Lilith was waiting for the steamer bringing her brother from India. She watched the people stepping off the gangplank. She feared she would not recognize him. When he had left he was a boy. A boy in a plaster cast of hardness, of dissimulation. Intent on defending himself against all invasion by others, against feeling, against softness, against himself. A boy swinging between violent, brutal acts, and fits of weeping like a woman. Would she recognize the compressed mouth, the ice blue eyes, the pose of nonchalance, the briefness of speech, the tension and the sudden breaks in the tension? A boy in a plaster cast of hardness. Untouchable. At times she suspected that he had refused to recognize her presence in him. Perhaps it was he walking there, so rigid in his clothes. No. So many people, so many valises, trunks, confusions, explosions of joy. And then suddenly there was no one else passing down the gangplank.
Lilith stopped one of the stewards: “Do you know Eric Norman? Can you tell me if he’s sick? I can’t find him anywhere.”
The steward promised to go and see. Lilith imagines Eric lying in his bunk, sick. She waits, already suffering as she suffered when he was small, in trouble. The steward returns: “I found him. He’s not sick, but his papers are not quite in order, so he can’t step off the boat until to-morrow morning. He wants you to come on board.”
The blue eyes watching behind eye glasses. They face each other without words. There is a break in their pause as if the bodies would break at the shock of the meeting. Then he smiles brusquely, and the talk breaks through the barrier of fifteen years.
“You look swell,” he says. “Are you as bossy as you were? Remember how you wanted to do the fighting for me? You wouldn’t let me fight my own battles with the boys. You came with an umbrella and beat them. They laughed at me for having a sister fighting for me. I had to go so far away to get away from you. You look swell! Who do you fight for now? Who do you help cross the street? Who do you stop the traffic for now, with insults at the drivers? You look swell, much sweller than before. But you can’t boss me now.”
All the passengers had left the boat but a few of the crew and the purser who was adding numbers and names on long green sheets of paper, behind barred windows. A few of the crew were cleaning the cabins and decks. They had drawn the curtains, covered the chairs and pianos and couches. They had waxed the floors, turned over the mattresses, folded up the blankets, put out the lights. The enormous parlors and lounge rooms looked ghostly. So many chairs in rows, with stiffened arms open on emptiness. The ship anchored in earth, it seemed, so steady it was. Room after room without dust, lights, glitter. Funereal. The mirrors reflecting nothing but a brother and sister walking through the enormous ship, through a labyrinth of linoleum hall-ways, passing doors open on a million empty cabins. The bunks like skeletons, showing the springs and the boxlike edges. Silence… A sudden shadow lurking of a sailor polishing brass knobs. Brother and sister walking through the city of abins. No smell in the kitchen, no rolling and swaying or cracking of wood. A carcass at rest. No music in the salons, no glitter of silverware chiming in the dining room. Repose of furniture, windows, lights. A funereal watch of covered chairs. A dead backstage. No vestige of the people who passed. Clean.
Brother and sister stranded. Not allowed to land. Walking on a frontier not marked on the marine or earthly charts. Frontiers of memory. The anchor dug deep into the sandy marshes of memory. Here in the skeleton of the marine monster, with its empty windows unblinking, its empty decks, empty salons, deserted by musicians and sailors, beyond the earth and beyond the sea, they sit before a banquet of memories, with the anchor lying deeply coiled in the octopus legs of memories. The ship was the world of their childhood, filled with indestructible games. He had carried it all to India, he had dyed it in foreign colors, his childhood, he had bathed it in exotic music, rinsed it in poisonous rivers, injected it with Oriental maladies, burned it with unnameable fevers, had choked it in strange incenses, perfumed it with yellow flesh, buried it in Mahometan cemeteries, throttled it in new loves. It had turned to ivory, to a mineral in his breast. She had covered it with hatred, he had lost it in opium deliriums, but there it was in their breast, turned to ore, to stalamite. The more they had pressed down on it the stronger the compression, the more it had gained in rarity, in fixity. In indestructibleness. A diamond lodged in the breast.
Brother and sister walking through the skeleton of the monstrous ship which took him away and brought him back with the same diamond lodged in the breast. Bathing in the acid of the past, they bared the bones unbleached and this diamond.
The first voyage with chairs, tables, rags, fancies, was the most prolonged in all their existence. The one they had boarded together at birth had never moved; they were locked in it forever, without passengers and without landing permits. All the other cabins empty, and they cursed forever to sail inside the static sea of their fantasies. Riveted to the shore of the past, forbidden to land, with the anchor set deep in rust.
Another day in the confessional. Lilith lying down and talking. Lilith watching the Voice with something like hostility, expecting him to say something dogmatic, some banality, some unsubtle generality. She wanted him to say it, because if he did he would be another man she could not lean on, and she would have to go on conquering herself and her own life alone. She was proud of her independence. She was waiting for the Voice to say something unsubtle that she could laugh at.
They were talking about Mischa. He told her that she was an obsession in Mischa’s life. That he saw her as the mother, the sister, the most unattainable of all women, and for this he wanted to conquer her, to free his manhood. Then she confessed how at first she had loved Mischa, but when she had felt his smallness, his way of hiding within woman, she had felt protection but no desire. She had wanted to give him an illusion but feared not to be able to sustain it to the very end. She begged the Voice not to tell him the truth, which would wound him, but to tell Mischa she was a little mad. This would explain the change in her, put all the blame on herself, and Mischa. a might enjoy discovering there were other abnormal people in the world. The Voice agreed with her. He asked her if she did not mind other people thinking she was not normal. She hesitated and then:
“No, I don’t mind. I like them to think me puzzling, mystifying and unpredictable. I feel then that I keep my real self a mystery.”
The Voice laughed a little at this.
“I see you don’t need any help at all, you are quite content, quite strong, quite able to manage your own life.”
At these words Lilith began to tremble, and then she felt her attitude crumble, the facade crumbling all around her. She became intensely aware of her weakness, her need of another. She said nothing but the Voice understood and continued:
“You have acted beautifully towards Mischa. As few women will act. In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they humiliate or demolish them.”
“I could not hurt Mischa. Whenever I see him I remember the story he told me about his first sensual curiosity. His mother had discovered him weighing his sex in his hand, reflectively examining it, had beaten him with a whip and left him locked up in the room. He wept hysterically, then quieted down and, dipping a finger in the tears, he had written on the walclass="underline" evil boy. He waited for the words to vanish, but they seemed to remain like stains on the wall, and he grew hysterically afraid the words would never dry and that the whole city would know about his doings.”