The Listener (4 page)

He had read the whole anthology and found it banal. There was only one story that was truly frightening. It placed its terror in full daylight in an ordinary room. But all the others gave him the opportunity to draw night or dusk. His vignettes were workmanlike depictions of the people and places the author and the reader would want to see. But they were uninteresting. Again and again he returned to his dark-filled pages. His back no longer ached.

It’s the unexpressed that interests me, he thought. I’ve been drawing too explicitly; it’s a mistake to clarify everything. He wrote to Stella.

He walked down to the general store and posted the letter. On his way home he ran into Jansson, who asked if there was a lot of water in the cellar.

“I haven’t been in the cellar,” he said.

“Maybe you could have a look,” Jansson said. “What with all the rain we’ve had this year.”

He unlocked the cellar and turned on the light. The bulb was mirrored in a motionless expanse of water, as shiny and black as oil. The cellar stairs descended into the water and vanished. He stood still and stared. The walls lay in deep shadow, hollowed out where pieces of the wall had collapsed, and the fallen pieces – lumps of stone and cement – lay half hidden under the water like swimming animals. It seemed to him that they swam backwards, towards the angle where the cellar hallway turned and went further in under the house. I must draw this house, he thought. Quickly. I need to hurry, while it lasts.

He drew the cellar. He drew the back yard, a chaos of carelessly discarded fragments, useless, coal-black, and entirely anonymous in the snow. It was a picture of quiet, gloomy confusion. He drew the sitting room, he drew the verandah. Never before had he been so fully awake. His sleep was deep and easy, the way it had been as a boy. He woke instantaneously, without that half-conscious, uneasy borderland that breaks up sleep and poisons it. Sometimes he slept during the day and worked at night. He lived in a state of furious expectation. He finished one drawing after another. There were more than fifteen, many times more. He no longer bothered with the vignettes.

Yes, he thought. She’s been working and she’s a little tired. She’s walking around in her house, getting undressed for the night. She’s walking around turning off the lights, one by one, she’s as white as blank paper, as white as the innocent challenge of the empty surface, and now she alone gives off light, Stella, my star.

He was almost certain that the house leaned outwards. Through the window, he could see four steps but not the top one. He put sticks in the snow in order to measure the change in the house’s angle of inclination. The water in the cellar did not rise. It didn’t matter, anyway. He had drawn both the cellar and the façade. He was now working exclusively on the ragged wallpaper in the sitting room. There was no mail. At times he was not certain which letters he had sent to his wife and which he had only imagined. She was further away now, a picture, a faint pretty picture of a woman. At times, cool and naked, she moved through their large salon of white wood. He found it hard to remember her eyes.

Days and nights and many weeks went by. He worked the whole time. When a drawing was finished, he set it aside and forgot it, continuing at once with a new one, a new white paper, a blank white surface that offered the same challenge, the same limitless possibilities, and an absolute isolation from outside help. Each time he began to draw, he made sure that all the doors in the house were locked. It had begun to rain, but the rain didn’t concern him. Nothing concerned him except the tenth story in the anthology. More and more, he thought about this one story, in which the author had subjected daylight to his terror and, against all the rules, enclosed it in an ordinary, pleasant room.

He came closer and closer to the tenth story. It was everywhere, and finally he decided to kill it by drawing. He took a fresh white paper and placed it on the table in front of him. He knew he had to make it visible, the only
story in the whole anthology that was genuinely full of horror, and he knew he could illustrate it only one way – it was Stella’s living room, her consummate room, where they lived their lives together. He was amazed but utterly certain. He walked around and lit the low lights, all of them, and the windows opened their eyes out towards the illuminated terrace. Beautiful, strange people moved slowly in groups of two or three, and he drew them all, calmly and surely, with small, grey, skilful lines. He drew the room, a terrifying room without doors, bulging with tension, the white walls shadowed with imperceptibly tiny cracks. He let them run on and widen. He drew them all. He saw that the window wall’s enormous sheet of glass was on the point of bursting from the pressure from within, and he began drawing it as fast as he could, and at the same time he saw the cleft that opened in the floor and it was black. He worked faster and faster, but before his pen could reach the darkness the room he was drawing turned and crashed outwards to its ruin.

I
T WAS EARLY SPRING
. Sometimes in the evenings she would stand and gaze at his windows, which had blue curtains. The light behind them was very soft. If the window was dark, she did not leave but stayed where she was and gazed nevertheless. She entertained no hopes; she was simply paying respect. The street’s impersonal loneliness, the cold, and the long walk home were also tributes. She had never seen him. She had a blue scrapbook into which she pasted every article about him from the newspapers, weeping with anger when what they said wasn’t kind. The pictures were often blurry and did not do him justice. His books were always about love. She was proud of the fact that he dared to write as he did, without the least concession to the changing times. He knew that longing and shyness and dreams are the essential nature and privilege of love, together with its patient capacity to wait and to forgive. He wrote a new book almost every year. She owned all of them, including the earliest works of his youth.

