The pain has lifted, literally rising. First she did not see. What was that white caress? God was painting the world on her retina with the softest brush; stars, snow falling, blossoms, rows of wild chestnut trees in bloom, each leaf a green tickle. She had never laughed like this before. This was not to be believed either. Just because something puts you in a rapture it is not necessarily to be believed.
She is in a room in bed; to this familiar notion Sophie Blind held on while she was having the wildest dream.
But is she dreaming?
She is in a room writing. The only trouble is that all the pages of the small pad are already covered with words in some foreign language. She sits up in bed. The room is unfamiliar, high-ceilinged—a marble washstand with a pitcher, the armoire, provincial French—a room in an old-fashioned first-class hotel in a seaside resort in Normandy. Clearly a dream because now she remembers the industrialist from Milan, they were streaking along the Amalfi coast in his Alfa Romeo—that dates and places it; but what has become of him? She must make a note of all this—quick, before he comes—on the lace paper mat on the breakfast tray. The room has changed again but she is used to this. Sophie Blind is used to unfamiliar rooms. She has been traveling all her life.
This room with printed muslin curtains tacked on the window frame, the drapes an obscure color, bedding piled high, could be in her grandmother’s apartment in Budapest. Pictures of bearded men in silver frames cover the wall. There is the bustle of backroom deliveries; rugs clapped over the sill, brushes scrubbing stone; guests are ushered in and shown out; the door of the buffet creaks each time another wine glass must be fetched.
She is looking at a page of Dore’s illustrated Bible, a picture showing the deluge, whirling throngs of nude bodies at the bottom, the dead draped voluptuously over rocks, the great white Ark approaching from above; in another second someone turns the page to a pastoral scene. The shadowy figure poking around the room, pulling things from chests, could be a cousin or uncle. Odd, the gaudy paraphernalia—boots, petticoats, hats and fans from the nineties and the twenties. The quick, sure grace with which he handles things and moves suggests her lover, her lover teasing her, putting on her great grandfather’s fur kaftan, next her aunt’s stole of silver foxes; his impersonations go too far. Stop, she pleads, but he is already pulling her mother’s sequined dress over his head: a woman’s painted face appears, a perfect likeness, the blond curls, the black beauty patch just below the left corner of the mouth; she is sitting, in tight, low-cut dress, legs crossed like Marlene Dietrich—Someone shakes the room like a kaleidoscope; chandeliers blossom and drop in mirror-lined ballrooms, there is too much glare and reflection. Now Sophie Blind isn’t sure whether she is dreaming. There is another question on her mind. When you are under their devilish drug, can you remember taking it, even supposing they didn’t slip it in your tea, the dirty bastards, supposing no foul deal, you volunteered like a fool, can you remember when you’re actually under the drug? Sophie Blind doesn’t remember.
She is looking up at her lover, astonished by the phrase, “...that happiness, so improbable, we call it love...” He sits on the edge of her bed, smoking gravely. She wonders why he looks into the distance, his head thrown back; she wants to see his eyes. “...because you’re dead Sophie,” she hears, like a voice out of a letter she is reading, “Dead.”
“We’ve been through this before—” she wants to say. Instead her eyes leap for a last glimpse of his dear face. It’s gone. Where? Disappeared. Into the wallhanging? A medieval hunting scene, the background faded greenery; a castle floats sketched faintly in the upper left; in the foreground spotted Dalmatian hounds on their hind legs, painted full-face, are jumping outward—such virtuosity of foreshortening in the Middle Ages; it’s astounding! Modernity, Reformation, Renaissance are classroom jokes after all, as she always suspected—the world ended when it was supposed to in the year 1274, if only they had believed it. “...Why there had to be a twentieth century—?” She hears a familiar voice repeat a student’s question in a heavy German accent. That was in another dream. She can’t see anything now. Actually she sees too much and too fast. It’s the same whether she keeps her eyes open or shut. Her lover is in the room and he wants her to be calm. Who’s having a hunting party in her head? Birds shot in flight are plummeting darkly from all directions and new ones are thrown in as fast, their cries piercing shrill.
She knows it’s over. She can’t stop now. She must get used to her new voice.
Yes, I’m dead. I knew I was dead when I came but I didn’t want to be the first to say it. Not just as I arrived. I wasn’t really sure, you see. Everything looked so new, the water tanks on the roofs, the wide avenues, and heavy glass doors; boys playing touch football on the sidewalk. As if I were in New York for the first time. My sense of things is sometimes distorted. But I never felt so intensely alive as now. That’s what’s confusing me. And your presence. Listening. Or just watching my face in sleep, always calm, you said. When I know you’re far away...Perhaps you are speaking to me the words to make everything clear. No need for words perhaps. Women want essentially only happiness, you said, happiness more than power or truth. But I care for truth. Now I am dead I
