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The men he served with found him and his preoccupation mildly humorous. He was not disliked or liked enough to make a target for that concentration of unease caused by people who alarm others. They did not laugh at him, or call him madman. Perhaps he was more like that dog who is a regiment’s pet. Once he mislaid his tin of loot and a couple of men went into a moderate danger to get it back: sometimes a comrade would bring him a bit of something or other picked up in a bazaar – amber, an amulet, a jade. He advised them how to make bargains; he went on expeditions with them to buy stones for wives and girls back home.
He was in Italy that week when – everything disintegrated. Anyone who has been in, or near, war (which means, by now, everyone, or at least everyone in Europe and Asia) knows that time – a week, days, sometimes hours – when everything falls apart, when all forms of order dissolve, including those which mark the difference between enemy and enemy.
During this time old scores of all kinds are settled. It is when unpopular officers get killed by ‘accident’. It is when a man who has an antipathy for another will kill him, or beat him up. A man who wants a woman will rape her, if she is around, or rape another in her stead if she is not. Women get raped; and those who want to be will make sure they are where the raping is. A woman who hates another will harm her. In short, it is a time of anarchy, of looting, of arson and destruction for destruction’s sake. There are those who believe that this time out of ordinary order is the reason for war, its hidden justification, its purpose and law, another pattern behind the one we see. Afterwards there are no records of what has happened. There is no one to keep records: everyone is engaged in participating, or in protecting himself.
Ephraim was in a small town near Florence when his war reached that phase. There was a certain corporal, also from Johannesburg, who always had a glitter in his look when they talked of Ephraim’s tin of jewels. On an evening when every human being in the place was hunter or hunted, manoeuvred for advantage, or followed scents of gain, this man, in civilian life a store-keeper, looked across a room at Ephraim and grinned. Ephraim knew what to expect. Everyone knew what to expect – at such moments much older knowledges come to the surface together with old instincts. Ephraim quietly left a schoolroom for that week converted into a mess, and went out into the early dark of streets emptied by fear, where walls still shook and dust fell in clouds because of near gunfire. But it was also very quiet. Terror’s cold nausea silences, places invisible hands across mouths … The occasional person hurrying through those streets kept his eyes in front, and his mouth tight. Two such people meeting did not look at each other except for a moment when their eyes violently encountered in a hard clash of inquiry. Behind every shutter or pane or door people stood, or sat or crouched waiting for the time out of order to end, and guns and sharp instruments stood near their hands.
Through these streets went Ephraim. The Corporal had not seen him go, but by now would certainly have found the scent. At any moment he would catch up with Ephraim who carried in his hand a flat tin, and who as he walked looked into holes in walls and in pavements, peered into a church half filled with rubble, investigated torn earth where bomb fragments had fallen and even looked up into the branches of trees as he passed and at the plants growing at doorways. Finally, as he passed a fountain clogged with debris, he knelt for a moment and slid his tin down into the mud. He walked away, fast, not looking back to see if he had been seen, and around the corner of the church he met Corporal Van der Merwe. As Ephraim came up to his enemy he held out empty hands and stood still. The Corporal was a big man and twenty years younger. Van der Merwe gave him a frowning look, indicative of his powers of shrewd assessment, rather like Mihrène’s father’s look when he heard how this nonentity proposed to give his daughter a valuable pearl for no reason at all, and when Ephraim saw it, he at once raised his hands above his head like a prisoner surrendering, while Van der Merwe frisked him. There was a moment when Ephraim might very well have been killed: it hung in the balance. But down the street a rabble of soldiers were looting pictures and valuables from another church, and Van der Merwe, his attention caught by them, simply watched Ephraim walk away, and then ran off himself to join the looters.
By the time that season of anarchy had finished, Ephraim was a couple of hundred miles north. Six months later, in a town ten miles from the one where he had nearly been murdered by a man once again his military subordinate (but that incident had disappeared, had become buried in the foreign texture of another time, or dimension), Ephraim asked for an evening’s leave and travelled as he could to V——, where he imagined, perhaps, that he would walk through deserted streets to a rubble-filled fountain and beside the fountain would kneel, and slide his hand into dirty water to retrieve his treasure.
