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By Root 21296 0

— and here I thought I had penetrated to the heart of the Check: from this time forward she could obtain no satisfaction in love unless she mentally recreated these incidents and re-enacted them. For her we, her lovers, had become only mental substitutes for this first childish act — so that love, as a sort of masturbation, took on all the colours of neurasthenia; she was suffering from an imagination dying of anaemia, for she could possess no one thoroughly in the flesh. She could not appropriate to herself the love she felt she needed, for her satisfactions derived from the crepuscular corners of a life she was no longer living. This was passionately interesting. But what was even more amusing was that I felt this blow to my amour propre as a man exactly as if she had confessed to an act of deli-berate unfaithfulness. What! Every time she lay in my arms she could find no satisfaction save through this memory? In a way, then, I could not possess her: had never done so. I was merely a dummy. Even now as I write I cannot help smiling to remember the strangled voice in which I asked who the man was, and where he was. (What did I hope to do? Challenge him to a duel?) Never-theless there he was, standing squarely between Justine and I; between Justine and the light of the sun.

‘But here too I was sufficiently detached to observe how much love feeds upon jealousy, for as a woman out of my reach yet in my arms, she became ten times more desirable, more necessary. It was a heartbreaking predicament for a man who had no intention of falling in love, and for a woman who only wished to be delivered of an obsession and set free to love. From this something else followed: if I could break the Check I could possess her truly, as no man had possessed her. I could step into the place of the shadow and receive her kisses truly; now they fell upon a corpse. It seemed to me that I understood everything now.

‘This explains the grand tour we took, hand in hand so to speak, in order to overcome this succubus together with help of science. Together we visited the book-lined cell of Czechnia, where the famous mandarin of psychology sat, gloating pallidly over his

specimens. Basle, Zurich, Baden, Paris — the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe’s body: steel ganglia meet-ing and dividing away across mountains and valleys. Confronting one’s face in the pimpled mirrors of the Orient Express. We carried her disease backwards and forwards over Europe like a baby in a cradle until I began to despair, and even to imagine that perhaps Justine did not wish to be cured of it. For to the involuntary check of the psyche she added another — of the will. Why this should be I cannot understand; but she would tell no one his name, the shadow’s name. A name which by now could mean everything or nothing to her. After all, somewhere in the world he must be now, his hair thinning and greying from business worries or excesses, wearing a black patch over one eye as he did always after an attack of ophthalmia. (If I can describe him to you it is because once I actually saw him.) “Why should I tell people his name?” Justine used to cry. “He is nothing to me now — has never been. He has completely forgotten these incidents. Don’t you see he is dead?

When I see him….” This was like being stung by a serpent. “So you do see him?” She immediately withdrew to a safer position.

“Every few years, passing in the street. We just nod.”

‘So this creature, this pattern of ordinariness, was still breathing, still alive! How fantastic and ignoble jealousy is. But jealousy for a figment of a lover’s imagination borders on the ludicrous.

‘Then once, in the heart of Cairo, during a traffic jam, in the breathless heat of a midsummer night, a taxi drew up beside ours and something in Justine’s expression drew my gaze in the direc-tion of hers. In that palpitant moist heat, dense from the rising damp of the river and aching with the stink of rotten fruit, jasmine and sweating black bodies, I caught sight of the very ordinary man in the taxi next to us. Apart from the black patch over one eye there was nothing to distinguish him from the thousand other warped and seedy business men of this horrible city. His hair was thin-ning, his profile sharp, his eye beady: he was wearing a grey sum-mer suit. Justine