38

We Study Each Other

Sometimes it’s as hard to tear yourself away from pretended love as it is from real love! I’m afraid that we might get so caught up in our pretend-roles that it’ll be hard to leave them.

We study each other. C. realizes that there’s no use getting angry with me; it’s better to be nice to me. I know that getting angry with him won’t accomplish anything either. You have to make nice. So our previous anger has turned toward politeness, and I need to be careful that nothing bad will come of all this good behavior. It’s so much easier to be good than bad, so much easier to smile than to grind your teeth. It’s so hard to hate, when all you want to do is love.

I don’t know. Has he really gotten better, or have I just gotten worse? We make choices. Two nights ago we had such a lovely time together. We went on a long walk, we talked and at times we didn’t talk . . . We stayed in my room in the light of the streetlamps until late at night.

When he wants to, he can be very pleasant and interesting. I told him so, and he said that he has to be that way with me. I could turn the greatest sinner into a reformed man. He feels calmer, his angry thoughts are driven away, something inside him forces him to take stock and to help create a chaste environment, to support my aims of modesty. “The more I look at you, my beloved,” he said, (apologizing for calling me “beloved,” a term he would use in prayer to God), “the more I realize that at first I didn’t really see you at all. I wonder at your composure, you’re so consistent in the way you hold yourself. Anyone else in your place would get annoyed with me, would hate me, but you are measured with me, the way you should be. You are so good that you don’t see the bad in others. You don’t even understand what bad is, in the full sense of the word. It’s so far from who you are. You only look for the good and when you find a sign of it you are so good that you could forgive the worst man. You create an atmosphere of goodness around yourself, and when I try to stand up against you I feel disarmed.” Does this mean that I’ve played my role extremely well, or just that he’s playing his even better than I’m playing mine?

My suspicions fell on him like a searchlight. I could tell that he felt them instinctively because he started energetically reassuring me that he’d never spoken the truth so earnestly before in his life. Everything that he said was true, didn’t I believe him?

“I believe—”

“But you don’t really believe me, right?”

“A little, not entirely,” I admitted.

“Do you think that I’m lying?” he asked, annoyed.

“Maybe.” I smiled affably. “Maybe. But even if it’s a lie, I like it. It’s a nice lie.”

“So you like a nice lie?”

“It’s better than an ugly truth.”

“No, you must sense that I’m telling you the truth. It would be impossible to try to fool you.”

“I don’t think so.”

He seemed upset at the idea (that it’s impossible to try to fool me), but he tried not to show it. He kept tactfully silent. Who knows what plans he was concocting for me in his own mind.

The more he improves himself for me, the more careful I have to be. It’s hard to tell truth from lies when the lie is nicer. It’s dark outside and it’s nicer to love than to hate.

C. says that he doubts that anything will come of his relationship with me. He talks and talks and it seems like I don’t listen to what he’s saying. I’m thinking of something else entirely. “What are you thinking about?” he asked me.

“This and that.” I answered.

“What do you think of everything I’ve said?” he asked.

“I haven’t formed an opinion yet. Or maybe I have more than one opinion.”

“That’s impossible. That can’t be true!” he cried, “The matter has two sides—negative or positive, abstract or concrete. Would you like me to explain it to you?”

“Explain away.”

“You say that with the same tone that you might say, ‘Speak, what do I care? Whatever you say won’t convince me. Your words are like peas thrown against a wall—nothing will stick!’ I’m afraid that I’m just wasting my breath.”

“Then don’t talk.”

“It’s all the same to you.”

I was quiet for a while, thinking about how to respond. Finally, when he complained that I didn’t pay enough attention to his speeches, I told him that he would be better off renting a hall and lecturing in front of an audience. Why should he waste so much energy on speaking to just one person? What would it matter if that one person should actually become a bit enlightened and acknowledge—

“Oh heavens!” he exclaimed in English. “That’s exactly what I want. Acknowledging something means following it to its logical conclusions. Someone once said, I forget who it was, ‘If even one person understood my work, it will not have been for naught.’ Let me tell you, if someone—especially if you were that someone—should acknowledge the truth of my words, then I will have reached my goal.”

When he said “my goal” I felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t stop feeling that way for a long time. I asked myself why I didn’t protest and tell him not to talk like that. I was firmly opposed to his reaching his goal. I pretended not to understand so that he would take more time to explain to me, and I could think about other things while he talked.

His method of convincing me to live was propagandizing to me about free love. It is necessary to love freely, he explained, supporting his argument with facts from life. He claimed that everything he said was theoretically grounded and factually supported. Only a great ignoramus could disparage or deny the facts he’d collected. Anyone who failed to acknowledge the truth of what they had to say was only denying themselves!

I didn’t want to acknowledge him, nor did I want to deny myself. I begged him to stop trying to convince me, because the whole matter was unappealing to me. He said that it didn’t appeal to me because I didn’t understand it. As soon as I began to understand, I would know. Then it would certainly appeal to me, and just like all the others that he had convinced before me I would beg him, “Please convince me further! Explain to me, open my eyes more to all the things hiding behind the curtains of life!”

His scientific knowledge gave him the right to call things by their true names. And I should hear them, he claimed. But I tapped my feet impatiently and bit my lips and was quiet. I let him say what he wanted to; talking with his mouth was better than explaining with his hands.

I asked myself why I let him go on this way, and I answered, “I want to study him.”