31

He Cannot Be Silent

It almost feels like I wasn’t actually taking part in everything that happened to me this past week. I’m like a fiddle without a musician, apathetic to myself and everything that surrounds me.

My memory won’t allow me to forget. I’m like a stranger to myself. I look over my own shoulder and wonder what will become of me. I don’t know today what I’ll do with myself tomorrow.

All of this watching myself from inside my own room is driving me out into the street. I’m beginning to see myself as a sinner, and it seems to me that I’m going to sin right under my own nose. I want to prove something to everyone, after all the troubles I’ve had from my unearned insults. I’ve decided that when C. comes to see me I’ll receive him with loud, demonstrative hospitality so that those listening behind the door will hear me greeting him, won’t think I’m hiding anything, and will spend the whole evening thinking about how to protect me.

C. stood by his promise. This time he didn’t tell me that I’d eventually come around to his way of thinking in spite of myself. He talked about astronomy, psychology, mythology, zoology, and all manner of other subjects, and when they did have something to do with physiology or love-ology, he only talked about it from a scientific standpoint. This, I had to allow. To suppress science would be a sin. It was enough that I asked him to suppress the feelings he’d already declared toward me.

We went together to the theater and to a few other artistic venues. He was sure of himself there, and he believed that I was proud of him because he knew so much about everything and he knew how to explain it so that others would listen. To be honest, I did enjoy it. Often on these excursions, I imagined that we were married. As a couple we’d run into a certain A. As A. got to know C., he’d come to believe I was deeply in love with him because of his breadth of knowledge; there was so much to say about him, and so much to listen to. A. would be overcome with sadness and wish that he, and not an educated man like C., had taken me, when he knew I had loved him so much!

To please me, C. started paying more attention to his appearance, and it did make him much better-looking. I began to seek out and find appealing things in his face, though it was far from handsome. I even joked that it bothered me that he was taller than me because it was a sign: he was continuously growing better. He said he wouldn’t stop at the title “doctor.” He’d go farther—to “professor.” Then he’d be able to marry a rich, beautiful girl. He’d live broadly and in style. And maybe then I’d regret that I hadn’t agreed to carry on an affair with him.

In the meantime, I busied myself imagining what might happen. I held these thoughts over myself as an excuse for my suffering, although the source of it was really my continued feelings for A. I tried to fill my emptiness with something else, with the poisonous desire for revenge, but I kept grasping at A. in my thoughts.

The demonstrative familiarity I’d shown in welcoming a young man into my room (my landlords had no way of knowing if it was always the same man) made me act even more brazenly. That evening was the last in an entire week of evenings of taking in visitors. When I heard his footsteps, instead of my usual behavior of drawing attention to myself I didn’t wait for him to knock before I opened the door.

He took me in with desiring eyes and held me in his arms. He probably thought I’d just been standing by the door, waiting for him to come.

“How nice!” he cried. “The door seems to open itself for your lover by magic! I didn’t even have to knock!”

“Please don’t talk so loud,” I begged. “It’s especially important to speak quietly when you’re talking about such things.”

“Be quiet? Oh, no! Today, like the world famous Tolstoy, I declare that ‘I cannot be silent’! I have decided to speak out today, and so I shall! Here you are, standing by the door waiting for me to arrive. How can you explain this? You love me. And if you love me, why should you put off your life for later? Who knows if we’ll even be alive later! Live for the present, and in the future you’ll have a past. Time does not stand still. What vanishes today does not come back tomorrow. I want today. See, I don’t even ask you what you did before today, I don’t try to learn about your past. I don’t want to know anything about it. Nothing.”

“I want people to want to know everything about me.”

“Why? So that they will know about your—respectable behavior?”

“Why not?”

“Who cares about that?”

“I do.”

“Well, well. That’s fine. I don’t want to argue with you about it. You can be as respectable as you want. It’s fine for you to be refined.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Thanks!”

“Why the sarcasm? Why the smirk? My dear friend, be good. No, not ‘my dear friend’—from now on you are ‘my darling.’ No need to be so formal. Let me . . .” He lowered himself to his knees. “Let me make you happy!”

“This is the first time in my life I’ve seen someone begging to give happiness away. And for how long?”

