What happened was this: Dorothée became ill. I sometimes think she resorted to illness because she was so thoroughly discouraged and because she no longer knew how to break the imaginary nightmarish shell that I’d shut myself away in. She sensed, guessed, in some obscure way that the only thing from the outside world that could reach me in my separated existence was her, her suffering, her illness. Dorothée liked me a lot; there’s no doubt that she loved me a bit.
At first, it was a slightly sore throat. Which got worse and worse. I can still see her. She was holding her throat. Even when she was speaking, even standing, she’d got into the habit of holding her right hand around her hurting throat. Yes, it seems to me that I’ll forever see Dorothée standing, her feet crossed, her sleeveless black dress, her right hand like a vice around her throat, her red hair, her blue eyes dark like those of a newborn and, surrounding her, her guests and Jacques, Jacques who watched her.
He knew no doubt, he knew long before me. But I had to learn of it as well, for she was in the hospital for what seemed to me a long time, but which wasn’t really. I didn’t see her anymore. And I was angry with Jacques for a long time because it was he who had told me about Dorothée’s illness. When I met him I had this vision which was just my held-in feelings; I threw myself on him and kicked and punched him. Yes, I would have loved to do that and shout: “Ah! You don’t love her; no, you don’t love her. Why don’t you call yourself Blaise? Why don’t you heal sore throats?” But I said nothing, I was as if indifferent. Jacques must have thought that I didn’t care. Certainly he thought that because he didn’t understand anything.
One day, I was given permission to go and see her. Dorothée phoned me — her voice was just a thin thread — and invited me to go and visit her. “You’ll have to make conversation,” she said to me when I arrived. She smiled. If I’d wanted to I’m sure that I could have told Isaac’s story through to the end, no doubt about it. But I didn’t even think of it. I looked at her without saying a word. To speak I would need to forget the bandage she had around her throat. But how could I? I looked at her; I saw her and I wanted to cry. But how could I cry at that moment? And hear her ask: “What’s wrong, Isaac?” And to answer: “It’s your throat, that’s what.” When she was smiling and apparently not suffering. How could I say that? How should I behave? I’d always been a stupid child, paralysed or disconcerted by the slightest thing. I was always in danger of turning into a cataleptic state, a thing, a stone. Yes, one day I’d be a stone.
I’d thought I had so much news and so many stories to tell Dorothée. And here I was, standing in front of her, looking at her bandages — Jacques had not warned me — and I couldn’t say a word. The visit was a disaster. I wasn’t present. Dorothée remained in her room on her own as if she’d not had any visitors that afternoon. I thought, I had this idea that she’d wept for her lost child for too long; the song that I heard all the time, the infinitely sad song was Dorothée singing; that’s why she had a bad throat. How to explain that thought? “What child, Isaac? What are you talking about?” That’s what she would have said. With an effort. And it was not worth it. The sad song, it seemed I was the only person to hear it, and even Dorothée, even she didn’t hear her own voice. That voice was as if separated, detached. It followed me, it accompanied me. And Dorothée didn’t notice it, just like the left hand is unaware of what the right hand is doing. When I left after this long silence, Dorothée murmured that she’d be well in no time and that she would soon be home. It was true.
I’d like to be able to say without shame: Dorothée’s illness brought me abruptly back to reality. I had a sudden fear of losing her, her, “I am,” not Someone, not Rose, but she who I hadn’t invented. When I didn’t see her, often, she took on the features of Abrame partaking in a sacrifice. I waited for her knife at my throat. But when I found her again in the real world, I was seized by another terror when looking at her fine red hair, her smile, her all-encompassing gentleness. No, it wasn’t Abrame, it wasn’t the Knight of Fear. God, how on earth had I come up with such an idea? What was I thinking? It was “I am,” it was Dorothée, a very gentle and very real young woman of whom I’d asked to play a cruel role in my nightmare. And who couldn’t, no, she wasn’t the Fear of Isaac, she wasn’t the good angel either, the guardian angel. She couldn’t plunge a knife or stop it.
She belonged to another world, one where she was called Dorothée, and where I was nothing to her, not her child, or her daughter or her ward. Oh! How fragile the bond between us if neither blood nor the law reinforced it. How easy it would be to cut it. One day, I would stand before her and she would not know me. What would I say then? Which law should I call upon? Which voice? Which love? “It’s your blood that cries out.” No, I couldn’t say that; no. And Dorothée would shut her door. And, once again, it would be the end of the world, and hell for me, madness …
Ah! I don’t know Dorothée. I don’t want to either see her or love her, her, “I am.” Her life and love are too fragile. The tiniest thing could break them. Reality is so precarious. Far too precarious for Isaac. Thank goodness, yes, thank goodness that I’m called Isaac and Abrame loves her, forever, even when he kills her, when he sacrifices her, when Isaac doesn’t understand what’s happening. Abrame loves her still. She’ll know that one day; she’ll know it forever. That’s what I thought when I found myself in front of the real Dorothée and my terror was even bigger than my fear of Abrame, and I fled. I went far away, very far from Dorothée, there where she couldn’t ever join me or leave me. I took refuge in my nightmare, the delirium, up there on the mountain of Moriyya where Abrame put up an altar stone for the child, the beloved one.
But Dorothée’s illness showed me just how vulnerable she could be and I suddenly was afraid for her. This fear distracted me from my nightmare. I completely forgot it. Or rather, it seemed that our roles were reversed. Dorothée became the child who cries out on the altar. The knife plunged in her throat. And me, what had I done? Was I blind? Had madness seized me? I sacrificed her. Me? It was me then? After having pushed her to the limit, to the edge of exhaustion, I sacrificed her. No, it was better to forget our imaginary scenarios, to abandon them. I now wanted to take my turn in protecting Dorothée. I was going to leave this awful story, and flee from Moriyya, yes, taking with me my poor child, my dear Dorothée who seemed so frail, so delicate in her hospital bed.
Thanks to Dorothée, her pain, reality won the victory over figments of my imagination. And I believed, I thought that there was Love outside of the Book. And I wanted to protect her life as she had mine. Dorothée pulled me away, called me away from the Book, away from the imaginary stories where I’d been shut away until then. She gave me a new birth.
After that, things moved very quickly, both from an events and knowledge point of view. My life started to resemble a story that it’s possible to narrate in the right order, without mixing up dates, but with calm and logic. I had this dream that showed that I was about to see the real Dorothée, her solitude and her suffering. I renounced the Someone within her. Dorothée was neither all-powerful nor invulnerable. I opened my eyes to her own passions, her own destiny, that part of her life where I had no place, where we were separated. I agreed to acknowledge the fatal evidence that I had denied for so long: Dorothée’s life did not belong to me. She too, like me, needed to go to a place where she became a tragic character. She also had her hell and agony. For me it was Moriyya, the mountain; for her it was an island. My furious outbursts, my tears, my delirium couldn’t stop it. She would go there; she was perhaps there already.
There was a rock in the middle of a sea. I arrived in a small boat with two others whose features remain indistinct, people like you, Theodore, whom I would only know later. The rock was in the form of a cone, a small pyramid with numerous rough patches. Very beautiful and rare flowers, probably saxifrages, were growing on the rocks. There were also shells that looked like desert roses. I still saw the ornate shells decorated with superb and complicated designs. I turned over one or two and found the crabs curled in on themselves. They were dead I think.
Our desire was to do a tour of the island and perhaps pick some flowers. But it was impossible for us to get near. An immobile reddish-brown cockerel standing on the north rock face was guarding the access. One of us picked up a rock and threw it at it. The cockerel immediately changed into a young redhead, her body nailed to the rocks like a ship’s figurehead. She was lying on her stomach and lifted her head. She suddenly turned towards us and I saw her sad, irritated, but very cold gaze. I told the others that it was best to forget our attempt to go round the rock and pick flowers. “Let’s leave,” I said, “leave her to her rock. It’s all she has.” Our boat moved away. But I’d taken with me a black crab shell decorated with strange, cabalistic designs.
