The Exiles Return (31 page)

‘It means a man who does not love women, but loves other men, chiefly boys. He can’t love you. He’s in love with that young man, the prince whom he always has about him. If he wants you, it is only as a kind of decoration, a screen to hide his real passions. He is just using you, Resi. It’s degrading, it’s insulting. You can’t, you must not allow yourself to be used in this way.’

‘But Lucas, I don’t know what you are talking about. What do you mean by “using” me? He loves me, I know he does, and he loves Bimbo too. Why shouldn’t he? He is fond of Bimbo, they are very good friends, rather like a father and son. What has that got to do with me? I am going to marry Mr Kanakis and you must stop annoying me. You have been a nice friend but I don’t love you and I never have. You know that. And now you must let me go.’ Again she turned to leave, and again he caught hold of her arm. She was shivering in her thin dress in the damp night air, and he was trembling with passion. He saw that his words had made no impression on her because she did not understand them.

‘Resi, listen, listen. I came to save you, and save you I
must.
I must make you understand, even if it shocks you.’

And he told her in crude, physical terms what homosexuality, what such a relationship, implied. ‘Your Mr Kanakis is not fond of young Grein, as you say, he is his pleasure-boy – he probably pays him for it, as he is so rich and Grein has no money – and he is buying
you
to be his screen. That is how you are being
used
, Resi – for God’s sake, open your eyes!’

Still she did not really understand, but the language he had used was so horrible that she was shocked and nauseated. She felt she would never be able to forget it when she saw Kanakis and Bimbo again.

She wrenched her arm free from his grasp and lifted both her hands to her ears. ‘Enough, enough,’ she whispered; she turned, swayed, and it was as if a cleft had opened in the ground at her feet. He though she was going to faint. Panic seized him – if she fainted, what should he do, out here in the garden, at night where he had no business to be? But she did not faint. Her inherent strength and stability, her integrity, saved him from such a predicament. She only uttered a low moan and ran, ran, unseeing, along the path back to the house, to the little side door which her maid had opened for her earlier in the evening, ran upstairs and along the stone corridor to her room. She was sufficiently in command of herself to close the door softly.

The night was very long. When she had reached her room, out of breath from running upstairs at top speed, Resi stood and looked round at her four walls with wide-open, aching eyes. Breaking away from Lucas, she had bolted for safety, blindly, like an animal under attack hoping to find refuge in its lair. Now she found she was in a cage, in a trap. There was no way out of her predicament. Her chest was bursting, her head was bursting, the walls were closing in on her, there was no way out, no room to move, no room even to breathe. If only she could cry. But she couldn’t cry: her chest was so tight, her eyes burning dry. She went to the window. The night was black – no moon – a faint light from distant stars distinguished different intensities of blackness – solid shadows of trees, swaying against the more diaphanous darkness of air. But the window was not an opening, only another aspect of the wall of her prison. No way out through the window, no way out through the door. Nowhere to go, no one to turn to. She was caught, irrevocably caught.

She began to pace up and down, up and down. She looked at the dressing table, brush and comb, scissors and nail file, powder and lipstick, all the familiar things belonging to the routine of everyday life, meaningless, useless now. She would never need them again. She stared at her bed, so clean, so white, the sheet turned down, the pillow rounded and smooth; if only she could sink into it, accept its cool embrace – sleep. But she kept on pacing the room, afraid to stop, afraid to give herself pause, to allow herself to think. Up and down, backwards and forwards.

At last, in utter exhaustion, she began to pluck at her clothes, and still walking up and down she unfastened her dress, let it fall, wrenched her slip over her head, pulled off her underwear. A sob rose in her throat, but some power stronger than her own will forced it down. It forbade her to make a sound, it held her in a vice. She was naked. A breath of air wafted in from the window and she shivered. She seized her nightgown from the bed and put it on, still walking up and down. After a while, a merciful numbness overcame her and she fell onto the bed and closed her eyes. Sleep came, or rather half-sleep, for it did not bring oblivion, only distortion. But it broke the brittle rigidity of her defences, the self-imposed ban on consciousness, it relaxed the tension which had been warding off thought. When it left her after a spell of scarcely an hour she was wide awake, and the window was as dark as it had been, the blackness even blacker, the walls of the room as enclosing.

