Basic Black with Pearls Read online

  – Now what’s wrong?

  – Each time we are together I think it may be for the last time.

  He tried to comfort me.

  – Happiness, he said, is memories.

  Reveries of happiness began to give way to other images, more importunate. That same night in Venice, I, or at any rate, my Canadian passport, was instrumental in saving Coenraad from the law. It wasn’t the first time, nor was it to be the last. That night we were recumbent on pillows in a gondola. It was May 11, and it was my forty-second birthday. The gondolier was singing La Donna è Mobile, his oar dipped rhythmically and he pretended to be watching the canal traffic ahead. I opened my eyes now and then to view the crescent moon behind Coenraad’s head. We were just about to pass under the Rialto bridge when the gondolier hissed, Quickly, signor, it is the police, and he and Coenraad exchanged jackets and places. When the police motorboat pulled alongside they shone a flashlight into the gondolier’s face. I found my passport and held up its blue cover to the light, while the gondolier smirked and spoke rapidly, removing his arms from my waist to gesticulate wildly, and the four policemen smiled and shrugged. After they pulled away, Coenraad said something in Italian. Somehow, he and the gondolier seemed to share a tacit knowledge, for he, the gondolier, once more embraced me. Coenraad plied the oar; he didn’t attempt to sing; we rocked on the water; I didn’t attempt to extricate myself from the man’s hard grasp.

  Again it was my Canadian passport that saved Coenraad. After Venice, we met in the Paul Cezanne Hotel in Aix-en-Provence. Every morning Coenraad took the first train to Marseilles, returning every night after midnight. He asked if Paul Cezanne suspected anything. He must have been joking. Because he had spent so little time with me in Aix, Coenraad, as a gesture of conciliation, permitted me to travel with him on the train to Paris. We had a private compartment on the Trans-Europe-Express. At Lyons two plainclothesmen burst in on us. They demanded that we show passports and open suitcases. I held up my passport with CANADA in gold print close to the eyes of one and then the other.

  – Ah, Canada! affably, adding he was pleased that de Gaulle had visited Quebec. And you, monsieur?

  To my surprise, Coenraad extracted from an inner pocket of his jacket on a hook opposite a document in the same dark blue color. One of the detectives had a thick soft-covered book under his arm which he consulted after writing down the numbers of our passports. Lewd looks all around. I interpreted these to mean that in our state of undress they took us to be a couple of Canadians in France having an illicit rendezvous. They were half right.

  In the King Edward at this hour of the night every room seems sealed off: no footsteps in the corridor, no doors banging shut. Outside, the city’s tumult is stilled. In certain sleepless states I have apprehensions of doom; my heart pumps furiously, even though I lie perfectly still. I attribute this to a fear my body knows, a fear my mind cannot name. Don’t be afraid, I chide myself, you have not been abandoned; Coenraad has been delayed, that’s all. Trust yourself, trust him, he loves you. Remember how he loves you. Gradually my heart slows down. I turn over on my left side. Sleep will not come: thoughts, vague and discontinuous, fill the darkness. Out of the flow, one idea obtrudes: some snow fell today. Gradually the significance of the weather strikes me. I am forced to contrast our meetings in cold climates with those in warm zones. In countries around the equator our love is at its hottest. Trade winds and warm waters, torpor in the day and ardor in the night. The heat keeps us in a fever of desire. Everything we eat is spiced with aphrodisiacs. We have never had harsh words in São Paulo or Rangoon or Palermo. Nor do we speak of matters that might cast a shadow across our sun: about hungry men, dying women, disfigured children; about arrests at night and executions at dawn. Later, I will read about such things in airports. But in the midst of it all, we know only one another in complete felicity. Coenraad jokes with policemen carrying submachine guns. In the colder regions something goes wrong. Whatever the cause — the cold or the damp or the gray pall — we quarrel easily. I must choose my words with care, ask no questions, avoid witticisms. (Amsterdam was an exception. Perhaps Coenraad felt at ease in his ancestral home. Perhaps being below sea level has something to do with an atavistic desire to return to water. The three nights we had at the Hotel Krasnapolski were spent in calm embraces and long sleeps, as if collapse of the dikes was imminent. And should we be washed away, we would be found clutching one another in our eternal repose.) In Stockholm, he was so easily irked and I so quickly wounded, that he sent me on to Edinburgh ahead of schedule. Despite a week’s separation, the coolness between us persisted. Coenraad had no enthusiasm for anything; he refused to visit the Castle with me. North of the forty-second parallel we always fuck without passion.

