SEVENTEEN: MY GIRLFRIEND IN AUTUMN

Nişka has changed again. She’s so nostalgic that her unwonted wistfulness had been rubbing off even on me. She has forgotten my lessons on sobriety and manly optimism. She admits that she sometimes cries at a blood red sunset. She is incomprehensible. She wants to go away, right now. But she doesn’t know where or know with whom. She visits me frequently in my attic. Since we first met, she has lost the ready and superficial mordancy that used to characterise her sentences and retorts. She listens more now, attentively, but mournfully. I don’t want to understand her, because within she stirs up a nostalgia that I had muffled to a murmur. I talk to her harshly, hotly, ransacking the cosy, mignon shelves of her soul. I take diabolical joy in demolishing her values, humbling her, trampling underfoot her all too commonplace feminine sensibilities. But I don’t always succeed in conjoining her soul to mine. She wavers while still half way there. Then I scorn her; and scorn doubt myself, because I have not yet been able to create the true Nişka that my soul demands.

I need Nişka’s friendship. She has so many qualities; why am I not able to complete her, perfectly?

She complains that I am too hard on her, that I don’t reveal my soul to her, my friend. Naturally, Nişka expects a confession. But how could she ever understand the madness of my decision? As for her, she suspects almost everything, apart from the major decision, which nobody else knows about. She intuitively reconstructs my motivations, employing the virtues of her choice femininity and based on my suggestions. But she wants me to tell her. What? She suspects that I love her. And awaits my confession. But I can’t lie to Nişka.

October afternoons with my friend in the park. She loved autumn. I hated it. Autumn and spring; nostalgia and longings that manipulated me from without and humiliated me. I had fallen in love with winter and summer, months of freedom, when work lasted till midnight, without melancholy or violent fits of impetuosity. I was frightened by autumn, but I faced it. The more dangerous the temptations, the more resolute was I that they should come. I knew I would prevail.

‘Do you know what I’m thinking about? About going away.’

‘Nişka, thinking about going away is stupid and pointless. Going away is the only thing that should interest you. If you want to go away, then go away.’

‘I’m not sure how to explain it. I want to go away, and yet I’m anxious about it, undecided. What would become of me all on my own? When would I take my degree?’

‘Well then stop thinking, and start working. In my adolescence I had similar desires. They troubled me, exhausted me, wasted my time. Now, I only want to think about what I have to do. When I’m finished, I’ll go away, without thinking about it beforehand, without regrets.’

‘You have the will.’

‘Nişka, complaining about it doesn’t entitle you not to want it too.’

‘I think that too much willpower mutilates you, turns you into a machine – you become a cog, you will do away with all life’s temptation, all its charm. I don’t understand you; you’ve gone too far.’

‘You talk like a schoolgirl. When you overcome temptations it doesn’t mean they disappear; they increase; didn’t you know that? And willpower doesn’t make you mechanical, it makes possible the most intense freedom. I want to help you understand this one truth; that in gaining power over an insubordinate will, you will be able to allow yourself every experience, every vice, every voluptuous feeling, every aberration. But only after you’ve got to know yourself, after you’ve unshackled the manly consciousness.’

‘But I can’t do that.’

‘A woman cannot, it’s true, but a woman must either renounce or imitate. Your nostalgia is a hybrid. If you are not able to go away on your own, then find a companion for yourself.’

‘But who?’

Her green eyes became pensive.

‘Find a companion and awaken his will. You have the power to influence male souls; this is a special gift. A man, by your side, will be tortured by the obsession of excelling. Your husband will be happy, unless he is of the Paul type.’

‘I’m not going to take a husband.’

‘Yes, I know, you told me that last spring.’

‘Paul was an accident.’

Sitting on a bench in the park, we both laughed, not at Paul, but at the seriousness with which I had been discussing women. Nişka was intrigued; what right did I have to speak about them, if I do not know them? Perhaps I was a Don Juan.

‘In which case I wouldn’t have known them. Don Juan had nothing but sexual conquest, a puttering, uncertain light. You can only really ever know that which you decline to master. And besides, women experience things in so many countless ways. It’s really not necessary to play the role of the young lover, or to exhaust yourself in the bedroom. In a consciously male soul, the female soul can be intuited through the process of introspection. When it comes to the body, conversation is irrelevant. I never talk about the female body, because my valuation is based on other criteria; I just wouldn’t be understood.’

I lived a strange life; I worked at night and in the morning, determinedly, serenely, perfecting my masterpiece: my brain; in the evening, I met with Nişka, shaping her soul. My two lives, however, were not mutually exclusive. I realised that my friendship with Nişka did not waste my time, but rather enriched it with experience. I cultivated and loved her like a favourite book. I wanted to make of Nişka another living masterpiece. I wanted every wellspring of elite femininity to pulse within her. I understood that no matter how perfect she might become, I would not find happiness through her. I understood my task; I had to be tempted by Nişka, by her soul, as a reflection of my will, and nothing more.

I was passionate about our friendship; as she grew lighter, I grew darker. But from thence to love was still a long road.

I had forgotten the decisions set down in The Diary. I was following two lines of growth: that of my personality and that of Nişka’s soul. I saw them both so clearly that one could say that I was just a spectator.