She never wrote to him. It gave her a secret advantage and the chance to continue loving – dreamily, stubbornly, and with greater and greater experience. Her rituals were free of the pathetic hope of being noticed. She could open the telephone catalogue and just stare at his name until her eyes filled with tears. She drew strength from the quiet perseverance that is a mature woman’s dignity and pride. She had not been a mature woman for very long.

The snow began to melt, and he published his most beautiful book. The critics were cruel. The reviews were so terrible that she couldn’t paste them into her scrapbook. She burned them and wept. This happened at the beginning of April, and something in the relationship between them changed in the weeks that followed. Hesitantly, then with earnest conviction, she dared to believe that he needed her. She understood him. She lived her life in accordance with his books, and everything he said was an echo of what she herself had felt, as completely as if they had called to one another.

She wrote to him. The letter was stiff and almost without adjectives. She told him that she considered the recent criticism unjustified. Awkwardly and with restraint, she tried to express what his books had meant to her and, finally, with a womanly wisdom that was surprising for her age, she did not provide her own address. He gets thousands of letters, she thought, and her pride touched both of them. I don’t want to be a letter that has to be answered. I want to be the anonymous correspondent that he can’t stop wondering about.

When she had mailed the letter, her sense of liberation was so great that she wanted to run and jump, so she ran into the park and rushed back and forth between the trees where no one could see her. She kicked open a channel for meltwater in the wet snow and dug in the sand with her hands.

For several days she hardly thought about him, and not once did it cross her mind to go and stare at his window. It was almost like deserting him, not really but almost, and in the end she started reading his books all over again in chronological order as a declaration of fidelity. Through all of them, men and women circled one another in worshipful reticence. Through hundreds of pages they approached their ultimate but always undescribed union.

One night she woke breathless with fear and knew that she had waited too long. He had forgotten her. She got up to write a new letter, in which she pleaded with him to pursue his muse in spite of everything. Reviews mean nothing, she wrote. What they think is utterly meaningless, they don’t understand. They don’t understand how courageous it is – at this moment, when love is cheap and vulgar and lacking in mystery – for someone to dare to defend purity. She tried to explain that he had taken what had become mere anatomy and built it into a temple, but the sentence became so odd that she scratched it out and started a new letter. And in the end she gave him her address, which she wrote in tiny letters at the very bottom of the page. She ran to the letter box on the corner and stood and gazed at it. The slot was half
open. It was like a mouth that was ready to bite her. She hesitated, then quickly tossed in the letter and the cover fell shut with a bang. And in that second she knew with sober certainty that she had now abandoned herself to disappointment.

He answered at once. He did in fact answer so quickly that she never had time to prepare herself to wait. There was the letter lying on the front hall rug, and it was from him. She had imagined that if he wrote – supposing he actually did write some day when he had the time or was in the right mood or had decided to get some chores out of the way – then she would take the letter to some pretty place, perhaps by the sea, and open it there. But she ripped it open right there in the hall without a thought to saving the envelope and read it quickly, breathlessly, skimmingly – a whole page, handwritten. He was chivalrous. His letter was like his books. He had taken time with it, and it was for her alone. He thanked her and assured her that his view of women would never change, that he would always see them as beautiful and pure.

The world changed, imperceptibly but utterly. She moved differently, lingeringly. Absentmindedly, without plan or calculation, she would look at her image in mirrors or shop windows, absorbing herself in her own femininity. What a lot happens, she thought, gratefully. So many changes. I haven’t had the time to be unhappy for weeks. Her job grew unimportant – for
what significance can a job have in these circumstances? She did it automatically, dreamily. Elegant, old-fashioned words wafted through her mind, and she amused herself with beautiful gestures or simply by sitting still with her hands in her lap. It was a happy, slow time. Once again she was using him to live a more concentrated life. She did not write to him. She partook of the uncommon happiness of delaying what she longed for. She knew that a rose lay at her feet, but she did not pick it up.

There came a period of rain, a long spring rain that took the snow with it. The ice broke up. And finally she wrote again, at night, very quickly and better than she’d ever written before.

He didn’t answer. Time passed and he didn’t answer. There is a difference between silence that anticipates and silence that is final.

Only now – in a state of disappointment so great that it denied her even the comfort of grieving – only now did she feel she understood what it was she hoped for. It was nothing less than to become the person he wrote to when he was feeling low, when he couldn’t work, when he doubted himself and felt alone. It could have been a long, beautiful correspondence, whose meaning and beauty lay in the fact that they never met, not a single time until one of them died. All through history, the artist and a woman have exchanged such letters, precious, inspirational letters that have given posterity a completely new view of the artist and his work. And possibly of the woman. She had spoiled everything, and it was a realization she couldn’t bear.

She took a taxi and ran up the stairs and rang his bell. It was eight o’clock in the evening. She had forgotten to make herself pretty, but for the moment she thought of nothing at all, just went straight in and said earnestly, “I’m the one who wrote to you.” Her gravity was almost stern and gave her a new dignity that was all her own. As she gazed at him, all the blurred newspaper portraits slid together, quick as a deck of cards, and he no longer looked like an author. He said, “It was nice of you to come and visit,” and he took her coat.

