Authors: Iris Murdoch
I hesitated, and then followed her up the wooden stairs which creaked woefully under my weight. I saw the wet prints of her bare feet on the steps.
The first room upstairs had the air of a landing, with nothing in it except a huge oak chest and a ragged sagging sofa. There was a strong smell of dust and mould. I stifled a sneeze. The inner door was closed. I faced her uncertainly, feeling both alarmed and dangerous. Slowly, facing me, she drew on a green dressing-gown. The nightdress was not quite transparent.
She was a strange figure, tall, taller perhaps than her brother, with the same wide nostrils and the same full heavy sensitive mouth. Her lips were a moist scarlet and her eyebrows two thick black triangles, but her face was not otherwise made up and the skin was pale and waxen as if it would be cold and not quite human to the touch. Her metallic hair looked almost greenish now. Her eyes, round which was drawn a turquoise-blue pencil line, were so exceedingly dark that it seemed her hair must be dyed. They gazed at me, large and oriental, the staring eyes of a sorceress or a prostitute, an artificial woman. I felt dazed, disturbed, confused.
I said in a low voice. ‘You mustn’t let me intrude on you. I don’t want to waken your brother. I was just surprised at seeing you and wondered –’ I was going to say ‘why you were crying’. But there were no traces of tears in those brilliant eyes.
‘I often come,’ she said, ‘at night. You see, I am not allowed to go in the house. And it is this.’ Her voice was very foreign and I could make nothing of her words; I was not even sure I had heard them right.
‘Can I help you?’ I said, The flight through the darkness and now her half-clothed nocturnal proximity, her curious animal calmness, produced in me an immediate elation, a sort of excited protective devotion. It was long since I had had so direct and yet so oddly natural an encounter with a woman. I felt ready to talk to her for a long time. And a sense that I might dangerously have taken her in my arms was instantly changed into a desire to serve her. Her tearless lamentation upon the lawn and now her mysterious words seemed like a sacred appeal directed especially to me.
She looked at me thoughtfully as if taking seriously what I had said. Then she said, ‘There is some coffee. But first I must show you something. After all you are the brother. And we have waited for you a long time.’
She moved toward the closed door of the other room and threw it wide open. There was already a bright light within by which I saw, sprawled upon a low bed and lying half naked in the abandonment of deep sleep, my brother Otto.
The brightly lit scene revealed through the doorway had a crudely unreal quality, it was suddenly too large and too close, as if the girl had summoned up a gross simulacrum in a vision. Yet it was no psychological doll, it was indeed Otto who lay there displayed as on a stage, Otto open-mouthed and snoring, Otto huge, shaggy, deplorably and shamefully present and fast asleep. My first feeling was a curious dull sense of deprivation. Then I felt disgust and then a pang of guilt and fear. I feared my brother’s rage should he awake and find me.
‘He will not wake,’ she said, guessing my thought. ‘He has drunk. He sleeps like a pig. Come and see him.’ We went in together and she closed the door behind us. It was like entering an animal’s den.
Most of the room was occupied by the divan on which my brother was sprawled, Heavy curtains were pulled closely across the windows and the atmosphere was stuffy and thick with a humid pungent smell. The floor was covered with a mass of clothes which encumbered my ankles like sticky seaweed. A half-empty whisky bottle was standing upright in one of Otto’s shoes. Otto, uncovered by the surge of the blankets, was wearing two very dirty round-necked vests rolled up in tubes about his chest and a pair of equally reprehensible long woollen pants pulled well down upon his hips. His thick soft waist was revealed, covered with a straggle of dark curly hairs, and below it the bare white protuberance of his stomach and the black cup of his navel, seemingly full of earth. His big bull-head was thrown back and his face seemed a crumpled mass of fleshy lines, his moist shapeless mouth ajar and gurgling, He seemed more like the debris of a human being than like a man.
The girl was staring down at him intently. Then suddenly she prodded him violently in the ribs with her bare foot. Otto groaned and settled his head more deeply into what I now saw was a pile of female underwear. The girl looked at me as if for approval of her demonstration, and said ‘Elsa.’
