Visions of Isabelle (2 page)

The children see Young Nathalie standing in front of the broken piano, feet apart, hands on her hips, her head extended so far back that they wonder how she can keep her balance.

"On the contrary," bellows Vava, "I have ruined my own life for you."

Now he, too, steps into sight so that from where they spy in the garden Isabelle and Augustin can see the combatants framed in separate windows like portraits on a wall. There is another window between–here sits their mother, twisting her head abruptly from Vava to Young Nathalie and back again like a spectator at a game of tennis. Isabelle barely listens to the argument–she is more fascinated by this trio of living paintings, framed and glassed.

"Yes! By making us slaves! Insulting everyone we bring home! Destroying our friendships! Filling our heads with hate!" Spittle shoots out of Young Nathalie's mouth as if she is pumping venom from a reservoir within.

"Ungrateful! Bitch! I taught you everything you know. You and your brothers were nothing but cold-assed little snot-noses until I–"

"Drove us insane!"

"Taught you what the world is! Taught you languages, mathematics, history, science, sketching, how to live!"

"I'd do anything to get out of this asylum."

"Anything? Fine. Pack your bags and get out. You'll be the laughingstock of whores. The daughter of General Paul De Moerder married to some tradesman scum! Your brothers will die of shame. Your mother will be snickered at by bakers. And I shall be defeated, too. So be it. But," and as he says this Vava leers at Young Nathalie with withering scorn, "you shall suffer the most–saving thread and pennies, skimping on soap, buying cheaper and cheaper cuts of meat. I can see your dinner table–pieces of bread mixed up with watch springs. I can see your body widening as your children take over your life, puking and crying and demanding this and that. I can see you mending their ghastly middle-class clothes, vulgar dresses garnished with disgusting frills, and I can hear the endless arguments over money–Christ, how I know these people!–money, money, money. 'We must cut down here, dear; mustn't spend too much there, dear.' Sickening! You won't last a year. And one winter day you'll come around here with a sniffling baby in your arms and say, `Vava, Vava, let me in, you were right. I've come home.' But I won't let you in. I won't look at you. You'll have to go back to your stinking life and that'll be my sweet revenge. Because, I promise you, if you go off with this idiot, you'll never enter this house again!"

"Oh! The slimy way you twist everything! We're already the laughingstock of whores! My brothers are already dying of shame. To think that the wife of General Paul De Moerder is living with a flabby old drunk, a defrocked priest who squanders our inheritance on some half-brained scheme to raise cacti in Switzerland and turn them into perfume! We must be mad to put up with you and your drunken fits. Mother–get rid of him. Listen to me–look at me when I talk to you–"

Old Nathalie now is staring straight ahead, as if she were looking into the eyes of Isabelle and Augustin crouched side by side by the hedge outside. They are shivering, trembling in each other's arms. Terrible things have been said inside the house–they have heard many fights before; have screamed, too, at times; have stood up to one another and to Vava; have shouted out words that later they wished they hadn't said; but never, at any time, has any one of them implied that it is their mother who gives Vava the power by which he holds them in thrall, that it is because of her weakness that they have become his slaves.

In the window on the left, Isabelle can see her sister pleading with Old Nathalie to send Trophimovsky away. In the window on the right she can see Vava, certain that this ploy of Young Nathalie will fail. And in the center window she can see her mother who stares with the look of a person who refuses to listen to things she does not wish to hear.

For a moment the tableau freezes, the characters held against the swirling scenery of the mural that riots across the background wall. But a moment later it all comes apart, the combatants hurl themselves against one another in a frenzy of slaps and screams. Vladimir is playing wild and dissonant arpeggios as Young Nathalie purses up her lips and lets fly with an enormous glop of spit that sails across the three windows and lands on Vava's leg. He gathers up his own spittle and lets fly at her, hitting her squarely between the breasts. Young Nathalie rushes at Vava with a scream. They meet, eclipsing Old Nathalie in the center window. Here Vava grabs Young Nathalie by the hair and with his other hand begins to slap her face. She kicks at his ankles until he falls upon his knees. The fiddling upstairs has become a screech.

