Visions of Isabelle Read online

  "She hardly touches the piano."

  "Especially, notice, since Vava's had it fixed."

  "She doesn't resent him–that's what I don't understand. Nothing upsets her. The angrier he gets at some imagined slight, the more she smiles–so gently that it enrages him more."

  "I've heard him crying in their room. And when she barricades the door, he whimpers outside, begging to be let in."

  "Do you suppose they–you know–?"

  "What? Oh–that. Well, probably. Doesn't everyone?"

  "I don't know, of course."

  "Well, don't ask me."

  "Come on, Augustin. You know all about that."

  He laughs.

  "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  "Haven't you?"

  "Haven't I what?"

  "You know–"

  He clears his throat. "If you must know–yes."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Absolutely not."

  "Were you afraid?"

  "Nothing to be afraid of."

  "What did it feel like?"

  "Impossible to describe."

  "Try."

  He ponders, then smacks his lips. "It felt very, very good."

  "You're ridiculous."

  "I know."

  "Who was she?"

  "Which one?"

  "How the devil should I know which one? Any of them. Tell me how it happened."

  "That's very personal, Isabelle. A gentleman doesn't talk about things like that."

  "But you're not a gentleman!"

  "Ha! You're right!"

  "A whore I bet."

  "Never!"

  "I suppose you're so handsome you don't have to pay."

  "My dear Nastasia Filippovna–I have never had to pay for a woman and I never shall."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Find out for yourself."

  "Gladly. Find me a lover. Introduce me. I want to be taught. Find me an experienced man who will initiate me into everything. That's the least a brother can do."

  He laughs, and she stalks off ahead. By the time he catches up, he hasn't enough breath left to speak.

  They move along the banks of the Rhone, following cow paths and horse trails, sometimes cutting cross country on their own. The atmosphere is bucolic, the light shimmers on everything. They pass cows with bells hanging from their necks, milkmaids poised outside chalets, ponies trailing mares in meadows, old men fishing from rocks on the banks. They see butterflies, bees, robins, sparrows, hear the croaking of frogs. The countryside is so peaceful, so far from the tensions of Villa Neuve, that Isabelle and Augustin feel elation, join hands, swing their arms in what is at first a mock imitation of rustic fraternal affection but becomes, by the time they reach the frontier, an unashamed demonstration of joy.

  The road toward Collonges is white clay, a rolling ribbon shaded by tall straight poplars evenly spaced. This road, soft in the brilliant April sun, seems to draw them along to a place unknown. Horizons change. The river widens and slinks. Someplace between Chancy and Collonges they find themselves alone–there is not even a hay wagon, a scarecrow in sight. They stop at a farm when they are hungry, and pay a few centimes for a loaf of bread. Then they are off again, through Collonges, to the outskirts of Bellegarde, where suddenly a huge vista opens up. They see miles of land split by the river, a silver trail in the afternoon light.

  They sit down and stare toward the south. Each is thinking of escape. The Alps, which to tourists are such an exhilarating sight, seem to them at this moment like fortress walls which close them in.

  "Oh, Augustin, how are we ever going to get away?"

  Escape–it is painful, impossible. All of them, Nicolas, even Vladimir, spend hours staring at ceilings or off into space, dreaming, plotting ways of leaving home.

  Augustin shrugs.

  "We must," Isabelle insists.

  "Yes. I suppose we must."

  "There has to be some way."

  "Yes..."

  "Or otherwise we are doomed."

  At this moment an extraordinary event occurs. In the last few minutes the afternoon sun which had been brilliant has begun to wane. Isabelle and Augustin, immersed in thoughts of escape, have not noticed this ebbing of the light. Suddenly they both realize that the sky is becoming dark. They look up, see the sun reduced to a crescent nearly covered by a dark brown disk. They look at each other with the same word upon their lips: "Eclipse!"

  They are amazed. They have read of this thing, understand perfectly how it can occur, have seen it demonstrated by Vava with croquet balls and a candle set before a mirror. But this is their first experiencing of it, unexpected, unforewarned.

