47

His Free, Wild Path

C. says that he won’t take any more lopsided wagons down windy roads that delay him. He will openly and forthrightly pursue his goals. “If you like it, then good! If you don’t, I don’t need your approval!” It won’t take long, he claims, for me to change my mind and realize that I can’t live alone with only my mind for company. The body is more than just the head. The heart also has needs. In the meantime, I can act as respectably as I want. And he won’t call me darling anymore. Not even in the dark. It’s better not to use such words with someone like me. He knows that sooner or later I’ll act on my own accord. I won’t be able to sit and wait for someone else to do it. Sooner or later, just like everyone else, I’ll get tired of it. I’ll realize that no one’s going to give me a medal for my restraint; I won’t get any awards from society for acting honorably. Future generations won’t even recite psalms in my memory. Maybe, if I’m lucky, a few old yakhnes will pray to have children like me.

He laughs at me while he says all this. But I only listen with a complacent smile that makes his blood boil. It’s my refusal to speak that makes him talk like this, he complains, forgetting his resolve to say not even one more word on the subject. “Now I won’t say anything else, not one word more. It’ll be as though I’ve gone mute. All that I want to say before I stop talking is this: even if the world turns upside down, I won’t be moved from my principles. I’ll stand by them with my dying breath. Whoever wants to tread the narrow path of our forefathers can go right ahead! I will forge my free, wide path through life. I won’t beg you anymore. That’s all! Basta!”

I enjoy listening to him talk like this. But I’m nervous that the landlady might hear. Last night when he left my room late in the evening her door opened and closed. I didn’t know if I should be glad that she knew that he wasn’t in my room anymore or worried that she saw how late he’d stayed.

Two rainy days passed and C. only came to see me once, to tell me that he barely had time to come and tell me that he had no time for me. He’s too busy with his future. His college professors are showering praise on him. He says that they’ve told him that they see him as someone who is already on his way to having a professor’s mind. When he graduates, he’ll begin his path and make broad strides toward higher rungs on the ladder of success.

He told me this, and much more, and then hurried away because he didn’t want to be late to the event this evening at a professor’s house that was practically being held in his honor. He asked me to excuse him for having no time to spend with me.

He left and now I’m alone. I believe in his future. I can picture him climbing the ladder of success while I’m left behind on the lowest rung. I imagine how it will be when he’s already achieved his life’s fortune, and I’m just a fool, a rejected leftover woman with no hope for the future, with no goal to look forward to. Yes, with the help of my imagination his glistening future has already darkened my present and my whole life. I think to myself, “What are you, after all? You aren’t poor, or ugly, or even very old, but some might say that you’re not rich, or pretty, or even very young. You’re clever. That’s what they say about you, you’re smart. Maybe that’s true, but what good is that? What has it taught you about life? It didn’t even help you to win the man who you thought was your one and only true love!” I turn my thoughts toward my love, A., and I find myself blaming him for how I’m envisioning C.’s great future. I would look at other people differently if I didn’t have this love fantasy with A. They’d seem more important to me, and better. A. ruined my taste for good things.

“You’re so educated,” I say to myself, “you’re so full of books that you’re like the largest library, and yet you can’t manage to do anything that your heroines do! All you know how to do is think sophisticated thoughts! In the end you’ll die without ever having lived. You’ll regret all the things you didn’t do . . .”

Now that C. isn’t with me, I’ve taken over his role, arguing to myself that I should try living, for once.

I saw Rae, who brought greetings from B. and a few words about A. and others who were living life. I was filled with protests against myself: How dare I swear off life? I can’t stop thinking about what B. said to Rae about me today: “What’s she up to, that strange girl? Is she raising her prices higher? Or maybe she’s entered a convent by now? She’s no fool, but she doesn’t know how to live.”

I was just reading yesterday that Schiller says life is slumber, and the best way to live is to have sweet dreams.

“Life is as short as the blink of an eye between two eternities,” as Plato says. So I ask myself why I spend my time worrying so much about something as insignificant as blinking. What’s the use? Whatever will be will be. Imagine I was someone else, looking at myself from the outside. Would I care what happened to me? Not for a minute! I made up my mind to care as little about myself as I would care about a stranger.

Gorky recommended “indifference toward everything, not spoiling your life with philosophy.” He said, “In the end your life will be judged like a fable, not by how you got there but by what you did.” I must try to do more with my life.

Because I hadn’t seen C. in a whole week, he’d grown in my estimation. His absence gave me the chance to imagine him as better than he really is. If he’d known what effect it was having on me, he’d have been very smart to stay away a few more weeks. Or not to come back at all! Then I’d certainly have developed a better opinion of him! But he was here yesterday, seven days after I’d last seen him. He came to my room in the evening and looked at me knowingly. He asked whether I’d been thinking about him.

He said that he was sure that I must have been thinking of him. You always think of people who love you.

I thought of A. Does he ever think about me?

“It was very hard for me to force myself not to come see you, and I couldn’t keep myself from you any longer,” C. said. “I felt that I had to see you. And were you pining after me? Tell me the truth, didn’t you miss me?”

“I was pining.”

“Just pining, in general?”

“Yes.”

“Not for me, specifically? You weren’t pining for my love?”

“I was longing for life.”

“Oh, for living! Well, that certainly has something to do with me. Living and I go hand in hand. If you want to live, I’m your man.”

He didn’t wait for my response. Straightaway he turned down the gaslights like a punctilious janitor noticing that it was ten o’clock. He called me “darling,” took me in his arms, and cursed my corset. What’s the purpose of this torture device, anyway? The most beautiful thing is to just be as you are, as nature made you. Why should you stifle yourself?

I stopped dreaming as I realized what was happening, and I took control of myself. C. couldn’t tolerate this, since in his mind this was the appropriate moment for living. Right now.

“No, no. Not now—”

“Why not now?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I understand.”

“You understand as much as a corpse,” I wanted to say. Instead I was silent. If only he understood enough to leave me alone.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time after C. left. I lay with my eyes open listening to a clock tick behind the wall. Time passed. It was almost as though it dragged along, like it had lost the strength to keep going with its eternal momentum.

It had been easy enough to shake C. off this time. I was left thinking how hard it was going to be for me next time, when he wouldn’t be so understanding. Although my life has little value to me, still it seems a shame for it to end in such a way. And I can see the end of my life so clearly if I were to begin living as he wants. I won’t let him come see me, so I won’t have to beg him to leave! It’s like lighting your house on fire and then trying to put it out.

But something in me spurs me to provoke him and myself. Maybe I want to reject someone else’s desire because my own love is unrequited?