I called the waiter and paid the bill. I had suddenly opened up, become emboldened. I was looking straight into the face of the man writing a few numbers on a long-leafed notebook, as if to say “Don’t you notice my happiness, you fool!” and felt a strong desire to greet with laughter the customers who hadn’t yet left the hall, even the orchestra. Inside me was suddenly a desire to embrace all people, to kiss everyone with the passionate affection of friends who have finally reunited after being separated for long years.
I got up from my place. I walked with wide, comfortable, self-confident steps and went to the wardrobe, jumping several steps of stairs at once. Although such rakish behavior wasn’t my habit at all, I left one mark for the woman who gave me my coat. At the door I took a deep breath and looked around. Above me the Atlantik sign had gone out; the sea waves had become invisible. The sky was clear and in the west there was a thin crescent that had approached the horizon.
Behind me a soft voice said:
“Did you wait long?”
“No… I just came out!” I answered and turned.
She was standing across from me, blinking her eyes like people thinking without making a decision. Finally, moving her lips slightly:
“You really seem like a good person!” she said.
All my courage, my freedom, had flown away as soon as she came. Although the desire passed through me to thank her, to cling to and kiss her hands, I could only say in a barely audible voice:
“I don’t know!”
The woman, in a very free manner, grabbed my arm, held my chin with her other hand, in a soft voice as if caressing a small child:
“Oh, you’re really shy like a young girl!” she said.
My face flushing, I looked ahead. I was thoroughly embarrassed by a woman treating me so brazenly. Fortunately she too didn’t go further. First she released my chin, then the hand holding my arm slowly dropped to her side. When I raised my eyes, I was left in astonishment. On the face of the person across from me was also tremendous confusion, even shame. A redness was spreading from her neck toward her cheeks. Her eyes were half-closed and she hesitated to look at me.
A question immediately passed through my mind: “Why is she doing this? It’s certain she’s not such a woman… But why is she doing this?”
As if guessing my thoughts:
“This is how I am!” she said. “I’m a strange woman… If you want to be friends with me, you’ll have to endure many things… I have very meaningless caprices, incompatible moods… In short, I’m a very troublesome and incomprehensible creature for the people who are my friends…”
Then, as if angry at having spoken so badly of herself, she added in a sharp, almost rude voice:
“But if you wish… I need no one… I don’t intend to be grateful to anyone, to want anyone’s friendship, favor… If you want…”
I, in my same soft and timid voice:
“I’ll try to understand you…” I said. We walked a few steps. She slowly entered my arm and began speaking in a colorless voice as if talking about very simple things:
“So you’ll try to understand me? Not a bad idea… But it seems to me, wasted effort!.. Only sometimes I think I can be a good friend… Time will show… If we have small quarrels, it doesn’t matter. You won’t mind.”
She stopped in the middle of the road, raised and waved the index finger of her right hand as if instructing a child to behave:
“Pay attention to this: the day you ask me for anything, everything is finished. Nothing, do you understand, you will ask for nothing…” Then she continued in an angry voice as if fighting with an unknown enemy: “Do you know why I hate you—that is, all men—so much in this world? Simply because they ask many things from a person as if they’re their most natural rights… Don’t misunderstand me; these demands don’t necessarily have to take the form of words… Men have such a look, such a smile, such a way of raising their hands, in short such a way of treating women… You’d have to be blind not to notice how excessively and how foolishly they trust themselves. To see the confusion they fall into when their demands are rejected in any way is enough to understand their impudent pride. They never give up thinking of themselves always as a hunter, us as poor prey. Our duty is only to submit, to obey, to give what’s wanted… We can’t want, we don’t give anything on our own… I’m disgusted by this foolish and impudent male pride. Do you understand? That’s why I think I can be friends with you. Because in your manner there’s none of that meaningless self-confidence… But I don’t know… I’ve seen savage wolf teeth grinning from the mouths of lambs…”
Toward the middle of her words we had started walking again. She was taking quick and hard steps. She was speaking, fixing her eyes now on the ground, now on the sky, making gestures with her hands. Between sentences she left pauses long enough to give the feeling she had finished speaking, and during this time she would continue on her way, again half-closing her eyes.
We walked quite a bit. She had fallen into a long silence again. I too was going beside her fearfully and keeping silent. On one of the streets around the Tiergarten, she stopped before a three-story stone building.