But now the torture of her predicament was explicit. It was in her head and articulate, and at the same time it was diffused in some indefinable manner inside her where it could not be located, a spiritual pain more excruciating than any physical pain she could imagine and which, she felt, however dreadful, would be a relief from this all-pervasive anguish. As she lay on her bed in the darkness, exhausted and afraid, her mind was terribly clear, as she saw, without any hope of escape or salvation, herself and her life in ruins, utterly, irretrievably destroyed. For she had committed the one great fatal sin, the one against herself, against her own integrity and moral being. She had committed self-betrayal. Others might pass such an action off with a shrug. There was no shrug for her, only shame and dishonour, and a self so despicable that she could never bear to live with it again. She did not think of the child in her body – she had never yet thought of it as a child – only that she had behaved like a common slut. And then she had allowed herself to be sold by the man who had so beguiled her (and who had never pretended to love her) to a man who wanted her as a social convenience and had got her because she was going cheap. So far nobody knew the real reason why she had agreed to marry Mr Kanakis. Her Aunt Fini thought it was because of his money. But her father and mother were coming over, and she would never be able to look into her father’s eyes without telling him the truth. And her father would undoubtedly find out that horrible thing Lucas had been telling her; Lucas, of course, was insanely jealous, but even he could not have said a thing like that if it were not true.

She was wound around and around with coil upon coil of shame and disgrace. Disgrace, disgrace, and nothing would ever wash her clean again. Suddenly tears came, released by an upsurge of self-pity. How could she have known? How could she have understood? She was alone, alone, with no one to turn to, in a strange, complicated country where everything was different and people did not mean what they said. Nothing was plain and straightforward, everything was full of pitfalls, of hidden purposes and implied meanings she could not grasp. Resi turned her face into her pillow, and sobbed, sobbed with pity over her own sad fate, over her poor lost self, working herself up with every convulsion of her shoulders, with every spasm of her body, to a paroxysm of grief. Exhausted, she relaxed and lay in a stupor, she did not know for how long.

When consciousness returned and she opened her eyes, the window was no longer black but pallid, as the cold grey light of pre-dawn crept into the sky. Day was beginning. Life was going to continue. But for her life could not continue. That horror must come to an end. Full stop. The words formed themselves in her mind. Something had said them to her while she slept, something outside herself, beyond her control. ‘Full stop’: that was what it said. Tremendously powerful, intensely comforting. The trapdoor which held her was opening, the vice was removed. No more unanswerable questions, no more bewilderment, no more pain. The end of life would be the end of trouble. Full stop, and no more pain. If she were not there, no one would be able to torment her, to pull her this way and that for their own purposes. She would have slipped through their fingers, she would be nobody’s plaything, she would, at last, belong only to her herself. As she lay, very still in the grey half-light, a feeling of exultation came over her, as if in response to that power that had spoken to her from somewhere beyond herself saying so clearly and decisively: ‘Full stop.’

It would be quite simple. How fortunate that she had learnt how to handle a gun. The guns had all been cleaned the day before, they stood in a shining row in the rack in the gunroom, and the cartridges were in a drawer under the rack. She knew which gun was Bimbo’s. She would use that one. Open the breech, cock it, all so smoothly, so silently, so well-oiled. She did not dwell on the last stage of the operation, the crucial one, but she knew, without putting it into words, what it would have to be. Place the butt on the floor, bend over the muzzle, pull the trigger with her bare toe. Don’t think about it –
do it.
Do it quickly, don’t hesitate, or it will be too late. It was getting lighter already. Very soon the men would be down for the early-morning stalking. She slipped out of bed and opened the door carefully. The corridor was almost dark, no sound or movement anywhere in the house. She ran on her bare feet on the polished floor to the head of the stairs and down to the gunroom.

