Visions of Isabelle Page 7

  "I don't believe any of this!"

  "It's true, Isabelle. Those gray plants with purple flowers down near the moat–they were poppies. Vava, of course, didn't know what was going on. As far as he was concerned Vladimir was just experimenting with some new exotics."

  "All right, all right, but what happened next?"

  "Things got difficult. The Russians saw all this money coming in and they got greedy. No matter how much we brought them, they immediately demanded more. So we needed to expand our market, and that meant recruiting smokers. Nicolas and I concentrated on that, visiting the student cafés and selling the stuff wherever we could. It had to end, of course. We ran out of flowers, and then the police got onto us because some of the students talked. These last weeks have been dangerous. We've been afraid to go around Bourg de Four, and meantime the Russians have been clamoring for money. A couple of weeks ago the question came up–what were we going to do?"

  "What could you do?"

  "We decided that Vladimir was safe. The Russians didn't know much about him and he wasn't involved in the selling. But Nicolas and I were cornered–it was clear we'd have to pull out. Nicolas wanted to go to Russia and he came up with a scheme. We'd go directly to Count Prozov–the man at the Russian legation who's been sent here to get rid of the terror rings. We'd give him all the information we had, and in return we'd ask for transport back to Russia and some position there so we could be safe. But for me this was impossible. I didn't give a damn about Russia, and I didn't trust Prozov. He's got his thugs here stalking the terrorists, and he's killed a few of them already. What was to prevent him from killing us, too, after we talked? Then there's something else."

  "What?"

  "Haven't you had enough?"

  "I want to know it all."

  "Well, all right, it concerns a girl. You know her. Madeleine Joliet."

  "Yes, of course I know her. But you're not serious?"

  "Very serious. We're engaged."

  "If Vava ever heard..."

  "But he hasn't. Nobody knows. It's a secret engagement. I didn't want to be thrown out of here just because he doesn't approve of her social position or some nonsense like that."

  ''So..."

  "So I couldn't go to Russia and leave her behind. Nicolas and I argued, and we decided to go our separate ways. The three of us made an agreement. Vladimir would stay on here, working in the garden, never leaving the house. Madeleine and I would slip into France, and then make our way south where I would join the French Navy. And Nicolas would go to Prozov with his list of cadres–he had everything down in code copied from its reflection in a mirror. That was the plan."

  "What happened?"

  "I don't know. The whole point, you see, was that the two of us would act on the same day. Well, when Nicolas disappeared a few days ago, I just assumed he'd lost his nerve–or something. It never occurred to me that he'd break his word. So I just went ahead with my own plans to leave on Monday night. But this afternoon I heard that ten or fifteen of the Russians have vanished suddenly, without a trace. I thought of Prozov, and then of Nicolas who's been gone, and then I thought that maybe Nicolas sold us out. I don't know. Maybe he had this in mind all along. He kept his little notebook for years. He always thought of himself as a patriot, and he's always wanted to go back and be the son of General De Moerder and be an officer in the Imperial army. I think he only started with the terrorists so he could get their names and then trade them off for a good position–show his patriotism and be honored in Russia as a savior of the czar. Anyway, whatever the reasons, I have to leave right away. I'm meeting Madeleine in an hour and we're off tonight for good."

  "But this is mad, mad–absolutely mad!"

  "Yes. That's exactly what it is." He sits down, exhausted. He is panting and she is dazed. For several seconds they stare out into space.

  "So, you will finally get away."

  "Yes..."

  "The navy."

  "Yes."

  "With Vivicorsi?"

  "So you know about that, too."

  She nods. Though he must realize she's been through his desk, he doesn't seem to care. It's as if nothing matters to him anymore.

  "And Madeleine–do you really think you'll be happy with her?"

  "I don't know. Maybe. Yes. I suppose I shall."

  Another silence.

  "When do you go?"

  "In a few minutes, I suppose."

  "No good-byes?"

  "No. Impossible. I shall have to write Mama later."

  "And you'll come back for me."