“I live here… With my mother…” she said. “We’ll continue our conversation tomorrow… But don’t come there… I think I wouldn’t be pleased to appear to you in that state… You can record this as a point in your favor… Let’s meet tomorrow during the day… We’ll walk around together. I have my own particular walking places in Berlin. Let’s see if you’ll like them… For now, good night… One minute: I still don’t know your name!..”
“Raif!”
“Raif?.. Just that much?”
“Hatipzade Raif!”
“Ah, impossible… I can neither keep it in my mind nor pronounce it! Can’t I just say Raif?”
“I’d be more pleased!”
“You too can just call me Maria… I told you, I don’t want to be under obligation!”
She laughed again; her face, which had changed expression several times since a while ago, again took on that sweet, friendly state. Extending her arm, she squeezed my hand in her palm. In a soft voice that for some reason gave me the feeling she was apologizing, she wished good night a second time, took her key from her bag, and turned her back. I moved away slowly.
I hadn’t gone five or ten steps when I heard her voice behind me.
“Raif!”
I turned around where I was and waited.
“Come! Come!” she said. In her voice was a manner as if she could barely control her laughter. Adopting a very polite air:
“I’m fortunate to have obtained so quickly the opportunity to address you only by your name!” she was saying. Because she had climbed to the upper steps of the stairs before the door, I raised my head and looked at her face. Because she remained in the twilight, I couldn’t see anything. I was waiting for her to continue speaking. Indeed, in that same voice reminiscent of laughter, but trying to be very serious, “So you’re going?” she said.
My heart leaping, I took a step forward. With a possibility I couldn’t determine at that moment whether it pleased me or not, and with a hope I feared to bring to mind:
“Should I not go?” I said.
She too descended two steps. Now her face, struck by the street lamp, was very clearly visible. Running her black eyes over my face with cunning curiosity, she asked:
“You still haven’t understood why I called you back?”
I understood, I understood… Here I come, I was about to throw myself into her arms. But inside me, much stronger than this feeling, I felt a collapse, a confusion, even a nausea. Turning bright red, I looked ahead. No, no! I didn’t want this!..
The woman’s hand moved on my cheeks:
“What’s happening to you? You’re about to cry!.. You really need not a sister but a mother… Tell me, you were separating from me and going now, weren’t you?”
“Yes!”
“You wouldn’t search for me at the Atlantik again… We had talked like that!”
“Yes! We’ll meet tomorrow during the day!”
“Where?”
I looked at her face stupidly. This hadn’t occurred to me at all. As if pleading, I asked:
“Is this why you called me?”
“Of course… You really don’t resemble other men… Their first business is first to secure these aspects. You’re taking your head and going… The person you’re searching for doesn’t always appear in your path like tonight, wherever you want…”
I felt an oppressive doubt lift from my soul. I was afraid of living an ordinary rake adventure with her. I couldn’t do that. Rather than see the Madonna in a Fur Coat in that state, I would prefer to be taken for stupid, inexperienced by her. But this possibility was also distressing. Thinking she would laugh behind me after we separated, that she would mock my naiveté, my timidity, could give results heavy enough to require me to turn my back on all people completely, to give up hope on everyone and withdraw completely into myself.
But now my heart was at ease. I was feeling great shame for my impertinent suspicions a few minutes ago and also great gratitude toward the woman across from me for freeing me from these suspicions. Pulling myself together with unexpected courage:
“You’re a wonderful woman!” I said.
“Don’t hurry… Be very cautious especially when passing judgment on me!”
I clung to her hands and kissed them. Probably my eyes had teared up. For a moment I saw her face approaching me, her eyes almost embracing me with a much warmer expression than what I had seen until then. Before this happiness approaching to a few centimeters from my face, my heart almost stopped.
But she suddenly and with a rather harsh movement pulled her hands away and straightened up.
“Where do you live?”
“On Lützow Street!”
“It’s not far!.. Then come and get me from here tomorrow afternoon!”
“Which apartment do you live in!”
“I’ll wait for you at the window. There’s no need for you to come upstairs!”
Turning the key standing on the door, she entered inside. This time I took the road home with quick steps. My body seemed lighter to me than usual. Before my eyes was always her image. I was murmuring something, but didn’t know what these things were. When I paid attention, I understood I was repeating her name and always addressing her with a bunch of caressing words. From time to time, I was giving short and silent laughs I had no possibility of controlling. When I came to the pension, the horizon had begun to lighten.
