Tales of the Night, page 28
“Mr. Toft,” said van Austen, “love is always a compromise between what is necessary and what is possible. In this case the necessary factor was our mutual inclination.
“And the possible,” he continued deliberately, “was my wife’s career. I’m sure we can confide that to the young man, can’t we, my angel? A career, Mr. Toft, that at that point was grinding to a halt. But that, with my position and wealth as a—how shall I put it—a crutch, would surely pick up steam once more.”
Behind him, a cold and invisible hand came down on Jason’s skull and commenced to squeeze hard.
“And my husband,” said Margrethe, “had used his head. You should know, Mr. Toft, and I think you ought to write this down, that his brain is the one part of his anatomy my husband has employed first and foremost.”
Murmuring to himself, Jason bent over his papers.
“You see,” the actress went on, “before he met me he had led a very colorful life, so colorful that … his mother had begun to find it a little too riotous for her liking. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Toft, that a boy’s best friend is his mother?”
“I have,” said Jason, “a wonderful—”
“So, you see,” she continued, “there were many good reasons why Georg married me and one of the best of these was his mother. Are you writing, Mr. Toft?”
“All of this,” Georg van Austen interjected reassuringly, “is told purely in the interest of the truth and is not meant as a disavowal of the powerful feelings we entertain for each other. I’m sure you understand that, Mr. Toft.”
“Absolutely,” said Jason.
“And now I would ask you to drink with us,” said van Austen and filled their glasses.
Jason was suddenly conscious of how the wine he had already drunk had settled over his eyes like a bridal veil and his hand came up to ward it off. For an instant van Austen’s expression turned quizzical and Jason recalled having heard that as a young man he himself had sailed as first mate and then captain on the company’s ships. Meekly he emptied his glass. Van Austen nodded approvingly.
“No one can possibly get to the bottom of our marriage,” he said, “unless they have drunk with us. The fact is, Mr. Toft, that it has been a long time since Margrethe and I were able to observe each other’s vile profiles while sober.”
The woman had been standing as she drank. Now she put down her glass and stepped into the center of the room as if needing more space for what was to come.
“Let us not dwell,” she said, “on the wedding. That, after all, is now part of Danish history. Let us move on to the years that followed.”
“To the children,” prompted Jason, like a drowning man clutching at a life preserver.
“To the unutterable loneliness,” said the actress.
“You see, Mr. Toft,” she proceeded, and as she spoke the faint note of levity gradually faded from her voice, “I actually did love him. I am, as it happens, a passionate soul, Mr. Toft, and back then I loved Georg van Austen to the point of utter distraction.”
Only now, with the situation on the verge of slipping out of control, did Jason see the light. Only now did he realize that this must be the first such conversation that this married couple had ever had, that inadvertently, with his petition and his presence, he had succeeded in unleashing a natural disaster.
“No one can have any idea,” the woman continued, “how I waited. But he never came. He was overseas, or at a launching, or a meeting of the guild. He was out ensuring his family’s immortality.
“You make a home. He takes no notice of it. You give birth to children. He takes no notice of them. You create your roles. He takes no notice of them.”
A spasm of anger surged through her form, contorting her features into a mask of hatred. For a moment only—then it was gone and when she spoke her voice was hoarse but controlled.
“In all my years on the stage there was one thing I wished for more than anything else. I wished that just once he would sit down there of his own free will, that he come to see me. But that never happened. Oh, of course he came. But always because the king was present or because the company had paid for a gala performance, because it presented him with an opportunity to show some foreign head of state his respect. And always his eyes were distant, brimming with the future, brimming with money, brimming with the van Austen family’s colossal, world-famous self-absorption.”
She drew a deep breath. “In the end,” she said, and now her tone was quite matter-of-fact, “in the end one realizes that one is unloved, and there is no more truthful moment than that. There is no pain in this world equal to the pain of knowing that by loving another person in vain, gradually and blindly one has poured one’s life down the drain.”