  "Of course."

  "Oh, Augustin!" She throws her arms around him, holds him as he begins to sob. "Who could ever have guessed it would end like this?"

  "It's all such an awful mess."

  "Yes," she says, "but at least you'll finally have escaped. Your life begins now, you know. You're so lucky to be a man. You have the whole world."

  "Yes, yes..." He smiles at her. "I'm glad I told you everything."

  "But you've been so stupid, Augustin."

  "I know. That's why I couldn't tell you before. I couldn't bear to face your cool judging eyes."

  "Promise me you won't be stupid again."

  "Yes. I promise."

  She holds him for a while. Then, he gets up slowly. She watches while he puts on his coat, retrieves his bag from the wardrobe. He turns to her, is about to speak.

  "No. Not here. I'll come with you to the door."

  The house is silent as they pass through the halls. Downstairs it is dark. Vava, Vladimir, Old Nathalie–they've all disappeared. Augustin opens the front door. They both step out. The cool wind that blows down from the Alps shakes the limbs of the trees, blows colored leaves to the ground. They stand in silence on the steps, inhaling the damp pungency of this garden they know so well. Augustin carefully places his bag upon the stones. Isabelle opens her arms and they embrace.

  Their kiss is long, tender, then slowly turns another way. Without realizing what is happening or why, their mouths begin to open, their tongues begin to dart, and Isabelle flings back her head. Suddenly they feel warmth, heat, fire. All the forbidden lust that has been stored inside them for years rushes out as they cling to one another and begin to sob. Their bodies press and twitch, they pant and moan, but it is too late for them. They have no time to consummate their love.

  Finally Augustin breaks away, wipes his tears and places his moist handkerchief in her hand. She watches as he walks away, disappears into the blackness of the garden, and then, long after he is gone, she returns to his room and spends the night between his deserted sheets.

  December 8, 1895

  Beloved Sister,

  Augustin De Moerder, soldier in the First Foreign Regiment, 18th Company, Serial No. 19686, at SidiBel-Abbes, near Oran, Algeria.

  There, my dear, is the whole unhappy truth. Still I dream of you and Mama.

  Yours forever, Augustin

  Villa Neuve,Christmas Eve, 1895.

  Beloved Augustin,

  The sky is sad and gray, and a blanket of snow covers the garden. It is Christmas Eve and I send you greetings from my unhappy heart. Who knows if we shall ever see one another again? Who knows if the kisses exchanged on the doorstep at 10:00 pm, Saturday, October 12, will have been our last? Where are all our dreams? Oh, Augustin–those papers we signed on September 21, 1894, in which we asked ourselves where we'd be the following year....

  A few days ago I received a letter from Vivicorsi in which, in reply to one of mine signed N. Podilinsky, sailor (I didn't know any other way to gain his confidence) he informed me that you'd joined the Legion. Then, yesterday, your confirmation. Have you really been such a fool?

  No one knows anything yet. Impossible for me to mention these letters. And really, even without this latest fiasco of yours, I'm being absolutely destroyed by all the madness around the house. Two brothers gone, and Vava in a bewildered rage. I am contemplating suicide, but have no fear–I shall resist.

  I vaguely understa
nd some insane scheme that has germinated in your over-heated brain: to become a naturalized Frenchman, thanks to the Legion, and then to join the Navy later. Let me know if that is really your plan. (Your notes from Marseilles were incoherent. What were you doing in Toulon? What was all of that about going to South America?)

  Augustin, darling, do you remember the day we sat alone in the shade of white maples in the mountains above Collonges? To be together like that again–beneath that great silent shadow, that magnificent eclipse. That is my dream.

  Yours, devotedly, near or far,

  Isabelle

  Nicolas De Moerder was not heard from again–it seemed to Isabelle that Mother Russia had swallowed him up. Vava stormed about cursing him and Augustin for their unforgivable stupidities, and then became even more enraged when Augustin wrote he could not bear the rigors and discipline of the legion and was scheming to cut short his enlistment on grounds of failing health.