Perhaps for the first time since childhood, I fell asleep without thinking of the meaninglessness and emptiness of my life, without saying “So today passed too… And all my days will pass like this, then what anyway!”
The next day I didn’t go to the factory. Around two-thirty, passing through the Tiergarten, I approached the house where Maria Puder lived.
I was asking myself, I wonder if it’s early. Thinking she had stayed up until morning, thinking of the tiredness of her night work, I hesitated to disturb her. Inside me was an indescribable tenderness toward her. I was imagining how she lay in her bed, how she breathed slowly, how her hair spread on the pillow, and I was thinking there could be no greater happiness in life than seeing this scene.
The interest I had withheld from all people until then, the love I had never truly felt toward anyone, seemed to have all accumulated and now emerged toward this woman as a tremendous mass.
I knew I didn’t yet know anything about her, that all my judgments were based on imagination and dreams. Nevertheless, I had an unshakable conviction that I was never mistaken.
Throughout my life I had always searched for her, waited for her. Could my senses, which had acquired an almost morbid faculty and sensitivity by gathering all their attention, all their being at one point and searching for this person everywhere, examining each person encountered from this perspective, be mistaken? These feelings had never made a mistake until now. They would pass the first judgment on a person, then my mind, my experiences would modify this, usually wrongly. But each time, this first feeling turned out to be right. It would happen that a person about whom I had passed positive judgment seemed bad to me over time, or vice versa. Then I would say to myself: “So my first impression deceived me!” but after a while—this while could be short or very long—I would be forced to admit the correctness of my first judgment, that the changes logic, external influences or deceptive events had made on it were false and temporary.
Now Maria Puder was a person I unconditionally and absolutely needed to live. This feeling seemed strange to me too at first. How could the existence of a person I hadn’t even known existed until this age suddenly become a necessity for me? But isn’t it always like this? Don’t we discover our need for many things only after seeing and knowing them?..
I too had begun to find the emptiness of my life until then, its purposelessness, solely in my deprivation of such a person. My fleeing from people, my hesitating to let even the smallest piece of what went through me be sensed by my surroundings would seem causeless and meaningless to me. From time to time I would fear that the melancholies surrounding me, the weariness of life, were signs of spiritual illness. When reading a book, noticing that the two hours that passed were fuller, more important than many years of my life, I would think of the frightening nothingness of human life and remain in despair.
But now everything had changed. In the few weeks that had passed since I saw this woman’s picture, I felt I had lived more than all the years of my life. Every day, every hour of mine, even the times I slept, were full. I was seeing that not only my limbs giving me only fatigue, but also my soul had begun to live, that the covered deep parts waiting inside me without my knowledge had suddenly emerged and presented me with extremely attractive, valuable landscapes. Maria Puder had taught me I had a soul, and I too was determining for the first time among the people I had encountered until now that she had a soul. Certainly all people had souls, but many weren’t aware of this and would go where they came from, again without being aware. A soul emerged only when it found its like, and without even needing to consult us, our mind, our calculations… Only then did we truly begin to live—to live with our soul. Then all hesitations, shames were set aside; souls, to embrace each other, would run to each other, trampling everything. All my timidities had disappeared. I was impatient to pour out everything before this woman, to lay my completely naked soul before her without hiding even the smallest point, with all my good and bad, strong and weak aspects. I had so many things to tell her… I thought these wouldn’t end even if I spoke all my life. Because I had been silent all my life; for everything that passed through my mind I had said: “Come on you, what good will it do to say it anyway?” Just as before, without any foundation, purely under the influence of an irresistible feeling, a prejudgment, I had said about every person: “This person won’t understand me!” this time for this woman, again without any foundation but subject to that infallible first feeling, I was saying: “This person will understand me!”…
While walking slowly, I had come to a canal passing through the southern edge of the Tiergarten. The house of Maria Puder was visible from this bridge. It was still three o’clock. Because the house windows were shining, it wasn’t visible whether anyone was behind the windows. Leaning on the edge of the bridge, I looked at the motionless waters. A light rain that had just started was making the water’s hair stand on end. Far ahead, a large motorized barge was unloading fruit and vegetables to carts on the wharf. Leaves falling one by one from the trees at the edges were sliding down, making twists in the air. How beautiful this dark and distressing scene was! How fresh this damp air I drew into me was! To live by sensing nature’s smallest movements, by watching life’s flow with unshakable logic; to live knowing one lives more, more powerfully than everyone, that one fills a lifetime with as much life as a moment… And especially to live thinking there exists a person to tell all this to, waiting for her…
Could there be anything more refreshing in the world?