The room was large. The blue curtains went from wall to wall and all the way down to the soft, purple floor. All the colours were deep and restrained and the lamplight was soft and flattering. It was an impersonal room, with a sense of lofty seclusion and luxury. The only thing that didn’t belong was a large, soiled tiger skin. Its mouth agape as if it were gasping for air. She walked around it to the sofa.

“Would you like a drink?” he said.

She sat down. “Yes, thank you,” she said. The sofa was much lower than she had estimated, and she nearly lost her balance and felt ridiculous. In the blink of an eye, she lost her dignity, the tiny but passionate dignity that had graced her for a few moments. She giggled and started digging in her purse. He mixed sweet vermouth and ice water without asking what she wanted. For himself, he poured some lemon juice.

Everything was ebbing away. The ice cubes tinkled in her glass as she shook it slowly and searched for words. She said what she had already written – that his last
book was the finest thing he’d ever done, and he replied that he was pleased to hear her say so, that he was very glad she liked it. Now the ball was in her court again. She clinked her ice cubes and said with enormous effort, “There are things that can be treated so many different ways, like this question of purity, which is so essential. I mean, whatever happens and however things evolve, you know, towards absolute freedom – people getting freer and freer, doing whatever they want and saying and showing whatever they want – but I don’t think it’s right. It’s not pretty. And words are important.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Words are important.” He was very attentive. Actually he had terribly small eyes and his lashes were perfectly black. She went on hurriedly. “What you describe in your books is a thing that has almost been lost. It belongs in another century! I mean, isn’t it true that people talk to death things that are so fragile and fine that they shouldn’t be talked about at all?”

He looked thoughtful and she added vehemently, “I mean, it gets all turned around. It turns people off, and isn’t that a shame?”

“That’s an interesting thought,” he said slowly and as if from a great distance. He had stood up and now he asked if she’d like to have some music. She said bluntly, “Yes.” He asked what kind of music and she said it didn’t matter. “But I have everything,” he said. “Whatever in the world you’d like. You have only to say.”

At that moment, all she could remember was Beethoven and the Beatles, so she said curtly, “You decide. The way you decided my drink.”

A clear, chilly, gentle music streamed forth and filled the room, thoughtful and impassive. The decision not to speak altered her face, which shrivelled and grew childish. She was no longer trying to please.

“Now you’re tired of me,” he said. “It was wrong of me, pouring you vermouth. May I offer you a whisky or Cognac instead, or is there something else you’d like?”

“No, no, not at all,” she answered quickly, half suffocated by remorse and confusion. Why doesn’t he talk the way he writes? He’s friendly, but it’s the wrong kind of friendliness. It doesn’t mean anything. That’s the way you comfort someone who doesn’t count, someone who’s behaved badly and isn’t even really grown up.

“Is that skin from Africa?” she said.

“India, maybe,” he said. Now he’s withdrawing again, that was wrong. You don’t make small talk with a writer, you talk about essentials. I’ve only been thinking of myself, not about him at all. They both began speaking at once, at exactly the same instant. They stopped and looked at each other.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “You were saying …?”

“No, it was nothing.”

“No, please go on …”

“I was just thinking,” she said. “What does a person do, what does an author do if he’s misunderstood and gets depressed and can no longer write? It must be dreadful to get bad reviews, and how many people are there who understood what it’s like, and how important it is not to …” His face closed and she went silent with shame, a shame she could not understand or control,
and the music had reached its finale and so it stopped as well.

It could all have been indescribably awful, but now the author extended his hand and touched hers, one short second, and asked respectfully which of his books she had read. She drew a deep breath and looked straight at him with that special sadness that only adoration can produce. “All of them,” she said. “Every book you’ve written. They have their own shelf and I never mix them with ordinary books. I live by them, though it’s not easy. I believe in them. I’m your disciple.”

The astonishing, archaic word “disciple” hung there between them, as palpable and exacting as the silence that followed his strange and chilly music. Now I need not say anything more, she thought. This was right, he liked it.

Finally he spoke the way he wrote, and only to her. With precision and respect he said, “My dear friend.” And these unusual words hovered in the air, filled the room, and were impossible to follow. It was too much, it was overwhelming. In blind ecstasy and terror she grasped his hand, quite hard, and pressed it to her mouth. A terrible embarrassment overcame them. They stood up simultaneously and heard someone open the hall door and come into the room. He spoke quickly and very softly. “You are my protectress. I shall not forget you.” With a cautious grip on her elbow, he escorted her out into the front hall and helped her on with her coat. He opened the door. The person who had come in was large and tall, but she never saw him, only his boots, and now
she was out on the stairs and then on the street, and the night was bright and quite warm. She walked up one street and down another and thought, My dear friend, My protectress, I shall not forget you. After such words, there was no longer any need to speak to each other ever again, and with great sincerity she decided that this was in fact a beautiful thing. She went home and went to bed and slept the whole night as peacefully as people do when a difficult work is completed – and completed with honour.