  Augustin begins to shiver; he feels cold. Isabelle embraces him tightly and they peer around at the strange soft light that plays upon the trees, draining all their green away. The Rhone, far below, goes rapidly from silver to deepest black. The snow on the mountains of Haute-Savoie loses its brilliance, turns to chalky gray.

  They press together, touch for warmth. A tremor passes through them, a single charge that links them to this cosmic change of mood. The eclipse binds them into one, and as they huddle, cold, superstitious, amazed and moved, it occurs to Isabelle who is fond of finding equivalents in nature for her own psychic states, that this incredible sight is a prophecy of familial doom, an omen of the darkening cloud that hangs above Villa Neuve.

  THE BROWN-EYED LEVANTINE

  By the end of November of 1893 Lake Geneva was frozen deeper than it had been in years–some said to a depth of two meters. The cold weather came in a flash, swirling down overnight from the Alps in a frosty wind, petrifying everything, including the juices of Alexandre Trophimovsky's precious Arizona cactus, killing whatever chance he might have had of recouping the fortune he'd put into the earth the previous spring.

  The air of that winter was extraordinarily clear, the mountains seemed painted, and the trees were coated with crystals of snow so delicate that they looked unreal. Children fought duels with icicles, dogs shivered and their barks turned hoarse, and as Christmas came upon the city, some of the owners of the larger villas ordered sculptures of the birth in the manger carved out of blocks of ice.

  A group of students from the university got together and constructed, according to an engraving in an old American book, an Eskimo igloo with a mathematically perfect dome. This was such a great success that the students were able to charge a nominal fee to curious passersby who could not believe that such a house was warm inside. Isabelle was one of those who paid, or rather she was the guest of her three brothers who escorted her on occasion into town. After the visit to the igloo she went to a café with Augustin while Nicolas and Vladimir disappeared on a mysterious errand. When Nicolas returned he was with someone new, a friend from Turkey whom he introduced as Rehid Bey.

  As the three youths talked, of politics, anarchism, Michelet, Bakunin, she studied the newcomer with extreme curiosity. He was slender, about her own height; his neck was wrapped in a long embroidered scarf, and his hair, or what she saw of it creeping around the sides of a matching Alpine cap, consisted of dark brown silky locks. But it was his eyes and eyelashes that she found most extraordinary–the eyes huge and soft dark brown, and the lashes lengthy, arching upward and downward with attenuated and, to her, delightful grace. However it was far more than these soulful eyes that interested her–really, and she said it to herself at the time, it was a very special aura, an almost sublime radiance that surrounded this young man whom she dubbed at once "the brown-eyed Levantine."

  At one point in the conversation, to which she barely listened, being bored by politics and particularly by what she considered the absurd intensity of her brothers and their extremist views, the eyes of Rehid Bey came to rest upon her own. She could not be certain if he was really seeing her. He acknowledged nothing, but at the same time gave off such a warm and mellow glow that Isabelle suddenly gasped as if she had been struck. At that moment of contact between their eyes, a flash of heat swept acr
oss her cheeks, moisture broke out upon her brow, and a tingling spread from a point at the base of her neck coursing in waves of delicious sensation to the tips of all her limbs. The cup of black coffee she had been holding slipped from her fingers, crashed upon the cobblestone walk below. Though people in nearby chairs turned around, her brothers barely glanced at her, for they were in the midst of making important points.

  Rehid Bey offered her a cigarette from a thin, elegant silver case.

  "Thank you," she said.

  "You are extremely welcome," he said, and this time, when his eyes met hers, she was certain she filled his sight.

  This encounter with the "brown-eyed Levantine" ricocheted in her mind through the Christmas holidays, which were, in this particular year, even worse than she remembered from before. Old Nathalie wanted a Christmas tree–she timidly broached the subject on one of those rare occasions when the family ate together at one time. "It will warm the house," she said, but Vava dismissed the idea with a snapping of his jaws. She brooded for a few days then brought the matter up again.