Now I would walk with her on these wet roads, we would sit in a deserted and dim place and come face to face. I would tell her many things, things I had never told anyone until now, not even myself. Most of these were being born in my head in an instant and were giving way to new ones with a speed that astonished me. I would take her hands again into my palms, would bite her cold fingers whose tips were a bit red, rubbing them.
In a word, I would be close to her.
It was coming to three-thirty. I wonder if she woke up, I said. Would it be right to go toward the house and walk around there? She had said she would look from the window. Could she guess I would wait here? I wonder if she would really come?.. I immediately expelled this doubt from my head. I felt that thinking this way was a distrust toward her, an injustice, kicking the building I had constructed myself. But once they came to my mind, these kinds of possibilities chased each other with great speed. She could have gotten sick. An urgent matter could have come up and she could have gone somewhere. This must be how it was. Such great happiness coming so easily wasn’t natural. With each passing minute my panic increased more, my heart beat faster. What happened to me last evening was one of those extraordinary states that occur only once in a person’s life. It wouldn’t be right to expect its repetition. My head had even begun to find various consolations. The sudden entry of my life onto such a new and dark-futured road perhaps wouldn’t be good for me. Wasn’t it more comfortable to return to my old calm, to cling to the chain of numb days?..
When I turned my head, I saw she was coming toward me. On her back was a thin raincoat; on her head a navy blue beret; on her feet low-heeled shoes. Her face was smiling. When she came beside me, extending her hand:
“Did you wait for me here? Since when?” she said.
“For an hour!”
My voice was trembling from excitement. She, thinking this was a complaint, with a half-joking reproach:
“Your own fault, sir,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour and a half. By not coming to the front of the house and preferring this poetic scene, I noticed by chance just now!”
So she had waited for me. So I was a person of importance to her. Like a caressed little cat, I looked into her eyes:
“Thank you!”
“What are you thanking for?”
Without waiting for my answer, she entered my arm:
“Come on, let’s go!”
I began walking, subject to her. She was taking short but quick steps. I was afraid to ask where we would go. We both weren’t speaking. Although I was extremely pleased with this silence, I was eating myself, thinking it was absolutely necessary to say something. Not one of those beautiful ideas that had passed through my mind one after another a moment ago, each surpassing the other in being important and interesting, was present. The more I forced myself, the more I felt my head completely emptying and becoming more wretched, and that my brain was nothing but a throbbing piece of meat. When I looked from the corner of my eye, I saw not a trace in her of this panic and excitement in me. With her black eyes turned to the ground, with that stone-solid and motionless calm on her face, that faint curve reminiscent of a smile at the corner of her lips, she was continuing on her way. She had simply left her left hand on my arm. Her index finger, standing a bit raised, was meaningful as if indicating a point ahead.
When I looked at her face again, I saw she had raised her thick and somewhat disheveled eyebrows as if thinking about something. The thin blue veins of her eyelids were visible. Her black and thick lashes were trembling slightly, and on them several tiny raindrops were shining. Her hair too had gotten wet in places.
Suddenly turning her head to me:
“Why are you looking at me so carefully?” she said.
This question also came alive in my head at the same time: How was it that, without hesitation, without bringing to mind that I was watching a woman at such length perhaps for the first time, I was watching her for so long? And how was it that even now, after she asked this question and turned her eyes to me, I continued looking at her without losing my courage? With a courage that astonished me too:
“Don’t you want me to?” I said.
“No, not that, I asked, that’s all… Perhaps I want it, that’s why I asked!”
Her eyes were so black and so meaningful that I couldn’t bear it:
“Are you originally German?” I said.
“Yes! Why did you ask?”
“Your hair isn’t blonde and your eyes aren’t blue!”
“It’s possible!”
On her face occurred a movement reminiscent of her usual smile but also appearing somewhat hesitant.
“My father was Jewish,” she said. “My mother is German. But she’s not blonde either!”
I asked curiously:
“So you’re Jewish?”
“Yes… Or are you also an enemy of Jews?”
“What nonsense… We don’t have such things. But I hadn’t guessed!”
“Yes, I’m Jewish. My father was from Prague. He became Catholic before I was born!”