But the square was full of people, and though this was not a time when a café served more than a cup of bad coffee or water flavoured with chemicals, the two cafés had people in them who were half starved but already inhabiting the forms of ordinary life. They served, of course, unlimited quantities of cheap wine. Everyone was drunken, or tipsy. In a wine country, when there is no food, wine becomes a kind of food, craved like food. Ephraim walked past the fountain and saw that the water was filthy, too dirty to let anyone see what was in it, or whether it had been cleared of rubble, and, with the rubble, his treasure.
He sat on the pavement under a torn awning, by a cracked wood table, and ordered coffee. He was the only soldier there; or at least, the only uniform. The main tide of soldiery was washing back and forth to one side of this little town. Uniforms meant barter, meant food, clothing, cigarettes. In a moment half a dozen little boys were at his elbow offering him girls. Women of all ages were sauntering past or making themselves visible, or trying to catch his eye, since the female population of the town were for the most part in that condition for which in our debased time we have the shorthand term: being prepared to sell themselves for a cigarette. Old women, old men, cripples, all kinds of persons, stretched in front of him hands displaying various more or less useless objects – lighters, watches, old buckles or bottles or brooches – hoping to get chocolate or food in return. Ephraim sat on, sad with himself because he had not brought eggs or tinned stuff or chocolate. He had not thought of it. He sat while hungry people with sharp faces that glittered with a winy fever pressed about him and the bodies of a dozen or so women arranged themselves in this or that pose for his inspection. He felt sick. He was almost ready to go away and forget his tin full of gems. Then a tired-looking woman in a much-washed print dress lifted high in front because of pregnancy came to sit at his table. He thought she was there to sell herself, and hardly looked at her, unable to bear it that a pregnant woman was brought to such a pass.
She said: ‘Don’t you remember me?’
And now he searched her face, and she searched his. He looked for Mihrène; and she tried to see in him what it was that changed her life, to find what it was that pearl embodied which she carried with her in a bit of cloth sewn into her slip.
They sat trying to exchange news; but these two people had so little in common they could not even say: And how is so and so? What has happened to him, or to her?
The hungry inhabitants of the town withdrew a little way, because this soldier had become a person, a man who was a friend of Mihrène, who was their friend.
The two were there for a couple of hours. They were on the whole more embarrassed than anything. It was clear to both by now that whatever events had taken place between them, momentous or not (they were not equipped to say), these events were in some realm or on a level where their daylight selves were strangers. It was certainly not the point that she, the unforgettable girl of Alexandria, had become a rather drab young woman waiting to give birth in a war-shattered town; not the point that for her he had carried with him for four years of war a treasury of gems, some precious, some mildly valuable, some worthless, bits of substance with one thing in common: their value related to some other good which had had, arbitrarily and for a short time, the name Mihrène.
It had become intolerable to sit there, over coffee made of burned grain, while all around great hungry eyes focussed on him, the soldier, who had come so cruelly to their starving town with empty hands. He had soon to leave. He had reached this town on the backboards of a peasant’s cart, there being no other transport; and if he did not get another lift of the same kind, he would have to walk ten miles before midnight.
Over the square was rising a famished watery moon, unlike the moons of his own city, unlike the wild moons of Egypt. At last he simply got up and walked to the edge of the evil-smelling fountain. He kneeled down on its edge, plunged in his hand, encountered all sorts of slimy things, probably dead rats or cats or even bits of dead people, and after some groping, felt the familiar shape of his tin. He pulled it out, wiped it dry on some old newspaper that had blown there, went back to the table, sat down, opened the tin. Pearls are fed on light and air. Opals don’t like being shut away from light which makes their depths come alive. But no water had got in, and he emptied the glittering, gleaming heap on to the cracked wood of the table top.
All round pressed the hungry people who looked at the gems and thought of food.
She took from her breast a bit of cloth and untwisted her pearl. She held it out to him.
‘I never sold it,’ she said.
And now he looked at her – sternly, as he had done before.
She said, in the pretty English of those who have learned it from governesses: ‘I have sometimes needed food, I’ve been hungry, you know! I’ve had no servants …’
He looked at her. Oh, how she knew that look, how she had studied it in memory! Irritation, annoyance, grief. All these, but above all disappointment. And more than these, a warning, or reminder. It said, she felt: Silly white goose! Rich little bitch! Poor little nothing! Why do you always get it wrong? Why are you stupid? What is a pearl compared with what it stands for? If you are hungry and need money, sell it, of course!
She sat in that sudden stillness that says a person is fighting not to weep. Her beautiful eyes brimmed. Then she said stubbornly: ‘I’ll never sell it. Never!’
As for him he was muttering: I should have brought food. I was a dummkopf. What’s the use of these things …
But in the hungry eyes around him he read that they were thinking how even in times of famine there are always men and women who have food hidden away to be bought by gold or jewels.
‘Take them,’ he said to the children, to the women, to the old people.
They did not understand him, did not believe him.
He said again: ‘Go on. Take them!’
No one moved. Then he stood up and began flinging into the air pearls, opals, moonstones, gems of all kinds, to fall as they would. For a few moments there was a mad scene of people bobbing and scrambling, and the square emptied as people raced back to the corners they lived in with what they had picked up out of the dust. It was not yet time for the myth to start, the story of how a soldier had walked into the town, and inexplicably pulled treasure out of the fountain which he flung into the air like a king or a sultan – treasure that was ambiguous and fertile like a king’s, since one man might pick up the glitter of a diamond that later turned out to be worthless glass, and another be left with a smallish pearl that had nevertheless been so carefully chosen it was worth months of food, or even a house or small farm.
‘I must go,’ said Ephraim to his companion.
She inclined her head in farewell, as to an acquaintance re-encountered. She watched a greying, dumpy man walk away past a fountain, past a church, then out of sight.
Later that night she took out the pearl and held it in her hand. If she sold it, she would remain comfortably independent of her own family. Here, in the circle of the family of her dead husband, she would marry again, another engineer or civil servant: she would be worth marrying, even as a widow with a child. Of course if she returned to her own family, she would also remarry, as a rich young widow with a small child from that dreadful war, luckily now over.
Such thoughts went through her head: at last she thought that it didn’t make any difference what she did. Whatever function Ephraim’s intervention had performed in her life was over when she refused to marry Paulo, had married Carlos, had come to Italy and given birth to two children, one dead from an unimportant children’s disease that had been fatal only because of the quality of war-food, war-warmth. She had been wrenched out of her pattern, had been stamped, or claimed, by the pearl – by something else. Nothing she could do now would put her back where she had been. It did not matter whether she stayed in Italy or returned to the circles she had been born in.
As for Ephraim, he went back to Johannesburg when the war finished, and continued to cut diamonds and to play poker on Sunday nights.
This story ended more or less with the calling of the flight number. As we went to the tarmac where illuminated wisps of fog still lingered, the lady from Texas asked the man who had told the story if perhaps he was Ephraim?
‘No,’ said Dr Rosen, a man of sixty or so from Johannesburg, a brisk, well-dressed man with nothing much to notice about him – like most of the world’s citizens.
No, he was most emphatically not Ephraim.
Then how did he know all this? Perhaps he was there?
Yes, he was there. But if he was to tell us how he came to be a hundred miles from where he should have been, in that chaotic, horrible week – it was horrible, horrible! – and in civvies, then that story would be even longer than the one he had already told us.
Couldn’t he tell us why he was there?
Perhaps he was after that tin of Ephraim’s too! We could think so if we liked. It would be excusable of us to think so. There was a fortune in that tin, and everyone in the regiment knew it.
He was a friend of Ephraim’s then? He knew Ephraim?
Yes, he could say that. He had known Ephraim for, let’s see, nearly fifty years. Yes, he thought he could say he was Ephraim’s friend.
In the aircraft Dr Rosen sat reading, with nothing more to tell us.
