“That’s my husband Ivan,” says Jenny, with a faint grimace.
And then a sadness, a bitterness takes shape between us.
Once she’s divorced Ivan, once she has, for the second time, moved back in with her parents, who, anesthetized by so many failures, have finally sunk into a sort of merciful torpor, Jenny summons herself up from my memory and rather grandly invites me to come see them. I find her irritable with the old couple, haughty and curt, as if for some reason they owed her. Gone is the sweetness in her features, gone her appealing look of dismay, replaced by a mask of sarcasm and scorn. The parents serve us the meal they’ve prepared, Jenny finds fault and complains, and in the end I leave the table to join the two old people in the kitchen, where they’re eating their dinner. I sit down beside them to finish my plate. They smile beatifically, unable to understand that they’re being mistreated. They’ve changed in a most surprising way. I know that in another time they inflicted a brutal upbringing on Jenny. After coffee, I want to leave right away, but Jenny recovers some of her warmth and her smiles, and asks me to stay. But when I suggest a walk around the village, her entire face turns cold and hard, and she refuses without the tiniest trace of friendship in her voice.
“She’s afraid of that woman,” the mother murmurs to me in an aside.
“That woman?”
“The one who hanged herself.”
Her voice is almost inaudible, a peep. She’s terrified.
Jenny has taken refuge in her old-fashioned little room, a girl’s room, crouching on her bed, her chin on her knees. I then picture us, four people feeling only the most tangled sentiments for each other, isolated in this gray house in the outer reaches of a gloomy province, and I have only one desire: to run away as fast as I can and desert these three people, whom I promise myself I will never see again.
“I met Ivan’s wife,” says Jenny — neglecting to mention that she too was, for one short year, Ivan’s wife.
A scowl flashes across my face. Jenny nods vigorously. In a monotone, speaking fast to stave off interruptions, she tells me how she and Ivan, early in their marriage, as they wandered the aisles of a department store, almost collided with a woman draped in a very elegant green coat, with genuine fur collar and cuffs, dyed green. It was her, Ivan’s wife, who’d hanged herself to death in her basement, later to be found by Jenny. So it really was her? I smile my disapproval and say nothing.
“It’s hard to believe,” says Jenny, “but I only mention it because Ivan recognized her himself. Ivan’s a down-to-earth man.”
And so Ivan, having recognized her, called out her name. And the woman, coolly, as was her way, spoke exactly this sentence:
“So, you two, how’s it going?”
Jenny asks me: would a stranger they’d mistaken for Ivan’s wife have spoken to them like that?
No, a stranger they’d confused with Ivan’s wife would not have spoken to them like that, certainly not. This woman then went on:
“Didn’t take you long. . I’m doing fine, myself.”
And in fact the only notable difference between this woman in green and the one they used to know lay in this one’s greater beauty, but it was still the same beauty, only expanded, vibrant, thanks to contentment, to money, to sexual pleasure.
“Yes,” Jenny says gravely, “sexual pleasure most of all, it was perfectly clear in her eyes, in her smile, in her way of rubbing the fur collar against her chin. Ivan saw it just like I did. That was the thing he couldn’t get over.”
Then I begin to hop from one foot to the other, staring at Jenny with a gaze drained of tenderness. I ask:
“What couldn’t that imbecile Ivan get over? His wife’s death? Her reappearance as a contented mistress? Yes, just what was it Ivan couldn’t get over?”
Jenny’s lips are quivering. How worn she seems, assailed by disillusionment, by multiple losses, by ridiculous, terrifying convictions!
In a tiny little voice she tells me Ivan continually tortured himself after this meeting, belittling himself, desperately jealous of the happiness he thought he saw radiating from his first wife’s entire magnificent person. I then understand that what particularly consumed them wasn’t seeing a dead woman before them and hearing her speak, but finding her so exultant, so infinitely appealing.
I feel deeply displeased by this nonsense, and I’m not far from hating Jenny, from finding her stupid and mediocre. Adopting a sly, mischievous air, she tells me that Ivan never found the woman in green again, although he took great pains to do so, whereas Jenny met up with her several more times. She saw her in that same department store, in the perfume aisle, then in the park of a nearby city where Jenny worked for a while. The woman recognized her and stopped to talk, still wrapped in her silky coat, gracious and aglow.
In spite of myself, I ask:
“Did you tell Ivan?”
Yes, Jenny told Ivan, and no doubt she was wrong not to conceal her joy and her pride, because it was against her, Jenny, that Ivan’s jealousy then turned. Jenny tells me he accused her of conspiring with the other woman. Oh, she couldn’t find the words to defend herself.
Did she feel like she was conspiring? Now I can’t stop questioning Jenny, I who, so full of disdain, wanted to flee and hear no more of this foolishness. Did she conspire against Ivan? Jenny tells me she never conspired — why would she have conspired? What would she have got, in the way of satisfaction or material goods, from conspiring? But with that their marriage came to an end, both of them fixated on the same person, though in different ways — Jenny longing for nothing less than to strike up a fresh friendship with the woman in green, in the hopes that she might learn about life, might learn everything that’s eluded her for the past fifty years, things others know but can’t tell her, not knowing just what they might be, and so, thinks Jenny, she might finally understand why everyone who comes close to her ends up turning away in anger and disappointment; and Ivan, for his part, wanting very simply to know how his first wife found her way to such radiance, once delivered of those nearest her. They’ve separated, but they keep an anxious watch on each other. Jenny says to me, spitefully:
“If she tried to hang herself so she wouldn’t have to see Ivan again, do you really think she’d come visit him now?”
And you, I say to myself, poor Jenny, why should she come visit you?
Jenny’s mother later confides to me that the hanged woman recently knocked on her door. Jenny’s mother opened it, recognized Ivan’s first wife, and fainted dead away. She tells me the woman was very beautiful, lovelier and more luminous than before, and she smiled with great kindness and self-confidence.
“She did die, though,” I say.
“Well, now we’re not so sure,” the old woman answers.
“It should be possible to find out.”
But the three sons want no part of it. None of them ever spotted their mother again after they saw her lying in her coffin.
“They resent Ivan and me for seeing her,” Jenny says, “and for not keeping it secret.”
Could it really be that some other woman was buried in the place of the woman in green? But who, in that case, was the hanged woman whose legs Jenny had clasped in her arms? And how could such a misunderstanding arise? I say goodbye to Jenny and her parents, fuming, vowing to have no more to do with this disastrous family. Not yet out of the house, I can already hear Jenny bitterly upbraiding the old couple. They don’t say a word, they seem to be listening to her with sorrow and interest.