Later, when I was once again capable of facing the past, and of analyzing this episode, I thought that the crab was a sign of cancer. While Dorothée was ill, I had feared the worst, even imagined that she would save me by taking my place on the funeral pyre, that she would be the lamb in the bush. While she was in hospital, I feared that she would take my death. My death was in her throat. Afterwards, when she was no longer in any danger from her illness, I returned to my dream. I thought of Hermann who had died in July, under the sign of cancer. Dorothée had perhaps told me or maybe I’d guessed. There was a summer’s day when her melancholy fell heavily upon us. I was there, I witnessed it, and I understood that it was probably some sort of anniversary.
I thought about that night in July when she had danced so much. Strange and secretive, she had a particular way of doing things. She didn’t mourn like others. Yes, that day when I had wanted to die so that she would love me and look at me, it was day of great sadness. She hadn’t managed to hide it from me. Now I was about to leave Dorothée, I’d soon leave her to her island, where she would eternally guard the sea grave of her lover. Jacques was kidding himself. He could well follow her everywhere, be company for her, pass days and nights by her side, but never, no, never would he have her soul. As far as essentials are concerned, I knew far more than him. I was in truth far closer to Dorothée than he would ever be.
Dorothée returned from hospital with the idea that to fully recuperate she needed to spend some time by the sea. I thought that she would go to Gloucester as was her custom. She loved that place, its tormented aspect, its rocky cliff on which happened to be a mysterious, she said, haunted house. Because of her love of the place, she accepted and loved all it offered — its shopping centre, its monuments, “The Gloucester Fisherman” who contemplates the sea, planted on his stone plinth with its inscription: “They that go down to the sea in ships,” its tourists in their bathing costumes by the roadside and its postcards.
But no, this time she wanted to go to the North Sea, the one that scares little girls, she said. She wanted to go to Denmark, to see it with me, to see what I had seen. She wanted to make this trip with me, so that I could show her this country I loved, this little country where, according to the Danish, one can always spit in the sea wherever one is. But no, no, we wouldn’t spit in the North Sea. Of course not. We’d go and watch on the ramparts of Elseneur the ghost king; we’d go to Kalundborg to see the Vikings’ graves; we’d amble along the Frederiksberggade in Copenhagen; we’d stop in front of Andersen’s statue. I’d learn Danish easily. I knew the essentials: thank you, and I’m tired, can you write it for me? and don’t forget. Dorothée would want to know everything about the Scandinavian gods. Odin, the god of fury, would lose all his powers. And then I’d take her to Lokken; it’s there that we could take time to write letters and postcards, and to contemplate the sea. All melancholy would be banished.
Spring was on its way and we could leave almost immediately. Dorothée would soon have taken all her end of studies exams. When she returned, she’d find a job and Jacques, who was meant to be working until July, would wait for her. As for me, perhaps I wouldn’t come back. No one was waiting for me. Madame Nadeau, my landlady, would find another student for my room. I’d leave my books, even Vita Nova.
I took with me Gaston Phoebus that I had hidden in my bag. I also took a photo of Dorothée. She was sitting next to me near a window, but one never knows. I often rummaged around in my luggage to reassure myself that it was still there along with Gaston Phoebus. Dorothée had fallen asleep. In sleep, her eyelids stayed slightly open; it was strangely disagreeable; her face lost its beauty then. But she was so curious and she wanted to see everything. Besides, she was still keeping an eye on me. Without her, I didn’t exist in anybody’s eyes. She knew that. I couldn’t sleep on the plane. I reflected on things. I had left nothing behind me, except you, Theodore, but I didn’t know you yet. The day would come, nevertheless, when it would be your turn to cross the ocean so that what should happen happened, like this meeting in Stormgade, so that all should recommence, my madness, my agony. And there, Dorothée will not be able to do anything for me anymore. It will be too late. But it’s maybe enough of one love. It’s perhaps enough to have been loved once, even if that love wasn’t an exclusive love, a love that was sometimes distracted, sometimes attentive, that Dorothée spread over her circle of friends like the sun. Why do I insist? Why do I ask for more and more, like a spoilt child? It’s enough to have been saved once, to have escaped death once.