“So in terms of religion you’re Christian!”
“No… I mean I have no connection with any religion!”
We had walked quite a bit. She didn’t continue her words. I too didn’t ask anything else. We were slowly coming to the outskirts of the city. I began to wonder where we were going. Surely we wouldn’t take a country excursion in this weather. The rain continued, in the same way. At one point Maria asked:
“Where are we going?” she said.
“I don’t know!”
“Aren’t you at all curious?”
“I’m subject to you… Wherever you want!”
Turning her moist and pale face like a white flower covered with dew drops to me:
“You’re very docile… Don’t you have any opinion, any desire?
I immediately put forward her words from last evening:
“You had forbidden me from asking you for anything!”
She didn’t answer. After waiting a while, I continued:
“Or weren’t you serious last evening? Or did you change your mind today?”
She denied strongly:
“No! No!.. I’m still of the same mind…”
She plunged into thoughts again.
We had come before a large garden with iron railings. Slowing her steps:
“Should we enter here?” she said.
“What place is this?”
“Botanical garden!”
“As you know!”
“Then let’s enter… I always come here. Especially in rainy weather like this.”
There was no one inside. We walked for a long time on sandy paths. Both our sides were surrounded by many trees that hadn’t shed their leaves despite the advanced season. Around large and rocky pools were various kinds and colors of grasses, flowers, and mosses. Large leaves covered the surface of the waters. In the high greenhouses were plants from warm countries, trees with thick trunks and small leaves. Maria:
“This is Berlin’s most beautiful place…” she said. “In this season, it’s so deserted as to have almost no visitors… Then these strange trees always remind me of distant countries I long for… Seeing them uprooted from the places they’re accustomed to and brought here and tried to be kept alive with such artificial measures and care, I pity their state a bit. Do you know, in Berlin the weather is clear and sunny only a hundred days of the year; it’s overcast two hundred sixty-five days. Can the greenhouses’ spotlights and artificial suns satisfy these trees’ leaves accustomed to light and heat? Despite this they live, they don’t dry up… But can this be called living?.. Isn’t separating a living being from the climate suitable to it and subjecting it to these wretched conditions for the pleasure of a few curious people a kind of torture?”
“But you’re also one of these curious people…”
“Yes, but every time I come here, my insides fill with deep melancholy!”
“Why do you come then?”
“I don’t know!”
She sat on one of the wet benches. I too perched beside her. Wiping the raindrops on her face with her hand:
“While watching the plants here, I also think a bit about myself!” she said. “Perhaps I remember my ancestors who lived in the same places with these trees, these strange flowers, centuries ago. Aren’t we too, like them, uprooted and scattered from our places? But these don’t concern you… Actually they don’t much concern me either… They only give me the possibility to think many things, to live many things inside my head… You’ll see, I’m a person who lives in my head more than in the world… Real life for me is nothing but a tedious dream… You perhaps found my work at the Atlantik very sad, whereas I’m not even aware whether it’s like that or not… In fact, sometimes it even entertains me… Besides, I do this work because of my mother. I must look after her, and there’s no possibility of getting by on the few paintings I make in a year… Have you occupied yourself with painting?”
“A bit!”
“Why didn’t you continue?”
“I understood I had no talent!”
“Impossible… How much talent you have for painting was obvious from the expression your face took while watching paintings at the exhibition… Say you understood you didn’t have courage. For a man to be so cowardly isn’t very pleasant… I’m saying this for yourself. As for me, I have courage… I want to paint and reflect my judgments about people in them, and perhaps I’m even a bit successful… But this too is empty… There’s no possibility for people I despise to understand this; those who can understand are already those not worthy of contempt. So painting, like all arts, is without addressee, that is, incapable of addressing what it actually intended… Despite this, this is the only work in the world I take seriously… That’s precisely why I don’t want to make a living by painting. Because then I’ll be forced to do not what I want but what’s wanted from me… Never… Never… I prefer to put my body on the market… Because it has no importance to me…”
She struck my knee roughly.
“That’s it, my dear friend, what we do isn’t anything else anyway… Last evening when a drunk kissed my back, you were there, weren’t you? He’ll kiss, of course… It’s his right… He’s spending money… And they say my back is attractive too… Do you also want to kiss? Do you have money?”
