Sylvie Germain - Magnus

At most exchange our ice

And for a moment watch it melt

Under the dark heat that burns our brow.

Jules Supervielle, ‘Sun’, The Innocent Convict

His student is not particularly gifted for languages, but so eager is she to learn, determined even in her impatience, that she makes fairly rapid progress. As soon as she feels well enough equipped to express herself in German, she uses only that language to communicate with her teacher. And gradually her behaviour relaxes. She becomes less defensive, no longer talks in curt snatches. Finally, she agrees to resume her old nickname, Peggy, as if this linguistic migration made her feel young again, liberated her.

Magnus notices this gradual transformation, and at first his explanation for it is the effort Peggy has to make to construct her sentences correctly, this concentration monopolizing her attention and thereby distracting her from the pathological guardedness she otherwise imposes on herself when speaking to anybody. But he soon suspects some other reason remains hidden behind this rather simplistic analysis, a more complex, obscure reason, related to the tragedy in Peggy’s life, as if Tim’s death had cast a pall over the mother tongue they had in common, the intimate and everyday language of their relationship as a couple, of their love; as if it had blighted that language. In fact she never speaks of this tragedy, and has never mentioned her husband’s name or made the slightest reference to him. Her assiduousness in shrouding in total silence everything about her life with Timothy MacLane makes this silence weirdly penetrating and disturbing. Magnus detects in it the constant cry of inconsolable love.

The lessons turn into increasingly natural and spontaneous conversations that sometimes extend well beyond the time they are supposed to end. They eventually abandon the ritual of the lesson in Magnus’s studio flat, and as soon as the weather is fine they go out for a walk, in town or in the parks, or meet in a museum or café, depending on what they feel like doing that day. But she never suggests meeting at her place.

However, one morning she telephones Magnus to invite him to come to dinner that evening. When she gives him her address, which he did not know, he realizes that she lives close to where he is, although she had led him to believe she lived in another part of town.

A pretty white two-storey house, with tubs of flowers on the door step, and the front door painted dark green. There is no name on the bell, the little nameplate has been removed, which makes Magnus feel suddenly hesitant. He pushes the bell anyway, but it produces no sound. After a few fruitless tries, he knocks on the door. His knocks resonate strangely as if fading away into empty space. Yet the door opens and Peggy, in a pale yellow dress sprinkled with tiny flowers and orange-coloured butterflies, stands in the doorway, smiling.

The house is actually empty, and naked light-bulbs hang from the ceiling. Peggy remarks casually that she has sold her house, the removers have been that very morning, and she is leaving the next day for Vienna. Magnus alternates between amazement and anger at Peggy’s mania for not saying anything and then suddenly presenting a fait accompli reaches an infuriating level, but he betrays neither his surprise nor his annoyance. After all, he says to himself, it is better like this: that she should go, that this secretive woman with her bizarre quirks should disappear as suddenly as she had turned up again. Yes, that she should disappear from his life before he became too fond of her presence, before he allowed himself to fall into the trap of disappointed love. He observes her with forced coldness. Certainly, she looks pretty in her floaty dress the colour of a starry dawn, with a halo of red curls round her forehead, her bright green eyes and child-like smile, but he keeps these charms at a distance, as if admiring a lovely statue behind a glass case in a museum, on his way past it.

In the unfurnished living room she has improvised a table by placing a plank of wood on some trestles and set two garden chairs facing each other. She has covered the plank not with a paper tablecloth but a large magnificently woven damask cloth in silky shades of white and yellow. The plates are paper plates, but the glasses are crystal. She has bought some excellent wines, and offers him black olives and cashew nuts served in plastic containers while they await the delivery of a takeaway meal ordered from an Indian restaurant. He has never seen her so relaxed and gaily talkative, except in the old days at the Schmalkers’ house, and it is as though time has shifted, as if the clock has turned back, and he has before him the delightful flighty young girl from whom he stole a kiss. But this evening he has no desire to kiss her, but rather to slap her. And besides, this fraudulent young girl is absurdly chattering on in German, and this irritates him. Everything irritates him, himself first and foremost for taking part in this farce he is at a loss to understand and in which ultimately he is not in the least bit interested.

The meal is delivered and Peggy hastens to serve the dishes while the food is still hot. Magnus eats without appetite and drinks without pleasure, though the wines are superb. He grows increasingly bad-tempered as his hostess, animated by the wine that she takes with little sips of enjoyment, becomes more and more radiant. And suddenly unable to contain his annoyance, he says in English, ‘I’m bored.’

Then driven by a cold rage whose intensity he would be unable to explain, he goes on, still speaking in English: ‘Yes, I’m bored with you. I’m disappointed in you. I taught you my language, even though I’m averse to speaking it, but what have you taught me? Nothing. For nearly five months we’ve seen each other twice a week, sometimes more, but never have you told me anything about yourself, or been bothered about me. Just who are you bothered about? No one but yourself. We were neighbours, so why pretend you were living on the other side of town? It’s a small detail, but why always be evasive and misleading, conceal things, lie? For you lie, you like to lie, to invent secrets, to fabricate a bogus mysteriousness. It’s childish and tedious.’

Peggy listens. She is no longer smiling. Her face has lost the flush and radiance the wine had given it. Even her lips are white.

He sees her sitting there in front of him, very stiff, as though nailed to her chair, with a chalky complexion, her hands clenched on the tablecloth. Far from being moved by the violent distress he has produced in her, he continues his indictment.

‘And let me tell you, you’re not honouring the memory of your husband by refusing to mention him, never uttering his name, not even here, this evening, in this house that was also his, where you lived together, and which you’ve just sold off like some unwanted piece of old furniture.’

He hears the quickened breathing of the young woman, paler than her dress the colour of a sad dawn that hangs loose on her paralysed body, and he hears his own voice whose inflections and quality are bizarrely unrecognizable to him, and he does not know where the harsh words he utters in this aggressive tone come from. ‘I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you, and I never will …’ With calm cruelty a voice that is not his own delivers words full of hostility, bitterness. Words that are no longer his, have nothing to do with him, appal him. But they issue from him, like the moans or confused words that issue from a sleeping man. ‘There’s nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant to me …’

Then a curious transfer or, rather, displacement occurs: Peggy slowly gets to her feet and takes over the acrimonious monologue in a subdued whispering voice: ‘Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’