  Isabelle was amazed; she had never seen her mother in such an insistent mood. The clash was frightening, for the more violent Vava became, the more he pounded down his fists, kicked at chairs, threw pots against the walls, the more tranquilly Old Nathalie repeated her demand.

  "But this is against everything I've been saying to you for twenty years," Trophimovsky said.

  "I don't care," she said. "This is what I want."

  Finally he shrugged and Vladimir was dispatched to cut an evergreen from the back of the house. When it was finally set up, decorated with candles, little wooden images of angels and stars and a crèche at its base arranged in a bosom of boughs (a bizarre sight before the long-abandoned fresco which, due to age and dampness, had begun to peel), Vava refused to enter the room. All the work was done by the children who found the whole business laughable but wanted, more than anything, to see their mother pleased. So in the evening the five of them, mother, three sons and sixteen-year-old Isabelle, sat in boredom beside the tree and the precious De Moerder icon (finally dusted after so many years), reading, singing, playing chess, even helping Old Nathalie with her knitting of winter sweaters. Vava stayed secluded in his office where they could hear him shouting at the chemical additives and precious distillations, cursing them for not blending as he had foreseen. The tension was frightening. They all tried to stay out of the old man's way, but were forced inside by the chill, at times so cold that Isabelle's cheeks became numbed at the merest contact with the wind.

  A break was bound to come, and when it did on Christmas Eve, it was with unexpected deviousness. Vava's eruptions were always public spectacles–he savored his performances and sometimes, in a joking mood, would remind them of a particularly fierce one and laugh with them at the memory. But this time he struck behind their backs. He slipped into the drawing room when they were all asleep, stripping the tree of all its ornaments, singeing and then scraping away the needles until all the branches were bare, painting the denuded tree an angry red, hoisting it up by its stump to the ceiling and from there allowing it to hang upside down, decorated with ornaments of his own–grotesque little figures crudely crafted out of paper and cork which appeared to be devils, monsters, ghouls.

  Old Nathalie, unfortunately, was the first to find it in the morning and she began to scream. The others converged upon her and stared, amazed, at the incredible sight.

  Vava had disappeared; at least they could not find him. Finally, after their initial horror, and after the boys had dragged the ruined tree out the back door, Isabelle saw him walking across the snow, looking haggard and a little scared, timid about coming too close to the windows to see the effect of his terrible prank. She never forgot that sight of him, for he appeared most vulnerable then–the nasty demon skulking with fear and shame in the Christmas snow. When he finally did come in, and with a grand smile asked how they liked his little joke, Old Nathalie turned her face and fled upstairs.

  "What's the matter with her?" Vava asked, and indulged in a meager laugh.

  Later, thinking about it, discussing it with Augustin, Isabelle was horrified at the amount of anger in his act, the treachery, the scheming, for the plan must have taken him the whole night to carry out. Just considering the meanness and rage that it would take to sustain an attack like that made her depressed and also worried about his sanity.

  By January the mood of Villa Neuve was dark. The three boys were constantly away on errands in town that seemed to Isabelle to be the flimsiest of pretexts for something else. Old Nathalie had taken to her room with a debilitating cold and Vava was wracked with a ruinous cough. Isabelle immersed herself in the darkest works of Russian literature: Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Gogol's The Overcoat and The Nose–books and stories that doubled her gloom. She felt cut off from everything, even from Augustin who would not, no matter how longingly she pleaded, tell her about his activities in Geneva. There were hints, of course–he could not resist feeding her inklings of depravity, suggestions about strange people, plots, conspiracies, women, drugs But he refused to be specific about any of these things, and she found him, on the rare occasions when he was home, deep in whispered sessions with Nicolas and Vladimir–conversations which would cease the moment she came near. Vladimir's behavior confused her the most, for he had always been a lonely boy, without outside friends, and devoted to Vava and his grandiose gardening schemes. Now he evaded the old man with a craftiness that defied her conception of his character, and she saw in his eyes the special gleam of a man who has secret knowledge and from that takes strength.

