“Just think of her, little Myra from Kishinev, who’d been nothing much to write home about in her prime and was now slowly coming apart at the seams — mustn’t she have known it was hopeless to wish to appear desirable and elegant in the eyes of the prince charming who had descended to her world? No, her love is too serene, too humble in its pride. It never occurs to her to compare herself to anything connected with him; she no longer thinks of herself at all — solely of him; she has identified herself with him totally. The instinct of her love shows her how to make an incense of adoration from the ghost of his great past; she builds it into a myth and wafts it around him like a golden aura. For his part, he’d have probably thrown all the claptrap out long ago, the now-tawdry brocades, gold-thread embroideries and bibelots, the frayed, smashed, worn-out fragments of former luxuries, the photos of persons reported missing and never found again, the letters and invitations, birth and baptism announcements of people long since dead, superfluous documents, worthless deeds of holding — it’s she who dotes on them like an archaeologist sifting through the dust of a pharaoh’s tomb; she documents each photograph according to his identification of the people in them and specifies their relationship to him—‘Aimee-Doudou, a cousin of his nephew Dschoudshouoglou-Pasha’—arranges them in chronological order, divides them into annual bundles, wraps them in silk tissue and ties them with silver thread; goes on and does the same with the invitation cards, the stock certificates of Nakhichevanian mining companies that collapsed twenty years ago. She gathers all the tiny splinters of a shattered rose-quartz hookah mouthpiece and beds them on cotton wool in an old cigar box, places one velvet-lined but empty jewel case on top of the other to make a tidy pile ….
“But all that may well have been due to some retarded, infantile romanticism of hers; turning a faded world into her dream world. No, I tell you, it’s something else. She’s building her myth, and she doesn’t want it for herself. Far more convincing is the way she made a cult of his Armenian bigotry, the evidence of her studies, her notes on Moses of Khorene and Gregory the Enlightener, the devout little pictures and bookmarkers, the umpteen crosses and rosaries all over the place. And there between the Bibles and Lives of the Saints you find hardcore pornographic literature and ooh-la-la pictures from Paris, beside a heap of rosaries in his night table we hit on an arsenal of connoisseur condoms, with roosters’ combs on the spunk bags, or harlequin heads with baubled jesters’ collars. He must have been a dirty old man, this noble camel driver, and there’s not a shadow of doubt that she kept her end up in his respect — on top of all the other specters in the house, the image of a lusty devotion to sex bobs up everywhere, culminating in the beckoning presence of the great, musty, freshly made bed. And there we stand beside it, Miss Alvaro and I, coolly sorting the wheat from the chaff amid death’s odors of decay ….”
Olschansky seemed to have stopped breathing. “Jesus Christ!” he suddenly hollered, “that’s it! I told you you should write, and you stupidly asked me what. This is it. Exactly as you just told it, word for word! It’s the erotic situation par excellence! It must make the blood rush to your heads, this walk through the no-man’s-land between the realities; you must both be literally itching for each other in that incubator of a tomb. Just think of the moment when you can’t stand the suspense any longer, when you fall on each other like cannibals—”
“I think of very little else,” I admitted.
“She too, of course ….”
“Very likely. Most probably. She gives no sign, of course…. It would have to happen spontaneously, if it’s going to happen at all. Any attempt to force it would ruin everything.”
Olschansky grinned. “Still a lot to do?” he asked.
“Hardly anything. We’ll be finished tomorrow; the dealer she’s decided on is coming the day after. He’s taking the things she’s chosen for herself into storage as well.”
“So happy hunting tomorrow, then,” Olschansky said.
I lay awake for hours that night. To begin with, I had a guilty conscience for having betrayed Miss Alvaro’s secret. But, then, what was there for her to be so secretive about, after all? At worst our cloak-and-dagger behavior. Still, I felt I had sullied something that had been pure and should have stayed that way; I was ashamed not so much on her account as on that of her Armenian uncle as I had come to imagine him, and my sense of guilt grew to the extent that I superstitiously began to believe he would reach back and punish me. On top of which I felt I’d perhaps laid it on a bit thick; perhaps the suspense I’d described existed only in my imagination. If Olschansky was so enthusiastic about its literary merits, it probably meant that the reality had already undergone a kind of poetic transfiguration and become pure fiction, all due of course to that powerful imagination of mine. The thought that I could so easily fall for my own hokum made me squirm with discomfort; I pictured myself leering lewdly at her at the supposed right moment and her jumping like a startled rabbit, then withering me with a look of total disgust. My embarrassment would be a fitting punishment for my indiscretion.
I realized too that my feelings for Miss Alvaro had indeed undergone some change, and I analyzed them. I was not in love with her, far from it, but I certainly did want her — especially now, after having described the lurid sparks we threw off — but probably not so much her as a person as the role she played in my little melodrama; any other actress would have done as well, just as any understudy could have stepped in for me. One thing was clear, however: the petite Christian Jewess engendered a mixture of respect and fondness I’d never before experienced with anyone of my own age, only with wise, benign older people. Iolanthe had been right: she was a lady, by no means the simple prim schoolteacher Olschansky saw her as. Her authority stemmed from her noblesse. I resolved to tell him as much: “You once told me about Queen Maria’s dignity,” I would say. “Try to regard Miss Alvaro as having similar qualities.”
This resolution made it easier for me to go with her to the apartment on the final day. Even so, I went reluctantly, as I was convinced that whatever might happen between us was bound to be a disappointment; the tension surely wouldn’t build, let alone erupt, to the irrevocable moment of truth, the cannibals’ feast; if I hadn’t just imagined it and she was really awaiting the onslaught as eagerly as I, we still would have invested too much promise in the fantasy, and the reality could never match it in strength.