“The children,” Jason croaked.
“The children,” said Margrethe, “oh, we had maids to see to them. In the icy waste where Georg and I have fought out our marriage, a child could easily have gotten frostbite. Don’t you think, Georg, that we ought to be happy that you have not had more to do with the children than has been the case?”
Georg van Austen planted his hands on the table before him and Jason realized that with this action alone he must on countless occasions have dominated the proceedings at many a directors’ meeting and in many a boardroom.
“Ah, my darling,” he said, “but you did manage to light lots of modest little flames at which to warm yourself.”
The woman’s gaze met his and their eyes locked, like two wrestlers getting a good grip and then starting to squeeze the life out of each other.
“In this—imaginary or actual—darkness,” said van Austen to Jason, “my wife felt moved to take her first lover.
“If, that is, it was the first,” he added. “As you wrote in your letter to us, with most narratives there is no knowing where they have their beginning. It was, at any rate, the first affair to come to my knowledge.”
The eminent businessman’s expression was impassive but Jason noted that the hands that rested on the table had begun to tense.
“In my family,” he said, “a contract has always been regarded as the highest conceivable human bond. Pacta sunt servanda, as Roman law has it. Agreements must be honored. The social contract between the nation and its representatives and the commercial contract between men of business are what make the civilized world what it is.
“The essence of a contract lies not in the signatures, not in its stipulations, not in the document itself. The essence of a contract lies in mutual trust. Trust, Mr. Toft, is the supreme human sentiment. And, hence, marriage constitutes the ultimate contract, presupposing as it does the most infinite trust.”
Slowly the shipowner pushed back his chair and drew himself to his feet. “There is no greater torture in the world,” he said, “than to see one’s boundless faith in another human being betrayed.”
He thought back. “I opened the door to my wife’s bedroom,” he said, “and found myself as close to the two of them as I am to you now, Mr. Toft.”
He took a step forward and a feeling of blind terror welled up inside Jason. Again he had the sensation of being in the jungle, with a huge white elephant bearing down on him. With a start he leaped out of his chair and edged away.
“There is something extraordinary about the sight of one’s wife naked together with another man,” said van Austen. “I know that certain religions cite instances of people’s leaving their earthly bodies while still alive. At that moment I understood what this meant. Do you hear, Margrethe? At that moment I wanted to leave my body.”
The woman opened her mouth to say something but he stayed her with a raised hand.
“In time, Mr. Toft,” he said, “you will discover that most women have developed an effusive way with words that serves to excuse and explain their breaches of faith. My wife, with her thirty-five years in the theater, her thirty-five years’ training in systematic duplicity, could explain away the Fall itself. But for us menfolk, action is what counts. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Toft?”
Jason took yet another step back and drew his chair in front of him.
“And action it was,” continued van Austen, “that came most naturally to me on that particular occasion. I fetched my rapiers. From my student days at Halle. You see, Mr. Toft, well into this century, duels were still quite common at the German universities.”
Van Austen lifted two silver forks from the table. “I give the young man a rapier,” he said and handed Jason a fork. “But he seems unable to grip it.” Jason dropped the fork. “So I press him,” said van Austen, placing the tines of the fork against Jason’s throat. “Then I tell Margrethe that if she wishes to see this little cricket survive to go on chirping through the summer nights she will have to beg for his life. A generous offer, don’t you think, Mr. Toft? But she says not a word and from that I deduce that one thing is certain and that is that she is not in love with him. And so I decide to let him go.”
He took away the fork and stepped to one side. Jason lurched past him and stumbled down the length of the table, dragging a candlestick onto the floor in his wake.
“Just as he was on his way out the door,” van Austen carried on at his back, “my wife came up with a most telling remark. Do you remember what you said, Margrethe?”
The woman stared at him, making no move to answer.
