Outline: A Novel (17 page)

Melete slowly shook her head.

‘As I said, I barely remember him, though I don’t forget people easily. So you could say that this attack has come from the place I least expected. In fact it would almost be true to say that this student was the very last person I had ever considered to pose a threat to me.’

At times, Melete continued, it had almost seemed to her that this fact was what had created his behaviour. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created an attack on itself, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

‘I prefer to call it madness,’ she said, ‘whether his or my own, and so instead I have tried to become fond of him. I look up and there he always is, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue. He is in fact entirely dependable, more faithful to me than any lover I’ve ever had. I try to love him back.’

She closed the wine list and put up her finger to summon the waiter. Elena said something to her in Greek and a brief dispute ensued, which the waiter joined halfway through and in which he appeared conclusively to take Melete’s side, taking the order from her with much brusque nodding of his head despite Elena’s continued petitions.

‘Elena knows nothing about wine,’ Melete said, to me.

Elena seemed to take no offence at this remark. She returned to the subject of Melete’s persecutor.

‘What you have described,’ she said, ‘is complete subjection. The idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous. It is entirely a religious proposition. To say that you love what you hate and what hates you is the same as admitting you have been defeated, that you accept your oppression and are just trying to make yourself feel better about it. And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.’

I watched the people at the other tables and at the tables on the adjoining terraces, all packed so tightly that the whole square seemed to be aflame with conversation. Here and there beggars moved among the talking people, who often took some time to realise they were there, and then either gave them something or brushed them away. Several times I saw this repeated, the wraith-like figure standing unnoticed behind the chair of the person obliviously eating, talking, absorbed in life. A tiny, desiccated, hooded woman was moving among the tables close to us, and presently she approached ours, murmuring, the little claw of her hand outstretched. I watched Melete place some coins in her palm and say a few words to her, gently stroking her fingers.

‘What he thinks is of no importance,’ she continued. ‘If I found out more about what he thinks, I might start to confuse him with myself. And I don’t compose myself from other people’s ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else’s poem.’

‘But to him this is a game, a fantasy,’ Elena said. ‘Men like to play this game. And they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. By not being honest with a man you allow him to continue his game, to live in his fantasy.’

As if to prove her point, my phone sounded on the table. It was a text from my neighbour:
I miss you,
it said.

It was only when you got beyond people’s fantasies, Elena continued, about themselves and one another, that you accessed a level of reality where things assumed their true value and were what they seemed to be. Some of those truths, admittedly enough, were ugly, but others were not. The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight. If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

Melete laughed. ‘According to that logic,’ she said, ‘there can be no relationship at all. There can only be people stalking one another.’

The waiter brought the wine, a small unlabelled bottle the colour of ink, and Melete began to pour it out.

‘It’s true,’ Elena said, ‘that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’

The person she was involved with now, she said – a man named Konstantin – had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that – unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience – she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so that she felt – for the first time, as she had said – a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross. That line, that boundary, was something she had never encountered so palpably in any other man, men whose defences were usually cobbled together out of fantasies and deceptions that no one – themselves least of all – would blame her for wanting to break through. And so not only did she feel a sense of prohibition around Konstantin, a sense that he would regard her raiding him for his truth much as he would have regarded her breaking into his house and stealing his things, she had actually become frightened of the very thing she loved him for, his equality with herself.

It remained, therefore, within his grasp, this weapon of which she had been so quick to disarm every other man: the power to hurt her. At a party recently, where she had taken Konstantin and introduced him to many of her friends, she had been enjoying the feeling of showing him off to her social circle, seeing his handsomeness and his wit and his integrity through their eyes – and vice versa, because this was a house of artists and other interesting people from her world – and she had started to eavesdrop a little on his conversation with a woman she knew but didn’t like very much, a woman called Yanna. It was partly out of spite towards Yanna that she had given into the temptation to eavesdrop: she wanted to hear Konstantin speak, and to imagine Yanna’s jealousy at the intelligence and good looks of Elena’s boyfriend. Yanna was asking about Konstantin’s children, of which he has two from a previous marriage, and then, quite casually, while Elena was listening, Yanna asked him whether he’d like to have any more children. No, he said, while Elena, listening, felt as though knives were being plunged into her from all sides; no, he didn’t think he wanted any more children, he was happy with things as they were.

She raised her glass to her lips, her hand trembling.

