‘Please, your ladyship, don’t do it … People who try suicide invariably regret it. In any case the fishermen will soon pull you out, stretch you out on the bank, and the next day the papers will report it and all your innocent relatives will feel humiliated. Dear lady, I beg you, come with me and I will escort you to your house keeping a respectable distance.’
It was as if Fanny had not heard him at all. She continued on her way, her eyes fixed on the ground, seeking the Danube perhaps, or the railway cuttings; possibly she was not even thinking of death.
Sindbad touched her arm. ‘Where are you going, Fanny?’
The woman raised her head, startled, then began to laugh loudly, strangely, with a touch of madness. ‘I knew I would find you!’ she said with the fanatical conviction of which women are capable.
‘Look, it’s my husband, my friend, my lover,’ she turned to the policeman, speaking so loudly the windows shook in the sleeping, long silent square. ‘You can put your mind at rest now, constable. I am not going to jump into the Danube.’
The policeman gestured discreetly to Sindbad that it would be best to keep an eye on the lady because something wasn’t right, then he watched as the couple walked off arm in arm.
‘Why are you on the street in the middle of the night?’ asked Sindbad at the third crossing.
The woman gripped his arm very tightly as if fearing to lose him again. ‘No …’ she said, as if in answer to some private thought. ‘It was all a misunderstanding. We shall never leave each other again. That’s right, isn’t it? We shall never leave each other again?’
Her tears flowed like warm rain on a freshly ploughed field. They almost sang, as sometimes one hears the dawn rain sing in a lonely house, knowing that trees, bushes and roofs will soon be putting on their clothes of freshness and light.
‘We shall never part again,’ answered Sindbad. ‘I have thought of nothing but you.’
‘You know what I did?’ the woman laughed. ‘I stared at your picture, I dandled it on my knee as if you were my child and I talked to you, played with you; I laughed and cried as I did that first winter after my little son died. You were in the graveyard too, weren’t you, and that’s where you’ve come back from because I had need of you?’
‘I’ve been on a long journey,’ Sindbad answered quietly. ‘Sometimes I thought I would never return.’
‘But you see! I knew. I knew you would come back,’ she laughed, raising her head as a little bird might. ‘My pillows told me so at night, the trees under my window whispered it, as did my own lips when I prayed … And tonight, when I was alone, walking up and down aimlessly, my hands linked, I stopped before the picture of my dead parents and my dear mother was suddenly speaking to me so clearly anyone might have heard her, saying, “You will see him!“ I fell to my knees and wept before her picture. When everyone had abandoned me, when I was as low as I had ever been and thought my life was over, all laughter, all love, all my beauty done with, my mother stretched her hand out to me. “You will see him!“ her voice rang out and suddenly my heart was full of lilacs bursting forth as they do at the feet of saints in country churches. I decided to put on my finest dress, the finest and most expensive, the one I had made for me when I first met you. I so wanted to look beautiful. I wanted to be the most beautiful woman you had ever seen, the most graceful, the most desirable. My maid was away so I dressed alone, skilfully, feeling an extraordinary happiness. Then I pricked my finger on a pin. My blood bubbled up and I would have been happy to bleed to death thinking I was dressing myself for you.’
‘Child,’ mumbled Sindbad, though, unquestionably, he felt rather flattered by her madness.
‘And when I was dressed, when I stood before my mirrors to check that everything was as it should be, I left the house, stealthily as if escaping from something. Perhaps I would never go back — if I failed to find you and talk to you, if you didn’t exhort me to live on for your sake, for your heart’s sake, for your delight in me, your love of me … if I did not hear in your voice the scent of leaves at first light, if I did not feel in your hand the gripping power of dreams, if I did not see in your eyes the rising sun as it sends brilliant white gulls scuttling into the heavy clouds that drift above the cold, austere waves of the lake at night.
‘I set out as if I knew for certain my way would lead to you. I wondered through the twilit streets without any thought of where I was going, as I did when my child died and those kind passers-by dragged him from under the wheels of the carriage. I could see my own feet walking as if I were following myself in the failing light and people were asking themselves who was this poor woman with the bowed head and where was she going? A bright-eyed woman stared at me from a shop window, her face flushed as if in theatrical limelight. It’s summer, she must have been thinking, the opera season is over, where is this strange woman going in full evening dress?
‘Forgive me, Sindbad, for dwelling so long on externals. We women, all of us from the cleverest to the most stupid, are equally preoccupied with our appearance. You have no idea how ashamed I was that I could be thinking of the plume in my hat at the same time as my whole wonderful life, with all its youth, femininity, ambition and hopes was set to collapse or resurrect in front of me, then as I left to find you, wherever and however far I had to go.
‘I walked down unfamiliar streets, passing houses I had never seen before, assailed by unfamiliar smells. Strange women dawdled past me, with wicked, calculating looks in their eyes.
‘Some instinct drove me towards the Danube and I felt lighter at heart. I came to the bridge and crossed it perfectly calmly, thinking of nothing, nothing at all. I never imagined strange men might accost me — a person is not accosted if they behave reasonably — or that I might be attacked by some thief such as you read about in the papers — if they did I would simply hand over my jewels and walk on.
‘How long did I continue walking? I no longer remember when I set out, the minutes are all mixed up like grains of sand. I saw a little inn with a green fence and a garden and a lantern hung on a post in the middle of it as in the penny dreadfuls, and dark-faced men were leaning together, pointing at me. I was not frightened, I did not tremble, and it was only some stupid sense of embarrassment that prevented me from going into the inn and ordering a glass of beer like cabmen do. Perhaps I thought they might not want to serve a woman alone, so I went on, heavy-hearted.
‘Suddenly someone spoke to me. He coughed respectfully, speaking in a low voice. It was a policeman who asked me not to kill myself because I could lead a very happy life … “Happy, happy, happy!“ my heart leapt, because I could sense you approaching, somewhere I heard your footsteps as I had heard them so often on quiet nights under my window; your face, with its bold open gaze, emerges from the shadows and I hear your fastidious voice …’
Sindbad had never before listened so intently to a woman as he did then to Fanny. This black-haired, black-eyed, long-legged woman had filled his life and occupied his heart for more than a year and a half. And in that year and a half he would love to have caught her at some lie. He felt that somehow, in some way, Fanny wasn’t telling him the truth, only he didn’t know where the simple meadow of truth stopped and the brightly coloured field of lies began. ‘Ah, but women are always lying,’ he thought as he kissed away her tears and felt her fingers running through his hair, aware of the perfume lingering on his moustache as they walked home. He clung to the lamp-posts and stared into the air in front of him. Where precisely did the lies start?