Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

One of the anecdotes about the girl was something that had happened on that skiing holiday. Carlitta and Klaus Schultz, Waldeck and one of his girls had gone together to the mountains. (‘Oh, the luck of it!’ Eileen had said to Waldeck at this point in his story, the first time he related it. ‘You were eighteen? Nineteen? And you were allowed to go off on your first love affair to the mountains. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had announced to my parents that I was going off on a holiday with a young lover? And in Austria, and skiing. .’ Poor Eileen, who had gone, every year, on a five-day cruise along the coast to stay at a ‘family hotel’ in Durban, accompanied by her parents and young brother and sister, or had been sent, in the winter vacation, with an uncle and cousins to hear the lions roar outside a dusty camp in the Kruger Park. She did not know which to envy Waldeck, Carlitta and Klaus most — the sexual freedom or the steep mountain snows.) Anyway, it was on the one really long and arduous climb of that delightful holiday that Carlitta, who for some hours had been less talkative than usual and had fallen back a little, sat down in the snow and refused to move. Waldeck had lagged behind the rest of the party to mend a broken strap on his rucksack, and so it was that he noticed her. When he asked her why she did not hurry on with him to catch up with the other members of the party, she said, perfectly calm, ‘I want to sit here in the shade and rest. I’ll wait here till you all come back.’

There was no shade. The party intended to sleep in a rest hut up the mountain, and would not pass that way again till next day. At first Waldeck laughed; Carlitta was famous for her gaiety and caprice. Then he saw that in addition to being perfectly calm, Carlitta was also perfectly serious. She was not joking, but suffering from some kind of peculiar hysteria. He begged and begged her to get up, but she would not. ‘I am going to rest in the shade’ was all she would answer.

The rest of the party was out of sight and he began to feel nervous. There was only one thing he could try. He went up kindly to the beautiful little girl and struck her sharply, twice, in the face. The small head swung violently this way, then that. Carlitta got up, dusted the snow from her trousers, and said to Waldeck, ‘For God’s sake, what are we waiting for? The others must be miles ahead.’

‘And when Klaus heard what had happened,’ Waldeck’s story always ended, ‘he could scarcely keep himself from crying, he was so angry that he had not been the one to revive Carlitta, and Carlitta saw his nose pinken and swell slightly with the effort of keeping back the tears, and she noted how very much he must be in love with her and how easy it would be to torment him.’

Wretched Klaus! He was the blond boy with the square jaw who always frowned and smiled directly into the camera. Eileen had a theory that young people didn’t even fall in love like that any more. That, too, had gone down under the waves.

Waldeck and his young wife arrived in New York on a Tuesday. Stefan Raines came to take them out to dinner that very first night. Eileen, who had never seen him before in her life, was even more overjoyed than Waldeck to find that he had not changed. As soon as they came out of the elevator and saw him standing in the hotel lobby with a muffler hanging down untied on the lapels of his dark coat, they knew he had not changed. He wore the presidency of the public utility company, the wealth and the Fifth Avenue apartment just as he had worn the paper cap in the Budapest night club on New Year’s Eve long ago. Stefan’s American wife was not able to accompany them that night, so the three dined alone at the Pierre. After dinner Stefan wanted to know if he should drive them to Times Square and along Broadway or anywhere else they’d read about, but they told him that he was the only sight they wanted to see so soon after their arrival. They talked for two hours over dinner, Stefan asking and Waldeck answering eager questions about the old Heidelberg friends whom Waldeck and Eileen had seen in London. Stefan went to London sometimes, and he had seen one or two, but many whom he hadn’t been able to find for years seemed to have appeared out of their hiding places for Waldeck. In fact, there were several old Berlin and Heidelberg friends living in New York whom Stefan had seen once, or not at all, but who, on the Brands’ first day in New York, had already telephoned their hotel. ‘We love Waldeck. Better than we love each other,’ said Stefan to his friend’s wife, his black eyes looking quietly out over the room, the corners of his mouth indenting in his serious smile that took a long time to open out, brightening his eyes as it did until they shone like the dark water beneath a lamplight on a Venetian canal where Eileen had stood with her husband a few weeks before.

Eileen seemed to feel her blood warm in the palms of her hands, as if some balm had been poured over them. No man in South Africa could say a thing like that! The right thing, the thing from the heart. You had to have the assurance of Europe, of an old world of civilised human relationships behind you before you could say, simply and truthfully, a thing like that.

It was the moment for the mood of the conversation to take a turn. Waldeck said curiously, suddenly remembering, ‘And whatever became of Carlitta? Did you ever see Carlitta? Peter told me, in London, that she had come to live in America.’

‘Now that’s interesting that you should ask,’ said Stefan. ‘I’ve wondered about her, too. I saw her once, twelve — more — thirteen years back. When first she arrived in America. She was staying quite near the hotel where you’re living now. I took her out to lunch — not very sumptuous; I was rather poor at the time — and I never saw her again. She was beautiful. You remember? She was always beautiful—’ he crinkled his eyes to dark slits, as if to narrow down the aperture of memory upon her — ‘even in a bad restaurant in New York, she was — well, the word my son would use is the best for her — she was terrific. Minute and terrific.’

‘That’s it. That’s it.’ Waldeck spoke around the cigar he held between his teeth, trying to draw up a light.

‘We adored her,’ said Stefan, shaking his head slowly at the wonder of it.

‘So you too, Stefan, you too?’ said Eileen with a laugh.

‘Oh, none of us was in love with Carlitta. Only Klaus, and he was too stupid. He doesn’t count. We only adored. We knew it was useless to fall in love with her. Neither she nor we believed any one of us was good enough for her.’

‘So you don’t think she’s in New York?’ asked Waldeck.

Stefan shook his head. ‘I did hear, from someone who knew her sister, that she had married an American and gone to live in Ohio.’ He stopped and chuckled congestedly. ‘Carlitta in Ohio. I don’t believe it. . Well, we should move along from here now, you know. Sure there isn’t anywhere you’d like to go before bedtime?’

The girl from South Africa remembered that one of the things she’d always wanted to do if ever she came to New York was to hear a really fat Negro woman singing torch songs, so Stefan took them to a place where the air-conditioning apparatus kept the fog of smoke and perfume and liquor fumes moving around the tables while an enormous yellow blubber of a woman accompanied her own voice, quakingly with her flesh and thunderously on the piano.

It was only two nights later that Eileen came out of the ladies’ room to join her husband in a theatre foyer during the interval and found him embracing a woman in a brown coat. As Waldeck held the woman away from him, by the shoulders, as if to take a good look at her after he had kissed her, Eileen saw a small face with a wide grin and really enormous eyes. As Eileen approached she noticed a tall, sandy-haired man standing by indulgently. When she reached the three, Waldeck turned to her with the pent-up, excited air he always had when he had secretly bought her a present, and he held out his hand to draw her into the company. In the moment before he spoke, Eileen felt a stir of recognition at the sight of the woman’s hair, smooth brown hair in which here and there a grey filament of a coarser texture showed, refusing to conform to the classic style, centre-parted and drawn back in a bun, in which the hair was worn.