“She said,” he continued, dwelling on the words, “‘I needed someone to lie with.’” He shook his head. “It was then that I decided he should die after all.”
He made a quick lunge at Jason and jabbed him in the stomach with the fork. Jason let out a squeal of terror and fell back onto the floor. Van Austen eyed him with interest. “Yes, that is exactly how he fell,” he said. “And do you know where I had stabbed him? In the right lung. At Halle we used to say that if you punctured a lung you could hear the soul leaving the body.”
Jason pricked up his ears. He could indeed hear something and for a second he thought he really had been wounded, until he realized what he heard was his teeth chattering.
“I know,” said van Austen, talking down to him where he lay, “what you, as the objective recorder—isn’t that what you called yourself?—are now thinking. You are thinking, What on earth did we do with the body? An excellent question. But you see, there was no body, because the young man survived. His wound was attended to. But never again did he show his face in this house. And that might have had something to do with the fact that for the rest of his life he would have to get by with only one lung. Anyone with only one lung needs to take good care of himself.”
With some difficulty Jason got to his feet and sank into a chair. His glass was refilled and obediently he drank from it. When he looked up, the curtains of the windows overlooking the square had been drawn. The Indian, from his position over by the wall, kept his eyes trained straight ahead and just at that moment Jason could not think where to turn for help.
Margrethe laid his bundle of paper in front of him and stuck his pen in his hand. “But you must hear the rest of the story,” she said, “if your picture of these events is not to be as imperfect as my husband’s. You see, after that incident he never slept with me again. Are you writing, Mr. Toft? After that, not once did he ever come to sleep with me.”
“The children…” said Jason, but the woman did not hear him, bitterness seeming by this time to have eaten away her self-control.
“Of course in your family, Georg,” she said, “you have always kept life at arm’s length, isn’t that so? You’ve taken the odd sniff at it, given it a little lick now and again, but when it came down to it, when it came to living and suffering, you didn’t really have the balls for it, did you, my darling? So off you scuttled, back to the safety of Mama and your family—”
“I warn you not to mention my mother’s name,” said van Austen.
“Mr. Toft,” continued Margrethe, slowly and deliberately, “do you know what the most striking trait of the van Austen family is? Its formidable gift for abstinence. For abstaining from life. And the greatest form of abstinence of all is this: on no account to forgive. And that you certainly have mastered, Georg, my sweet. You have the ability to hate and hate, you have allowed a little chunk of ice to enter your bosom and there it lies, keeping you cool. And with this sliver in your heart you warm your hands on the family, on the thought of the van Austens’ damn—”
“But you have children!” ventured Jason.
“Ah yes, the children,” said the actress. “Does that surprise you? But surely you don’t think, Mr. Toft, that a woman like me can live without men.”
“Margrethe!” warned van Austen.
The tears began to stream down the woman’s cheeks, but her voice remained clear and calculated. “When one has to live without love,” she said, “one can always get by on sex. Now don’t tell me, Mr. Toft, that you pictured marriage as a sort of Yuletide at the Vicarage, did you? Or like Levin’s phony Within These Walls? You surely didn’t think this was Little Women. I found other men, Mr. Toft. And with them I had children.”
For a second or two she was silent. Then she began to snarl, softly and as if in torment. Eventually she looked at her husband. “I cannot cry anymore,” she said. “Do you hear, Georg? I’m all dried up. Do you know what it’s like for a woman to be all dried up?”
“Mr. Toft,” she went on, “write down that every child was for him.”
She pointed at her husband with a finger that trembled uncontrollably. “Do you hear, Georg? Every single child was a cry to you, begging you to listen to me. But you are deaf. And you are blind.”
She walked right up to him and her voice dropped to a whisper. “But when all is said and done, you’re not a man, are you, Georg? Not really a human being at all, are you? If the truth were told you are nothing but your mother’s means of descent to the next generation.”
At that, van Austen struck her, the blow hurled her to the floor, and he eased himself down beside her.
