David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (6 page)

GOLDER
LIT
A cigarette, but put it out when he started choking on the first puff. His shoulders were wracked by a nervous, asthmatic cough, which filled his mouth with bitter phlegm. Blood rushed to his face, normally deathly pale and waxy, with dark circles under the eyes. Golder was an enormous man in his late sixties. He had flabby arms and legs, piercing eyes the colour of water, thick white hair, and a ravaged face so hard it looked as if it had been hewn from stone by a rough, clumsy hand.

The room reeked of smoke and that smell of stale sweat that is particular to Parisian apartments in summer when they have been left empty for a long time.

Golder swivelled around in his chair and opened the window. For a long while, he looked out at the Eiffel Tower, all lit up. Its red glow streamed like blood down the cool dawn sky. He thought of Golmar. Six shimmering gold letters that tonight would be turning like suns in four of the world’s greatest cities.
GOLMAR:
two names, his and Marcus’s, merged together. He pursed his lips. “Golmar… David Golder, alone, from now on…”

He reached for the notepad beside him and read the letterhead:

GOLDER & MARCUS

Buyers and Sellers of Petroleum Products

Aviation Fuel. Unleaded, Leaded, and Premium Gasoline.

White-Spirit. Diesel. Lubricants.

New York, London, Paris, Berlin

Slowly he crossed out the first line and wrote, “David Golder, ” his heavy handwriting cutting into the paper. For he was finally on his own. “It’s over, thank God,” he thought with relief. “He’ll go now…” Later on, after Teisk granted the concession
to Tubingen, he would be part of the greatest oil company in the world, and then he would easily be able to rebuild Golmar.

Until then… He quickly scribbled down some figures. These past two years had been especially terrible. Lang’s bankruptcy, the 1922 Agreement… At least he would no longer have to pay for Marcus’s women, his rings, his debts… He had enough to pay for without him. How expensive this idiotic lifestyle was! His wife, his daughter, the houses in Biarritz and Paris… In Paris alone he was paying sixty thousand francs in rent, taxes. The furniture had cost more than a million when he’d bought it. For whom? No one lived there. Closed shutters, dust. He looked with a kind of hatred at certain objects he particularly detested: four lamps, Winged Victories in bronze with black marble bases; an enormous square inkstand, decorated with gilt bees—empty. It all had to be paid for, and where was he supposed to get the money?

“The fool,” he growled angrily. ” ‘You’re ruining me!’ So what? I’m sixty-eight… Let
him
start over again.
I’ve
had to do it often enough…”

He turned his head sharply towards the large mirror above the cold fireplace, looking uneasily at his drawn features, at the mottled bluish patches on his pale skin, and the two folds sunk into the thick flesh around his mouth like the drooping jowls on an old dog. “I’m getting old,” he grumbled bitterly. “Yes, I’m getting old…” For two or three years now he’d been getting tired more easily. “I absolutely must get away tomorrow,” he thought. “A week or ten days relaxing in Biarritz where I can be left in peace, otherwise I’m going to collapse.” He took his diary, propped it up on the table against a gold-framed photograph of a young girl and started leafing through it. It was full of names and dates, with 14 September underlined in ink. Tubingen was expecting him in London that day. That meant he could have barely a week in Biarritz … Then London, Moscow, London again, New York. He let out an irritated little moan, stared at his daughter’s picture, sighed, then looked away and began rubbing his painful eyes, burning from weariness. He had got back from Berlin that day, and for a long time now he hadn’t been able to sleep on the train as he used to.

He stood up to head for the club, as always, but then realised it was after three o’clock in the morning. “I’ll just go to bed,” he thought. “I’ll be on the train again tomorrow…” He noticed a stack of letters that needed signing piled on the desk. He sat down again. Every evening he read over the letters his secretaries had prepared. They were a bunch of asses. But he preferred them that way. He thought of Marcus’s secretary and smiled: Braun, a little Jew with fiery eyes, who had sold him the plans for the Amrum deal. He started to read, leaning very far forward under the lamp. His thick white hair used to be red, and a hint ofthat burning colour still remained at his temples and at the back of his neck, glowing, like a flame half hidden beneath the ashes.

THE
TELEPHONE NEXT
to Golder’s bed broke the silence with its long, shrill, interminable ringing, but Golder didn’t wake up: in the mornings, he slept as deeply and heavily as a dead man. Finally he opened his eyes with a low groan and grabbed the receiver.

“Hello, hello…”

He carried on shouting “Hello, hello,” without recognising his secretary’s voice, until he heard the words, “Dead, Monsieur Golder… Monsieur Marcus is dead…”

He said nothing. “Hello, can you hear me?” the voice continued. “Monsieur Marcus is dead.”

