Part 7 (1/2)

The Dutchwoman returned with the daylight; I had not slept the whole night. She went to the window and stood veiled by the early glimmer, pulling at the ribbon which had raveled in her hair; and while she leaned, her elbows on the sill and her fingers working invisible as submarines in the short tough snarls, it seemed she listened, as for footsteps; but only the faint knocking of a chain, and then the rocking of a quick bicycle on cobblestones came up to us from the street. I lay amazed: there were long creases in her dress, and long creases in her cheek carved by the wrinkles of some alien bedsheet: the side of her face was grooved like the belly of a beach against which the tide has repeatedly shouldered, and the red dawn lit into bright shallow scars the fluted skin. She was, for the moment, qualified by some private act or notion-an ugliness new in the world had mounted her and reigned in the ruts in her firth and in the swift sly receding clangor of the bicycle and in the secret morning.

She began to hum, rolling down her stockings.-”Anneke?” I ventured.

”Are you awake?” She looked over crossly. ”Go back to sleep. It's too early.”

”The concierge was here, Anneke.”

”What?”

”The concierge-”

”In the middle of the night? What did you tell her?”

”I said you would come back in the morning.”

”Now you have done it! Listen, if your mother should find out-”

”Oh, I won't tell her, I promise!”

”The concierge will tell her. Now I am finished.”

”Ah, no, Anneke,” I moaned under her fierce palms loosened from their lair; they hung against my face, broad and retributive and racy with an oiled nighttime odor and the distinguishable smells, like fog and ash, of her hair; and in the warm pale hearts, sentencing and consigning me, of the palms of her hands I seemed to see those deserts of Palestine, warm and pale, hot and white, laden with drifted sand like salt.

In the afternoon, although the sun poured honey, we did not go down to the sea. It was my penalty. The Dutchwoman took up my box of sh.e.l.ls and flung it into an iron barrel, filled half with kitchen refuse and half with rain-water, that loomed in the yard behind the concierge's rooms, busy with flies; innumerable foul splashes of rust leaped up and scattered their thousand wings into the dread colonial airs (”irretrievable, irretrievable,” roared the gypped black carousing flies)-”If you had cherished each one like the separate gems of a treasure I should do the same,” she announced with the bitter strength of justice: ”I do only what your mother wishes.” And now everything must be explained to the concierge (how mild my punishment compared to that!), who was snooper, intruder, prevaricator, twister, telltale-everything must be set out straight. ”The foolish child,” the Dutchwoman took up, ”she had a bad dream. What a pity, the very hour I was called away.”

The concierge made a noncommittal sound against her upper palate. From the porch of the house the far waves flickered.

”On such short notice it was impossible to get a nurse ... the doctor had to ask me for the night-”

”Exactly what is the matter with your friend?” inquired the concierge with dry civility.

”A serious disease, poor thing.”

”Quel dommage!” The concierge neatly bit off a hangnail. ”Will she live?”

”With G.o.d's help,” the Dutchwoman said piously.

”Let us pray the disease is not of a contagious nature,” remarked the concierge, outdoing my governess in solicitous religiosity by crossing herself briefly; but her voice seemed oddly cool.

I thought I would placate them both by a show of concern equal to their own. ”Anneke,” I gave out penitently, ”does your friend have the ringworm?”-remembering the torments of poor Jean Francois.

”No, it is something else.”

”Does her head itch?” I pursued nevertheless.

The concierge howled. ”Voila!” She slapped her s.h.i.+nbone as though in the presence of a stupendous joke. ”You have the right idea, but the wrong end,” she went on boisterously cackling, and took her hilarity into the house.

”Sssstupid alleycat!” hissed the Dutchwoman after her. ”Rotting eye of a fisss.h.!.+” And when she turned to glare at me, her mouth was wild and wishful as though it had tasted quarry.

Some days afterward Enoch and two of his a.s.sistants arrived quietly in a mild brown car. ”Your mother stopped in Paris on the way down,” he told me. ”Her car's smashed up-she had an accident. The chauffeur was injured, and she's gone to see about the insurance.”

”And Mrs. Vand?” said my governess with a disapproval faintly discernible. ”Madam is all right?”

My stepfather looked surprised. ”Of course she's all right. She's coming the rest of the way by train.-Meanwhile I have some paperwork to take care of. I may as well do it here as anywhere, since it's on the way.”

”On the way where?” I wondered.

”Zurich. We're due there day after tomorrow.”

”Is my mother going too?”

”It's up to her,” he said, and threw me one of his rare amused visionary smiles: ”Do I ever know what sh.e.l.l do? Not until it's too late, you can bet on that.”

The men retired to my mother's room, where the concierge had set up half a dozen card tables; and all afternoon the two a.s.sistants, light-haired bashful earnest young men, drew meticulous marks on yellow form-sheets, while Enoch, reclining elbow-deep in mimeographed doc.u.ments as thick as Russian novels, disputed with them in a clatter of alien syllables.

”What language is that?” I asked the Dutchwoman.

”Don't eavesdrop,” she chided me, although she was plainly listening herself: the windows were open and the dark and serious voices of the men fell to the garden. We lay in the shade of the eaves on a strip of blue canvas. The Dutchwoman took off her sungla.s.ses-she had been peering into an old stained American picture-weekly in which my sandals had been wrapped. ”It is Czech and Rumanian and Polish and Hungarian and German.”

”Do they know all those languages?” I marveled.

”They are reading lists of names. -Where are you going?” she broke off. ”You are not to bother Mr. Vand!” She s.n.a.t.c.hed after me, but I left her pinching air and faintly calling, and when I gained the threshold of my mother's chamber her cries had grown too dim to matter, or too indifferent.

”Well, come in,” said Enoch, absorbed and aloof.

”We heard you in the garden,” I began.

The two young men lifted their fountain pens curiously, watching Enoch.

”What are those names?”

Enoch did not reply.

I tried again. ”Whose names are you looking at?”

”Everybody's,” said the first a.s.sistant.

”Europe's,” said the second a.s.sistant.

”n.o.body's,” said Enoch. ”They are all dead.”

”I saw a man shoot himself,” I readily offered, ”once when I was throwing up. He had only one leg.”

Enoch tamely viewed me. ”That's better than none.”

”But he died,” I countered, as though that were some sort of argument ”In the road. Anneke saw it too.”