But one day I’ll meet a young man called Nikki, or Raffaele; or a girl wearing a single pearl around her neck on a gold chain or perhaps a middle-aged woman who says she thinks pearls are unlucky, she would never touch them herself: a man once gave her younger sister a pearl and it ruined her entire life. Something like that will happen, and this story will have a different shape.
An Unposted Love Letter
Yes, I saw the look your wife’s face put on when I said, ‘I have so many husbands, I don’t need a husband.’ She did not exchange a look with you, but that was because she did not need to – later when you got home she said, ‘What an affected thing to say!’ and you replied, ‘Don’t forget she is an actress.’ You said this meaning exactly what I would mean if I had said it, I’m certain of that. And perhaps she heard it like that. I do hope so because I know what you are and if your wife does not hear what you say then this is a smallness on your part that I don’t forgive you. If I can live alone, and out of fastidiousness, then you must have a wife as good as you are. My husbands, the men who set light to my soul (yes, I know how your wife would smile if I used that phrase), are worthy of you … I know that I am giving myself away now, confessing how much that look on your wife’s face hurt. Didn’t she know that even then I was playing my part? Oh no, after all, I don’t forgive you your wife, no I don’t.
If I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many lovers,’ then of course everyone at the dinner-table would have laughed in just such a way: it would have been the rather banal ‘outrageousness’ expected of me. An ageing star, the fading beauty … ‘I have so many lovers’ – pathetic, and brave too. Yes, that remark would have been too apt, too smooth, right for just any ‘beautiful but fading’ actress. But not right for me, because after all, I am not just any actress, I am Victoria Carrington, and I know exactly what is due to me and from me. I know what is fitting (not for me, that is not important) but for what I stand for. Do you imagine I couldn’t have said it differently – like this, for instance: ‘I am an artist and therefore androgynous.’ Or: ‘I have created inside myself Man who plays opposite to my Woman.’ Or: ‘I have objectified in myself the male components of my soul and it is from this source that I create.’ Oh, I’m not stupid, not ignorant, I know the different dialects of our time and even how to use them. But imagine if I had said any of these things last night! It would have been a false note, you would all have been uncomfortable, irritated, and afterwards you would have said: ‘Actresses shouldn’t try to be intelligent.’ (Not you, the others.) Probably they don’t believe it, not really, that an actress must be stupid, but their sense of discrepancy, or discordance, would have expressed itself in such a way. Whereas their silence when I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many husbands,’ was right, for it was the remark right for me – it was more than ‘affected’, or ‘outrageous’ – it was making a claim that they had to recognize.
That word ‘affected’, have you ever really thought why it is applied to actresses? (You have of course, I’m no foreign country to you, I felt that, but it gives me pleasure to talk to you like this.) The other afternoon I went to see Irma Painter in her new play, and afterwards I went back to congratulate her (for she had heard, of course, that I was in the auditorium and would have felt insulted if I hadn’t gone – I’m different, I hate it when people feel obliged to come back). We were sitting in her dressing-room and I was looking at her face as she wiped the make-up off. We are about the same age, and we have both been acting since the year——I recognized her face as mine, we have the same face, and I understood that it is the face of every real actress. No, it is not ‘mask-like’, my face, her face. Rather, it is that our basic face is so worn down to its essentials because of its permanent readiness to take other guises, become other people, it is almost like something hung up on the wall of a dressing-room ready to take down and use. Our face is – it has a scrubbed, honest, bare look, like a deal table, or a wooden floor. It has modesty, a humility, our face, as time wears on, wearing out of her, out of me, our ‘personality’, our ‘individuality’.
I looked at her face (we are called rivals, we are both called ‘great’ actresses) and I suddenly wanted to pay homage to it, since I knew what that scoured plain look cost her – what it costs me, who have played a thousand beautiful women, to keep my features sober and decent under the painted shell of my make-up, ready for other souls to use.
