Visions of Isabelle by William Bayer Page B

protect her face and so lowers her hood and marches forward without flinching. By the time she reaches the house her hair is soaked, her face is washed, and rivers of water slide down her chest and legs.
    She thrusts open the door, enters and slams it shut. Wiping water from her eyes she calls to the servant for a towel. It takes her a few moments to realize that there are others in the house: a doctor, a priest and a large fat woman she recognizes as a nurse.
    They tell her what has happened during the night: the heart attack that struck as the sun went down; Old Nathalie discovered unconscious, by a servant; the hours of waiting; the agony while desperate neighbors tried to search her out; the final crisis just before the dawn. Even as they are telling her all this, and eyeing her with reproach, Isabelle forgives herself and begins to mount a grief that, by the next few days, she carries to a frantic pitch.

    T rophimovsky, hearing that Old Nathalie is sick and anxious to lure her back to Meyrin, departs before the arrival of the cable informing him that she is dead. He comes to Bône unexpected by Isabelle and not expecting to find a wreath upon the door. He realizes what has happened while still in the street. With the same steeliness that had made it possible for him to persist for years with his scheme to manufacture perfume, he takes firm grip. If a passerby had peered at him at that moment, he would have seen a strange and pitiful sight: an old man ravaged for the slightest instant, a human face reflecting the stun of grief between two moments of studied calm.
    Men are shrouding Old Nathalie's body at the very moment that Vava enters the house. Isabelle is throwing herself wildly about, rushing up and down stairs, her robe streaming, her fingers clutched into her short and ungraspable hair. From her mouth comes a trail of sobs and wails. The body rests on a table in the small courtyard, a calm center in a whirling storm. As Trophimovsky watches she pushes back the men, then flings herself upon the corpse. The smell of pitch is in the air, and a chorus of sobs issues from the adjoining roofs where the women of the neighborhood stand looking down.
    Appalled by Isabelle's vulgar demonstration, Trophimovsky, unnoticed in the gloom of the front arch, shouts to her as loudly as he can.
    "What is this farce?"
    Isabelle spins around, snapped by memory of the bellow that made her brothers tremble for years.
    "Oh, my God! Vava! Vava!" She starts toward him, but his next words stop her cold.
    "If she's dead then let's hurry and get her in the earth. Old corpses stink, and this spectacle must cease."
    "But..."
    Just the grayness of his pallor, the iron set of his jaws, brings back memories of the coldness, the hardness with which he stained her youth. Smitten by the reality that Old Nathalie, the single source of warmth and tenderness in her life, is gone, she flings back her arms and shrieks. Staring about, wondering what to do, she rushes to the table, kneels beside it, and begins to knock her head against the wood.
    "Life without her–impossible! Please, God, take me! Let me die, too!"
    Vava steps into the sunlight, squints at Isabelle writhing near the ground.
    "Here," he says. "Use this."
    She turns to him, through her rain of tears sees his offering hand and the polished Colt revolver in his palm.
    "Go ahead," he says. "Take it! It will provide you with the quickest and least painful death."
    "Oh, my God!"
    She screams, runs from him, scales the steps to the main level of the house. The rooftop audience has ceased to mourn, is now enraptured with the drama being played.
    "What's the matter?" he taunts her. "Lost your nerve?"
    She stares down at him, the shrouded body, the men, the servant, then up at the Arabs all around.
    "Beast!"
    "You really want to die?" he demands.
    "Yes! Yes!"
    "Good!" He runs past her, grazes her body, then mounts the stairs to the roof.
    "Wonderful view from here," he shouts. "Come on up! A