The Ravishing of Lol Stein (17 page)

"The police are downstairs."

I don't dispute her words.

"People are being beaten on the stairway."

I don't dispute her words.

She doesn't recognize me, hasn't the faintest idea who I am any more.

"I don't know any more, who is it?"

Then she remembers me faintly.

"Come on, let's go."

I say that the police will catch us.

I lie down beside her, beside her closed body. I recognize the smell of her. I caress her without looking at her.

"You're hurting me."

I keep on. By the feel of my fingers I recognize the contours of a woman's body. I draw flowers upon it. Her whimpered resistance ceases. She is no longer moving, now doubtless remembers that she is here with Tatiana Karl's lover.

But now at last she begins to doubt that identity, the only identity familiar to her, the only one she has used at least as long as I have known her. She says:

"Who is it?"

She moans, asks me to tell her. I say: "Tatiana Karl, for example."

Exhausted, at the end of my strength, I ask her to help me.

She helps me. She knew. Who was it before me? I shall never know. I don't care.

Later, shouting, she insulted me, she begged me, she implored me to take her again and in the same breath said to leave her alone, like a hunted animal trying to flee the room, the bed, coming back to let herself be captured, wily and knowing, and now there was no longer any difference between her and Tatiana Karl except in her eyes, free of remorse, and in the way she referred to herself—Tatiana does not state her own name—and in the two names she gave herself: Tatiana Karl and Lol Stein.

It was she who waked me.

"It's time to go home."

She was dressed, her coat on, standing there. She still looked like the person she had been throughout the night. Reasonable in her own way, since she would have liked to stay longer, she would have liked to begin all over again, and yet she decided she couldn't. Her eyes were lowered. She pronounced her words slowly, in a voice which was hardly more than a whisper.

While I am dressing she goes to the window, and I studiously avoid approaching her too. She reminds me that I am supposed to meet Tatiana at the Forest Hotel at six o'clock. She has forgotten a great many things, but not this rendezvous.

In the street, we exchanged looks. I called her by her name, Lol. She laughed.

We were not alone this time in the compartment, and had to talk in hushed tones.

At my request, she talks to me about Michael Richardson. She tells me how great a tennis buff he was, says that he used to write poetry that she found beautiful. I urge her to talk about it. Can she tell me anything more? She can. Each word is a shaft of pain wracking my whole body. She talks on. Again I urge her to continue. She lavishes pain with generosity. She tells me about nights on the beach. I want to know still more. She tells me still more. We are smiling. She's been talking the way she did that first night, at Tatiana Karl's.

The pain vanishes. I tell her so. She says no more.

It's over, truly over. She can tell me anything, whatever she wants to about Michael Richardson, about anything.

I ask her if she thinks Tatiana Karl is capable of informing John Bedford of our affair. She fails to understand the question. But she smiles when she hears Tatiana's name, at the memory of that small black head which is so far from realizing the fate that has been decided for her.

She does not talk of Tatiana Karl.

We waited until the last passengers had left the train before we left.

In spite of everything, I felt Lol's growing remoteness as something extremely difficult to bear. What? for no more than a split second. I asked her not to go home right away, told her it was still early, that Tatiana could wait. Did she even consider it? I doubt it. She said:

"Why tonight?"

Night was falling when I reached the Forest Hotel.

Lol had arrived there ahead of us. She was asleep in the field of rye, worn out, worn out by our trip.