My tongue remained as if tied. I was blinking my eyes rapidly, biting my lips. When Maria noticed this, she frowned; her face took on an even paler state than usual, like lime:
“No, Raif, I don’t want this. Absolutely… The thing I can least endure is pity… The moment I sense you pity me, goodbye!.. You can’t even see my face.”
When she saw I was completely confused, that I was actually in a pitiable state, she put her arm on my shoulder:
“Don’t be offended by my words!” she said. “We shouldn’t hesitate to discuss openly things that have the possibility of muddying our friendship in the future. In such matters, cowardice is harmful… So what? If we understand we can’t get along, we’ll say goodbye and part… Is this such an important disaster? Can’t you still accept that staying alone in life is fundamental? All approaches, all unions are false. People can only draw close to each other up to a certain limit; they fabricate the rest; and one day when they understand their mistake, they abandon everything and flee from their despair. Whereas if they were content with what’s possible, if they gave up supposing what’s in their imagination is reality, this wouldn’t be so. Everyone accepts what’s natural; neither disappointment of dreams nor disappointment remains… In this state of ours we’re all worthy of pity; but we should pity ourselves. To pity another is to suppose one is stronger than them, and we have no right to see ourselves so great or others more wretched than us… Shall we go now?”
We both straightened up. We shook off the raindrops accumulated on our coats. The wet sands were creaking under our feet.
The streets had begun to darken, but the lamps hadn’t yet been lit. We were returning with quick steps, passing through the same roads as we came. This time I had entered her arm. I was snuggling up to her like a small child, bending my head that way.
Inside me was a strange state between joy and sorrow. The more I saw how many of her feelings, thoughts resembled mine, feeling the closeness between us more strongly, I was happy; but I was afraid because I understood she parted from me at one point, that she absolutely didn’t want to hide truths from herself, to deceive herself at any cost. Because a vague feeling whispered to me that after completely seeing a person, whoever they are, and not hiding what one sees from oneself, one could never get completely close to them. But I didn’t want to be so truth-loving. I understood I couldn’t endure any truth distancing me from her. After finding in each other the things most necessary, most valuable for our souls, wouldn’t it be more human and more fair to pretend not to see other details, or rather to sacrifice small truths for a great truth?
It was certain that this woman who gave correct and sound judgments in every matter thought this way, subject to her bitter experiences in life, to the environment’s corrupting influences. Because she was forced to live among people she didn’t want, didn’t like, to laugh at them by force, she was seized by such deep resentment, suspected everyone. As for me, because I had remained distant from people throughout my life and wasn’t much disturbed by them, I wasn’t angry at anyone. What gnawed at me was only a feeling of great loneliness, and again under the influence of this loneliness, I was ready to deceive myself in many points toward a person I understood was close to me.
We had come to the middle of the city. The streets were bright and crowded. Maria Puder was thoughtful and probably also a bit sad. Fearfully:
“Are you upset about something?” I said.
“No!” she answered. “Nothing happened to upset me. In fact, I’m pleased with our walk today. I’m certainly pleased…”
While saying these, it was obvious she was thinking other things. In her eyes that occasionally caught my face was an absent state, and in her smile was an alienness that frightened me. At one point she stopped in the middle of the street.
“I don’t want to go home!” she said. “Come on, let’s eat dinner somewhere together. We’ll talk until my work time!”
I met this proposal I hadn’t at all expected with unnecessary excitement. But seeing this state of mine made her more alienated, I quickly pulled myself together and looked ahead. We entered a rather large restaurant in the western parts of the city. Inside wasn’t very crowded. In a corner, a Bavarian women’s orchestra in national dress was playing noisy tunes. Sitting at a side table, we ordered food and wine.
The stillness of the person across from me had passed to me too. Inside me was a causeless distress and oppression. When the woman noticed this, she tried to free herself from her thoughts and open up a bit, to smile. She struck my hand resting on the table with her hand:
Why are you sulking? Young men eating dinner with a young woman for the first time are more cheerful and talkative!” she joked.
But it was visible she didn’t believe what she said either. Indeed, she quickly took on her old state. To do something, anything, she ran her eyes over the tables around. She drank a few sips from the wine before her and suddenly turned to me, looking into my eyes:
“What can I do? What can I do? I just can’t be otherwise!” she said.
What did she mean? I only sensed this in a dark way. I felt that what she said she couldn’t do and what had been upsetting me since a while ago were the same, but I couldn’t clearly determine its nature.