  In Hamburg our affair almost came to an end.

  I had taken a long walk beside the Elbe. It was a cold, damp day in March and by four o’clock I was glad to be inside the hotel. In Germany, inevitably, I suffered from a rampant imagination. I was grateful, therefore, that Coenraad’s message had brought me to Vier Jahreszeiten, where the splendour clung to the nineteenth century. In the lounge a fire was crackling in the huge hearth, its flames fitfully reflected on the gleaming oak walls. Everything shone: crystal and silver and polished leather chairs. On a long table at one end copper chafing dishes were set out on a white damask cloth. A chef in a high white hat was whipping a sauce in a copper bowl; to his right an assistant handed him a spatula, wooden handle forward as a nurse hands an instrument to a surgeon. Waiters in black suits glided about the room, starched white aprons tied at their waists and flapping at their ankles above polished black shoes. I sat at a small table. Two waiters came at once. I ordered coffee and cake. A third waiter appeared, murmured, Bitte?, pulled out the other chair and helped a woman sit opposite me. She addressed me in accented English, Ah, you are here. So. And began to pull off long white kid gloves. She was stout, yet elegant in a black velvet suit with a white satin blouse. She leaned her elbows and her breasts on the table, rested her (hennaed) head in her hands and began, quietly, to weep. Her fingers were covered with rings: two diamond, one broad gold band, one ruby, an emerald and a turquoise. Coffee and small cakes were brought. She sipped and nibbled and wept. Although I have been warned never to speak to strangers, my heart went out to this pathetic person.

  – You mustn’t cry in public, I told her.

  – It’s the only safe place to cry.

  – You humiliate yourself and embarrass others.

  – You believe that because you are in love. Yes, yes, I can tell. It is difficult for one in love to think of tears. If one is given to weeping as I am, it is easier to cry in the company of one who is happy.

  I was still drinking my first cup of coffee when yet another waiter brought me a second. I was about to dismiss him and his coffee when he began to remove from a silver tray and place before me silver pitchers of cream, one after the other, seven of them. It was a signal! To make certain, I looked down at his shoes. They were not black and pointed like the others. He was wearing a pair of brown brogues. I looked up into a pair of gray warning eyes.

  – I wasn’t always like this, she was saying. It started with a little sniffle before dinner, then a few tears as a nightcap. As the empty days dragged on, I got into the habit of feeling sorry for myself in the middle of the afternoon. Before I knew it, I was having outbursts before breakfast. I forgot to eat: I cried instead. My health suffered. I became thin, nervous, unable to control my craving for that blessed release of warm, salt tears. My dear, may that day never come for you when you cannot control your tears. I am not so bad now. I am able to hold out until four in the afternoon when my chauffeur brings me here for tea. Everyone is so kind. I am not alone; people try to help. Often I am joined by someone ready to give way and shed a few tears with me. You would be surprised how many people, from every part of the world, have pent-up sorrows and need only a little encouragement to let go.

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nbsp; She proferred a fine lawn handkerchief, folded, with “E” embroidered in pink silk in the corner.

  – No thank you, I have no tears left.

  – You poor dear, it must have been dreadful.

  – Actually, it never occurred to me to come out in the open. I cried in the basement, in the dark, so no one would know. Often I did my laundry at the same time.

  Her eyes brimmed over, then she covered her face with the (now-unfolded) hanky and began to sob. My waiter hovered. I poured the seven creams into my empty cup, met his glare and said, That will be all, thank you.