Plane journeys are always too long for me. We had taken a game of Scrabble with us, but it’s better to talk when one’s afraid. And I was afraid of loving Denmark again; I feared Dorothée’s reaction to this country that I’d loved before. To pass the time and my fear, when she woke up, I told Dorothée about the dream I’d had the day before. It seemed so clear — it was the impatience of the departure, and I didn’t give it a great deal of attention. Dorothée wasn’t really listening to me. When I was worked up, I became terribly talkative sometimes, and that made her head spin.
I found myself in the middle of a family; Dorothée was there, a man and a girl of my age with features that remained blurred. The man suddenly stood up and left the room. He returned soon and I noticed that he was carrying a watch. So I did the same. I went into the next room to pick up a watch. Then I returned to sit next to Dorothée who said to me: “You see how much you identify with him; you do everything like he does.”
Dorothée’s faced darkened. With her eyes closed, she murmured as if she were speaking to herself: “He loved watches, clocks, timepieces, he collected them … Because his days were numbered perhaps …”
I understood then; I knew that it was Hermann, the unknown man, haunting my dreams. That’s how I entered Denmark, that I returned, light and free, having exorcized the ghosts that had been running my life.
You haven’t asked me to stop yet, Theodore, and it’s almost finished. You’ll let me go to the end of my story then, to the bitter end. You have no pity, only contempt, that heavy contempt that one always feels for those who are mad enough to love us. You can’t do anything about it, I know. This attachment weighs you down, irritates you, tires you like those dogs that circle around us wanting to be stroked. Come on, have a bit of courage, finish me off; you don’t have to endure it. It’s not your fault, after all, if I suffer. Your name lost me; it’s your name’s fault. But I won’t call you Theo or The, don’t be angry. You won’t allow me to be so familiar with you, I understand. I assure you. Come on, have some pity. Finish me off. And my story. You hold the end. It depends on you. But you don’t like writing either. Just a short note. “Don’t bother me anymore. T.” That’s all. It’s easy to end a story. Except when Dorothée’s present. She stops us, she always stops us ending it. She removes us alive from the tale. But she’s far away now, very far. You can finish. But hurry up, because I’m afraid. Quickly, hit hard.
I only started this long letter to take my mind off the waiting, to distract me while I waited for your reply to my previous letter. I didn’t think that I’d have time to exhaust my memories of Dorothée; I didn’t think that silence would be your response. How can I make sense of silence? That’s far too difficult for me. It’s so tempting to lose one’s mind over a silence when the truth is intolerable. And I don’t want to face reality, no, I never have. I prefer madness, to be taken for a mad woman, and that my demented behaviour is blindingly obvious to all. I prefer to call myself Isaac. Can you understand that? Dorothée had understood. Ah! She was Someone, Dorothée. To know, to see Someone once, at least once in a lifetime, that’s more than most of us can hope for. Once, that’s all. “Very well, Isaac, I’m listening; tell me your story, but it’s the last time, you hear me …”
It’s finished, almost finished.
Dorothée loved Denmark. She wanted to see everything again, see everything with me, even the unexpected. While she contemplated all these things, I watched her reaction. Little by little, through her eyes, I rediscovered the country as I had seen it before; enthusiasm and desire returned to me like a fresh vision. I saw Steen again; I returned to Steen’s bed, leaving Dorothée to Copenhagen’s nights and its music. For the city was an important centre for amateurs of Jazz. For me, it was always a place without music from which I wouldn’t come back. I walked alone and free without fear or melancholy along the Vestre Kirkegaards Allé. I believed with the naiveté of a child that the ghosts could no longer have a hold over me. Never again, no, never would they knock on my window panes. And me, I would never again plead to be let in like a beggar. I’d never again beg Someone to open his arms to me, to forgive me. I was free; I was free for a time, living off pure light, without God, without passion.
