"You are bastards, aren't you?" she asked carelessly. "You are definitely bastards. Wouldn't you say so?" She was still looking at her skirt, really interested in the way it filled and turned. "And you are the biggest bastard of them all actually, aren't you? Because you get it both ways. One minute our bleeding heart, the next our red-toothed warrior. Whereas all you really are--when it comes down to it--is a bloodthirsty, land grabbing little Jew."
Not only did he stand up, but he hit her. Twice. Having first removed her sunglasses. Harder and faster than she had ever been hit before, and on the same side of the face. The first blow was so heavy that a cussed triumph made her thrust her face against the direction of it. Quits, she thought, remembering the Athens house. The second was a fresh explosion in the same crater, and when it was over he pushed her down onto the bench, where she could cry her heart out, but she was too proud to shed another tear. Did he hit me for his sake or for mine? she wondered. She hoped desperately it was for his own; that at the twelfth hour of their mad marriage she had finally penetrated his reserve. But one glance at his closed face and sparse, unbothered stare told her that she, not Joseph, was the patient. He was holding out a handkerchief to her but she waved it vaguely away.
"Forget it," she muttered.
She took his arm and he walked her slowly back along the concrete walkway. The same old couple smiled at them as they passed. Children, they told each other--as we were once. One minute quarrelling like murderers; the next back to bed to make it even better than before.
The lower apartment was much like the upper one except that it possessed no balcony and no prisoner, and sometimes while she read or listened she managed to convince herself that she had never been upstairs at all--upstairs was a chamber of horrors in the dark attics of her mind. Then she would hear the bump of a packing case through the ceiling as the boys cleared up their photographic equipment and generally prepared for the end of term, and she had to admit that upstairs was as real-as downstairs after all: more real, since the letters were fabrications, whereas Michel was flesh.
They sat in a ring, the three of them, and Kurtz began with one of his preambles. But his style was a lot crisper and less roundabout than usual, perhaps because she was a proven soldier now, a veteran "with a whole basket of exciting new intelligence already to her credit," as he put it. The letters were in a briefcase on the table, and before opening it he reminded her once more of the "fiction," a word he had in common with Joseph. The fiction was that she was not only a passionate lover, but a passionate correspondent who in Michel's long absences was deprived of all other outlets. Explaining this, he pulled on a pair of cheap cotton gloves. The letters were therefore not a mere sideshow in the relationship; they were "the only place you could live aloud, dear." They recorded her increasingly obsessive love for Michel--often with disarming frankness--but also her political reawakening and her transition to a "global activism" that took for granted the "linkage" of anti-repressive struggles anywhere in the world. Put together, they comprised the diary of "an emotionally and sexually aroused person" as she advanced from vaguely focused protest to wholesale activism, with its implicit acceptance of violence.
"And since we could not rely on you, in the circumstances, to provide us with the full variety of your literary style," he ended as he unlocked the briefcase, "we decided to compose the letters for you."
Naturally, she thought. She glanced at Joseph, who was sitting straight-backed and uncommonly innocent, with his palms pressed virtuously together between his knees, like a man who had never hit anyone in his life.
They were in two brown wrapped packages, one much larger than the other. Selecting the smaller first, Kurtz clumsily opened it with his gloved fingertips and -spread the papers flat. She recognised the black, schoolboy writing of Michel. He unwrapped the second and, like a dream come true, she recognised the handwriting as her own. Michel's to you are in photostat, dear, Kurtz was saying: we have the originals waiting for you in England. Your own letters, now, they're the originals, so they belong to Michel, don't they, dear?
"Naturally," she said, this time aloud, and on an instinct glanced in Joseph's direction, but this time quite specifically at his locked-up hands so intent upon disowning authorship.
She read Michel's letters first because she felt she owed him the attention. There were a dozen, and they varied from the frankly sensual and passionate to the brief and authoritarian. "Kindly in your letters be sure to number. If you do not number, do not write. I cannot enjoy your letters if I do not know I receive them all. This for my personal safety." Between passages of ecstatic praise for her acting came arid exhortations to perform only" r?les of social significance which can awaken awareness." At the same time she was to "avoid public acts that reveal your true politics." She was to go to no more radical forums, attend no more demonstrations or rallies. She was to conduct herself "in the bourgeois manner," appearing to accept capitalist standards. She should let it be thought she had "renounced to the revolution" while secretly "continuing, by all means, with your radical reading." There were many confusions of logic, many lapses of syntax, many misspellings. There was talk of "our soon reunion," meaning presumably in Athens, and there were a couple of coy references to white grapes, vodka, and taking "plenty of sleep before we are together again."
As she read on, she began to form a new and humbler picture of Michel, one that came suddenly much closer to their prisoner upstairs. "He's a baby," she muttered. She glanced accusingly at Joseph. "You built him up so much. He's a kid."
Receiving no answer, she turned to her own letters to Michel, picking them up gingerly, as if they solved a great mystery. "Schoolbooks," she said aloud, with a stupid smile, as she took a first nervous look at them, and this was because, thanks to poor Ned Quilley's archives, the old Georgian had been able to reproduce not merely Charlie's exotic taste in stationery--the backs of menus, bills, the headed notepaper of hotels and theatres and boarding houses along her route--but had caught, to her mounting awe, the spontaneous variations in her writing, from the infantile scrawls of early sadness to the passionate woman in love; to the goodnight scribble of the bone-weary actress holed out in the sticks and longing for a little light relief to the would-be erudite copperplate of the revolutionary who troubled to write out a lengthy passage of Trotsky, but missed the second "r" in "occurred."
Thanks to Leon, her prose was given no less exactly; Charlie actually blushed to see how perfectly they had imitated her lurid hyperbole, her lapses into awkward, incomplete philosophising, her rampant, violent fury against the ruling Tory government. Unlike Michel's, her references to their lovemaking were graphic and explicit; to her parents abusive; to her childhood wrathful and unavenged. She met Charlie the romancer, Charlie the penitent, and Charlie the hard-nosed bitch. She met what Joseph called the Arab in her--the Charlie who was in love with her own rhetoric, whose notions of truth were inspired less by what had happened than by what should have happened. And when she had read them all through, she put the two piles together and, head in hands, read them again as a complete correspondence--her five letters to his every one, her answers in reply to his questions, his evasions in reply to hers.
"Thanks, Jose," she said finally, without lifting her head. "Thanks a hell of a lot. If you'd lend me our nice gun a moment, I'll just pop out and shoot myself."