"I'm leaving, I'm leaving," Young Nathalie screams at him, and Vava screams back, "Get out, get out!"

"I'll never come back!" she yells, yanking herself free.

"Never come back!" yells Vava, and turns away.

Augustin has fled. But Isabelle remains crouched by the hedge–she hates Young Nathalie, adores Vava and her mother, cannot understand how her sister can do such a terrible thing. To marry a watchmaker's apprentice–it is madness. She has seen the young man, and then listened to Vava dissect his middle-class values to bits. "Make love to anyone anytime you want," Vava has said, "but never renounce your dignity nor give up your soul." Young Nathalie, upstairs now packing her bags, is throwing her life away.
I should speak to her
, Isabelle thinks, and then,
If she won't listen to Vava she won't listen to me.

Vava is pouring Old Nathalie vodka from a flask. He pours one for himself, swallows it in a single gulp, dashes the glass against the floor. Isabelle's mother does not even quiver at the sound. Seeing that peace has fallen again upon Villa Neuve, Isabelle wanders back into the garden to look for Augustin. She finds him sobbing behind the woodpile. To comfort him, she kisses his cheek.

The evening comes and with it chaos. Nicolas arrives back from Geneva. When informed of Young Nathalie's departure he says, "Good riddance," and retires to his room. No dinner is served. The children wander into the kitchen, grab what bread and vegetables they can find, devour them on the spot, leaving a mess. Old Nathalie sits cross-legged on the floor, playing polonaises on the ruined piano. Vladimir has long since put down his violin and disappeared to a secret part of the garden where he sits, arms curled about his legs, staring tearfully at the moon.

Playing hide-and-seek with Augustin among the hedges near the house, Isabelle hears the perfume of Chopin give way to Tchaikovsky's "Marche Slav." She peers through the drawing-room window, watches Vava dance around, vodka flask in hand, jumping and twirling like an Armenian peasant. "Faster, faster!" he yells, but Old Nathalie cannot meet his demand. He jumps upon the piano and dances there; Nathalie becomes stuck on a chord. Vava, angry, pounds his foot on the piano top and the musicale ends with the sound of splintering wood.

While Isabelle has been watching, Augustin has crept behind her and placed his hands over her eyes.

"Guess who?" he whispers.

"Vladimir Petrovitch."

"Yes, Zinaida."

A week before they stole off to an obscure corner of the garden and there Augustin read Turgenev's
First Love
aloud. Both of them loved the story and decided to take its characters' names. Now Isabelle laughs in Augustin's face as she imagines what Zinaida would have done to Vladimir Petrovitch. Together they run off around the corner of the house to peer in another window and spy on Nicolas. They find him posing in a tight pair of riding pants and nothing else, his hand resting on his shoulder, holding an imaginary revolver. He makes several paces across the room, pauses, then turns and lowers his arm so that the weapon is pointing directly at his image in the mirror.

"Puff," he says, in a hoarse and masculine whisper, as he squeezes off a shot.

Isabelle begins to giggle. Startled, Nicolas turns and glares at the window. Isabelle and Augustin hurry away.

L
ong after midnight Isabelle is awakened by terrible noises downstairs–curses, shouts, gardening pots hurled against walls. She moves to her door and opens it a crack. A thud. Isabelle peers down the hall. Her mother's door is closed. She can hear Vladimir whimpering in his room, then the sounds of creaking floorboards as if people are moving in the hall. She goes to the landing, makes out Nicolas and Augustin creeping toward the drawing-room door in their underwear. They pause, then enter. She waits a moment then tiptoes down the stairs. The stone is cold against her bare feet. At the bottom she discovers the drawing-room door is closed. She inches her way across the hall, kneels at the keyhole, presses her eye against cold brass.

