"Ah, excuse me. I hear the bell ring."
He disappeared around the bookshelf. A customer had come into the shop; Karen heard a murmur of voices and then another tinkle from the bell over the door of the shop. Simon came back, wearing a look of disgust.
"Some fool in search of best-sellers. The latest Stephen King, he wanted. As if I would carry such a book."
"Ah," said Karen. "So there is a type of literature you haven't read."
"There is no type I have not read."
"Stephen King?"
"Certainly. He does what he does very well. I don't care for what he does. It is a matter of personal taste. I prefer horror to be more delicate— a frisson, a suggestion, instead of a catalog of disgusting details. The whisper from an invisible throat, the shadow where there is no object to cast it, a sudden breath of cold air in a warm room. Don't you agree?"
"I don't read horror stories," Karen said.
" 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?"
"Oh, but that isn't . . . Well, yes, it is; but the horror is psychological; it is a brilliant study of a woman retreating into madness from—"
"Ah, bah. More of your feminist jargon. What does it matter if the victim is a woman being driven mad by the constraints of male-dominated society or an unbeliever tormented by a narrow concept of religion?"
"It isn't a question of better or worse," Karen protested. "You can't compare absolute evil; all you can do is fight it whenever it manifests itself."
"Precisely what I was saying. The agony is the same and the cause is the same: a rigid moral absolutism that inflicts pain under the pretext of kindness."
"What story are you referring to? Sounds like Poe."
"No; I doubt you have heard of the author. The story is called 'The Torture of Hope.' It is about a prisoner trying to escape from the cells of the Inquisition, only to find, just as he seems to reach freedom, that his captors have allowed him to hope as the ultimate torture. And the worst thing about both stories is that the tormentor is not a perverted sadist. Quite the contrary; the husband and the Grand Inquisitor have noble motives. They wish to save their victims from damnation, by society or by God."
"Simon, I promise I won't steal your precious surprise. Please let me
see it."
"Not just yet. First you must listen to this. Where did I put that book ..." Turning, he ran his finger along the shelf behind him.
Karen bit her lip. Simon wasn't being deliberately sadistic either. His attitude was typical of the world from which he had come—Europe between the wars, sophisticated, intellectual, more than a little decadent. Though he had never told her his precise age, he must have been in his teens when his native Vienna had fallen to the forces of evil and his family and friends had vanished into the death camps. The values of that vanished age, remembered by an impressionable boy, were all the more to be cherished because of the horror that had swept them away. Whatever their failings, the aristocrats and intellectuals of old Europe had realized that the deliberate, delicate prolongation of pleasure was an art to be cultivated in all aspects of life, from the enjoyment of sculpture to the appreciation of music, from dining to making love.
"You are flushed," Simon said, turning back to her with the book in his hand. "Is it too warm? Old people have cold bones; I will lower the heat."
Karen wiped the smile off her face. Maybe Simon was right; she had been "alone" too long. "I'm not too warm," she assured him. "I was thinking about . . . something else."
"If it makes you blush I don't want to hear it," Simon said reprovingly. "Now listen."
He had only read a few sentences when the shop door opened again and he went out to attend to the customer, leaving the book open on his chair. This time he was gone for some time. Karen picked up the book. When Simon returned she started and let out a strangled shriek.
Chuckling, Simon took the book from her hands. "Where had you got to? Ah, yes. 'He pressed forward faster on his knees, his hands, at full length, dragging himself painfully along, and soon entered the dark portion of this terrible corridor.' "
"You startled me," Karen mumbled. "Creeping in like that."
Simon raised an elegant eyebrow at her and went on reading. " 'Oh Heaven, if the door should open outward. Every nerve in the miserable fugitive's body thrilled with hope.' "
He started to close the book. "You see what I mean. The physical tortures inflicted on the rabbi are never described in detail, only hinted at. It is his mental suffering—"
"Okay," Karen said. "Finish it. Please."
"I wouldn't want to bore you with third-rate fiction."
"You did that on purpose. I know he doesn't make it, but I'll never sleep tonight if I don't find out what happens."
Simon did as she asked. He had a sonorous, flexible voice and he knew he read well. He gave the dreadful story everything he had. Scarcely had the poor rabbi reached the gardens and raised his eyes toward Heaven to praise God for his escape than he was clasped in a tender embrace and he realized that "all the phases of this fatal evening were only a prearranged torture, that of hope." "The Grand Inquisitor, with an accent of touching reproach and a look of consternation, murmured in his ear, his breath parched and burning from long fasting: 'What, my son! On the eve, perchance, of salvation—you wished to leave us?' "
Karen shuddered, then laughed—at herself. "I concede your point. But I'm afraid modern readers wouldn't be affected."
"They have become jaded—too many chain saws, too many decomposing corpses. And few comprehend that mental torture is the worst of all—the