  On February the seventeenth, Isabelle turned seventeen.

  Augustin took her into town, brought her to a Viennese pastry shop and there she was surprised by the appearance of her brothers and a fabulous confection ordered especially by them–a cake embellished with scallops of frosting and chips of candied fruit, her name emblazoned at an angle in an elaborate cursive script. Below it was a symbol of her life, an ax (for she was known in the family as the best of them at chopping wood) and a quill pen (since they knew she loved to read and longed to write). These two objects were crossed into an emblem, and the decorated piece was the one she devoured first. She was touched by this attention, and also by the way the boys included her in their talk, asking her opinion about politics and people, promising to introduce her to suitable young men. After tea they proceeded to a portion of Lake Geneva that had been cleared of snow and skated out among hundreds of young people, the three De Moerders clearing the way, mimicking trumpet flourishes and courtly bows as if introducing their younger sister to the grown-up world.

  Isabelle's skating was excellent, though more forceful than balletic. She had a special walk, a gait that would remain with her all her life. It was a strong, sliding stride, similar in ways to the famous desert pace of the foreign legionnaires of France. When applied to ice with bladed shoes, it allowed her to sweep about, hands behind her back, to glide with a swiftness that had more grace than all the coquettish pirouetting of the other girls who came to the lake in pairs to meet young men.

  With her brothers as a phalanx, on account of her special sense of herself at being seventeen, it was not long before she was a center of attention, and mobs of youths, students, soldiers, even young doctors and frivolous millionaires were trailing behind her, gliding at her side, trying, by various means such as racing ahead of her, sliding suddenly to a stop, then skating back past her, to catch her eye. She neither ignored them nor showed much interest. She set her face into a warm but abstracted smile and raced about as she saw fit, weaving in and out, cutting across their paths without much regard for their elaborate and mistimed attempts to intercept. Her brothers were delighted, cheered her on, took turns sweeping beside her, grasping her hand and leading her at racing speed far out to the edges where ice met snow. These mad dashes charged her body with a glow and filled her head with that special exhilaration obtained so easily by the limber and th
e young.

  Gliding back from one of these wild forays she spotted a familiar form sliding across the ice. She was struck at once by this person's graceful ease, the way he skated among the others with the superior air of a champion racehorse amidst a herd of mares. He wore a red sweater and a pair of elegant riding trousers with leather patches at the knees. A moment later he was joined by Nicolas, and the two of them slid along while deep in animated talk. Then Vladimir swooped down to them and they skated up to her three abreast.

  "Ah," Augustin whispered in her ear, "it's Rehid Bey."

  A moment later he stood before her and she was struck by the tiniest ridge of frost that clung to the tips of his arched eyelashes. He greeted her warmly, and while her brothers tried hard to conceal their smiles complimented her on her magnificent carriage.

  "You skate," he said without the slightest trace of irony, "like a Russian princess among Finnish serfs."

  She glowed with pleasure but felt weak-kneed. Suddenly her ankles gave way, she tried to recoup her balance, but fell awkwardly upon the ice. Augustin began to giggle, but Rebid Bey knelt to help her up. While Nicolas looked on amused and Vladimir gawked and Augustin turned his face away, Rehid Bey gravely placed one of her hands upon one of his, and with a nod of his head motioned for her to step out. She did, then he swooped forward himself and bore her away.

  It was as if wings had sprouted from her shoulder blades, as if they were two eagles glinting through the sky, as if they were twanging through space, zinging on rosewood skis through powdered snow, darting faster than time, flashing forward on thunderous stallions, a pair of pebbles rolling over and over in a cascade of foaming glacier melt. Before, she had been one of the attractions for the other skaters, but now, with him, she was the single attraction on the lake. "The brown-eyed Levantine and me," she kept saying over and over to herself as they gleamed before a multitude of witnesses, twirling dervishes, her hand on his, their skates flashing the cold February light.