I found myself replying ‘Elsa.’ The magical repetition of her name seemed like a charm which was to stop me from going away. She sat down now upon the bed and gestured me to sit too. Very cautiously I lowered myself on to the end of the divan, the odorous bulk of Otto rising and falling between us. And as I did so I thought again, in a resigned way, that if Otto were to open his eyes now he would probably break me in two.
I stared at the girl. She seemed solemn, cool, with a pathetic air of tawdry ceremony. The aroma of whisky and sweat and sex from Otto was overwhelming; and I began to notice that she herself was far from immaculate. The pale, waxy, greasy face was very dark about the nostils and smeared with blood and dirt about the chin. A downy moustache covered the deeply indented upper lip and long fine hairs drooped at the corners of the full painted mouth. Her hands, busy now at the neck of her nightgown, had long chipped nails, patchy with old varnish, and I saw she was wearing a number of what appeared to be diamond rings. The metallic hair fell wantonly forward to veil the big crudely outlined exotic eyes. I found her extremely attractive. I was filled with a repulsive excitement and shame and glanced down at Otto. He slept, his open mouth like a wet, red, sea anemone.
‘You are Edmund from the south. Will you have some whisky?’
‘No, thank you.’
She picked up the bottle from Otto’s shoe and tilted it to her lips, closing her eyes. ‘You know my brother David. Do you like my brother? We are Russian Jews.’
‘Yes, I like him. Where do you come from in England?’
‘We are not of England. We are of Leningrad.’
This surprised me a little. I had seemed to gather from Isabel that the Levkins were only of distant Russian extraction. ‘Have you been over here long?’
‘Since six years.’
‘Why did you leave Russia?’
‘It was my father. We were young then, My mother is since long dead. My father was a piano player, he is very grand, very much known, but he cannot like Russia because it is not good for the Jews. He laughed at the Synagogue, but in his heart not. In his heart he is always very sad. Then one day he took us through a big dark forest and we walk and walk and then there are such big wooden towers and bright lights and we run and run and they are shooting at us –’
‘But you all got through –’
‘My father was hit in the hand with a bullet so that he cannot any more play the piano ever.’
‘Ah – I’m sorry – Where is he now?’
‘He is not anywhere. He is dead of what they say is a broken heart. So after that we are wandering people. You see these rings? Before my father die he give to us these diamonds so that we are not poor in whatever country we are. They are of very much value but we do not sell them because they are remembering of him.’
She spoke in a casual sing-song voice as if she had told the story in just those words many times before. She had lifted her hand now and was flashing the diamonds about in the light. She seemed less a victim than a little lost princess telling an ancestral legend in a strange court. Yet I pictured the scene at the frontier, the terrified fleeing children, the father’s wounded hand. It was no legend but a tale of today, an everyday, everyman tale. I began to tell her, to tell them all, that I was sorry.
But now for the second time I saw that she had fled. She had drawn her knees up and thrust them into the crook of Otto’s knees and fallen down beside him. Perhaps the memories had been too much. She closed her eyes and seemed to go instantly to sleep. Otto moved slumbrously at her contact and for a moment the two bodies quivered and shifted in sympathy before settling down conjoined, her head against his neck, her knees within his knees, her hand in his hand. They looked unbearably, cosily conjugal. I stared at them for a while, Adam and Eve, the circle out of which sprang all our woes. I stared at them until they became a mere pattern of lines, a hieroglyph. I covered them with a rug.
‘So you have discovered the love birds!’
David Levkin was standing at the door. As I moved hastily away from the bed he passed me and pulled the curtains wide apart. It was bright daylight and a sunny morning.
My one thought was to get out of the summer-house as quickly as possible. I shot out of the bedroom door, practically leapt the stairs, and came out into the cool wood where the sun was streaking the birch trunks with a pure and scarcely spotted white. I felt I had waked from a bad dream. I took a few paces down the path.
Someone touched my arm and I found that Levkin was following me. I felt irritated and absurdly guilty at his having discovered me watching the sleeping pair. I walked faster and he still followed a pace or two behind. He touched me again.
‘How did you know about them?’
‘I didn’t know about them. I heard your sister out on the lawn crying and I followed her.’
‘Yes, she goes often at night. She thinks that she is a ghost, to haunt the house. But she is not sad. I think she suits your brother. Is it not so?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ I kept walking on, not looking at him.