At a party, all dressed up, when I’m a ‘person’, then I try to disguise the essential plainness and anonymity of my features by holding together the ‘beauty’ I am known for, creating it out of my own and other people’s memories. Of course it is almost gone now, nearly all gone the sharp, sweet, poignant face that so many men loved (not knowing it was not me, it was only what was given to me to consume slowly for the scrubbed face I must use for work). While I sat last night opposite you and your wife, she so pretty and human, her prettiness no mask, but expressing every shade of what she felt, and you being yourself only, I was conscious of how I looked. I could see my very white flesh that is guttering down away from its ‘beauty’; I could see my smile that even now has moments of its ‘piercing sweetness’; I could see my eyes, ‘dewy and shadowed’, even now … but I also knew that everyone there, even if they were not aware of it, was conscious of that hard, honest, workaday face that lies ready for use under this ruin, and it is the discrepancy between that working face and the ‘personality’ of the famous actress that makes everything I do and say affected, that makes it inevitable and right that I should say, ‘I don’t want a husband, I have so many husbands.’ And I tell you, if I had said nothing, not one word, the whole evening, the result would have been the same: ‘How affected she is, but of course she is an actress.’
Yet it was the exact truth, what I said: I no longer have lovers, I have husbands, and that has been true ever since …
That is why I am writing this letter to you; this letter is a sort of homage, giving you your due in my life. Or perhaps, simply, I cannot tonight stand the loneliness of my role (my role in life).
When I was a girl it seemed that every man I met, or even heard of, or whose picture I saw in the paper, was my lover. I took him as my lover, because it was my right. He may never have heard of me, he might have thought me hideous (and I wasn’t very attractive as a girl – my kind of looks, striking, white-fleshed, red-haired, needed maturity, as a girl I was a milk-faced, scarlet-haired creature whose features were all at odds with each other, I was pretty only when made up for the stage) … he may have found me positively repulsive, but I took him. Yes, at that time I had lovers in imagination, but none in reality. No man in the flesh could be as good as what I could invent, no real lips, hands, could affect me as those that I created, like God. And this remained true when I married my first husband, and then my second, for I loved neither of them, and I didn’t know what the word meant for years. Until, to be precise, I was thirty-two and got very ill that year. No one knew why, or how, but I knew it was because I did not get a big part I wanted badly. So I got ill from disappointment, but now I see how right it was I didn’t get the part. I was too old – if I had played her, the charming ingenuous girl (which is how I saw myself then, God forgive me), I would have had to play her for three or four years, because the play ran for ever, and I would have been too vain to stop. And then what? I would have been nearly forty, too old for charming girls, and then, like so many actresses who have not burned the charming girl out of themselves, cauterized that wound with a pain like styptic, I would have found myself playing smaller and smaller parts, and then I would have become a ‘character’ actress, and then …
Instead, I lay very ill, not wanting to get better, ill with frustration, I thought, but really with the weight of years I did not know how to consume, how to include in how I saw myself, and then I fell in love with my doctor, inevitable I see now, but then a miracle, for that was the first time, and the reason I said the word ‘love’ to myself, just as if I had not been married twice, and had a score of men in my imagination, was because I could not manipulate him, for the first time a man remained himself, I could not make him move as I wanted, and I did not know his lips and hands. No, I had to wait for him to decide, to move, and when he did become my lover I was like a young girl, awkward, I could only wait for his actions to spring mine.
He loved me, certainly, but not as I loved him, and in due course he left me. I wished I could die, but it was then I understood, with gratitude, what had happened – I played, for the first time, a woman, as distinct from that fatal creature ‘a charming girl’, as distinct from ‘the heroine’ – and I and everyone else knew that I had moved into a new dimension of myself, I was born again, and only I knew it was out of love for that man, my first husband (so I called him, though everyone else saw him as my doctor with whom I rather amusingly had had an affair).
For he was my first husband. He changed me and my whole life. After him, in my frenzy of lonely unhappiness, I believed I could return to what I had been before he had married me, and I would take men to bed (in reality now, just as I had, before, in imagination), but it was no longer possible, it did not work, for I had been possessed by a man, the Man had created in me himself, had left himself in me, and so I could never again use a man, possess one, manipulate him, make him do what I wanted.