“That’s a hard question to answer. It depends how it feels later. One day you’re in love, and the next day you’re not. Love is like life. One day it’s here and the next day it’s gone. Who can tell? That’s why it’s no use asking, ‘For how long?’ Love is part of life, and life doesn’t last forever. And life is meant to be lived! Down with the slavery of superstition! We must fight, loud and proud, against the whole world for our right to be human and to live. You love me and I love you. It’s not our first love. But it might be our last. After all, you’re not the kind of woman who can love for a long time, because you don’t allow yourself to love, my dear friend. How foolish it is for me to call you ‘friend,’ when from the first time I saw you, I thought of you as more.”

“It’s good that you only thought it.”

“And who can keep me from saying it? My darling, my love! You’re an awfully dear girl! And today I’ve decided to show you that I love you. I love you so!”

“Why so much?”

“Don’t ask. Don’t ask why. You can’t explain these things. I just know I love you and to me it’s so wonderful that I’ve suddenly stopped being interested in scientific questions. Even if someone else could explain why, it’s not something that I could ever explain. I love you for the intensity of your longing to be loved and to love. I’m amazed by your strong yet supple will, by your bitter yet sweet smile. I love you because you are as closed-lipped as a diplomat and yet as pure and open-hearted as a child, because of your severe glares and the soft expression hidden in your eyes, beneath that severity. I love you for your Jewish beauty, for your body, for your hair, for your arms, for . . . oh, how can I account for it all? Maybe I just love you because—I love you!”

I sat by the window in the blue-violet electric light of the streetlamps, and he knelt at my feet. The flowers on the curtains pressed against the walls and fluttered in the breeze from the open window as though alive. I looked down at him quietly and intensely as he spoke. He seemed so unlike himself. I almost thought I could see in him some similarities to A. There are moments when one person in love looks so similar to another. Love, whether full of elevated longings or base instincts, is always beautiful when it speaks, and especially when, after it speaks, there is silence.

But, although C. speaks beautifully, he cannot be silent. To prevent his hands from acting in place of his tongue, I kept him talking. One word from me prompted a flood of words from him, one question led to endless explanations. He was proud to give me as much information as he could, and he especially wanted to speak about anatomy. He divided human beings into components so that he could put them back together again. He didn’t care if this aroused unseemly associations. He was happy to explain that, from a scientific perspective, it does no good to feel uncomfortable about such things. Once you understand the matter thoroughly, the false feeling of shame and discomfort will dissipate.

It seemed to me that he was making me the subject of his lesson.

“What’s this?” he asked, for example, pressing my nose, my eye, my cheek, my neck, my arm. Like a child just learning to answer such questions, I smilingly gave the answers.

“In Latin we call this such and such,” he explained and pointed to something else, asking, “What do you call this?”

“My heart?” I said, not sure if my heart was exactly where he was pointing. Who knows, maybe it’s located somewhere else in Latin. That turned out to be true.

“Not there!” he said, strict as an old professor. “It’s much lower. Right down here. This is where it beats.”

I already knew all this. He told me that I wasn’t missing anything except for a bit more passion. Not just more, I was actually missing passion entirely. Considering that I was so normal, I should really be a bit more normal. I should let myself follow my own normal desires; I should make use of God’s gift of human happiness and well-being.

I didn’t know (and maybe I never will) how to use it. To fully use it, so that, as they say, “the wolf will be satisfied and the goat remain whole.” A young man up to his ears in love, overtaken by passion for me, and on his way to being a college graduate, was right in front of me ripe for the taking. He looked at me like I was about to bring redemption to the world, and I just sat there. I sat, and sat, and . . . that’s all.

He showed me, from a scientific standpoint, that it was not healthy for me to sit that way, on a chair, as if I were in a public place. I was in my own room, so why shouldn’t I make myself comfortable?

“I can see the sky from here,” I answered. “And I love to watch people walking in the street after midnight. They look so mysterious, each like he’s going to a secret meeting. It reminds me of my old home where nowadays people must walk around like this, like shadows, even in the daytime.”

He begged me to stop. “My dear, don’t think of your old home. The old country isn’t a home anymore. Our home is here, where we are. We are citizens of the whole world. The Poland that I once passionately championed no longer belongs to us. Right under my own eyes they turned me into a German. Fine, so let me be a German, a Frenchman, a Turk, even an Eskimo, as long as I can be alive. Life, in the fullest sense of the word, is the most beautiful and precious thing that we have. Looking at you now, I see how beautiful you are. The pale glimmer of electric streetlamps falls on you and lights up your eyes as they gaze upon me, warming my soul. I feel as though my soul will sprout wings and fly to the highest heavens leaving me here, at your feet.”

“My feet would trample a man without a soul.”

“Let them!” he cried out passionately. “Go on and take a step! Step, step, step! I myself will place your foot on my neck, on my head! Don’t you see, my love, I lay myself at your feet! I give myself over to you. You can do with me what you will.”

I didn’t know what to do with him. His passion did not win me over. My temperament was probably at fault. I was no poem, but a plain paragraph of prose. Instead of being persuaded by his enthusiasm I was preoccupied with thoughts of my intellectual landlords. They must have overheard the quiet ruckus going on in here, and who knows what they were thinking.

“My dear, love is the greatest happiness in life, especially for a woman. A woman’s life must be filled to the brim with love. Of all the varieties of love, free love is the only one that can raise up the soul, delight the spirit, and so forth, and so on.”

“What kind of a free love can this be, if we have to be so secretive about it? Hidden love is what it should be called,” I said, “and if you have to hide it, it must not be as wonderful as you say it is.”

“But keeping it secret is what makes it so interesting, so nice, so sweet!”

“Whatever you say,” I answered. “But don’t say it so loud. The people in the house—”

“—are asleep.”

“Then you shouldn’t wake them.”

“They sleep so soundly that they won’t hear anything. Simple people are heavy sleepers.”

“They’re . . . intellectuals.”

“Never!”

“Regardless, you shouldn’t wake them.”

“They think that we—that you’re asleep.”

“And that I’m talking in my sleep?”

“Alright. I’ll be quiet, if you’re so afraid. You’re as scared of them as if they were your parents, or as if you were dependent on them to make a living. I’ll be quiet. But you can’t blame me if when I close my mouth I speak with my hands. A man must have some way to express his passion.”

“Go away! Go home! Go!” I begged him. Biting my lips to quell my distress, I grabbed his fresh hands and frantically pushed them away with all my strength.

“Oh, my darling!” he said, his passion increasing with my actions. “You beg me to leave, but you are holding my hands. How like a woman! When a woman says no, she means yes. It’s a woman’s nature. She wants to be taken by force, so she can claim later that she didn’t ask for it. Women are complicated. But you, my darling, try too hard to suppress your desires. Why should you fight it? It’s for your own happiness as well as mine. Instead of holding a man back, a woman should help him to achieve happiness.”

I did not feel like helping him achieve happiness. I felt that I’d feel a lot better if he were on the other side of the door. But perhaps then I’d want him next to me again. That’s how it is.

“We’ll talk about this some other time,” I said. “Now is not the time.”

“But now is the time for it. Now, now, now!”

“It’s almost daytime. People will be getting up soon.”

“Who cares if they get up or not? They have nothing to do with us. We love each other and we have a right to live however we want. Soon the sun will rise and look at us with contempt for not making use of the dark, dark night, which was given to us for our brightest moments. We’ll regret not trespassing the boundaries between my ‘we can’ and your ‘we mustn’t.’ Where is the logic in such living? Tell me, where?”

I was utterly spent from not sleeping and from straining to listen to see if others could hear us. I’d had it with his wild gesticulations. I refused to leave my chair, as though I was chained to it, and pushed his hands away. He lay down in front of my feet and swore that he wouldn’t get up until I sent for an ambulance to take him away.

“I’m sick, tired, broken, and it’s all because of you!” he cried. “You are so hard, so cold, that you don’t care if a man expires right here at your feet. You have the eyes of a dove and the heart of a tiger. And you have no soul.”

“What can I do about that?”

“Let me give you my soul.”

“And then what about you?”

“I’ll die here at your feet. No, not here. Let’s go to your bed. Why are you sitting there on your chair? Are you nailed to it? Did you grow into it? Look, she won’t budge!” Now he wasn’t even talking to me directly. It was like he was complaining to someone else about me. He chided me this way, talking on and on, until he finally grew silent. He lay still, with his head on my footstool, and I thought he had fallen asleep. A knock on the door sent us scrambling to our feet.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Who is it?” I called out toward the door.

“Open the door, and you’ll see!” a deep, gravelly voice answered from behind the door. “Open up!”