‘But it will be to do with you. For you will stay with us now? You will stay and help us?’
‘Go away,’ I said. I loathed his tone of voyeur-like complicity. I wanted to forget Otto and his greasy enchantress, they were no business of mine.
‘They sleep well, don’t they? You could watch them all night. It is the drink I believe. Was my sister long asleep? Do you think she is beautiful?’ He plucked at my sleeve again.
I turned to face him.’ Levkin, I have no wish to discuss with you the affairs of my brother or your sister.’
‘The affair! The affair!’ he said excitedly. ‘And my name is pronounced Lyevkin, Lyevkin. It means “little lion” in Russian, and I am called that. At least you may say it means so, for you see a lion is in Russian
lyev
…’
I walked on. He followed and then started chattering again. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day, Mr Edmund? A fine clear morning. I love these mornings when I come over to wake them. So beautiful. A philosopher says it is our greatest crime, to ignore the beauty of the world.’
‘Clear off.’
‘May I show you my paintings, Mr Edmund? I work as a stone cutter. But really I am a painter. And you too are a painter –’
I stopped and faced him again. There was something menacing and unpleasant about all this chatter and I wondered if he were putting on some kind of act. I disliked his glee over Otto’s situation and it distantly occurred to me that he might be intending blackmail. Blackmail would be just in the style of Otto’s apprentices.
‘I’d advise you to practise keeping your mouth shut,’ I said. ‘Otherwise you’ll find yourself in trouble. You haven’t been long enough in this country to be able to take any chances. I don’t suppose you’ve even got a British passport.’ I thought it would do no harm to frighten him a little in a vague way. I was alarmed for Otto, and I did not trust that boy with his air of a merry little procurer.
Levkin’s response was surprising. He gave a wild burst of laughter, doubled himself up with glee and then sprang high into the air. ‘See,’ he cried breathlessly, ‘I lev-itate, I lev-itate!’ He paused in his gyrations, viewed my grave face, fell to laughing again and gasped out at last, ‘Whatever did she tell you?’
I was bewildered. ‘Well, she told me how you had come here –’
‘Oh, which one, which one! I can hardly bear it!’ He held his stomach for laughter.
‘What do you mean, which one?’
‘Which story was it this time? The story of swimming the river, or the story of the aeroplane, or the story of the tunnel –’
‘She said you came through a forest –’
‘And our poor old father’s hand was hit by machine-gun bullets so that he never played the piano again and died of a broken heart?’
‘Well, yes –’
‘And the rings, did she show you her rings, how they were diamonds my father got for us?’
‘Yes –’
‘Oh, how funny she is! She tells so many different stories and they are all false. That one is just now her favourite. She read it in the newspaper, about the poor man’s hand. No, no, Mr Edmund. We are not such romantic people. My poor sister is a little fanciful I’m afraid. Our father is not a pianist, he is a merchant of furs, and he did not die of a broken heart but is very much alive and making his money still, and we were not born in Leningrad or wherever she said, we were born in Golders Green. And as for those rings, they are rings of glass which she has bought for a few shillings. So you see how wrong you are to threaten me, Mr Edmund, for I am as British as you are – and indeed I mean no harm as you will see when you know me better and we become friends.’
‘I doubt if that will happen,’ I said. ‘But do I understand you – your sister – perhaps imagines that all those things happened –?’
‘Yes, she is a little – not crazy quite, but as I say, fanciful, she imagines, yes. She has what we call
Polizeiangst.
She thinks always she is persecuted. Did she tell you of the little men in this wood who are watching her? No? She is so troubled by being a Jew. She suffers it all the time, and all what is happening in all the world to Jews she thinks that it is happening to her.’
‘Poor child,’ I said. I recalled the waxen face and the staring eyes. Yes, a little mad perhaps. Another victim of a wicked world. I let Levkin lead me along a path that led away from the house and went by a roundabout way to the workshop.
‘She is a witch, though,’ said Levkin. ‘A
rusalka
as they are called in Russia. She has a sort of death in her. And she is fallen, oh, fallen ever since she is very young. She has had many many men. That is what Lord Otto likes. That she is crazed and that she is a prostitute. And she likes him because he is a monster and a nun. But I should not talk like that about my master, should I?’