  "He's a weakling and a coward," Vava ranted. And then, to Old Nathalie: "It seems his yellow De Moerder blood has finally won the game!"

  But Vava was pleased with Vladimir who stayed within the villa walls, head down near the ground, preoccupied with plants. For his devotion to the garden Vava lovingly named him "Cactophile," and said many times that Vladimir was the only one of the De Moerder children who showed signs of purpose and strength of will.

  Through 1896 the atmosphere at Villa Neuve grew oppressive–with only a single brother still at home (and one she believed was slowly going insane before her eyes), Isabelle alone bore the brunt of Vava's rages, and of her mother's inconsolable tears. She spent hours on her correspondence with Eugène Letord, begging him for help, still dreaming of escape.

  He'd convinced her now, and so had Augustin, that North Africa should become her home. She'd decided to become a writer and to begin her career there. But her problems seemed insurmountable. She was certain that Vava would never willingly let her go, and that, if she ran, Old Nathalie, without her presence as a defense, would crumble with the strain.

  In February i897, Isabelle finally decided to make her move. A friend of Augustin had a house for rent in the Algerian coastal town of Bône. She showed the letter to Old Nathalie, then proposed that they leave Switzerland together, if only to free themselves awhile from Vava's diabolic moods.

  After some days of discussion Old Nathalie agreed, then together they planned their attack. They chose the breakfast hour to announce their plans, since Vava was always irascible at the end of the day, if not completely incoherent and drunk.

  He glowered at Old Nathalie the whole time Isabelle spoke, grinding his breakfast rolls in his hands.

  "And it won't be as if we were really leaving home," she lied. "Just a long vacation–a chance for all of us to calm our nerves. If we're away too long, you can always make a visit, and of course we'll come back here often to see you and Vladimir."

  Silence, then, as Vava sprouted a crafty smile–a prelude, she was sure, to a horrible scene.

  "So you're to live among the barbarians!" he said, finally, still looking at Old Nathalie though addressing Isabelle. "I'm sure you both do need the sun–your pallors have turned a sickly gray, doubtless the result of lack of commitment to productive work! And then you'll have your wretched brother close at hand, and this 'Eugène' you speak about, who's surely after what he thinks is virginal flesh and the illusive 'Russian Fortune' that all Frenchmen think we possess."

  His lower lip was trembling. She felt his sarcasm was about to give way to rage. But he kept his temper, and for a moment Isabelle thought she saw the gleam of moisture in his eyes. If there were tears, Vava drew them back. A moment later he turned serene.

  "Ah," he said, as warmly as he could, "just as our little family has reduced itself to three–the three, I might add, whom I've always loved the best–you two decide you have to leave. I won't stop you. I'd even join you if I could. But please forgive me if I stay on here. The Cactophile and I are very close now to the formula for the ultimate perfume. After all these terrible years I feel the breakthrough is just months from my grasp."

  And then, as if he sensed their talk of a "vacation" was a pretext for a more permanent escape:

  "Ha! You'll always be welcome back, of course, even if you come back only when you've heard I've gotten rich!"

  With that he gulped his coffee, stood up, threw the crumbs of his rolls onto the table, bent down, kissed them both, then marched out to the garden shouting orders at Vladimir, while Isabelle and Old Nathalie stared after him in disbelief.

  THE WARM SHADE OF ISLAM

  She is ravished by the sun. Her skin glows with its warmth. It gazes down upon the white city out of a sky of the clearest blue, radiating energy, illuminating life.

  She buys herself a man's woolen robe, then strides through the narrow streets of Bône like a tribal prince. It is Ramadan, the Moslem holy month, and the fasting has made the Arabs irritable. But she doesn't care–she revels in their surliness, for it requites her expectation of a disturbing barbaric land.

  The light glitters off white walls. Minarets, like affirmative fingers, point the way to heaven and sky. The sea is clear. The muezzin whine. The juices of the oranges run like blood.

