Part 8 (1/2)

His voice quivered as if shaken by the throbbing of his heart, and his heart said:

”Kneeling on the seat, you looked out of the little window in the back of the cab and cried to me, 'He is nearer! He is further off! He will catch us. I do not see him any more. He has lost us.' Ah!”

And with one and the same movement their lips joined.

She breathed out like a sigh:

”That was the one time I enjoyed.”

”We shall always be afraid,” he said.

These words interlaced and changed into kisses. Their whole life surged into their lips.

Yes, they had to revive their past so as to love each other, they had constantly to be rea.s.sembling the pieces so as to keep their love from dying through staleness, as if they were undergoing, in darkness and in dust, in an icy ebbing away, the ruin of old age, the impress of death.

They clasped each other.

They were drowned in the darkness. They fell down, down into the shadows, into the abyss that they had willed.

He stammered:

”I will love you always.”

But she and I both felt that he was lying again. We did not deceive ourselves. But what matter, what matter?

Her lips on his lips, she murmured like a th.o.r.n.y caress among the caresses:

”My husband will soon be home.”

How little they really were at one! How, actually, there was nothing but their fear that they had in common, and how they stirred their fear up desperately. But their tremendous effort to commune somehow was soon to be over.

They stopped talking. Words had already accomplished the work of reviving their love. She merely murmured:

”I am yours, I am yours. I give myself to you. No, I do not give myself to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong to myself?”

”Are you happy?” she asked again.

”I swear you are everything in the world to me.”

Now, she felt, their bliss had already become a mere memory, and she said almost plaintively:

”May G.o.d bless the bit of pleasure one has.”

A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer blasphemous yet divine.

I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression.

”No,” she said, ”you are not going to love me always. You are going to leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything.