Nine

He stared for a time at the door, wondering about the woman. It was possible, of course, that he had misjudged her entirely and that he mistook her friendliness for something else altogether. Or rather that the motives behind her apparent desire to befriend him were basically suspect. Did she, in fact, want him to make love to her?

This question seemed to hang in his mind for some time, an obstacle that he could not think his way round. If she wanted him to make love to her—and it was pretty clear, he thought, from her behaviour that she did—then he would have to examine himself and his own desires thoroughly. What did he want? If she were to come to his room and offer herself, like some sacrifice, how would he react? He realised that he didn’t know the answer, that he couldn’t predict the outcome, that if the sacrifice were offered he wouldn’t know whether to accept or refuse. And if he accepted? What then?

He looked out of the window and down into the street. Part of the trouble lay in his inexperience. Apart from his mother—and she could hardly be counted—he hadn’t known any women. At university his acquaintances had drifted from one love affair to the next, blindly, as if they were groping after something. To Berg, this was a puzzle: he had stood outside the carnival and looked on, conscious of the bewilderment of the participants, aware at the same time that he himself lacked whatever dynamism was needed to take part.

Apart from his mother: but there had been nothing apart from his mother. For most of his life she had been the centre of his universe, if not the universe itself. Like some unwilling satellite he had circled her sick bed, her endless sick bed, not waiting for her to die but waiting for something in himself to snap—his mind, his nerve, his will: he could not name it, whatever it was. It had something to do with the women he had watched; women in cheap furs hustling their clients up dark staircases into wooden rooms, baring their purple thighs beneath a blind light-bulb. Whatever it was, it had something to do with this act, an act that he had witnessed a million times in his imagination.

His mother was the obstacle to his life, the locked door that prevented his exit from the room to those other rooms where he could detect the faint sound of laughter. The rooms beyond that he wanted badly to enter—while he waited for that particular something to snap. Having snapped, he could no longer be imprisoned in that unending round of prescriptions and tablets, demands and whims, in that sick imagination.

His mother: his only relationship with a woman.

He smoked a cigarette and looked round the room. He could not even decide if he found Monika attractive: partly because he could not find in himself any response to her, as if that faculty for response had been numbed, or worse still, deadened. He imagined that she had had many lovers, perhaps even here, in this room: perhaps on that very bed. A whole procession of men, lodgers like himself, that she had tried as though to find one to take the gipsy’s place. He could see her on the bed, waiting for him to move towards her, calling his name softly: Berg, Berg.

What could he do? What was expected of him?

He looked at the unfamiliar room. Compared with what he had been used to, it was the drabbest place he had ever seen. Even its shadows seemed uncompromising, stark, without texture. He lay down and closed his eyes: at least the room was his and not his mother’s.