For a long time it was as if I was dead, empty, sterile. (That is, I was, my work was at its peak.) I had no lovers, in fact or in imagination, and it was like being a nun or a virgin.
Strange it was, that at the age of thirty-five it was then for the first time I felt a virgin, chaste, untouched. I was absolutely alone. The men who wanted me, courted me, it was as if they moved and smiled and stretched out their hands through a glass wall which was my absolute inviolability. Was this how I should have felt when I was a girl? Yes, I believe that’s it – that at thirty-five I was a girl for the first time. Surely this is how ordinary ‘normal’ girls feel? – they carry a circle of chastity around with them through which the one man, the hero, must break? But it was not so with me, I was never a chaste girl, not until I had known what it was to remain still, waiting for the man to set me in motion in answer to him.
A longer time went by, and I began to feel I would soon be an old woman. I was without love, and I would not be a good artist, not really, the touch of the man who loved me was fading off me, had faded, there was something lacking in my work, it was beginning to be mechanical.
And so I resigned myself. I could no longer choose a man; and no man chose me. So I said, ‘Very well then, there is nothing to be done.’ Above all, I understand the relation between myself and life, I understand the logic of what I am, must be, I know there is nothing to be done about the shape of fate: my truth is that I have been loved once, and now that is the end, and I must let myself sink towards a certain dryness, a coldness of intelligence – yes, you will soon develop into an upright, red-headed, very intelligent lady (though, of course, affected!) whose green eyes flash the sober fires of humorous comprehension. All the rest is over for you, now accept it and be done and do as well as you can the work you are given.
And then one night …
What? All that happened outwardly was that I sat opposite a man at a dinner party in a restaurant, and we talked and laughed as people do who meet each other casually at a dinner-table. But afterwards I went home with my soul on fire. I was on fire, being consumed … And what a miracle it was to me, being able to say, not: That is an attractive man, I want him, I shall have him, but: My house is on fire, that was the man, yes, it was he again, there he was, he has set light to my soul.
I simply let myself suffer for him, knowing he was worth it because I suffered – it had come to this, my soul had become its own gauge, its own measure of what was good: I knew what he was because of how my work was afterwards.
I knew him better than his wife did, or could (she was there too, a nice woman in such beautiful pearls) – I know him better than he does himself. I sat opposite him all evening. What was there to notice? An aging actress, pretty still, beautifully dressed (that winter I had a beautiful violet suit with mink cuffs) sitting opposite a charming man – handsome, intelligent and so on. One can use these adjectives of half the men one meets. But somewhere in him, in his being, something matched something in me, he had come into me, he had set me in motion. I remember looking down the table at his wife and thinking: Yes, my dear, but your husband is also my husband, for he walked into me and made himself at home in me, and because of him I shall act again from the depths of myself, I am sure of it, and I’m sure it will be the best work I can do. Though I won’t know until tomorrow night, on the stage.
For instance, there was one night when I stood on the stage and stretched up my slender white arms to the audience and (that is how they saw it, what I saw were two white-caked, raddled-with-cold arms that were, moreover, rather flabby) and I knew that I was, that night, nothing but an amateur. I stood there on the stage, as a woman holding out my pretty arms, it was Victoria Carrington saying: Look how poignantly I hold out my arms, don’t you long to have them around you, my slender white arms, look how beautiful, how enticing Victoria is! And then, in my dressing-room afterwards I was ashamed, it was years since I had stood on the stage with nothing between me, the woman, and the audience – not since I was a green girl had I acted so – why, then, tonight?
I thought, and I understood. The afternoon before a man (a producer from America, but that doesn’t matter) had come to see me in my dressing-room and after he left I thought: Yes, there it is again, I know that sensation, that means he has set the forces in motion and so I can expect my work to show it … It showed it, with a vengeance! Well, and so that taught me to discriminate, I learned I must be careful, must allow no second-rate man to come near me. And so put up barriers, strengthened around me the circle of cold, of impersonality, that should always lie between me and people, between me and the auditorium; I made a cool, bare space no man could enter, could break across, unless his power, his magic, was very strong, the true complement to mine.
