising Miss Alvaro, although I knew immediately that this was but a welcome excuse: I was only too glad for the chance to talk about it.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like,” I said. “We’re as complete strangers now as we ever were; apart from what she tells me in connection with her dead relatives, I know nothing about her whatsoever. And she nothing of me, since I’ve had no call to tell her anything. We still act with the same polite formality as we did on the day she first spoke to me, still keep our distance, partly on purpose and partly because we no longer have any choice. Just think of it: never a personal word, no confidences, and of course, God forbid, no intimacies. It would never occur to either of us to ask the other where or how we were going to spend the evening when we part at the door; our private lives could take place in two different worlds. In reality we simply take separate routes and come straight back here to be under the same roof, sit at the same table twice a day, and watch carefully that no one gets a hint of our relationship, the secret we share — like partners in crime. Then, when we meet at the apartment the next day, we again negate our other life at Löwinger’s, never mention it. As a result, instead of becoming easier with each other, the tension builds. The sense of intimacy I feel with her — and she with me, I’m sure of it — grows stronger by the day, our hearts are continually in our mouths, so to speak, and all generated by a purely vicarious experience, by the exploration of two other, dead people’s lives. What we find there grows into a monstrous secret between us.
“I say ‘monstrous’ because no one should be allowed to delve into another’s life in the way we’re doing, into the remotest nooks and crannies of intimacy. Each one of us has something we prefer to keep hidden, from ourselves just as much as from others; we shut it away and pretend it’s not there. But here we are, Miss Alvaro and I, digging out every last morsel and examining it minutely. We know the lives of these two superb, consummate lovers to the last detail, down to their underwear and toilet articles, their hairbrushes, their soap and eaux de cologne, the racy magazines and jam recipes they read as they reclined on the sofa digesting a good dinner, the dentures they popped into a tumbler beside the bed when they went into their lovemaking routine, less and less passionately over the years, possibly, after decades of experience and experiment, but still with heavenly appeasement; the suppositories they needed to ease the passage of their sumptuous fare, probably giggling and thrusting them up each other’s flabby backsides — each day we unearth some new dimension that again adds a new dimension to the intimacy between us. We sold their whole wardrobe, complete with everything from his bedroom slippers to his tails and white ties, from her corsets to a moth-eaten mink stole — his Christmas present in 1927—to a secondhand dealer, so that little chapter’s over and done with, thank God. Sorting out their clothes gave us an indelible impression of their physiques. We came to know their collar and hip sizes, the shapes of their feet, their body odors, the peculiarities of the stains their sweat left, the irksome sphincter and bladder weaknesses of the people who wore these shirts and pants, shoes and jackets, dresses, overcoats, dressing gowns and nighties, and pressed the contours of their bodies into them ….
“They’re ghosts, and because they’re ghosts, they take possession of us, enter us like astral bodies. We politely shake hands and take leave of each other every evening, Miss Alvaro and I, but even if the one lies in bed in room number eight and the other in room number twelve at Löwinger’s Rooming House, we are in fact lying together in that big double bed near the Biserică Albă, holding each other, making love, taking a sip of camomile tea, then embracing again, lulling ourselves to sleep. We no longer know which is the real existence: that of ardently united lovers, acting as if they are superficial acquaintances who happen to live in the same rooming house; or that of people who are briefly drawn together by chance and who pretend not to realize they are lovers for life. And the next day we crawl a little deeper into the souls of our phantom matchmakers ….
“At the moment we’re going through all the drawers in the living room. Piles of documents, letters, diplomas, invitations to all manner of festivities, stacks of photos, all dating from Uncle’s glorious Constantinople days, of course, before he met the little Jewish girl from Bessarabia. I have a thorough knowledge of the financial status of this Armenian from the Golden Horn, right down to the last sou, both before and after the momentous day of Mussadegh. He must have been immensely rich, but the way he ran his business affairs is of a naïveté that would make a bookkeeper weep. Even after he had to emigrate, he should have been in a position to live a life of considerable comfort, but he allowed crooked little lawyers to take him for a ride. The deeper one goes into his papers, the more his innocence touches one’s heart, the more one is warmed by his open-handed generosity and his love for the woman who meant more to him than anything he’d lost or still might lose. And all the more intensely, almost violently, does the woman herself take possession of us with her total, heartrending, never-despairing humanity ….
“I hope you know me well enough by now to believe me when I say that I’m not normally given to sentimentality. Normally the story of a Jewish woman from the sticks who lives in dread of losing the man who raised her to a certain affluence and security, who gave her a vestige of elegance and social prestige — her efforts to make herself indispensable with her sickly-sweet attentivenesses, his slippers toasting by the fireside, the goose crackling in the oven — wouldn’t touch me in the least, nor Miss Alvaro, I think. But the passion this woman invested in her sole raison d’être is of such force that one can’t help being bowled over by it; she haunts us with her dedication to the goal of becoming everything for her husband, to replace what he’d lost and possibly still mourned. All these impressions and feelings are transmitted to us by ghosts; she’s no longer alive, he’s no longer alive, they’re both dead, and still their love lives on; you can read it in every trace: her recipes, with footnotes underlined in red—‘Aram adores this!’ ‘Special favorite of Aram’s!’ Or in the lists of presents he made for birthdays and Christmases to come, with shaky handwritten notes in the margin toting up his bank balance or the yield of his paltry shares. It’s so powerful, it so transcends death, that we feel their presence physically every time we open a drawer.
“What must the woman have felt when she went through his papers or sorted his photographs? What did she think when she saw this evidence of a world that must have seemed like fairyland? Wouldn’t you think she’d despair of ever filling the gap when she looked at the pictures of his paradise lost, the thousand and one nights’ extravaganza, the complacent indulgence of immeasurable wealth? Tea parties at exquisitely timbered villas on the Bosporus, the guests gliding directly into the reception rooms in their boats; next to the visiting Sultan of Morocco we see Her Majesty the Queen’s ambassador half hidden by the duchess of Lusignan’s enormous picture hat, the duchess and the hostess vaguely related by marriage since the days of the Rubenides’ regency over Cyprus; another photo shows the same illustrious party at a sumptuous picnic in Anatolia — the gentlemen in Shantung suits and ladies in white linen draped between chunks of the ruined pillars of Ephesus, lying on piles of rugs and heaps of cushions; some have come on horseback, a few of the younger women already emancipated, sitting boldly astride their mounts; to one side a spindle-wheeled Daimler, caked with dust, its demon driver and his heavily veiled passenger posing playfully beside a camel bearing the whole Kurd family, father, mother, four children, grandmother with a baby goat and two chickens on her lap; yet another view of the same slim gentlemen in gray walking dress, with sloe eyes and tapering noses, mustaches weighing heavily on their drooping mouths, tarbooshes perched pertly on their delicate heads; here again the ladies, in diaphanous Neo-Renaissance gowns, diamonds highlighting their hair, shimmering from their fingers, stout ropes of pearls trussed around their breasts ….