“Dead,” Golder repeated slowly, while a strange little shiver ran down his spine. “Dead… It isn’t possible …”

“It happened last night, Monsieur… on the Rue Chaba-nais… Yes, in a brothel… He shot himself in the chest. They’re saying that…”

Golder gently placed the receiver between the sheets and pressed the blanket over it, as if he wanted to smother the voice that he could still hear droning on like some enormous trapped fly.

Finally, there was silence.

Golder rang the bell. “Run me a bath,” he said to the servant who came in with the post and breakfast tray, “a cold bath.”

“Shall I pack your dinner jacket, Sir?”

Golder frowned nervously. “Pack? Oh, yes, Biarritz … I don’t know. I may be going tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, I don’t know…”

“I’ll have to go to his house tomorrow,” he muttered. “The funeral will be on Tuesday no doubt. Damn…” He swore quietly. The servant, in the adjoining room, was filling the bath. Golder swallowed a mouthful of hot tea, opened some letters at
random, then threw the rest on the floor and stood up. He sat down in the bathroom, closed his dressing-gown over his knees and absent-mindedly twisted the tassels on his silk belt as he watched the flowing water with an engrossed, mournful look on his face.

“Dead… dead…”

Little by little, a feeling of anger grew within him. He shrugged his shoulders. “Dead… is death the answer? If it were me …” he muttered with hatred.

“Your bath is ready, Sir,” said the servant.

Once alone, Golder went up to the bathtub, stretched his hand down into the water and left it there; all his movements were extraordinarily slow and hesitant, incomplete. The cold water froze his fingers, his arm, his shoulder, but he lowered his head and didn’t move, staring dumbly at the reflection of the electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling as it shone and shimmered in the water.

“If it were me … ” he said again.

Old, forgotten memories were resurfacing from deep within his mind. Dark, strange memories … A whole harsh lifetime of struggle … Today, riches, tomorrow, nothing. Then starting over … And starting over again … Oh yes, if he’d ever considered
that,
well, honestly, he would have been dead long ago. He sat up straight, absent-mindedly shook the water off his hand and leaned against the window, holding his freezing hands towards the warmth of the sun. He shook his head and said out loud, “Yes, honestly, in Moscow for example, or even in Chicago…” and his mind, unaccustomed to dreaming, conjured up the past in dry, brief little snapshots. Moscow … when he was nothing more than a thin little Jew with red hair, pale, piercing eyes, worn-out boots, and empty pockets… He used to sleep rough on benches, in the town squares, on dark autumn nights like these, so cold… Fifty years later, he could still feel in his bones the dampness of the thick white early morning fog, a fog that clung to his body, leaving a sort of stiff frost on his clothes … Snowstorms, and in March, the wind …

And Chicago … the small bar, the gramophone with its grating, tinny old-fashioned European Waltz, that feeling of
all-consuming hunger as the warm smells from the kitchen wafted towards him. He closed his eyes and pictured in extraordinary detail the shiny, dark face of a black man, drunk or ill, slumped on a bench in the corner, who was hooting plaintively, like an owl. And then … His hands were burning now. He carefully held them flat against the glass, then took them away again, wiggled his fingers, and gently rubbed his hands together.

“Fool,” he whispered, as if the dead man could hear him, “you fool… Why did you go and do it?”

GOLDER
FUMBLED ABOUT
at Marcus’s door for some time before ringing the bell: his thick, cold hands couldn’t find the buzzer and hit the wall instead. When he got inside, he looked around him in a kind of terror, as if he expected to see the dead man laid out, ready to be taken away. But there were only some rolls of black fabric on the floor of the entrance hall and bouquets of flowers on the armchairs; they were tied with purple silk inscribed with gold lettering, and the ribbons were so long and wide they trailed on to the carpet.

While Golder was standing in the hall, someone rang the bell and delivered an enormous, thick wreath of red chrysanthemums through the half-open door; the servant slipped it over his arm as if it were the handle of a basket.

“I must send some flowers,” Golder thought.

Flowers for Marcus… He pictured the heavy face with its grimacing lips, and a bridal bouquet beside it…

“If you would care to wait for a moment in the drawing room, Sir,” the servant whispered, “Madame is with…” He made a vague, embarrassed gesture. “…with Monsieur, with the body…”

He held out a chair for Golder and left. In the adjoining room, two voices were talking in a vague, mysterious whisper, as if at prayer; the voices grew gradually louder until Golder could hear them.

“The hearse decorated with Greek statues and a silver rail, in the Imperial style, with five plumes, with an ebony-panelled, silk-lined casket with eight carved, silver-gilt handles are included in the Superior Class. Then we have the Class A; that comes with a polished mahogany casket.”

“How much?” a woman’s voice whispered.

“Twenty thousand two hundred francs with the mahogany
casket. Twenty-nine thousand three hundred for the Superior Class.”

“I don’t think so. I only want to spend five or six thousand. If I had known how much you charged I would have gone elsewhere. The coffin can be made of ordinary oak if it’s covered in large enough draperies…”

Golder got up abruptly; the voice was immediately lowered, softening once again to a solemn whisper.

