“I loved Hazel so. I was swallowed up by her, just as before that I loved Georgia, and she could do anything with me. I would even help her to see her lovers. I would do anything she asked me. She got tired of me, and I went off alone to Holland, and I could not play the violin any more, I wanted to die. I made love to other women, but it was not the same. What terrible things I have done in my life, you can’t imagine. I don’t know what you will think. I can’t see your face and that bothers me. I can’t tell you because maybe you won’t want to see me any more. Georgia told me one lies down and talks, it is like talking to oneself except that this Voice comes and explains everything and it stops hurting. I feel fine here lying down, but I am ashamed of so many things and I think they are very bad things I did, this sleeping with women, and other things. I killed a woman who got married. It was in my birth place, in the South. She got married and then died the night of the wedding, and I did it. I thought all the time before the wedding that she ought not to love a man, there is no tenderness in men, and then I thought of the blood, and I prayed she should die rather than be married, and so I wished it, and she died. And I am sure it was my fault. But there is something much worse than this. It happened in Paris. I was working at the violin. I remember. My room was on the level with the street and the windows were open, and I did not realize the windows were open; I was playing away, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I looked at the bow and looked at it for a long while and I was taken with a violent desire to pass it between my legs, as if I were the violin, and I don’t know why I did it, and suddenly I saw people laughing outside… I nearly died of shame. You will never tell this to anyone? I can’t see your face. I can’t tell what you are thinking about me. When I don’t know what people think I always imagine they are laughing at me, criticizing me. I don’t feel that you condemn me, I feel good here, lying down. I feel that at last I am getting some terrible things out, getting rid of them maybe. maybe I will be able to forget them, like the time I gave a little boy an enema with a straw, and I thought I had injured him for life, and a few years after that he got sick and died, and I didn’t dare walk through the town because I am sure it was the enema that did it. Don’t you think it was? I don’t know why I did that. I wish I could see your face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, and I was not told why, I was told it was for appendicitis, and when I was well I found out I had no more woman’s parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can’t have a child. But that is good. I don’t like men, they have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child, that means I am a cripple, men won’t love me. But I’m sure I wouldn’t like it with a man, I tried how it felt once with a toothbrush, and I didn’t like it. I had the funniest dream just before coming to you; I had opened my veins and I was introducing mercury in them, in each vein at the finger tip. Why can I never be happy? I’m always thinking when I’m in love that it will come to an end, just like now I think if I don’t find more things to tell you, I won’t be able to come again, and I am afraid of this coming to an end, afraid you will not think me sick enough.”
A week later, ten days later, she is lying down and talking to the Voice:
“Last night I was able to play. I felt you standing like an enormous shadow over me, and I could see your large signet ring flashing, and what was stranger than all this, I smelled the odor of your cigar suddenly in the middle of the street. How can you explain this, walking casually through a street, I smelled your cigar and that made me breathe deeply: I always walk with my shoulders hunched up, you’ve noticed it, I walk like a man, I am sure I am a man after all, because when I was a child I played like a boy, I hated to dress up in pretty things and I hated perfume. I don’t understand why the smell of your cigar, which reminds me of my talks with you, made me want to breathe deeply. It’s very funny. I haven’t thought about Hazel for the last few days; maybe I don’t love her any more, I only feel I love her when we are separating, when I see her going off on a train; then I feel terrible, terrible. Otherwise I am not very sure that I love her, really. I feel nothing when she is there, we quarrel a lot, that is all. With Georgia it was different, she made me feel she was there: Lillian, do this for me, Lillian, do that for me, Lillian, telephone for me, Lillian, carry my music. She was always deathly ill, I had to run around for her all the time; she was always dying, but always well enough to receive lovers. Always clinging to me, talking about her great loneliness, her love affairs. This talking to you is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. How strange it is to talk absolutely sincerely, as it comes, to say everything in one’s head, not to have to think beforehand. I am getting well, but I don’t want you to send me away. When I was a child I always wanted to go to Africa. I had a scrap book all about Africa and maps, time-tables, boat sailings, information, pictures of airplanes, trains, of the ships that could take me there. My school was very far away, I had to walk for two hours, and I called it Africa. I would set out for it all prepared as for a trip. I liked going to school because it was Africa, and I thought about it at night. And then they built a new school right next to my home, five minutes away, and I never went to school again, I never learnt anything; I was expelled and I made a mess of it, my father never forgave me, he was so mad he threw a knife out of the window and it hit our mare in the leg and that made a terrible impression on me, it was my fault too. Yesterday when I left you I was thinking about God, and what do you think happened to me? Walking out of the hotel I stumbled on the steps and I found myself kneeling on the sidewalk, and I did not mind it at all, it was wonderful, so many times I have wanted to kneel on the sidewalk, and I had never dared, and now thinking about you and what I could say to you the next time so you won’t think I’m cured yet and send me away… There is something I have now which you can’t take away from me, ever since I came here I have a feeling so warm and sweet and life-giving which belongs to me, I know you gave it to me, but it is inside of me now, and you can’t take it away. There was another time when I was thankful and I wanted to kneel in the street and that time I pretended to lace my shoe and I just kneeled there, and everybody let me, thinking I was lacing my shoe.”
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Mischa came to the Voice limping, but be only talked about his hand. He can no longer play the ‘cello. His hand is stiff. He is mute about his leg. His mother was a Cossack woman, who rode horseback. His father was obsessed with hunting. He himself had never wanted woman, except when they wore red dresses. Then he felt like biting them. Woman seemed to him something soft and blind, something to hide into. When he saw a woman he wanted to become small and hide in her. He used to call his mother, in Russian, his Holy Secret. His hand had been twisted, cramped for many years. He holds it out to show the Voice. He talks constantly about his hand, how it feels, if it is stiffer to-day than yesterday. He played the ‘cello when he was very young. He was a child prodigy. He remembers early concerts, and his mother afterwards taking him between her large, strong horse-woman’s knees and caressing him with pleasure because he had played well. His mother was like no woman he had ever seen. She had long, black hair which she liked to wear down when she was at home, a sort of forest of black hair in which he would hide his face. His good-night kiss was never anywhere but inside this black hair. Absolute blackness then, the hair tickling his eyelashes and getting inside his mouth. Hair so violent and strong, with a smell that made him dizzy, hair that entwined itself around him. His mother looked like a Medusa. Her hair must have been made of snakes. Her face, somehow, fixed into one expression. The eyes never blinked, he believes. She kept them open on one. And the voice of a man, and a bass laughter. A laughter that lasted longer than any he had ever heard. He could hear it from his bed at night. He dreamed of climbing with the help of his mother’s long, heavy hair to a place where his father could not reach him. His father, all in leather, armed with guns, carrying wounded blood-dripping animals, surrounded with dogs. It seemed to Mischa that he had found his mother’s voice in the ‘cello. There were deep notes in the ‘cello which sounded and resounded in him like his mother’s voice.