“It’s not nice of you, Margrethe,” he said, “to force me to wash your mouth out with soap in front of our young friend here. But being the filthy little whore that you are, you know you would do well to refrain from mentioning my mother’s name.”
Margrethe raised her head off the floor and burst out laughing. Her laughter swelled, then broke and subsided to a snicker.
“You there,” she said to Jason, “did you get the bit about the unutterable loneliness? You have to put that in. You have to write that Georg van Austen is the loneliest man on this earth. Even his children refuse to acknowledge him. How many years is it, Georg, since even one of the children has shown any interest in seeing you?”
Van Austen’s hands opened and closed, groping blindly. “You turned them against me,” he said, wetting his lips. “And I have never asked for, never wished for companionship. The company is my life. In that lies my immortality. That and the children. Even if they don’t want anything to do with me.”
“Even in that you are mistaken,” said Margrethe. “As you well know. But surely you don’t imagine, Georg dear, that you could possibly be father to any one of them? After all, one doesn’t get to be a father by lying down on the job. You know very well that for that one has to be on the ball. For that one has to be upstanding. But then you’ve known that all along.”
Van Austen swayed momentarily. “The company,” he said, “the company and a monument to my memory.”
Margrethe was on her feet again and now, as she spoke, she drove him back against the table. “Passé, yet again,” she hissed. “When this gets out, Georg dear, you’ll find yourself with a monument to your memory the like of which you never thought possible, the sort of memorial that could destroy a bigger company than yours.”
“It will never get out,” said van Austen. He pointed at Jason. “He lives with Helene. He would never—”
“No,” said Margrethe, and she stopped dead, straightened her shoulders, and inhaled in preparation for the fateful blow. “No,” she repeated, “that little worm will never write about all this. And if he did, no one would believe him. But do you know whom they would believe, Georg? They would believe me. People would believe Margrethe van Austen.”
“You?” said van Austen.
“Me,” said the woman. “I have been writing about us, Georg. On those endless nights when I have sat in the dark and felt life running out, I have held back a little. I have saved a few bits and pieces. I have written a play about the two of us. It may not be any good, but the subject is of interest to the public. So it has been read. And accepted. By the Royal Theater, Georg. Right over there. And it tells the truth. They’re going to lap it up, Georg. They’ll see that every word is true. There will be no monument to your memory. There will be a pillar to your shame.”
For a second, all the power and attention in the room centered on the woman, as if owing their very existence to her. Then van Austen’s hands shot out, fastened around her throat, pulled her to him, lifted her off the floor, and squeezed. Jason barely had time to feel the hair rise on the back of his neck before the woman’s form twitched in her husband’s grasp, then hung still.
Stunned, Jason was aware of how, in those seconds, the processes by which one ages became palpable, how he seemed to turn gray from within.
Then the Indian crossed to the curtains, and as it occurred to Jason what he was about to do, a blind instinct to cover up death and everything else of an unseemly nature made him put out his hands to stop him. But it was too late. The curtains slid aside. Below them, brilliantly illuminated, lay Kongens Nytorv, swarming with people in evening dress who had been making their way home but who now stopped to look up at the windows.
Slowly van Austen lowered the woman in his arms until Jason saw her loosely dangling feet touch the parquet floor. Then it was as though her high heels regained their footing, the muscles of her calves tensed and began to move, and she executed the first steps of the dance. Van Austen’s feet followed hers, the step was in triple time, they were dancing a waltz. Jason lifted his eyes to the woman’s neck. It rose straight and sure from her shoulders, the hollow of the throat exposed, the skin glowing with a delicate blush, and it carried her head high, tilting her face up to her husband. Her lips were slightly parted and her eyes rested on his face as if she were in a trance. Gently and smoothly, with eyes for no one but each other, yet with somnambulistic assurance they danced in front of the windows and then off, through the room, over to a distant white door, and then they were gone.
