Women

Mihail Sebastian, Gabi Reigh

• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781912430314
• eBook ISBN: 9781912430321
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

The frustrated wife of a French-Tunisian plantation owner, a mysterious older woman, a world weary tomboy, an unhappy mistress, a Parisian factory worker destined for tragedy, an acrobat turned cabaret sensation – these are the women whose lives are linked by their relationship with one man – ?tefan Valeriu. Divided into four separate stories connected by one man, Women takes us from ?tefan's amorous entanglements at an Alpine lake resort, to his life in Bucharest and Paris, as each of the women in his life opens up new worlds for him. Women is a hymn to love in all its forms, romantic or platonic, sometimes reckless, often glorious and always, ultimately, ephemeral.

Reviews:

"He wonderfully captures the atmosphere of prewar Romania in all its complexity, all the beauty and the horror… I love Sebastian for his lightness, for his wit…" -- John Banville, BBC4 'It's an edgy account of sexuality, desire, and the strictures of contemporary relationships... a compelling portrait of desire in its many convoluted manifestations.' -- Kirkus Reviews, Kirkus Reviews '..these concise stories... showcase Sebastian's brilliant eye for emotional detail.' - -Publishers' Weekly

'His prose is like something Chekov might have written – the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation.' -- Arthur Miller "Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian's magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years." -- Phillipe Sands, The Guardian

Renée, Marthe, Odette

Chapter I

It is not yet eight o’clock. Ştefan Valeriu can tell this by the rays of the sun, which have only just reached the end of his deck chair. He can feel the sun traversing the wooden slats in the frame, enfolding his fingers, hands, arms, like a warm shawl… Some time will pass – five minutes, an hour, an eternity – and his closed eyes will quietly fill with a blue pulsation, streaked faintly with silver. It will then be eight o’clock and he will tell himself without conviction that he should get up. Just like yesterday, and the day before. But he will remain there, fixed in his place, silently congratulating himself for creating this sundial on the first day he arrived, out of a deck chair and the corner of a terrace.

He can feel his hair burning in the sun, coarse as hemp, and decides that, after all, it’s not the end of the world that he had forgotten to bring his bottle of Pétrole Hahn pomade, his sole, yet essential luxury, from his room on Rue Lhomond in Paris. He likes to run his fingers through his unruly hair which the comb had failed to tame this morning even after three futile attempts, to feel its sun-bleached roughness against his skin.

It is probably very late. He can hear voices coming from the alley. Someone is calling out from the direction of the lake, a woman’s voice, perhaps the English girl from yesterday who watched his vigorous front crawl and admired his victory over the water, complaining that she only knew breaststroke.

Stretching his leg from the deck chair, Ştefan’s naked foot searches the grass for a cooler patch. He knows of a place towards the left, not far off, towards the thicket, where the dew lingers right until the middle of the day. This was it – his somnolent body burning in the sun… that chilled freshness of the grass…

Monday evening, having hurriedly changed his shirt after his long train journey, he had gone down to the dining room of his small hotel for the first time, and the garrulous Serbian at the table at the back had remarked loudly, for everyone to hear: “Tiens, un nouveau jeune homme.”¹

Ştefan had been doubly grateful. Both for the “nouveau” and also for the “jeune homme”.

Last week, while finishing his final medical exams, he had felt like an old man. Worn out, though not yet old. The exhaustion of the sleepless nights, the early mornings at the hospital followed by long afternoons at the library, the two-hour-long exam taken in a dingy room monitored by a deaf professor, the heavy winter clothes, the perpetually dirty collar…

And then, the name of this alpine lake, discovered by chance on a map in a bookshop, the ticket bought in the first travel agency he passed, the race through some department stores (a white pullover, grey flannel trousers, a summer shirt), and finally, his departure – an escape.

Un nouveau jeune homme.

He didn’t know anyone there. Occasionally, someone had thrown a word his way, but he responded evasively. Ştefan was self-conscious about his accent and didn’t want to give himself away as a foreigner on the first day. After lunch, he would hurry past the diners at their tables, abstracted, frowning. The others probably thought him surly. He was merely lazy.

Towards the back of the terrace, the forest begins, rising above them. It starts with a small patch of tall grass, dense and elastic. The weight of his body crushes it as he sleeps there through the afternoon, yet by the following morning it has rebounded, blade by blade, intact. He surrenders himself there, his arms spread out, his legs stretched out, his head buried in the grass, defeated by a force which he feels powerless to resist.

A squirrel is skipping from one hazel tree to another. How do you say “squirrel” in French?

There is an immense silence… No. Not an immense silence. That’s just what they would say in a novel. Rather, there is an immense clutter of sounds, a zoological uproar, crickets chirping, locusts rustling, beetles darting up against the sky, beating their wings wildly and then dropping with a dense, leaden sound. Amongst all these, Ştefan Valeriu’s breathing is a mere detail, a derisory sign of life, as derisory and fundamental as the breath of the squirrel that jumps or the pulse of the locust which rests on the tip of his boot, mistaking it for a rock. It’s good to find yourself here, an animal, a living thing, an inconsequential beast that sleeps and inhales, exhales, under the same sun as everything else, on a two-square-metre scrap of ground.

