Sometimes I wondered — though I could never quite tell — whether he really believed what he said. Because whatever he happened to be saying, I felt the opposite was also true. And when he looked into my eyes, it was as if it were not me he was speaking to. For example, once — this was a long time ago and I haven’t thought of it since, but it suddenly seems clear now — I was sitting in his room between two air raids with my back to the writing desk. I didn’t think he was paying me any attention, because he was reading a dictionary at the time. I took my compact out of my handbag and started powdering my nose. Suddenly I heard him say, “Best be careful!”
I was startled and stared at him, openmouthed. He rose from the table and stood in front of me, his arms folded.
“What should I be careful of?”
He looked at me with his head to one side and gave a soft whistle.
“Best be careful, because you’re beautiful!” he said in an accusing tone. But he spoke with concern, apparently seriously.
I laughed. “What should I be careful of? Russkies?”
He shrugged.
“Them? They just want to give you a hug. Then they’ll be off. But there will come others … people who’ll want to strip the very flesh off your face. Because you’re beautiful.”
He peered at me shortsightedly. He pushed his glasses up to the top of his nose. It was as if he had just noticed I wasn’t plain, that I had a pretty face; as if he had never really looked at me the way people should look at a woman. So, finally, he was looking at me. But it was appraisingly, the way a hunter looks at a well-bred dog.
“Strip the flesh off me?” I laughed again, but my throat was dry. “Who? Sex maniacs?”
He spoke sternly, like a priest preaching.
“Tomorrow, everyone who is beautiful will come under suspicion. As will those with talent and those with character.” His voice was hoarse. “Don’t you understand? To be called beautiful will be an insult; talent will be called a provocation, and character an outrage. Because it’s their turn now, and they will appear everywhere, from everywhere, emerging in their hundreds of millions and more. Everywhere. The ugly ones, the talentless, those without any character. And they’ll throw vitriol in the face of beauty. They will tar and slander talent. They will stab through the heart anyone with character. They’re here already … And there’ll be more of them. Be careful!”
He sat back down at his desk and covered his face with both hands. He didn’t say anything for a time. Then, perfectly charmingly, without any transition from one mood to another, he asked if he should put some coffee on.
That’s what he was like.
But that’s not all. He was aging, but sometimes it seemed as if, behind his hand, he was laughing vengefully at the process of aging. There are men, you know, who think old age is the time for revenge. Women at that age go mad, take hormones, put on more makeup, or take young lovers … But men when they age often go about smiling. And it is precisely this smiling kind of older man that is most dangerous as far as women are concerned: they are like a conquering army. At this stage of the great, boring duel between men and women — of which it is impossible to get bored — it is men who are the stronger, because they are no longer driven to fury by desire. They are no longer ruled by the body: they are in charge. And women can scent this the way a feral creature can scent a hunter. We can only rule over you men as long as we can hurt you. While we can carefully feed men with a few tidbits, a little give-and-take of power, then immediately deny them the merest taste of it and watch them shouting and screaming, writing letters, and uttering dire threats, we can relax, because we know the power is still ours. But when men are old it is they who have the power. Not for long, it’s true. Being old is not the same as being ancient. Because the next stage is approaching, the time of dotage, when men become children and they need women again.
Go on, laugh. I’m only chattering on, being amusing, because the sky is almost light. See, you are so beautiful when you smile proudly, like that.
This man was sly and vengeful in his aging. Occasionally he’d remember he was getting old, and the thought would cheer him up, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses, and he’d look at me with delight and satisfaction. He was practically rubbing his hands together, happy because there I was in his room and he was aging and I could no longer hurt him. I would cheerfully have hit him then, torn the glasses from his nose, thrown them on the floor, and stamped on them. Why? Just so I should hear him cry out. So he would shake me by the arm or hit me, or … Well, yes. But there was nothing I could do, because he was aging. And I was afraid of him.
He was the only man I was ever afraid of. I had always believed I understood men. I thought they were eight parts vanity and two of something else. Don’t grunt like that; I’m not talking about you — you are an exception. But I thought I knew them, knew how to talk their language. Because nine out of ten men thought that if I looked at them from under my brow as if looking up to them, I must be admiring their beauty or intelligence! I could lisp and simper with them, play pussycat, admiring their terrifying intellect, which I, a poor little nobody of a girl, an ignorant, innocent shrinking violet, couldn’t properly grasp, of course, and certainly not understand. It was enough for me to worship at their wise, masculine feet, listening spellbound to their brilliant observations, especially since they were kind enough to permit me, silly woman that I am, to tell them how brilliant, how superior, they were at work, how one of them managed to put one over on those Turkish salesmen when he palmed them off with low-quality leather rather than top grade, or how another courted the powerful so faithfully that they eventually rewarded him with a Nobel Prize or a knighthood. That was the kind of thing they used to brag about. As I said, you are an exception. You don’t speak, you just keep drumming. And when you don’t speak, I know for certain that there is nothing you are trying to keep silent about. It’s marvelous.
But the others are not like you, darling. The others are vain, vain in bed, in restaurants, while they are just walking along or putting on their morning coats to flatter the latest celebrity, or loudly summoning the waiter in a coffee house … everything about them declares vanity, as if vanity were the one true incurable human disease. Eight parts vanity, I said? Maybe nine. I was reading in the Sunday supplement of one of the papers that our planet is mostly water and that only a little of it is dry land. That’s how it is with men; they’re nothing but vanity supported by a few fixed ideas.
This one was vain in a different way. He was proud of having killed everything in him that might have been a product of vanity. He treated his body as if it were an employee. He ate little; his manners moderate and disciplined. When he drank wine, he shut himself away in his room as if he wanted to be alone with some perverse figure who suffered from an evil obsession. He didn’t care whether I was in the apartment at all when he was drinking. He’d set me up with a bottle of French brandy, a few nice nibbles on a tray, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes, then retire to his room to drink. It was as if he didn’t think highly enough of women to let one watch him drinking.
He drank rare wines and went about it seriously. He chose a bottle from his collection the way a pasha might choose one or another odalisque from his harem to spend the night with. When he filled his last glass, he would loudly declare, “To Hungary!” I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t laughing when he raised his glass. He wasn’t clowning. The last glass was always drained in honor of the country.