‘We had never,’ she continued quietly, ‘discussed the question of children, but it is obvious that for me it remains open, that I may very well want to have children. Suddenly this party I was enjoying, where I had felt so happy, became a torture. I was unable to laugh or smile or speak to anyone properly; I just wanted to go away and be alone, but I had to stay there with him until it was over. And of course he had noticed that I was upset, and kept asking me what was wrong; and for the whole of the rest of that evening and night he kept asking me to tell him what was wrong. In the morning he was due to go away on business for a few days. I had to tell him, he said. It was impossible for him to go to the airport and get on a plane with me in this upset state. But of course it would have been so humiliating to tell him, because I had overheard something not meant for my ears, and also because of the subject itself, which ought to have been approached so differently.

‘It seemed to me that this was a situation it was impossible to get out of, while still thinking as well of one another as we had before. I had this feeling,’ she continued, ‘which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were. I find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to,’ she said, ‘the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak.’

I looked at the couple at the table next to ours, a man and a woman who had eaten their meal in a more or less unbroken silence. She had kept her handbag on the table in front of her plate, as though she was worried it might be stolen. It sat there between them and both of them glanced at it occasionally.

‘But did you tell Konstantin that you had heard him?’ Melete said. ‘That morning, while you were waiting for the taxi, did you admit it?’

‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘He was embarrassed, of course, and said it had been a thoughtless comment, that it didn’t mean anything, and in a way I believed him and it was a relief, but in my heart I thought – why bother to speak at all? Why say anything, if you can just take it back the next minute? Yet of course I wanted it to be taken back. And even thinking about it now the whole thing seems slightly unreal, as though by allowing it to be taken back I can no longer be sure that it actually happened. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the taxi came and he got in it and left, both of us friends again, but afterwards I had the feeling of a stain, something small but permanent, like a little stain that ruins the whole dress – I imagined all the years passing, and us having children, and me never being able to forget the way he had shaken his head and said no when someone had asked him whether he wanted them. And him perhaps remembering that I was a person capable of invading his privacy and judging him on what I had found. This idea made me want to run away from him, from our apartment and the life we have together, to hide myself somewhere, in something unspoiled.’

There was a silence, into which the noise from the surrounding tables steadily flowed. We drank the soft, dark wine, so soft it could barely be felt on the tongue.

‘Last night I had a dream,’ Melete said presently, ‘in which I and several other women, some of whom were friends of mine and some of whom were strangers, were trying to get into the opera. But all of us were bleeding, pouring out menstrual blood: it was a kind of pandemonium, there at the entrance to the opera house. There was blood on our dresses, dripping down into our shoes; every time one woman stopped bleeding another started, and the women were placing their bloodied towels in a neat pile by the door to the building, a pile that got bigger and bigger and that other people had to pass to get in. They looked at us as they passed, men in their dinner jackets and bow ties, in absolute disgust. The opera began; we could hear the music coming from inside, but we couldn’t seem to get ourselves across the threshold. I felt a great anxiety’, Melete said, ‘that all of this was somehow my fault, because I was the one who had first noticed the blood, noticed it on my own clothes, and in my tremendous shame I seemed to have created this much bigger problem. And it strikes me’, she said to Elena, ‘that your story about Konstantin is really a story about disgust, the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.’

Elena nodded her golden head, and put her hand across the table to touch Melete’s fingers.

When she was a child, Melete continued, she used to suffer from the most terrible attacks of vomiting. It was a quite debilitating condition that persisted for several years. The attacks always occurred at exactly the same time of day and under exactly the same circumstances, the hour when she would return from school to the house she shared with her mother and stepfather. Understandably enough, her mother was very distressed by Melete’s suffering, which had no apparent cause and therefore seemed to be nothing less than a criticism of her own way of life and the man she had introduced into the household, a man her only child refused – as though by a point of principle – to love or even to recognise. Every day at school, Melete would forget about the vomiting, but then as it became time to go home she would feel the first signs of its approach, a feeling of weightlessness, almost as though the ground were giving way under her feet. She would hurry back to the house in a state of anxiety, and there, usually in the kitchen, where her mother was waiting to give her her afternoon snack, an extraordinary nausea would start to grow. She would be taken to the sofa to lie down; a blanket would be put over her, the television switched on, and a bowl left by her side; and while Melete retched, her mother and stepfather would spend their evening together in the kitchen, talking and eating dinner. Her mother had taken her to doctors, therapists, and finally a child psychoanalyst, who suggested – much to the mystification of the adults who were paying his bill – that Melete take up a musical instrument. He asked her whether there was any instrument in particular she had ever thought of playing, and she said, the trumpet. And so, reluctantly, her mother and stepfather had bought her a trumpet. Now, every day after school, instead of the consuming prospect of the vomiting, she had before her the prospect of blowing through the brass instrument to produce its great rude noise. In this way she had made manifest her disgust in flawed humanity, and also managed to interrupt those tête-à-têtes over supper in the kitchen, which could never again be conducted in quite the same way, without her as their victim.