She sees her brothers standing beside Trophimovsky, muttering together in muddled tones. Vava is lying on his back, extremities spread, snoring loudly, twisting in his sleep. Saliva trickles from his mouth, oozes into his matted beard. The room is a shambles–broken glass and shards of pottery are scattered about. The mural is disfigured by gashes of red, as if cans of paint have been hurled at the walls.

"How I hate him!" Nicolas' whisper, furious and cold, cuts to her ears through the heavy wood. He plucks a hoe from the pile of garden tools and raises it above his head.

"I could kill him now and set us free," he says, and turns to Augustin as if for consent. The eyes of her brothers meet; Isabelle trembles with fear.

"Shall I kill him?"

"Could you, really?" Augustin asks.

"It would be easy. I could make it look like he fell on his rake. In the morning when Mama comes down she'll think he killed himself by accident."

"She'll weep–"

"Nothing new."

"What would happen to us?"

"We'd go home! To Russia!"

Augustin ponders the problem.

"Don't do it," he says.

"I will," says Nicolas. "Someday I will."

He heaves the hoe into a corner and the two of them start toward the door. Isabelle presses herself back against the wall, is nearly crushed as her brothers come out.

Later, when they have gone and all is quiet upstairs, she slips inside and looks down at Vava raging in his sleep.

O
n the morning of April 15, 1893, Isabelle Eberhardt rises from her bed and makes her way to an austerely framed mirror that hangs in an alcove off her room. This room, in the back and on the second floor, is strangely shaped as if made up of all the spaces left over after the creation of the other rooms of Villa Neuve. Isabelle likes it–the odd corners, alcoves and diagonally slanting walls are always a feast for her wandering eyes. She spends hours here, reading, studying, dreaming of distant lands.

She is sixteen years old, her hair is cut short like a boy's, and her ears stand out a little from the sides of her head. Looking at herself she is pleased–she appears intelligent, youthful, brave and, when she chooses, severe. A young person not to be trifled with, she thinks, a person who can hold their own in a duel. She is particularly happy about the way her eyebrows are set–slightly off-center, each one curved into a different arabesque. She gazes at her reflection a long while, wonders for a moment how she may look in ten or twenty years, and is in the midst of a fantasy in which she sees herself dancing, the center of attention at a great ball, when she hears a sound, glances to the side and catches a flash of Augustin's hand pulling her covers over his head.

He hasn't seen her, is too busy hiding in her bed for some ambush he evidently plans to spring, perhaps when she changes into her clothes. She smiles at the mirror, finds it charming the way her smile breaks the brooding, intelligent cast of her face, and then continues with her fantasy, a dizzying waltz in which she is swept around and around at dazzling speed by a tall lean nobleman wearing elegant white silk gloves (she cannot see his face, but can feel the texture of the gloves) until the room, the gilt, the crystal, even the jewels of the women blur into sparkles and streaks of light.

Fantasy concluded, she sets about for a way to properly deal with Augustin. She begins to hum a Russian folk song abstractly, hoping to deceive her brother into believing he has not been seen. As she hums she moves closer to her bed, and then, with the speed and energy of a panther, she leaps, landing directly on Augustin's back. Quickly she pulls a blanket over his head, wraps it down about his face. She holds on tight as he begins to buck, so that his yells and pleas are muffled by heavy wool.

She laughs as he struggles, and when he raises his body she presses her knees against his flanks as if she is taming a runaway horse. For a moment they fight, and then, when he begins to weaken, she lets him go. He comes out from the covers gasping, red-faced. She looks at him quizzically, and when he regains his breath, the two of them begin to laugh.

"You surprise me, Nastasia Filippovna."

"You were trying to surprise me, dear Prince Myshkin." (In recent weeks they have read together from
The Idiot
in their rooms, lying across each other's beds.)

"What were you admiring so assiduously in your mirror?"

"Myself, of course."

"Of course. But what part of yourself? Superficial exterior or subterranean soul?"

"Both."

"Any conclusions?" "