  None of this byplay diverted the woman opposite me, who, as the expression goes, was well into her cups.

  – My husband will be released from prison next week, she was saying. He has bleeding ulcers, I will have to cook milk soups for him. What do I want with him now? Everything has gone on as if he were dead. The factories are humming, the servants run the house. Once I cried because he left me alone; now I cry because he is coming back. What will I do with him wandering about the house, getting in everyone’s way? . . . And every evening we will make our promenade around the grounds for an hour, in every sort of weather, in rain and snow.

  – Leave, go far away, it’s not too late!

  – Ah, the young, they know what they must do. For me it is too late. Too late to sleep in strange beds. I have gone through so much. Two world wars, many changes, my friends dead, my son in Argentina, my daughters in America, my husband in prison . . .

  – Your husband is a Nazi!

  – Never. He owned factories; he did what he was told.

  – You were his wife, you should have stopped him!

  – He was my husband, he did not consult me whether he should produce tanks.

  Sadly I nodded in understanding: Zbigniew spends all his spare hours with his mare; Coenraad (what exactly is his work?) will not juggle one assignment for an extra night with me.

  – Sell your jewels, pack your hankies, go! You have learned to cry amidst strangers; you can live anywhere!

  It was beyond my comprehension why I would want to comfort this fat old woman whose very existence was a sign of guilt, a woman who no doubt drank champagne in her private bunker while my family . . . gone . . . all gone . . . I am the only one left alive. My own tears began to flow. I accepted, unfolded and used the handkerchief she handed me. I kept crying, quietly, naturally, relieved to know I still had tears in me. At the very least, I could weep for the dead. The woman was dry-eyed now. Sober, one might say.

  – No, my dear, forgive me, she was saying, you have been so kind, but I cannot exchange boredom for danger. I have suffered enough. Now I have my little pleasures every day at four o’clock to look forward to. You will agree it has been a pleasant hour, nicht wahr?

  That night I awaited Coenraad in a massive bed. I was perfumed and ready. I was naked under the heavy eiderdown in anticipation of the (delirious) night ahead, my half-closed eyes full of images of his body, his hands, of his mouth over mine. I shifted to my left side to calm myself. I was too warm. As I flung the heavy quilt off me, I was reminded that I helped my mother carry a feather comforter, covered in red cotton, in a wicker trunk on and off trains from Radom to Hamburg, from Ellis Island to Toronto. Thoughts of love evaporated. All I could see was weeping women. Against whom should I direct my protests? Against the French torturer in Algeria who consulted Franz Fanon for treatment for insomnia, the torturer who protested he could not sleep nights because his stubborn victims made his work so difficult? . . . A sense of doom turned the room with its silken walls and fine furniture into a ghetto. Now my eagerness for my lover was for another reason: in his presence terrors vanish.

  At midnight he came in through the unlocked door, still in his waiter’s outfit, propelling a tea cart. I was hungry. I jumped out of bed, ran forward and whipped off the cover of a silver dish. Inside was a revolver. Under a white damask napkin in a bread basket was his makeup kit. I should have been warned by the presence of his professional paraphernalia: perhaps he was still on duty. Coenraad was silent and undemonstrative, keeping his hands at his sides, as I pressed myself against him to reach behind him and untie his waiter’s apron. I often have to help him, because of a severed tendon in his right hand (Athens, 1967) which renders ineffective the use of the principle known as the opposing thumb and forefinger. He compensates with his left hand, but not under all conditions, especially if the knot is tight. I often wonder how he manages when I am not with him. He then took off his shoes with a sigh of relief. He did not remove the rest of his clothes. He sat in the reading chair facing me. He had harsh words that sounded like this:

  – When will you learn not to trust everyone!

  – I cannot live with suspicion.

  – You know the rules; take it or leave it.

  – There are no rules for weeping women.

  – Just don’t speak to strangers.

  – Au fond, as they say, we are all strangers.

  – Exactement. All I ask is that you refrain from conversations with wives of condemned Nazis.

  – You know who she is!

  – It is my duty to know these things.