Her eyes wanted to get stuck and remain wherever they looked, and she seemed able to separate them from there with difficulty. From her mother-of-pearl dull white face, faint tremors occasionally passed.
She began speaking again. In her voice was a trembling that had suddenly appeared, a barely controlled excitement:
“Please don’t be angry at me…” she was saying. “It will be better to speak plainly with you so you don’t get caught up in empty hopes… But don’t be angry at me… Yesterday I came beside you… I asked you to take me to my home… Today I proposed we walk together… I said let’s eat dinner together in the evening… I almost imposed myself on you… But I don’t love you. I’ve been thinking this the whole time… No, I don’t love you either… What can I do? I perhaps find you pleasant, even attractive; I perhaps see you have aspects different from all the men I’ve met until now, but that’s all… Talking with you, discussing many things, arguing, fighting… Getting angry, making up again, these will certainly please me… But loving? I can’t do this… Now you’ll wonder why I’m saying all this out of the blue… As I said, so you won’t be angry at me later by expecting other things… Let me tell you now what I can give you, so you won’t later claim I played with you: However different you are, you’re still a man… And all the men I’ve met, when they understood this—that I don’t love them, can’t love them—left me with great distress, even anger… Goodbye… But why did they think me at fault? Because I didn’t give something I never promised them, that they only kept alive in their heads? Isn’t this injustice? I don’t want you to think of me in the same way… You can record this too as a point in your favor…”
I was astonished. But trying not to break my calm:
“What need is there for these things? The form of our friendship is subject not to me but to you. It will be however you want!” I said.
She objected strongly:
“No, no, it won’t be like that at all. Look, you see? You too, like all other men, are taking the path of getting everything accepted by appearing to accept everything. No, my friend! Issues aren’t settled with such soothing words. Think that although I’ve always tried to pass open and sincere judgments on this subject, whether against myself or others, I couldn’t reach a conclusion. Human relationships, especially male-female relations, are so tangled and our desires, our feelings so incomprehensible and murky that no one knows what they’re doing and gets swept away by the current. I don’t want this. Doing things that don’t satisfy me one hundred percent, that don’t fully satisfy me, diminishes me in my own eyes… Especially one thing I can’t endure is woman’s being forced always to remain passive before man… Why? Why will we always flee and you chase?.. Why will we always surrender and you take surrender? Why will there be domination even in your pleadings, helplessness even in our refusals? Since childhood I’ve always rebelled against this, could never accept this. Why am I like this, why does a point other women don’t even notice seem so important to me? I’ve thought a lot about this. I wonder if there’s an abnormal aspect in me, I said. No, on the contrary, perhaps I think this way because I’m more normal than other women. Because my life, purely as a coincidence, passed distant from the influences that accustom other women to seeing their fate as natural. My father died when I was still small. At home we remained, my mother and I. My mother was almost a symbol of womanhood accustomed to being subject, to obeying. She had lost the habit of walking alone in life, or rather had never acquired this habit. Although I was seven years old, I began managing her. I advised her fortitude, taught her sense, supported her. Thus I grew up without seeing male domination, that is, naturally. At school, the indolence of my girl friends, their ambitions always disgusted me. I didn’t learn anything to make myself liked by men. I never blushed before men and didn’t wait for a compliment from them. This state condemned me to tremendous loneliness. My girl friends found being friends with me and accepting my ideas contrary to their pleasures and comforts. Being a pleasantly held toy seemed to them easier and more attractive than being human. I didn’t become friends with men either. When they couldn’t find the soft morsel they sought in me, they preferred to flee rather than come face to face with equal forces. Then I understood very well what male determination and power was; no creature in the world runs after such easy successes, and no creature is as selfish, conceited and arrogant as a man, but at the same time cowardly and comfort-loving. After noticing these things once, it was impossible for me to truly love men. I saw that even the men who pleased me most and were close to me in many respects showed these wolf teeth on small occasions; after togetherness that gave both of us equal pleasure, they approached me with foolish glances trying to apologize, to protect, but at the same time supposing they were victorious in some way. Whereas it was they who were in a pitiable state, whose wretchedness emerged. No woman can be as helpless and ridiculous as a man in a state of passion. Despite this, they have such misplaced pride as to suppose this state of theirs is a manifestation of power… Oh my God, one goes mad… Although I know I have no unnatural tendency in myself, I prefer to fall in love with a woman.
