Visions of Isabelle (12 page)

She lies here on mats made of rushes strewn over bales of hay. In the corner, behind a screen of candles, an Arab plays a flute. She stares about at the faces of the men, but as her lungs absorb the smoke, she loses her ability to concentrate and fixes her eyes upon one of the flickering flames, thinking of night and shade and death. She does not understand why she feels depressed. She has escaped, after all, and to a place she loves. But she senses that her life is soon to change–that something in it is flickering and will soon go dark.

The shadows of the other men, settled, immobile, reposed, seem stained upon the walls. It seems to her that they are, all of them, timeless and lost in the corner of an enormous cave. After a long while of being immersed in sadness, she falls into intoxicated sleep.

At dawn she wakes to find herself in a room of sleeping men. They lie, like cattle, in heaps covered by dark burnooses that give off an odor of cold damp wool. All the candles have decomposed to pools of wax, and outside, on the narrow cobbled lanes, she can hear the patter of rain, and somewhere farther off, the slamming of a shutter before the wind.

Slowly she pulls herself to her feet, checks to see that nothing has troubled her in the night. Then she makes her way to the streets. Rain runs in gutters toward the port; the cobbles are slick with mud and donkey dung. Few people walk the medina: some old women with heaps of twigs piled on their backs, some men in shabby skullcaps pushing wagons filled with fruit. She pulls up her woolen hood, and shivering, weary, aching in her bones, hunches her shoulders and begins to climb.

When she emerges at the top of the hill, an enormous gust twirls her against a wall. As she enters Rue Bugeaud the rain slashes down from all angles; she cannot protect her face and so lowers her hood and marches forward without flinching. By the time she reaches the house her hair is soaked, her face is washed, and rivers of water slide down her chest and legs.

She thrusts open the door, enters and slams it shut. Wiping water from her eyes she calls to the servant for a towel. It takes her a few moments to realize that there are others in the house: a doctor, a priest and a large fat woman she recognizes as a nurse.

They tell her what has happened during the night: the heart attack that struck as the sun went down; Old Nathalie discovered unconscious, by a servant; the hours of waiting; the agony while desperate neighbors tried to search her out; the final crisis just before the dawn. Even as they are telling her all this, and eyeing her with reproach, Isabelle forgives herself and begins to mount a grief that, by the next few days, she carries to a frantic pitch.

T
rophimovsky, hearing that Old Nathalie is sick and anxious to lure her back to Meyrin, departs before the arrival of the cable informing him that she is dead. He comes to Bône unexpected by Isabelle and not expecting to find a wreath upon the door. He realizes what has happened while still in the street. With the same steeliness that had made it possible for him to persist for years with his scheme to manufacture perfume, he takes firm grip. If a passerby had peered at him at that moment, he would have seen a strange and pitiful sight: an old man ravaged for the slightest instant, a human face reflecting the stun of grief between two moments of studied calm.

Men are shrouding Old Nathalie's body at the very moment that Vava enters the house. Isabelle is throwing herself wildly about, rushing up and down stairs, her robe streaming, her fingers clutched into her short and ungraspable hair. From her mouth comes a trail of sobs and wails. The body rests on a table in the small courtyard, a calm center in a whirling storm. As Trophimovsky watches she pushes back the men, then flings herself upon the corpse. The smell of pitch is in the air, and a chorus of sobs issues from the adjoining roofs where the women of the neighborhood stand looking down.

Appalled by Isabelle's vulgar demonstration, Trophimovsky, unnoticed in the gloom of the front arch, shouts to her as loudly as he can.

"What is this farce?"

Isabelle spins around, snapped by memory of the bellow that made her brothers tremble for years.

"Oh, my God! Vava! Vava!" She starts toward him, but his next words stop her cold.

"If she's dead then let's hurry and get her in the earth. Old corpses stink, and this spectacle must cease."

"But..."

Just the grayness of his pallor, the iron set of his jaws, brings back memories of the coldness, the hardness with which he stained her youth. Smitten by the reality that Old Nathalie, the single source of warmth and tenderness in her life, is gone, she flings back her arms and shrieks. Staring about, wondering what to do, she rushes to the table, kneels beside it, and begins to knock her head against the wood.

"Life without her–impossible! Please, God, take me! Let me die, too!"

Vava steps into the sunlight, squints at Isabelle writhing near the ground.

"Here," he says. "Use this."

She turns to him, through her rain of tears sees his offering hand and the polished Colt revolver in his palm.

"Go ahead," he says. "Take it! It will provide you with the quickest and least painful death."

"Oh, my God!"

She screams, runs from him, scales the steps to the main level of the house. The rooftop audience has ceased to mourn, is now enraptured with the drama being played.

"What's the matter?" he taunts her. "Lost your nerve?"

She stares down at him, the shrouded body, the men, the servant, then up at the Arabs all around.

"Beast!"

"You really want to die?" he demands.

"Yes! Yes!"

"Good!" He runs past her, grazes her body, then mounts the stairs to the roof.

"Wonderful view from here," he shouts. "Come on up! A terrific place to jump!"

Looking up at him, poised against the sun, one arm extended to show her where to leap, the other dangling the Colt by its trigger guard, she finds herself suddenly relieved.

"Where on earth did you get that gun?" she asks him with a grin.

"I always carry a revolver," he replies. "I never know when I'm going to meet a suicidal girl."

O
ld Nathalie is buried in an Arab cemetery overlooking the port of Bône.
 
Trophimovsky weeps during the entombment, but Isabelle remains calm, her face a gentle mask. Later the two of them return to the little house on Rue Bugeaud, drink vodka together and talk of this wondrous soothing woman far into the night.

"She never said a bad word to me in all the years," Vava says, "but her eyes–they reproached me for my sins ten thousand times."

