Читать книгу The Golden Hour - Beatriz Williams - Страница 14

IF SOMETHING WERE to happen to my husband,” Elfriede says, “which God forbid, I wouldn’t marry again.”

“No. No. I don’t see why you should. I never did understand why women agree to marriage, unless perhaps as a kind of business arrangement.”

His answer so surprises her, she sits up and turns to stare at him. They’re lying side by side in a meadow not far from the clinic, but shielded from view by the shoulder of the mountain and, for good measure, by a stand of shrubby trees. Though the sun’s out and the temperature warm, the wildflowers have begun to die out by now. Color and scent have faded. Thank goodness for sunshine, then. Turning Wilfred’s hair—growing out nicely—a bright, autumnal copper. He lies with his arms raised, elbows bent, hands cradling the back of his head, and he stares back at her in enchantment.

“You’ve got grass in your hair,” he says.

Elfriede reaches for the back of her head. “Why do you say that? About marriage?”

“I just think it’s a rum deal all around, don’t you? Particularly for the women. Most wives—not all, by any means, but most—most wives strike me as chattel. They’ve got this dull, mute, complacent expression that says they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. They simply go about their appointed daily tasks, keeping busy, and—oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re happy. But it’s the dumb happiness of surrender. I’d rather be miserable than happy like that.”

A long stalk of meadow grass hangs from the corner of his mouth. The day after their encounter in the woods, Wilfred had a relapse—a minor one, as it turned out, but he was in bed for another week and confined to the infirmary garden for the week after that, and Elfriede begged him not to smoke any more. He protested that it was the damp weather and not the cigarette (half-smoked) that had caused the relapse, but he threw away the rest of the cigarettes anyway. Instead he chews on the meadow grass. Like a bull, she tells him. More like a steer, he corrects her, mournfully.

Now he plucks the grass from the corner of his mouth and says, “Also, I’ve always suspected their husbands don’t do much to please them in bed, these women.”

Elfriede makes an O with her mouth and turns away to face the peaks of the neighboring mountains. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says.

“You speak from experience?”

“You shouldn’t ask such questions.”

Wilfred makes a noise—not his Scotch noise, another one. He has a wardrobe of noises for every occasion. Each nuance of thought. Over the course of the past few weeks, Elfriede has learned and cataloged them all. This one’s meant to convey amusement, tempered with just a lash of longing.

“Anything but that,” Elfriede says. “You can ask me anything but that.”

IN FACT, GERHARD WAS ALMOST touchingly eager to please her, after the disastrous deflowering. He had dreamed of nothing but consummation with Elfriede during those months of their betrothal, and when at last he lifted his damp, triumphant head from the pillow next to hers, he’d evidently expected to see his own expression of spent rapture mirrored in that of his bride. The tears astonished him. Well, they horrified him! Filled him with profound remorse.

The thing about Gerhard, he was so stiff and formal in public and to strangers and even to his own family, his two sisters, one married and one maiden. Inside the privacy of marriage, however, he was a pussycat. Not, not a pussycat. More like a spaniel, deeply emotional, almost abject, wholly bound to the late Romantic ideal of a singular, mystical, all-powerful love between husband and wife. Also as a Romantic, he worshiped nature. He loved to go walking with Elfriede, away from the schloss and its gardens, maybe rowing on the lake. He didn’t say much during these expeditions, but tears often welled in his eyes as he gazed at her, especially once she became pregnant and her belly began to swell beneath her dress. He hated to leave her side, even to work in his study for a few hours, as duty demanded. Yet when he traveled to Berlin or to Vienna—to pay his respects to his Kaiser, to see to his business interests, to buy art for his collections—and Elfriede asked to go with him, he always refused.

No, he said. His angel Elfriede must not be polluted by the dirt of the city. He liked to think of her here, in the country, breathing the pure air that was so healthful for their growing child. Besides, he would say, kissing her tenderly, she wouldn’t like Berlin, it was chock-full of merchants and artists and Jews. The worst, decadent aspects of Vienna transported into a kind of German Chicago, whatever that was.

Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.

Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.

STILL, SHE CAN’T DISCUSS THESE things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)

“FAIR PLAY, I SUPPOSE,” SAYS Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”

“All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”

Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”

“Travel where?”

“Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”

Wilfred laughs. “America’s not as exotic as you think. Maybe the western part.”

“Have you been there?”

“I went to Boston with my father, one summer. It was hot and dirty and businesslike, and the people were surprisingly prim. They draw from Puritan stock, I believe. Then we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks, which was rather nicer. It sticks out right into the ocean, you see, curling like a scorpion’s tail, and we swam in the surf every morning at sunrise.”

“Heaven,” says Elfriede.

Wilfred struggles upward to sit beside her. “Not quite.”

“Why not?”

“This is more like heaven, if you ask me.”

A breeze comes upon them, stirring Elfriede’s clothes. Stirring his. The sky is clear above the greens and grays of the mountaintops, except for a single, small cloud that sticks to the highest peak. The air smells of warmth, of sunbaked grass, and occasionally of Wilfred when his scent steals close enough.

“I don’t understand …” she begins softly.

“Understand what?”

“Why you should move me like this, when he loved me so much. So terribly.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it? This.”

She leans her head on his shoulder. “What are we to do?”

“Nothing.” He touches her hair. Then he says it again, in English. Nothing.

Nothing, she repeats.

“No-thing. Th-th-th. Put your tongue beneath your upper teeth.”

“No-thing,” Elfriede says again, paying particular attention to this English th, her Waterloo these past few weeks. In order to pass the anxious time while Wilfred lay in bed with his relapse—a friendly orderly passed the notes between them—she began to teach herself English with the books from the sanatorium’s extensive library. She hoped to astound him when he recovered. Good morning, she said to him, when they met at last on the wall of the infirmary garden, the exact spot where they had spoken their first words to each other. (This by design, of course, in a note passed that morning from the orderly’s pocket.) I hope you are vell. She remembers how he turned—she’d come up to him from the meadow behind—and how the sight of his face, pale but radiant, made her dizzy. How his smile, growing slowly across his face to expose his teeth, illuminated the universe. Well, he said. W-w-w. Well.

W-w-well, she repeated.

I am well, thank you. Are you well, my love?

I am wery vell.

Now it’s a joke between them, how wery vell they both are during these slow, beautiful hours together. How wery vell the sun shines upon them, how wery vell the air smells, the ground feels, the skin glows. How wery vell she’s progressing in her English lessons.

Nothing, Elfriede says again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. We are doing nothing. How is zat?

“I’m being discharged,” Wilfred says in German.

BUT ISN’T THIS WHY THEY’VE fallen in love, so suddenly and so utterly? Because of course Wilfred must go home when he’s better, because of course Elfriede and Wilfred must part. It’s so easy and so safe to fall in love when the universe is against you. Now, they haven’t quite said those words to each other—I love you, we’ve fallen in love—but Elfriede has no doubt they echo inside Wilfred’s head, in the same way they echo in hers.

I am wery vell, she said aloud, on the wall of the infirmary garden. Translation: I love you.

Come, let’s go for a walk, Wilfred replied, taking her hand. Translation: I can’t bear to exist without you.

And they walked, and they existed with each other, and in the touch of Wilfred’s hand Elfriede imagined the rest of him. When they sat to rest, Elfriede stared at their clasped palms in the grass, Wilfred’s large, white bones curled around hers, and a premonition of grief came upon her. But what will I do when you’ve gone? she whispered.

I have an idea, Wilfred said. Let’s not speak of that day until it comes.

NOW IT’S COME.

“What?” Elfriede says.

“After all, I’ve regained my health.”

“But they don’t ever make you leave, the doctors. You can stay as long as you like.”

“Only if you’ve got the dosh, my dear.”

“But I could—we could—I have plenty of money—”

“You mean your husband has plenty of money.”

Elfriede bows her head to this truth. Across the meadow, about thirty yards away, the grass stirs. A rodent of some kind, or a rabbit. Making preparation for winter, though the sun is still warm, no hint of evil yet cools the air.

“We have until Thursday,” Wilfred says. “Four more days.”

“And then what?”

“Nothing. I go about my life, pretending my heart’s not beating away somewhere else, beating inside your chest—”

“Oh, don’t. Don’t.”

He doesn’t. So they sit, as they always do, as they’ve done for the past few weeks, since Wilfred was first allowed out of the infirmary garden with strict instructions not to exert himself, not to expose his lungs to any hint of inclement weather. Lucky for them, the weather has been fine, an unprecedented succession of warm, dry, perfect days. Or maybe it’s not luck, after all. Maybe some more conscious force has arranged their affairs in this manner. Either way, the result’s the same. They sit side by side in the meadow grass, watching the sun make its eternal arc across the heavens. Sometimes he touches her, as he does now. His fingertips on the backs of her knuckles.

“I once met this fellow in the south of France, this painter. Do you know what he called this time of day? The hour before sunset?”

“No.”

“The golden hour.” Wilfred waves his hand at the sun, which now burns just above the jagged peaks that form their horizon. “He said that’s when everything looks the most beautiful, just before the sun sets. This luminous air turning everything to gold. He said it made him want to paint the whole world. And then it’s gone, just like that. The sun disappears. The night arrives.”

“The golden hour.” Elfriede stares at Wilfred’s hair, which has indeed transformed into a gold so pure as to make the alchemists weep, like the sun itself. She wants to touch it, to bury her face in it, to lick the gold from each strand before it’s gone. Before Wilfred’s gone, and the night arrives.

“What about you, Elfriede?” he asks. “That’s the important thing. What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Except I can’t stay here any longer if you’re gone.”

“Can’t you?”

“No, it’s impossible. It will hurt too much.”

“Not so much as it hurts me to leave.”

“No, more. Because you’ll have Vienna, you’ll have new sights and scenes, nothing to remind you of me. Whereas here, these buildings, this mountain, this meadow—everything is you now. And it will be empty.”

“Is that so intolerable?”

“You know it is.”

“Hmm.” The fingertips make another waltz on her knuckles. A Blue Danube of longing. “I thought you needed approval from this doctor to leave. Are you certain you want to cross him?”

“He can’t stop me. I’ll find a way out, like you.”

Find a way out. Once she says the words, once she releases them into the air, they become possible. The horror of the outside world loses all consequence compared to the horror of existing inside the sanatorium without Wilfred. Against that, she has no other fear: not the mountain roads or the trains or the stares of strangers, not the husband she has disappointed, not the baby who doesn’t know her, not Herr Doktor Hermann and all his degrees and authority. She can leave. She is the wife of a baron, after all. She can arrange for a carriage, she can simply walk out the door if she wants. Who will dare to stop her?

Elfriede straightens her back. Her eyes are dry now, her blood’s warm. “Yes. I can’t stay here without you. I’ll leave.”

“Good,” says Wilfred. “That’s settled. But where will you go, my heart?”

She curls her fingers inside her palm, so that her entire hand disappears in the grass beneath Wilfred’s hand. Sometimes, sitting in this patch of meadow under the sun, smelling the warm, dead flowers, she forgets that anything else exists except the two of them, disappearing into the grass and each other.

Where will she go? She belongs to only one other place. Only one other heart beats inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.

“Back to my son, maybe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll go back to my son and miss your freckles. All twenty-six of them.”

BUT NO SUCH AGONIZING DECISION needs to be made, after all. When Elfriede returns to the sanatorium—by a different path from Wilfred’s, of course—Herr Doktor Hermann waits for her in her room. He takes her hands.

“There is terrible news, Elfriede,” he tells her. “I’m afraid your husband is very sick. The family has summoned you home to his side.”