Angrily, Golder grasped his handkerchief between his hands and absent-mindedly twisted and knotted it. “It’s stupid, all this… ” he muttered, “it’s so stupid…”

He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. There wasn’t any other way. It was stupid, just stupid… Yesterday Marcus was sitting opposite him, shouting, alive, and now… No one even used his name any more. The body… He breathed in the heavy, sickly smell that filled the room. “Is that him, already,” he thought, horrified, “or these awful flowers? Why did he do it?” he muttered to himself in disgust. “Why kill yourself, at his age, over money like some little nobody…” How many times had he lost everything, and like everyone else just picked himself up and started again? That was how it was. “And as for this Teisk business,” he said out loud, vehemently, as if he were imagining himself in Marcus’s place, “he had a hundred to one chance it would come off, especially with Amrum involved, the fool!”

All sorts of ideas were buzzing angrily around in his mind. “You never know what’s going to happen in business, you have to go with your instincts, change your tactics, try everything you can, but to choose death … How long are they going to make me wait?” he thought with disgust.

Marcus’s wife came in. Her thin face, with its large, beaklike nose, had the sallow colour of antler-horn; her round, bright eyes glittered beneath her thin eyebrows, which sat very high on her forehead and looked oddly uneven.

She walked towards Golder with small hurried steps, took his hand, and seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But Golder had a lump in his throat and said nothing.

“Yes. You weren’t expecting it…” she murmured with a bizarre little high-pitched squeal that sounded like a nervous
laugh or stifled sob. “This madness, this humiliation, this scandal … I thank the good Lord for not having given us children. Do you know how he died? In a brothel, on the Rue Chabanais, with whores. As if going bankrupt weren’t enough,” she concluded, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.

Her sudden movement revealed beneath her black veil an enormous pearl necklace wound three times around her long, wrinkled neck which she jerked about like an old bird of prey.

“She must be very rich,” thought Golder, “the old crow. It’s always the same story: we kill ourselves working so that ‘the women’ can get richer…” He pictured his own wife quickly hiding her cheque-book whenever he came into the room, as if it were a packet of love letters.

“Would you like to see him?” she asked.

An icy wave flooded over Golder; he closed his eyes and replied in a shaky, colourless voice: “Of course, if I …”

Madame Marcus silently crossed the large drawing room and opened a door, but it led only to another, smaller room, where two women were sewing some black material. Eventually she said, “In here.” Golder could see candles burning dimly. He stood motionless and silent for a moment, then made an effort to speak.

“Where is he?”

“Here,” she said, pointing to a bed that was partly hidden beneath a great velvet canopy. “But I had to cover up his face to keep away the flies… The funeral is tomorrow.”

It was only then that Golder thought he could make out the dead man’s features beneath the sheet. He looked at him for a long time with strange emotion.

“My God, they’re in such a hurry,” he thought, overwhelmed by a confused feeling of anger and hurt. “Poor Marcus… How helpless we are when we die… It’s disgusting…”

In the corner of the room stood a large American-style desk with its top open; papers and opened letters were scattered about the floor. “There must be some letters from me in there,” he thought. He spotted a knife lying on the carpet. Its silver blade was all twisted. The drawers had been forced; there were no keys in the locks.

“He probably wasn’t even dead when she rushed in to see what was left; she couldn’t bear to wait, to try to find the keys…”

Madame Marcus caught the look on his face, but stared straight at him; all she did was to mutter curtly, “He left nothing.” Then she added more quietly, in a different tone of voice, “I’m on my own.”

“If I can help in any way…” Golder automatically replied.

She hesitated for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, “what would you advise me to do with the Houillere shares?”

“I’ll buy them from you at what they cost,” said Golder. “You do know they’ll never be worth anything? The company went bankrupt. But I’ll also have to take some of these letters. I imagine you expected as much, didn’t you?” he added in a hostile, sarcastic way that she appeared not to notice. She simply nodded and stepped back a bit. Golder began sifting through the papers in the half-empty drawer. But he couldn’t manage to overcome a sudden feeling of sad, bitter indifference. My God, what’s the point of it all, in the end?

“Why did he do it?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t know,” said Madame Marcus.

“Was it over money? Just money?” He was thinking out loud. “It just isn’t possible. Didn’t he say anything at all before he died?”

“No. When they brought him back here, he was already unconscious. The bullet was lodged in his lung.”

“I see,” Golder said with a shudder, “I see.”

“Later on, he tried to speak, but his mouth was full of foam and blood. He only said a few words, just before he died… He was almost peaceful, and I asked him, ‘Why? How could you do such a thing to me?’ He said something I could barely make out…Just one word that he kept repeating: ‘Tired… I was… tired…’ And then he died.”

“Tired,” thought Golder, who suddenly felt his age bearing down on him, like a heavy weight. “Yes.”