But now she moved to his sister Hāna, and concealed yet not concealed, down on the road, unannounced by the wheels of the trap and the pony’s homecoming trot, he watched them. He saw how they grew together, breast to breast, their arms around each other’s necks, thigh to thigh, lip to lip. They were an image and an image in a mirror, clasped.
Really, it was not much. Women kissed. Friends might kiss. And yet, this passion. Smoke rose from their skins, the air about them trembled as later in the day the heat of the drought would make it do.
Ernst ran. He ran straight at them. They heard him then, his gallop over the track, his blundering rush across the little scattered stones, and the dust rose round him. He was a whirlwind. He thrust them apart as they were themselves thrusting apart. Ysabelle fell back into the bole of the tree, slipped down it, sat in the dust, staring. Hāna he slapped, once, twice, across her face.
He was roaring, like a lion, like a bull—
His words – were there any words? Oh yes, jargon of streets and alleys, epithets old as humankind. But words? Were there any? Are there any, for such rage?
Hāna attempted to speak. He raised his hand to strike her again and Ysabelle, staggering up, caught his arm, hung on it, and so he flung her off, sprawling again, and this time heard her thin quick cry of pain.
Now language assembled itself. Not whores – madwomen. They were mad. Their brains – diseased.
He swept up Hāna and bore her off. Suddenly, it was so very visible, the differences in their size and strength, as if he and she were beings of two unlike species.
Her arms outstretched, she called to Ysabelle – “No, don’t try to stop him—” And Ysabelle, her knee twisted by the violence of her fall to boneless water, could only lie on her side, as if indolent, observing this, observing Hāna borne along in a cloud of dust and hair, into the brown masculine house that smelled of maleness and cigars. While another cloud, purple as Hāna’s ribbons, covered the screech of the sun.
Ysabelle walked home. That is, she limped, crawled. She fainted three times, the pain was so great. Finally she dropped on the road before her own house, and Mireio, who saw it, brought Jean, who carried Ysabelle inside. Thus, both women were carried into a house by a man, and helpless.
“I fell, and twisted my leg.”
This was exact, if not decorous. Or true.
As she lay on her bed, her knee packed with the poultices of herbs, tightly bound, and beating like a drum, sometimes leaning to vomit in a chamber-pot, Ysabelle turned over in her mind what she should do. But she was feverish, and could not be sure what had happened. How could Ernst have deduced, from their parting embrace, so much? Yet he had. Indeed, it could not be denied. Of course, any woman who rejected him must be – unnatural. Already condemned. Hopeless.
She would have gone to his door, limping, crawling, but the girl, Gittel, had run out. Gittel, terrified, heaving Ysabelle up and bending under her weight like a young willow. Her thick accent: “Go – go, Madame. She’ll calm him. She always does, the four years I’m with them.”
And Gittel had pushed Ysabelle away. And from the male house, no sound issued. The birds sang on. The clouds passed intermittantly across the sun. Eclipses.
It was Ysabelle he would condemn. She was a witch who had seduced—
Hāna, so ignorant, naive, unable to judge, to see the deadly snare—
He would reprimand and instruct. He might be cruel. He might strike her again, and lock her up in her room. Then he would come here. Ysabelle, her brain white with the lights that splashed over her eyes, formulated what she must do. “Oh Ernst – Ernst – after our last time together – I thought you loathed me. Don’t you know how women sometimes pretend – so foolish – she let me, out of pity – she let me make-believe – that she was you!”
And then, stroking him, begging him to take her, his stinking filthy body, his disgusting tongue, and worse, the rest – the rest. But Ysabelle would have it all, she would do anything. For that way, she could protect – she would even take his member, as she had heard tell a prostitute – a mad prostitute presumably – would do, take it into her mouth – and choking down her revulsion, moaning as if with joy, become his utter slave.
She would die for him, if she must.
Hāna . . .
Mireio said to Jean that she thought that bad man, Monsieur Ernst, had led Ysabelle a dance, and cast her off. No matter. If there was a pregnancy, it could be dealt with . . . Mireio was skilled. But after all the good food they had wasted on him – the devil.
Jean shrugged. None of this concerned him. A little over a hundred years before, these rich people would have been put under a honed blade. That would have settled their minds wonderfully.
Ysabelle tossed between oblivion and awareness. She thought the pillow was Hāna, because some of Hāna’s sweet scent had been left there. She thought the acid voluptuous aroma of the cherries, plucked by Mireio, or bleeding in the grass, was the sharp catch of Hāna’s personal perfume in the moments of her ecstasy.
In her fever, Ysabelle spasmed in a deathly pleasure.
When the fever broke, pale and shuddering, Ysabelle sat by the window.
The nightingale still sang. She heard it all night long, as the swelling of her leg waned with the moon.
“No rain,” said Mireio.
Seven days passed, and then, Ysabelle went to her writing table, and began to try to compose a letter to Ernst. It was to be a love letter, confessing she could not bear not to see him. That his disapproval broke her heart. He had witnessed her ultimate foolishness, kissing his sister, locked in a female fantasy that Hāna was himself. Would he forgive her, come to her? She did not want marriage, never had, but to lose his regard – it burnt her away, like the summer leaves.
As she was writing this letter, over and over, attempting to make it right, Ernst’s letter to Ysabelle arrived, along with a package, its contents also wrapped over and over, in expensive paper from the city.
“My dear Friend,” he began, “Ysabelle: I know what worry you must have endured, and as soon as the burden upon me was eased, I sat down to write to you. We both of us care for Hāna so deeply. Let me assure you at once that now the terrible insanity which overwhelmed her has been alleviated. Could you see her, as I did, two days ago, look into her face, clear of all shadow and every frightful thing, you would know, as I do, that this was for the best.
“You will understand, that morning I calmed her as well as I might. Luckily, I keep some opiates by me, for use in certain of my experiments. These rendered Hāna her first peace, and after that I was able to convey her to St Cailloux. Here my friend, Le Rue, took charge of her at once.
“She had by now awoken, and on feeling her pulse, which was so rapid, he declared immediately this was enough to inform him such a passionate heart was unnatural, and could do her only harm. He confided to me that, in the Dark Ages, she would have been supposed possessed by the Devil. But he is a man of science. The ‘Devil’ is merely in her mind, its disorder. He acted before nightfall.
“I will not describe to you the operation, the details might alarm you, and besides you would not understand it. It involves certain nerve fibres in the frontal portion of the brain. A delicate pruning away. My magnificent friend, he made the tender incision. He is adept, and although Hāna was his very first subject, the success with her has made him sanguine for the help of others.