At Lokken, where in the past time had stopped, Dorothée left me. The day of her departure she suggested — mischievously, lovingly — that I write to her immediately. She’d have only just returned when she had news of Isaac. With her watching me I wrote a short note, half in French, half in Danish, which said amongst other things: “Dear Dorothée, I’m in love with Denmark. It’s mad how much I love this country. I can’t get over it.” She read it. She laughed. No, there were no mistakes.
I lived there a long time, you know that, Theodore. Sometimes when I was alone or with Steen or with others, I surprised myself by using Dorothée’s gestures, her attitudes, her expressions. Standing, I sometimes found myself holding my throat when speaking. I think I had swallowed Dorothée. I would never lose her again. I’d never be afraid of losing her again.
Time was moving again; time passed. No doubt I would never have left Denmark if you hadn’t arrived as a tourist one day. Did I know when I looked at you that day that I would go so far as to sacrifice everything to please you? That I would offer you my dearest memories, Dorothée, even my life? But it’s in vain that I write to you, that I try to move you, seduce you. No thing or person can command love. And he who would keep his life loses it … I renounce Someone, you, Theodore. Take my life. I’m giving it to you.
The German language is right; death is a man. Here it comes; it’s approaching to take me. I can tell by an omen. And I’m not Isaac; I’m more like the daughter of Jephta. I’m a girl. I will not be spared. You don’t stop the knife, Theodore, you haven’t interrupted my story. And the end is near, you know. The other day, I had this vision. An hallucination. It wasn’t a dream. I had just gone back to bed after having got up, having been suddenly woken by anxiety in the middle of the night. I’d heard a floorboard crack. Then I saw him in the doorway. I saw him. Death. And I screamed and screamed until he disappeared. Eventually he left and I went back to sleep thinking that, yes, the German language is right. Death is a man. And he is going to return soon. I know. I sense it. Dorothée used to say often: “We can’t hide anything from you, Isaac.” And he’s coming, I’m certain of it. Take my life. Take care of Dorothée; don’t leave my dearest memory lying around just anywhere.
It’s spring, I think. Several months have passed since I began this letter. Bird song is becoming more and more insistent. I should go out. I’ll go for a walk, yes, I think I’ll go to the sea. Walk in the sea. I imagine that it is silent on the bottom of the sea, that the sailors and the drowned are quiet. There one doesn’t keep checking the mail, or give a start each time the phone rings. Fear has disappeared, as has the desire to return like birds do. And madness is there, spread out in the silence. No one seems to need to hide it. It’s dark, it’s so dark and calm on the bottom.
But I’m rambling. Forget that thought. I’ve chased it away. I don’t want you to come like one gives in to blackmail. It’s true that I thought I’d finish this letter by sending you an immense appeal, like an avowal, like a prayer. I wanted to finish this by asking you to give me back my life, you, from now on Someone, you, Theodore, but I was interrupted by a child ringing the doorbell. She was fifteen or sixteen. The age I was when I met Dorothée. And her fear, her fear, how could I not recognize it? She is being tracked, followed by death. From one moment to the next, she could be struck down. Her fearful eyes are fixed on the emptiest angle in the room. That desire she had to crouch there, her desire for vast and empty rooms. I thought I saw my own ghost bent over, afraid, prostrated in the panic and silence. And when she said: “I’m condemned, I’m going to die, today, today, and I’m afraid, I’m so afraid,” I thought of Dorothée, and I spoke like her; I said — and it seemed to me I could still hear her voice — what she’d said to me before: “You want to die, is that it?” And the tears shook her. I felt the fear suddenly leave her as if shedding an old skin; then I saw life inside of her, so lost, so fragile, this life that was reaching out to me as if I were a refuge, and I think: No, I won’t finish this letter; after all, no, I think I won’t write to you. She said her name was Isaac, but her name is Florence. I know. She lives next door.