A Lady in Shadows Page 10

  On the other hand, Krafft-Ebing also believed that the “woman, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire. If it were otherwise, marriage and family life would be empty words. As yet the man who avoids women, and the woman who seeks out men are sheer anomalies.” Perhaps I was, with my undeniable “sensual desire,” just as abnormal as August?

  I should perhaps have asked August himself, but I had not yet dared to do that. He had assured me that he was just as interested in women as he was in men, that he found me exceedingly desirable, and that he would do his best to be faithful to me.

  He had never hid the fact that it had gradually become more and more important for him to be married. It was expected of a man in his position, and it would protect him to some extent from gossip. For my part, beyond the physical attraction I felt, August possessed another attractive trait—he found my intellect at least as interesting as my appearance, and he encouraged me to develop it. He had promised me two things: that he would treat me in every respect as a person, not just as a woman, and that he would never lie to me. In my marriage to him, I believed I would find a freedom I had hardly dared hope for. Assuming we did not have children. Married, impregnated, conquered—no, I would not let it happen. Not now. Perhaps not ever . . .

  That this would be a sensible and convenient marriage for us both, undertaken under certain rational premises, did not, however, mean that it was to be a loveless marriage of convenience. Not at all.

  I had to tell him that Falchenberg was in Varbourg, I decided. I glanced at the clock on the wall behind Althauser. August would be on the train right now, somewhere south of Strasbourg. He had swapped lectures with a colleague in order to be able to invite me and Papa out to dinner tonight to celebrate my first day at university. If I went directly to the lodging he used when he was here, I would have time to speak with him there. This was a conversation I preferred to have out of my father’s hearing.

  The house in Carmelite Street was so cramped that we had little room for overnight guests unless they felt like being quartered on the chaise longue in the salon or among the beakers and test tubes in the laboratory. In fact, August would probably not have minded the latter, but Madame Vogler would never have survived it. A professor from Heidelberg! On a bench in the laboratory! Never in her live-long days . . . !

  Consequently, August had rented lodgings from a widow who ran a small pension not far from Réunion Square. I think he discovered it was a temperance establishment only after he had moved into two nice rooms overlooking the street. It hardly suited his at times quite Latin temperament, but it did make the whole arrangement all the more respectable. It also meant there was an excellent tearoom where I could wait for him.

  Madame Guille recognized me and greeted me politely when I arrived.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Does this mean that we may expect the professor before too long?”

  “I hope so,” I said, and ordered a pot of orange pekoe.

  The salon had a large bow front protruding into the little square at the end of Rue Fevre, but the sun was so fierce that I chose a table at the back of the room, shaded even further by a tall rubber tree in a tub. I did not need to keep an eye out for August after all; Madame Guille would tell him I was here. I borrowed yesterday’s edition of Varonne Soir from the newspaper rack. Despite the fact that there had been no decisive development in the investigation of Rosalba Lombardi’s death—or perhaps precisely because of that fact—interest in the case had dwindled. Today, Caserio’s execution took up most of the front page, and of Rosalba, Eugénie Colombe, or Jack the Ripper there was no mention. Mademoiselle Death was equally absent from the headlines, I noted with a deep-felt gratitude. Christophe had devoted his efforts to a more rewarding subject and was trying to make his readers so afraid of “vengeful actions from Caserio’s anarchist coconspirators” that they hardly dared venture into the streets. As usual, it was impossible to tell if Christophe was a first name, a last name, or just a nom de plume.

  In the midst of my reading, I suddenly became aware of a German-speaking voice. Varonne is a border province, and many of Varbourg’s inhabitants are bilingual, even though the Third Republic is reluctant to acknowledge this fact. But I did not know many who were capable of expressing themselves in so articulate and precise a Hochdeutsch. I was already halfway out of my chair, with a spontaneous smile, when I realized that my fiancé was not alone.

  He was standing in the street outside in intense conversation with Falchenberg. He had placed a hand on Falchenberg’s arm, as if he wanted to prevent him from leaving, but had now lowered his voice so that I was able to pick up only a word here and there.

  I sat back down abruptly.

  I caught “unpleasant” . . . “emotional” . . . “can’t go on.”

  The conversation went on for interminable minutes. Then Falchenberg tore himself loose with a violence that made passersby turn around for a second look. I had no trouble catching the word he threw in August’s face.

  “Coward!” he shouted, and stormed off with long, ill-tempered strides.

  If Madame Guille had not intervened, I would probably have remained in the cover of my rubber tree while August walked by and would then have fled home to my father. Waves of extreme emotions shot through me. Indignation, anxiety, a nauseating uncertainty—but stronger than all these was an intense urge to smash, tear, kick, slash that pompous Teutonic fool. If only he would get run over, if only large horse hooves would stomp on his ridiculously broad German chest, if only a wagon wheel would roll across his blond head and . . .

  My entire body was shaking, and I only slowly realized that this entirely unfamiliar wave of destructive urges and homicidal hatred was what other people called jealousy.

  “Monsieur le Professeur,” I heard Madame Guille exclaim outside in the vestibule, “your fiancée is waiting for you.”

