‘I never said you had it. I only said I believed you could produce it when it was needed.’
‘Here it is.’ She released the spoon and laid that hand lightly on the one which held the tucked-in and undisturbed basket. Then immediately and peacefully but without haste she smiled at him, serene and uncritical. ‘You really cant help it, can you? You really cant.’
‘Marya,’ the woman on the bench said. Again immediately but without haste, the smile went away. It was not replaced by anything: it just went away, leaving the face unchanged, uncritical, serene.
‘Yes, Sister,’ she said. She turned and went back to the bench where the other woman had risen now; again the girl had made that convulsive start to rise too; this time the tall woman’s hard thin peasant hand was gripping her shoulder, holding her down.
‘This is——’ the old general said.
‘His wife,’ the tall woman said harshly. ‘Who did you expect it to be?’
‘Ah yes,’ the old general said, looking at the girl; he said, in that gentle inflectionless voice: ‘Marseilles? Toulon perhaps?’ then named the street, the district, pronouncing the street name which was its by-word. The woman started to answer but the old general raised his hand at her. ‘Let her answer,’ he said, then to the girl: ‘My child? A little louder.’
‘Yes sir,’ the girl said.
‘Oh yes,’ the woman said. ‘A whore. How else do you think she got here—got the papers to come this far, to this place, except to serve France also?’
‘But his wife too,’ the old general said.
‘His wife now,’ the woman corrected. ‘Accept that, whether you believe it or not.’
‘I do both,’ the old general said. ‘Accept that from me too.’ Then she moved, released the girl’s shoulder and came toward the desk, almost to it in fact, then stopping as though at the exact spot from which her voice would be only a murmur to the two still on the bench when she spoke:
‘Do you want to send them out first?’
‘Why?’ the old general said. ‘So you are Magda.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Not Marthe: Magda. I wasn’t Marthe until after I had a brother and had to cross half of Europe to face thirty years later the French general who would hold the refusal of his life. Not gift: refusal; and even that’s wrong: the taking back of it.’ She stood, tall, still, looking down at him. ‘So you even knew us. I was about to say “Not remembered us, because you never saw us”. But maybe that’s wrong too and you did see us then. If you did, you would remember us even if I wasn’t but nine then and Marya eleven, because as soon as I saw your face tonight I knew that it would never need to flee, hide from, fear or dread or grieve at having to remember anything it ever looked at. Marya might fail to see that maybe—Marya now too, since she also had to come all the way to France to watch the refusal of her half-brother’s life, even if she doesn’t need to fear or dread or grieve at having to remember either—but not I. Maybe Marya is why you remember us if you saw us then: because she was eleven then and in our country girls at eleven are not girls anymore, but women. But I wont say that, not because of the insult that would be even to our mother, let alone to you—our mother who had something in her—I dont mean her face—which did not belong in that village—that village? in all our mountains, all that country—while what you must have had—had? have—in you is something which all the earth had better beware and dread and be afraid of. The insult would have been to evil itself. I dont mean just that evil. I mean Evil, as if there was a purity in it, a severity, a jealousy like in God—a strictness of untruth incapable of compromise or second-best or substitute. A purpose, an aim in it, as though not just our mother but you neither could help yourselves; and not just you but our—mine and Marya’s—father too: not two of you but three of you doing not what you would but what you must. That people, men and women, dont choose evil and accept it and enter it, but evil chooses the men and women by test and trial, proves and tests them and then accepts them forever until the time comes when they are consumed and empty and at last fail evil because they no longer have anything that evil can want or use; then it destroys them. So it wasn’t just you, a stranger happened by accident into a country so far away and hard to get to that whole generations of us are born and live and die in it without even knowing or wondering or caring what might be on the other side of our mountains or even if the earth extends there. Not just a man come there by chance, having already whatever he would need to charm, trance, bewitch a weak and vulnerable woman, then finding a woman who was not only weak and vulnerable but beautiful too—oh yes, beautiful; if that was what you had had to plead, her beauty and your love, my face would have been the first to forgive you, since the jealousy would be not yours but hers—just to destroy her home, her husband’s faith, her children’s peace, and at last her life,—to drive her husband to repudiate her just to leave her children fatherless, then her to die in childbirth in a cow-byre behind a roadside inn just to leave them orphans, then at last have the right—privilege—duty, whatever you want to call it—to condemn that last and only male child to death just that the name which she betrayed shall be no more. Because that’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. It must be something much bigger than that, much more splendid, much more terrible: not our father gone all that long distance from our valley to seek a beautiful face to be the mother of his name’s succession, then finding instead the fatal and calamitous one which would end it; not you blundered there by chance, but sent there to meet that beautiful and fatal face; not her so weak in pride and virtue, but rather doomed by that face from them;—not the three of you compelled there just to efface a name from man’s history, because who on earth outside our valley ever heard that name, or cares? but instead to create a son for one of you to condemn to death as though to save the earth, save the world, save man’s history, save mankind.’
She brought both hands up in front of her and let them rest there, the fist of one lying in the other palm. ‘Of course you knew us. My folly was in even thinking I would need to bring you proof. So now I dont know just what to do with it, when to use it, like a knife capable of only one stroke or a pistol with just one bullet, which I cant afford to risk too soon and dare not wait too late. Maybe you even know the rest of it already too; I remember how wrong I was that you would not know who we are. Maybe your face is telling me now that you already know the rest of it, end of it, even if you weren’t there, had served your destiny—or anyway hers—and gone away.’
‘Tell me then,’ the old general said.
‘—if I must? Is that it? the ribbons and stars and braid that turned forty years of spears and bullets, yet not one of them to stop a woman’s tongue?—Or try to tell you, that is, because I dont know; I was only nine then, I only saw and remembered; Marya too, even if she was eleven, because even then she already didn’t need to dread or grieve for anything just because her face had looked at it. Not that we needed to look at this because it had been there all our lives, most of the valley’s too. It was already ours, our—the valley’s—pride (with a little awe in it) as another one might have a peak or glacier or waterfall—that speck, that blank white wall or dome or tower— whatever it was—which was first in all our valley that the sun touched and the last that lost it, still holding light long after the gulch we crouched in had lost what little it had ever snared. Yet it wasn’t high either; high wasn’t the right word either; you couldn’t—we didn’t—measure where it was that way. It was just higher than any of our men, even herdsmen and hunters, ever went. Not higher than they could but than they did, dared; no shrine or holy place because we knew them too and even the kind of men that lived in, haunted, served them; mountain men too before they were priests because we knew their fathers and our fathers had known their grandfathers, so they would be