  She barters in the souks, then stands back to exalt in the clamor all around. The east wind blows with a faint and maddening howl, and everywhere there are smells, hundreds of them: incense, sewage, coriander, lemons, mint, donkeys, sea and death.

  She discovers kif within the month. Of all the odors of Bône the pungent smell of the drug caresses her most forcefully, snags her off the boulevards of the European quarter into narrow rooms on twisting streets. With kif, the notes of flutes become the harmonies of stars, the thud of drums becomes a cosmic pulse.

  She walks through the streets of woodworkers, ironmongers, copper-beaters, button-makers, men who work gold and make daggers, women who mold pots and weave cloth and rugs. Then, exhausted, she flings herself down upon the mats of a cafe, lies back against velvet cushions, nibbles at honey-soaked confections and sips mint tea.

  She loves the way the tea burns her lips, and the sound of Arabic, so guttural, so much like grunting, so filled with "ach" and hiss, that wafts from the circles of men shrouded in hoods of dark brown wool.

  She spends hours in cafés reclining with her pipe, inhaling pungent, acrid, beckoning smoke that penetrates her nostrils then crawls deep within to balloon her head. She stares out into streets striped by sunlight burning down through overarching slats, and after blurred hours, she makes her way through the dark medina labyrinth, guided by oil lamps that glow like pinwheels. From there she wanders to the ramparts of the port where the sea, phosphorescent and still, seems to quiver at the pressure of her breath.

  She trembles with anticipation as she prepares to meet Eugène. What will he be like? Will all the confidences they've exchanged make them awkward, shy?

  Their rendezvous is set for the Café de France, central meeting point for travelers by the docks where the boats from Europe come in. Though they've long since exchanged photographs, they set up elaborate signals of identification which they then most scrupulously observe. He's to arrive in his uniform a half hour early, take a table, immerse himself in a novel by Dostoyevsky. When a tall young woman in a cape of rust-colored wool sits near, he's to offer her a cigarette.

  He looks as she's always imagined he would–tall, straight, blond hair cut into short curved locks. His face is sensitive yet firm–the face of a man who lives a double life, spends his days feigning excitement over maneuvers, his nights writing verse, humming Brahms, reading Aeschylus in Greek.

  As they appraise one another (to him she's always been a cipher, someone he's met by the sheerest luck, whose friendship he prizes but whom he dares not tell himself he's ever really understood), they fall into an excited intimate way of speaking that reminds her of a brother and a sister in reunion after a term away at school.

  "Good–you're happy," he says. "I can tell by your eyes."r />
  "Oh, yes, Eugène, yes! Now I feel that everything begins."

  "And you like it here?"

  "I adore it! I think that I really am an Arab at heart–born by mistake in a wrong country, you see, struggling all these years to find my real home. Now I can't imagine being anyplace else. The streets; the light; this African sun–look!" She reaches down, touches the pavement beneath the table. "These stones, even these stones! I feel as if I've known them always, have dreamed of them. As if they're a part of me, and have always been."

  He stares at her, amazed.

  "Really," she says. "You've given me the best gift of my life." She makes a great circle with her arm. "This," she says. "All this!"

  "You are extraordinary. I can't get over it. I don't know exactly what I expected. Someone very difficult, I suppose–someone moody, tormented, dark. But you are just like your letters. So full of life."

  Tears come into her eyes. She searches his face for some clue to the love that comes upon her so suddenly in this ordinary café.

  "People are looking at us," he whispers.

  "I can sense it. Yes!"

  "Listen. The tone of the café has changed. People are touched. They are watching us and inventing stories in their minds."

  "Yes! Yes!"

  And to her it does feel as if the whole café terrace, the quai, the port, the coast are coated in dark shadow, while shimmering sunlight dances only upon them.

  "All right," he says. "Now you've escaped. You're free. But what about the future? What will you do now?"

  "I don't know. I'm still struggling with that. I want to be a writer–to shock people. And–a great personage, like a character in a novel. My life should be full of struggles and passions. Great moments. Ecstasy. Fame."