  Her unintentional warning gave me a moment to collect myself and try to control this unhelpful emotional phenomenon. I rose when August entered.

  “I came to tell you that Erich Falchenberg is in town,” I said with as little emotion as possible. “But I can see that you already know that.”

  He threw me a long look. Then he turned to Madame Guille.

  “I think my fiancée and I will take our tea upstairs,” he said. “In my drawing room.”

  “But of course,” answered Madame Guille with a quick little dip in her knees—there is something about August that makes even full-grown women curtsey.

  “August!”

  “Not here, Madeleine!” he said quietly. “Come upstairs.”

  He took my arm, and unless I was prepared to entertain the present café guests with yet another scene, there was nothing to do but to follow him.

  I had visited August’s lodgings before but had never been alone with him there. He hesitated for a moment, on the verge of leaving the door ajar in the name of propriety, but then apparently decided that our topic of conversation required a more complete privacy.

  Though he stayed here for only a few days a month, the “drawing room” was already looking more like an office. There was no bookshelf, so books were piled on the dresser, on the desk he had installed himself, and even on the window ledges, thus severely hampering Madame Guille’s efforts to maintain the décor in a simple modern style dominated by black, white, and charcoal gray. I hope he tipped the maid generously, because he did not make her work easy. There was not quite the same debris of sports equipment that characterized his office in Heidelberg, but to compensate there were several glass jars displaying organs I suspected were riddled with parasites—I recognized a sheep’s brain and something I thought must be a segment of a bovine rumen. He collected interesting pathologies with the intention of adding them to the Heidelberg collection wherever he had the opportunity.

  “You saw me with Erich,” said August. “Did you hear what we were talking about?”

  “No,” I said. “I did not think you were still seei
ng him!”

  “I am not, at least not in the way that you mean,” he declared. “In Heidelberg, there is no way to avoid occasionally bumping into each other.”

  “But what is he doing here, then? And why did he seek me out?”

  “Has he done so?” August asked sharply. “When?”

  “Today. At the university.” The skin on my neck and face burned with the thought of the way he had behaved, the words he had used. I was not going to repeat them to August.

  “He is very young,” said August with an apologetic tone that did not lessen my indignation. “He thinks everything in life is either black or white, all or nothing.”

  “Excellent. Then he will have no difficulty understanding that you and he are nothing from now on.”

  “Madeleine . . .”

  “I will not share you with him. Ever. Not in . . . in any way.”

  “I would never do that to—”

  He did not have the chance to complete his sentence, because I had a bizarre sense that my body had been taken over by someone else. My hands grabbed hold of the nape of his neck and forced his face down to kissing height, my mouth opened so abruptly and totally that he must have thought I was planning to devour him, and perhaps I was. I had never before experienced so thorough and unstoppable an urge to possess someone or something. Mine, screamed my rebellious body. No one else’s! Mine.

  I think he tried to say something, but the words were lost inside my open mouth. I felt them as an odd mutual breath, a moist gulp of air that emanated from him and died against my tongue, as a vibration in my jaw when our teeth collided. His arms closed around me. I could not feel his hands as anything but a general pressure against the back of my corset, and I was so impatient that tears burned against my eyelids. I wanted to feel his long strong fingers directly against my skin, I wanted to own him, consume him, make him so fully and completely mine that there was no way back. But in this first moment I had already used up my modest practical experience. Why couldn’t Madame Aubrey have given us just a few concrete directions about how to get to the “happy duty” part?

  “Madeleine . . . Wait.”

  This time the words could be heard. I still clutched his neck so hard that he could not quite straighten up, and he had to pronounce them in the vicinity of the corner of my mouth. But I heard them.

  “I want you to show me,” I said. “I want to know if we can!”

  He laughed quietly and warmly against my cheek.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much . . . ,” he said teasingly.

  I was not ready to be teased. “Krafft-Ebing calls it brain damage,” I lectured him.

  “What?” he asked, though I was pretty convinced he knew exactly to what I was referring.

  “To be drawn to one’s own sex. It happens in utero, he says . . . and what if it is irreversible?”

  “Herr Krafft-Ebing is an idiot,” he said hoarsely.

  “He is a professor!”

  “As am I, my sweet.”

  “Of parasitology,” I protested. “It is not the same thing!”

  “No, but I do happen to know what I am talking about. In practice, so to speak.”

  “Then show me how to do it!”

  His breathing changed abruptly. It became deeper and more audible. And his hands pressed even harder against my back.

  “Are you sure?” he said, with a voice that I would not have recognized if I had not been staring at his lips while he said it.

  Somewhere in the deepest nooks and crannies of my brain, I heard Erich Falchenberg’s contemptuous whisper: “Étudienne is just another word for whore.” But I did not care. Or rather, it just made me more eager. At that moment, it seemed to me the only thing I could do to exorcise his towheaded ghost. I pulled August’s head closer to mine and kissed him again.

  “I think I must tell Madame Guille that we do not want tea after all,” he said. But in the end he just locked the door.

  It was astounding. Astounding to be undressed by a man. Astounding to stand before him without feeling the least bit of shame. A certain self-consciousness, perhaps, but no shame. Astounding to discover that his gaze was caress enough, just to be seen and enjoyed was enough for my muscles to contract, for my blood vessels to expand, and the nerve endings of my skin to send electric waves through my body.