If crickets were disposed to think, would they philosophize about eternity? And what if, perhaps, eternity tasted just like this afternoon?

Below, on the terrace of the small hotel, he can see chairs, shawls, white dresses. And further, the blue lake, transparent, idyllic. A picture postcard.

¹ “Look, a new young man.”

Chapter II

The evening is cold, blue, filled with faded sounds drifting over from town, over the lake, where electric lights glow in the distance. It’s Thursday and there is a military band playing in the park.

Almost everyone from the small hotel had caught the 8.27 boat to attend the concert. Ştefan Valeriu had stayed behind. The entire valley, opening out in front of the terrace, is tinted deep blue by the glinting bark of the cherry trees.

“Do you play chess, sir?”

“Yes.”

Why did he say “yes”? It would have been so easy to say “no” and then he would still be outside, free to continue his stroll on the terrace. A thoughtless “yes” and now he is at a table in the dining room, condemned to concentration.

His partner is a tall, dark-skinned, bony man, middle-aged and ugly. He plays slowly, calculating his moves.

“You weren’t interested in going to the concert?”

“No.”

“Me neither. My wife was dying to go, so I let her. But I…”

Ştefan lost a rook, was building up to an attack on the king.

“You are from the Midi?”

“No. I’m Romanian.”

“Impossible! You sound French. Or maybe I’m just not used to the accents here. Because I’m not from France. I’m Tunisian.”

“Tunisian?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m French, but I live there. I own several plantations. My name is Marcel Rey.”

Ştefan’s attack failed, and as his pieces had been decimated in the course of play, he capitulated. The others were returning from town. They could hear the whistle of the steamboat as it drew near to the jetty.

They walked outside into the courtyard to meet them. A chorus of voices, cheerful exclamations, hands being shaken, noisy greetings.

“Oh, Marcel, if you knew how beautiful it was!”

“Renée, meet this gentleman, our new friend. Ştefan, this is my wife.”

She was a tall, slim woman. In the darkness, he could only make out her eyes. Ştefan kissed her hand. A small, cold hand, that gave nothing away.

*

They went on a day trip to Lovagny, to visit the castle, the three of them. Marcel Rey, his wife and Ştefan. And there was also Nicolle, the couple’s little girl. They walked for a long time, laughed, posed for photographs. Monsieur Rey had bought a small cine-camera which he sometimes used to capture particular scenes and then sent the film to be developed in Paris.

“Renée, move over there next to Monsieur Valeriu. That’s right, laugh, talk, I need to see some action.”

“If we’re going to shoot a movie together,” Ştefan whispered, “I’d rather it was a love scene.”

He said it lightly, casually, so that, if need be, he could easily turn it into a joke.

Renée smiled vaguely and said nothing. Ştefan played with the curls of Nicolle’s hair. Monsieur Rey carried on filming.

*

He found out all their family history. They had both been born in Tunisia to two old colonial families, in a small town. He had been to France once before, in 1917, only to be shot in the shoulder after two hours in the trenches and then sent back home a week later. Until this summer, she had never travelled further than Tunis. They were married in 1920, had a child – Nicolle – in 1921, bought a vineyard in 1922, a plantation a year later, and two more every year since. Djedeida, their little town, was about 50 kilometres from Tunis. A tight set of Europeans, hemmed in by the many local tribespeople, who scratched a living in the slums and wandered menacingly through the streets. The Reys slept with a shotgun by their pillow. Saturday evening, when the workers gathered to be paid, Renée kept guard by the phone, in case they needed to call Tunis for help. She told him all this calmly, evenly, a little wearily, and Ştefan Valeriu had to needle her with questions to extract the details.

“Can you pass me my shawl? I’m cold.”

He threw it across her deck chair and, trying to cover her legs, his hand paused on her knee. Renée started, afraid, and cried out instinctively: “Nicolle, Nicolle!”

In the evening, Ştefan replied to some letters from Paris:

“I don’t know anyone here. Just a Tunisian family, an accomplished chess player and his virtuous wife. I can’t see us sticking together.”

*

He unties a boat from the hotel jetty and rows to the middle of the lake, where the chains of mountains arrange themselves around him symmetrically, throws down the anchor and lays down at the bottom of the boat, dropping the oars to the side and allowing them to float in any direction.

He feels a laziness, a pure, unapologetic laziness, tranquil as an enormous absence. He shuts his eyes. The sun envelops him whole.

Earlier, in the dining hall, he had noticed the young couple who had recently arrived at the hotel and who were occupying the annexe in the courtyard, away from everyone else. Their honeymoon, probably. She was remarkable. She had come in timidly, slightly dishevelled, and the look in her eyes revealed to Ştefan the signs of the previous night’s passion. It was almost as if she brought with her, filling the whole house, the scent of the bedroom, of warm, sensual pillows, of two sleeping lovers stirred by morning’s diaphanous light.

“Unbearable! It’s contagious! We ought to complain!’, Ştefan protests to himself.

A whirl of water crashing against the boat, the distant shout of a swimmer, the clock at Sai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Authornotes
• Copyright
• Title page
• Introduction: Gabi Reigh
• Front
• Renée, Marthe, Odette
• Émilie
• Maria
• Arabela