* * *
April 8, 2001 — Increasingly, though it’s Jenny and not me who has problems, I’m the one who calls Jenny, simply for the pleasure of hearing her speak. She goes to Ivan and his wife’s house every morning, when Ivan’s away, in what seems an implicit agreement between the two women. The wife lights a cigarette in front of Jenny, who, never having smoked in her life, having always looked on cigarettes with virtuous horror, can’t imagine that pleasure, and yet now she envies this gesture, and her own, her adorable way of pushing a lock of hair back along one side of her head, now strikes her as trivial, inadequate. Her parents’ fears have come true: she’s losing a part of her dignity, but not for the reasons nor in the circumstances they imagine. She’s forgotten that she’s a woman adrift, alone and abandoned, that no one anywhere feels any need for her, that she was loyal to her profession and that her profession coldly rejected her — all that, which so consumes the two old people’s thoughts, she’s forgotten, and so she’s no longer ashamed. But before Ivan’s wife she’s tormented by the sort of disdain that she feels for herself, for her physical person, her own insignificance. The woman in green humbles her, not deliberately, unaware that she’s doing it — and if she did know it and want it, Jenny would never let it happen.
* * *
April 10, 2001 — Repeatedly questioned, with no attempt on my part to conceal my burning curiosity, Jenny revealed what the two of them discuss in her daily visits. Ivan’s wife does the talking. She lights a first cigarette, silently and slowly, sits down in an armchair, crosses her legs, and, with her cigarette always about to slip from between her index and middle fingers, tells Jenny of the life Jenny would have lived had she spent it with Ivan, her first, overpowering love. Surprised, I ask:
“But what does she know about that?”
And Jenny answers that Ivan’s wife describes her own life with Ivan, which is a fairly reliable way, thinks Jenny, of showing her the life Jenny and Ivan would have had together. That’s what goes on every morning: the one speaks and the other listens, and as the one talks the other feels herself growing small, transparent, and empty, more convinced than ever of her insipidity. In parallel, her regrets about Ivan grow ever more wrenching. I ask, surprised:
“But what’s in it for her? Why should she do that?”
And Jenny answers, surprised at my surprise:
“To console me.”
I ask:
“Console you for what?”
“For the tragic mistake I made, not choosing Ivan when I still could,” answers Jenny in her hard voice, intended to repel any reaction of pity.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that Jenny comes away from these conversations not consoled but crushed by despair and self-loathing. In a murmur, she tells me:
“We’ll never be young again, never.”
I want to object, I want to shoot back: Well, I’m young. I’m only in my thirties, after all. But isn’t Jenny right? Oh yes, I tell myself, Jenny’s right, Jenny’s right. What she’s thinking of — the belief in the infinity of possibilities, the illusion that you can forever start over again, that every mark made on you lasts a little while then ends up disappearing — all that we no longer have. I ask Jenny:
“We no longer have that, but isn’t it better this way? Isn’t it a thing to be grateful for, every day?”
* * *
April 11, 2001 — Around eleven this morning, Jenny went to Ivan’s wife’s house.
The air is mild and perfumed and full of hope. Jenny’s blond-white ponytail undulates against her back. Jenny walks with her head high, and she promises herself, although the promise brings a lump to her throat, that this is her very last visit. The time has come to put an end to these lamentations, Jenny tells herself, and to this homesickness, home being the life she never had, with Ivan. That’s how she sees this: a land whose soil she trod for a few happy steps, and which she then thoughtlessly left behind, and now it’s been wiped off the map. She can never come back. That’s the form of her sorrow, of the thing weighing on her heart ever since she saw Ivan again.
The house seems to be empty. Jenny knocks, waits and waits, then goes in all the same. The kitchen and living room sit frozen in an atypical tidiness. She hesitates, sits down. She takes the wife’s pack of cigarettes from the little table. She hesitates again, then pulls one out and lights it somewhat clumsily with the lighter she knows so well, which she’s found lying on the table like a thing not so much put down as put away. She crosses her legs and smokes. She’s aware of her flushed face, her shame. She imagines her parents, eyeing her sternly, reproaching her for being a woman and smoking, for being worthless and smoking.
And then she suddenly stands up and bolts down to the basement, still holding the cigarette. Her shoes clap sharply against the cement steps. In her haste, she almost trips, almost tumbles headlong down the stairway.
She embraces Ivan’s wife’s thighs and hips. The wife is wearing green corduroy pants and a blouse of green satin. Her feet are bare, and Jenny notes their soles, gray with dust.
What’s left of the cigarette is still clasped between Jenny’s lips. She’d like to wash off those feet, already cold, rub them, implore them. Straining to hoist up the body so she can loosen the knot on the rope, she spits out her cigarette butt, then presses her face into Ivan’s wife’s bulging belly and begins to sob in horror and dismay, now and then shouting out toward the basement walls, which bounce her cry back to her in a feeble echo. The house is deserted, she can call out all she likes — who will hear her?
* * *
Two years go by with no news from Jenny, each of us keeping our distance from the other, her, ashamed of confiding in me when it’s not in her nature, me, remorseful for pushing her to tell me what she’d rather have told no one.
In a pedestrian street of a small city, one crowded and tiresomely bustling Saturday in the year 2003, I run into Jenny, who, ever the same, pushes back a few strands of hair that have come out of her bun before giving me a kiss. In our joy at seeing each other again, our cheekbones bump painfully. I have on my chest a baby Jenny’s never met, of whose very birth she knew nothing. She looks at the baby with delight, and the change makes me realize how downcast and defeated her whole manner had been just a moment before. She points toward the back of the man who was with her, now silently plodding away, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped. His head is bald, ringed with a crown of gray hairs.