  I wanted so badly to reciprocate and began to open his shirt, button by difficult button. The shirt had presumably been clean and freshly ironed when he put it on in the morning in Heidelberg, and I could still smell the soap even though there were now sweat stains under the arms and on the back. He wrenched it off and let it fall on the floor with the unconscious indifference of a man who has had someone to pick up after him his entire life. He was surprisingly tanned and even more muscular than I had imagined—I later discovered that he quite often rowed in his vest or even completely shirtless.

  I think he was waiting to see if I would lose my nerve. He made no move to continue the undressing. But I was determined enough to press on, despite the shyness burning in my cheeks.

  He kissed me passionately and deeply, and finally I could feel each single one of his fingers, spread out in a fan against my back, one hand between my shoulder blades, the other somewhat lower. I could feel the nakedness, his and mine. The warmth that was generated where skin touched skin. His sex that rose between us, foreign and yet already familiar. So what if I had never done this before? My body already knew his, had exchanged thousands of unheard messages during the past months. While he and I had conversed, all proper and rationally sensible, those two, his body and mine, had secretly been discussing entirely different matters.

  Suddenly it was very quick. I don’t think it was his intention. I think he was taken by surprise, overwhelmed by the covert understanding between our bodies. Nothing was measured and considerate any longer. He abruptly pressed his knee between my legs, and I fell—let myself fall—back against the bed. I did not quite make it, sliding down onto the floor in an avalanche of pillows and sheets, and with a single jerk of pain and desire he was inside me, and I had him where I wanted him, mine, and Professor Krafft-Ebing and Erich Falchenberg could take each other by the hand and jump into the sea, because neither of them could touch what was happening now. Neither of them knew this precise rhythm, this pulse, this sweet salty desire and the dark explosions that occurred behind my closed eyes with each surge, with each thrust.

  The afternoon sun fell in through the windows and burned against my eyelids. The sound of the traffic on Rue Fevre came and went as if I could turn it off and on at will. The infinite became finite again, and time picked up its ticktock pace. I felt a fold in the blanket beneath me, a tiny, insignificant discomfort. A soreness inside, a stiffness in unfamiliar muscles. It was terrible that it was over. I wanted to go back. I did not want to lie here and register all these details as if it was information I needed to record in one of my notebooks. As if they were symptoms.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, and stroked me along my neck with gentle fingers. “Are you having regrets?”

  “No,” I whispered. “I just wish that it was not already over.”

  Again, his intimate and quiet laughter.

  “When you say yes, you certainly say yes,” he said. “But, Madeleine . . . It isn’t over. This is just the beginning of what you and I will have together.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, trying to smile. It was ridiculous and meaningless, this pitch-black sense of loss, missing him even while I was still lying in his arms and was with him, skin to skin. But it was nonetheless what I felt.

  August 27, 1894

  “It was kind of you to come.”

  Marie Mercier opened the door herself. In fact I suppose I should think of her as Madame le Commissaire, but although I had been present at the quiet wedding at city hall, I still found it difficult.

  “Not at all,” I said politely, though in truth it was quite a journey to get here. The Commissioner had bought a house in La Valle, an old village that
had not yet quite completed its transformation into a suburb. The plan to expand the streetcar line was still only a plan, and I had been forced to hire a hansom.

  “No, I know it is a long way to come,” she insisted. “And that you really have no reason to take the trouble for my sake. I am grateful to you.”

  “Where is Louis?” I asked.

  “In school. Everything is a bit strange for him still, but his teachers say he is making good progress.” Her smile was apologetic, but the maternal pride beneath the surface was unmistakable. “That was one of the reasons we moved out here. I think it is a good place for a child to grow up.”

  For Louis, the street urchin who was used to boasting that he was named after two kings and an emperor, it was certainly a new life, I thought.

  The house was not quite new—until recently it had belonged to the little town’s doctor—and it was definitely not modern either. It had more the air of a country house than an elegant villa, and the large conservatory facing the garden paradoxically strengthened this impression. If one ignored the glass panes, it was precisely on such verandas that Sunday lunches were served in the summer on the farms of the region, in the shadow cast by grapevines and ivy. Tea, however, was an immaculately bourgeois affair, presented on the Limoges set that I myself had chosen as a wedding gift to the couple from Papa and me.

  Also at the tea table was Fleur Petit.

  Even though I was aware that they knew each other, it was still a minor shock to see her there. It would have been entirely understandable if Marie had tried to distance herself from her former life, but apparently she was not someone who forgot old friends just because her own circumstances had improved.

  “Mademoiselle Petit,” I said.

  “Just call me Fleur.” She rose and greeted me, and her alert, dark gaze swept across me from my not especially fashionable flat boater to the new canvas sporting boots August had given me because he thought they would make it easier for me to bicycle. I was still quite uncertain in the saddle and was not convinced that I would ever come to like it, but I had not told him that. I so much wanted not to disappoint him. Besides, the boots were considerably more comfortable in the late-summer heat than my old black button boots.