*   *   *

It was Father Jahoda who found her. He was in the room only seconds after the shot had gone off. And within the next seconds, in which he bent over the stricken girl whose beautiful face was beautiful no longer, he had decided on his course of action. There must be no scandal, no sensation. His status was one of authority and he would use this authority to its limits and beyond its limits to prevent it. From then on his authoritarian personality dominated the situation and everyone involved in it. He telephoned for a doctor. And then, in spite of the early hour, he telephoned the Chief of Police in Vienna and got through to him. The Police Chief promised to send down a high-ranking officer at once, for this fatal occurrence must be kept out of the hands of the local gendarmerie, who would only create a confusion.

Then he set to work on Kanakis. He had been the first to appear downstairs after he had heard the detonation and that was fortunate as Father Jahoda said he wished to speak to him alone. He ordered the others, who had come rushing down in disarray, full of excitement, surmises and apprehension, to return to their rooms. Such was the daunting severity of his appearance, and the authority of his voice, that he was instantly obeyed. And obeyed also by Kanakis, after he had been informed, and who was so stunned by the terrible news imparted to him that he had no heart and no will to ask any questions, but acted like an automaton at the Jesuit’s directions.

He must, Father Jahoda said, take advantage of the circumstance that he was an American citizen and well-acquainted with the American High Commissioner, that his house was situated in the American zone of occupation. He must get in touch as quickly as possible with the High Commissioner himself, so that he might send down a senior official to take charge, in conjunction with the Chief of the Vienna Police, of a tragic accident of which he, Father Jahoda, had been the sole witness. The victim of the accident had also been an American citizen. It was in everybody’s interest, and especially in the interest of the American authorities, that there should be no scandal or sensation-mongering. No Austrian had been involved, it should not be allowed to create tension between the local and the occupation jurisdictions; the matter should be treated on a quasi-extraterritorial basis. And so it was agreed.

Then Father Jahoda made his deposition, later that morning, in front of all the inmates of the house, the police and the American representative. He spoke drily and dispassionately, suppressing with a gesture of his hand every attempt at interruption or questioning as irrelevant and not to the point.

Marie-Theres Larsen had shot herself. But the shot had been accidental. She had not committed suicide. It had not been suicide. Father Jahoda repeated this again and again. It was true that she had been handling a gun. Why and for what purpose was beside the point. She might possibly have thought of using it against herself, but the fact was that she had not done so. That the gun had gone off was his, Father Jahoda’s, fault. It was he himself, to his profound sorrow and distress, who had brought about the accident in that, by opening the door of the gunroom rather precipitately, he had startled her. Her toe, which had been on the trigger, had twitched. As the shot went off, she had called out loudly ‘No!’, which was incontrovertible proof that even if she had had some suicidal intention she would not have carried it out.

There was some restlessness among the audience and a murmur of ‘Why? Why?’ Father Jahoda looked at each one of them severely, but the Police Inspector took up the question. Why had the Reverend Father gone down to the gunroom hastily at such an early hour of the morning? Had he suspected anything out of the ordinary might happen? Anything at all, or anything relating to Fräulein Larsen in particular?

Father Jahoda felt that he had to answer that question. Yes, he had felt that Fräulein Larsen had been disturbed, or should he say, excited. She had been engaged to be married to Mr Kanakis here present, and he had felt, during the few days that he had spent at the Buchenhof in her company, that she had been rather tense, far from at ease. However, that was probably not unnatural in a young girl engaged to be married to a much older and very rich man. But she had her aunt with her, who must have been a support for her, and anyway it was not his business to inquire. She was not a Catholic; he could not expect her to unburden herself to a priest.

Then, last night, she had gone out late and come back a little later. He had heard her go into her room – their rooms were near each other on the same corridor. He had heard her pacing up and down, obviously in some distress of mind, and he had twice gone to her door to see whether she had at last gone to bed. When all was quiet he had retired as well, but he had made up his mind that, though she was not a Catholic, he would try and speak to her the next morning. It was then, in the early hours, when he had got up, as was his habit, to perform his devotions, that he had heard her running down the corridor, and as within several minutes she had not returned, he had put on his dressing gown and gone down in search of her. The door of the gunroom had been ajar. He had pushed it open and as he did so, that shot had gone off, accidentally.