Выбрать главу

That night, what was left of it, I slept alone for the first time in months. Or did not sleep, but lay in a sort of conscious daze, rather, attended by my familiar demons. I have always been prey to night terrors – hardly surprising, I suppose – but lately they are mainly of the waking kind. When I was young my dreams were all chaos, lust and violence, now in my old age sleep is a room of quiet marvels into which I am nightly ushered. It is the ante-room of death; in it, my fears are stilled. Tonight, however, that door was locked against me, and I lay on my back under a humid sheet with my hands folded on my chest like the dead Christ in his shroud and listened to the restless world's carousings. The city seemed to be celebrating one of this festive country's many feast days, for the streets outside were loud with revellers until the early hours. Or it may have been an hallucination: at one particularly clamorous stage of the celebrations I crept to the window and looked down and saw a sort of heraldic cavalcade passing along the street, young men in doublets and striped hose carrying banners and gowned girls with elaborate headdresses mounted on prancing steeds, followed by a band of motleyed minstrels. Toward dawn the crowds, phantom or real, at last dispersed, and then the all too real garbage trucks and delivery men took over. The curtain edges were lightening when I thought I saw Cass Cleave come into the room. She sat by me in the shadows and did not speak. I tried to touch her, to feel her warmth, but my winding-sheet held me fast and I could not move a limb. What was I thinking of, to leave her in the care of others, at such a time? But then, I was not aware that it was such a time. All the same, of the many derelictions of which I have been guilty in my life, this one seems to me now the most reproachable.

I do not know what passed between Kristina Kovacs and Cass Cleave that night, while I cowered in my forsaken bed, what confidences were offered, what pledges given. Kristina has not volunteered to tell me, and I have not had the heart to ask. I harbour no resentment against her. She acted for what she thought was the best, as unwitting mischief-makers usually do. If she does know my poor secrets she likely does not care, so engrossed is she in the hard business of dying. I sit with her for hours, in the evenings especially, and often late into the night. I think that for most of the time she forgets I am there. I can sense her labouring over her pain: it is as if she is trying to hew something out of tbe most unmalleable material, to fashion something that is beyond her powers and her failing strength. The doctors insisted that she undergo radium treatment, the only result of which I can see is that now she is entirely bald. She refuses to wear a wig. In this shorn state she has acquired an austere, elemental beauty; her pharaonic head, held frailly aloft and faintly trembling on the delicate, fleshless column of her neck, is stark and absolute, all line and plane and angled shadow. Sometimes when I am sitting with her I stroke her head; it seems to comfort her, and she nudges against my hand, with an almost forceful insistence, like a cat. Her scalp is warm and always a little moist, and there is a vein that beats beneath it, very fast. I accused her lightly that night at Franco Bar-toli's of being jealous, but I am the one who is jealous now. Whatever I may call what I felt for Cass Cleave – the word love, in my mouth, has acquired a blasphemous overtone – I know that Kristina in some way came to share it. They had only that one night together, and I am no more willing to speculate on how they spent it than I am to ask Kristina to tell me. I am prevented by a sort of prudishness, or do I mean pudency; the blaze that burns the jealous lover feels so like the heat of lust.