‘What makes you think it will come to-morrow?’
‘I’m sure it will. It’s overdue now. Then, in town, they will fix up your leg and then we will have some good destruction. Not that dreadful talking kind.’
‘Should we have a drink? The sun is down.’
‘Do you think you should?’
‘I’m having one.’
‘We’ll have one together. Molo, letti dui whisky-soda!’ she called.
‘You’d better put on your mosquito boots,’ he told her.
‘I’ll wait till I bathe. . . .’
While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there was no longer enough light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his way around the hill.
‘That bastard crosses there every night,’ the man said. ‘Every night for two weeks.’
‘He’s the one makes the noise at night. I don’t mind it. They’re a filthy animal though.’
Drinking together, with no pain now except the discomfort of lying in the one position, the boys lighting a fire, its shadow jumping on the tents, he could feel the return of acquiescence in this life of pleasant surrender. She was very good to him. He had been cruel and unjust in the afternoon. She was a fine woman, marvellous really. And just then it occurred to him that he was going to die.
It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it.
‘What is it, Harry?’ she asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You had better move over to the other side. To windward.’
‘Did Molo change the dressing?’
‘Yes. I’m just using the boric now.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘A little wobbly.’
‘I’m going in to bathe,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right out. I’ll eat with you and then we’ll put the cot in.’
So, he said to himself, we did well to stop the quarrelling. He had never quarrelled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarrelled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarrelled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it . . . How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How everyone he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself of loving her. He wrote this letter at the Club, cold sober, and mailed it to New York asking her to write him at the office in Paris.
That seemed safe. And that night missing her so much made him feel hollow sick inside, he wandered up past Taxim’s, picked a girl up and took her out to supper. He had gone to a place to dance with her afterward, she danced badly, and left her for a hot Armenian slut, that swung her belly against him so it almost scalded. He took her away from a British gunner subaltern after a row. The gunner asked him outside and they fought in the street on the cobbles in the dark. He’d hit him twice, hard, on the side of the jaw and when he didn’t go down he knew he was in for a fight. The gunner hit him in the body, then beside his eye.
He swung with his left again and landed and the gunner fell on him and grabbed his coat and tore the sleeve off and he clubbed him twice behind the ear and then smashed him with his right as he pushed him away. When the gunner went down his head hit first and he ran with the girl because they heard the M.P.s coming. They got into a taxi and drove out to Rimmily Hissa along the Bosphorus, and around, and back in the cool night and went to bed and she felt as over-ripe as she looked but smooth, rose-petal, syrupy, smooth-bellied, big-breasted and needed no pillow under her buttocks, and he left her before she was awake looking blousy enough in the first daylight and turned up at the Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying his coat because one sleeve was missing.
That same night he left for Anatolia and he remembered, later on that trip, riding all day through fields of the poppies that they raised for opium and how strange it made you feel, finally, and all the distances seemed wrong, to where they had made the attack with the newly arrived Constantine officers, that did not know a goddamned thing, and the artillery had fired into the troops and the British observer had cried like a child.
That was the day he’d first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompoms on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and the officers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.
So when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And there in the café as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the office sent his mail up to the flat.
So then the letter in answer to the one he’d written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the handwriting he went cold all over and tried to slip the letter underneath another. But his wife said, ‘Who is that letter from, dear?’ and that was the end of the beginning of that.
He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt anyone and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.
‘How do you feel?’ she said. She had come out from the tent now after her bath.
‘All right.’
‘Could you eat now?’ He saw Molo behind her with the folding table and the other boy with the dishes.
‘I want to write,’ he said.
‘You ought to take some broth to keep your strength up.’
‘I’m going to die to-night,’ he said. ‘I don’t need my strength up.’
‘Don’t be melodramatic, Harry, please,’ she said.
‘Why don’t you use your nose? I’m rotted half way up my thigh now. What the hell should I fool with broth for; Molo bring whisky-soda.’
‘Please take the broth,’ she said gently.
‘All right.’
The broth was too hot. He had to hold it in the cup until it cooled enough to take it and then he just got it down without gagging.
‘You’re a fine woman,’ he said. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me.’
She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from Spur and Town and Country, only a little the worse for drink, only a little the worse for bed, but Town and Country never showed those good breasts and those useful thighs and those lightly small-of-back-caressing hands, and as he looked and saw her well-known pleasant smile, he felt death come again. This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall.
‘They can bring my net out later and hang it from the tree and build the fire up. I’m not going in the tent to-night. It’s not worth moving. It’s a clear night. There won’t be any rain.’
So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more quarrelling. He could promise that.