  – But she is old and harmless.

  – No one is harmless.

  – You’re paranoid!

  – I’m under orders!

  – And does the Agency give you permission to make love to me?

  – They don’t need to; officially you do not exist.

  These last words left me silent and profoundly depressed, especially since they were spoken without the movement of a muscle. His face was a waiter’s face; it had the gray pallor of one who spends his life under dim electric lights. He added:

  – Moreover, when will you learn to lock your door? You endanger me with your carelessness.

  It was just as well I had made no mention of having been followed in my walk along the Elbe.

  I have no postcards of Hamburg. I want no reminders of a night spent with our backs turned, and of Coenraad getting dressed just as light appeared at a space between the drapes and then slipping out as if I were not in the room.

  I was awake still with memories of Hamburg as disquieting as a nightmare. It was true that officially I did not exist. My passport bore a false name. No one but Coenraad knew my whereabouts. Since I was no longer domiciled I did not appear on voters’ lists. I was a stranger in the midst of strangers. Not for me the comfort of being recognized by the company I keep. Yet this solitary life had its advantages: if no one cared about me, I need please no one. Except my lover. I was reminded of the time I asked him why, with an entire world of women, literally, to choose from, why it is me he loves. At that moment I was being held and kissed so that his reply can be recalled in its meaning only. I think he said something that indicated that he, too, is subject to nightmares; that he could not go on unless someone loved him; that he must have something to look forward to and that I was to be trusted.

  Did I imagine that there was less vitality out on the streets that next morning? People ambled along as if it were spring; cars meandered as if they were on a country lane. Of course. Friday has become a day of demarcation between the past week’s work and the weekend’s (anticipated) pleasures. And if I have to be alone this week-end, how will I put in the time? In any other city, in any other part of the world, there are for me new sights and sounds to excite the senses. Yet here in the city I have known all my life I do not know what to do with myself.

  This time I avoided the main lobby of the Royal York Hotel and went directly downstairs to the coffee shop, not because of any diffidence, but rather because I felt that the lower one goes in the economic scale the faster the service is. Beside the Please Wait to be Seated sign, the same hostess was standing. I noticed the pearls had given way to a gold chain over the black dress. Had she decided that pearls, in her position, were somewhat pretentious? She headed tow
ards the rear of the dining room, that is to say, once more away from the windows and towards the kitchen, but after a few steps changed direction and led me to the same table as the day before. I wondered whether it was my (now established) resistance, or my black dress and pearls, similar to her professional dress, or perhaps it was the memory of yesterday’s journey and detours that led to her capitulation. A small victory, mine, but I told myself it was a beginning.

  This morning, except for the waitress and myself, there were only men in the dining room. I pushed aside the menu with its numbered fare and looked about me. This morning I did not feel it necessary to lower my eyes: overnight I had undergone some kind of change: I found I was not uncomfortable in this roomful of men, even though it still suggested a fraternal order, Elks, Eagles, or Orange Lodge. I was able to stare frankly into the face of a man two tables over: I liked his long bony wrists visible over his plate. To my right, a young man was leaning forward, almost bursting out of his jacket, intense with anxiety as he pointed to papers spread out between his coffee cup and the cup of the man opposite, who, being importuned, moved his head and shoulders as far back as his chair permitted. Almost obstructed from view, so that I had to shift to my left to see what went with his thick red hair, was a handsome face with pink cheeks and blue eyes. Even though they returned my gaze, his eyes were remote.

  Then I realized I was repeating a habit I had when I was sixteen: I “tried-on” a possible mate the way I speculated about an expensive dress in a shop window: this one, or that one, would “look good on me.” This morning, in contrast to my adolescent habit, I found a number of possibilities my skin could accept: this morning I was not being too selective: “fussy” was my father’s term. I even considered a serious dark young man in a corner, perhaps in his twenties, who was, possibly, scribbling love poems, a look of inner turmoil on his face — writing love poems calculated to lead his lady to erotic dreams, as Coenraad must have intended when he gave me a book of Sanskrit love poems.