MY FRIEND ZARATHUSTRA
MY FRIEND Zarathustra has stolen my wife.
Yes—I mean what I say, and you must listen; must hear what’s not said if you’re to understand properly what is said. For, as with him, silence is to me an instinct.
So (I repeat) Zarathustra—carrier of the ashes of the old to the mountains in order to prepare a new beginning, spokesman for the inseparability of creation and destruction, teacher of the eternal recurrence—this same Zarathustra has stolen my wife.
The bastard.
I try to recall, now, when it might have begun between them; at which point, perhaps, she first reached out to touch the hand he offered, but memory fails—I must have been working too hard at the book to take notice. I suppose she may have loved him from the first. That those months of close friendship in the huge house on the hill overgrown with vines—the fires at night as we read together, the fourteen rooms, the quiet, hollow Sundays—concealed all along the slow slide of this fact, and others, beneath me. As I worked in my room on the top floor above the trees. Sometimes when I wake now alone in early morning hours, I imagine there were moments when I felt, dully, never perceiving the truth, that some intangible thing was dipping from me; felt some pale remain of sadness inside, irretrievable. If so, these moments were few, and quickly passed.
(There were times he was happy; he remembers. Now he stands at the window, looking down on the town. Neons are coming on, like exclamation marks for something the darkness is trying to say; they show red on the glass. In the distance radio towers rise against the sky. Fragments accumulate on his desk. He is aware of the space between things. He holds broken facts in his hands.)
Her work grew ever better, the colors bold and the rapid strokes finding relief in sudden, unexpected islands of close detail, ever more explicit, the content increasingly erotic—a body in grey fleshtones with three heads turned each to the other, the lips livid, against a background of alizarins and ochre; my own became increasingly subtle and sparse, moving toward silence. It occurred to none of us, I think, to wonder for so much as a moment whether things outside proceeded along the course which had brought us, or driven us, there; to that sole, solitary refuge.
The hills spread about me now as I write, looking down on the tops of trees. A light fog resides forever inside them. The dampness of it enters the open window of my bedroom each morning, a clean, fresh smell appropriate to new beginnings. The sunrise is splendid, breaking in rainbows through the mist and drifting, light dew; most nights the Northern Lights fan out and fill the sky, as though beautiful cities were burning far away. There is no life anywhere in these trees. Where birds once sang and young deer broke the crust of new-fallen snow.
My work—what can I say of it? I fear I am now past all ambition; that volition, like hope, has died within me and nothing will issue again from that still center. (There would be such comfort in despair.) Times were, a single image, a phrase, would imbue page upon page with life; stories would spring fullblown from the chance word of a friend, the pattern of light through leaves at the window, the eager edge of a razor. Now lifeless pages of notes and scattered scenes accumulate on my table like slices of cheese on a platter: these weak attempts to retrieve my life. This might, I suppose, be expected, a function of the events outside, an equivalent decay.
—Tonight J wants to play for us the piano. He sits on the bench beside her, his face in his hands, weeping. B’s fingers form broad X’s in the moisture on the tabletop. It is Chopin, she says. The keyboard is roughly sketched out with a carpenter’s pencil at one end of the table; there are no halftones. And so we wait.
—This morning we found him in the tub, the drain closed, his own blood all around him; in aspic. His eyes stared up and forward at the tiles on which J has painted a cluster of grapes, and on them, a roach. One of the girls is pregnant. Bits and shreds of half-digested food cling to the sink’s sides each morning.
—Force of circumstances driving the protagonists to the commission of a dreadful act . . .
(He is standing at the window. It is open, and he speaks words to it. They scatter on the darkness, random as facts, unforgiving. He has done this before. He will do this again. He is free.)
I remember the last night. We had just made love and she stood at the window, her stomach bulging slightly now and her breasts full, the old stretch-marks lost. The motel sign was red on the glass; darkness entered through the window. And she said, Jim. Jim . . . we’re leaving. When she turned to me, light from the hall glinted on tears in her eyes that, now, would never fall. I’m sorry. After a moment I stood and nodded, then came up here and began to write down everything I remembered about her. At dawn I found I could write no more, and I realised she was gone.
(He is tall, large, with deep blue eyes and heavy ridges above them, like shelves for dark things that might fall out of the sky. He listens to his own voice ringing in the corridors of night. He smiles. It is almost over now.)
It is 3 A.M. now, a cool night wrapped in clouds, and again unable to sleep, I take down a book. It is a foreign edition and with a small silver knife I must cut the pages free as I read:
We are to recognise how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence—yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment—
But wait. There are sounds outside now. Voices milling about, feet. Voices. Together.
I go to the window. There are fires. The villagers have come at last.