"She was a pure flame, a pure spirit in a demon's nest." Isabelle lies upon a sofa, feet bare and hanging over the arm, smoking kif from a brier pipe.

"In all our years together I never gave her anything–not even a bottle of French perfume." Vava's eyes are moist. Isabelle glances at him, decides, sorrowfully, that he does not have long to live.

H
e stays with her for two weeks, trying to lure her back to Villa Neuve. But she refuses him every time, insisting she must stay in North Africa and find out who she is.

"I want to be a writer," she tells him. "And now I must try my hand."

In the end, when he sees she cannot be budged, he hands her a wad of money and wishes her good luck. She will always have a home in Meyrin, he says, and the villa will be left to her and Vladimir and Augustin when he dies.

On the morning he sails for Genoa she awaits a precious phrase. She wants him to acknowledge his paternity, but though he gives her a lengthy, loving gaze, the words never come.

CACTOPHILE

S
ince the first days of October 1895, he had hardly stepped out of the villa grounds. He was twenty-nine years old and had spent nearly two decades working in the garden. He had not taken a violin lesson since 1887, but in the ten years since he had continued to play, devising a special technique by which he could render the tremulous screech he favored most. After 1894 he devoted himself exclusively to the E-string, and for the past year had not played a single note below high A.

He found himself bizarre, but not so bizarre as the world outside. There, it seemed, people ran about speaking nonsense and defying nature. It was strange, he knew, to fondle the earth and speak to plants in a loving whisper. He knew it was mad to take the nettles of cactus and, hidden away behind some trees, use them to puncture bare flesh, imprint stigmata upon his palms. But was this any stranger than the pursuit of money, the desire to change a political regime, or belief in romantic illusions which one knew in advance would break one's heart? At least in his life there was order, a genius to direct him, a father to love and respect, and the glories of nature which he could nurture with his hands. A germinating seed was more exciting than a slippery kiss. Better to make things grow, make beautiful things flower, to alter and embellish the very shape and texture of the land, than to waste one's life in cosmopolitan pursuits.

The walls and moats of Villa Neuve did not make the place a prison. Rather they were its guardians, the guarantors of his security. The house was a fortress to him–from it he could defend himself against the enemies he knew were plotting outside.

Vava had pointed them out, and they were everywhere. The baker, the postman, the local women who washed people's clothes. They spied upon the house, tried to obtain information by appearing friendly, smiling, starting trivial conversations. But sooner or later the questions would begin, clouded at first in innocent curiosity, but becoming increasingly direct. "Where is your sister?" "Why does she go about like a man?" "Where are your brothers?" "Is it true they are wanted by the police?" "Your older sister who left years ago--where is she now?" "Where does the money come from?" "How do you live?" "Didn't your brother run off with a girl from town?" "Was your father really a priest?" "Is he really your father?" On and on, probing, demanding, trying to accumulate sufficient facts so that someone, somewhere, could put the pieces together and complete the dossier.

At first he agreed with Vava, that they were after information about the perfumes. But then he realized that Vava was not working on perfumes at all. Of course the old man would never say anything to contradict this well-known fact, but it was clear to him that all this effort, these years of work and this enormous expense was not on behalf of the sweetness of womankind. Vava was a genius and a genius does not waste his life on trivial things. No, Vava was working on something infinitely more important behind the smoke screen of perfume, and when Vladimir discovered by deduction what that was, all the odd things that had happened about the house over the years fitted together into a grand design.

Why, for instance, he had begun to ask himself some years before, did Vava carry a revolver, even when he went to his laboratory, even when he retired to his room to sleep? None of the others had seen it, but he had spotted it by accident some time before, and then by cleverly stumbling against the old man at various times and feeling it beneath his clothes, had learned it never left his side.

The revolver was but the first in a chain of seemingly random elements which when added together revealed a pattern that convinced him his deduction was correct. There was Vava's tension, the violent mood he created about himself, which could not be explained by the mere pursuit of a scent. He was always at a crisis of nerves because he was working on something dangerous, and that, too, was why he enforced seclusion upon the house. No one was allowed in, the gates were permanently barred–he had not wanted Young Nathalie to marry because he could not abide the presence of a stranger he could not trust.

Nicolas and Augustin–they might have sensed it, too, known that there was more to Vava's difficult behavior than mere hysteria and rage. Perhaps Nicolas had pulled a triple cross–pretended to the Russian students he was an anarchist, pretended to Augustin that he was a patriot, while all the time, having somehow discovered the true nature of Vava's work, it was that and not the names of the members of the Russian group that he had inscribed in code and sold. But was Augustin really innocent? It was strange the way he'd disappeared so fast, then turned up in the Foreign Legion. He had never shown any military inclinations. Why this sudden interest in soldiering and arms? Perhaps he, too, had information of value to a Ministry of War. And why had Vava sent Isabelle and Mama away? Clearly because things were getting too dangerous, the work on the botanically based explosives too close to completion, and their enemies, the agents of the nations that wanted the formula, were closing in.

That was the only explanation–an incredible scientific breakthrough–a way of creating explosions by means of naturally found and easily acquired substances. Even a child could see the potential–an army that could sweep into a country like Russia virtually without supplies, make its own gun powder out of plants and barks and leaves, lard the fortifications of enemy towns with materials that could reduce its walls to dust.

But having deduced the true nature of Vava's work, it was important that he never speak of it aloud. Of course Vava knew that he knew–how else explain those smiles and winks, those comforting pats on the back when they worked together in the garden? How else explain those strange half-uttered phrases, those lines filled with innuendo and double-entendre: "our perfumes shall knock down walls"; "our scents shall pierce through armored plate"; "capitalism shall yield before our odorous power"; "let the pope beware–the world will never be the same!"?