Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

Anna saw he was a purist, a prude. She had always, perhaps, known it. Then, exactly then, it didn’t matter. Yet, she was for an instant half offended. The woman had been so beautiful. Garlic on her breath was an irrelevance, unless you hated garlic, which Árpád did not. Criticism did not belong to this night.

And Anna shrugged. “What a stern judge.”

“You’ve ruined me,” he said. “Always so fresh and fragrant.”

But these things a man could say who had never been afraid. You’ve ruined me for other women – The choice.

Her happiness ringed her. She had given him this and shown him – shown him – but what had she shown him? Ah, shown what was his own true worth.

Now he saw that he was stared at for his exceptional qualities, stared at in admiration and envy. He had taken to it so quickly, too, as if, like the dances, he had practiced for this hour. Perhaps he had done so in dreams.

Sometimes, even dancing with him, she saw him objectively. On this night of rarities and display, when everyone was set free, of them all he was the most splendid, his escape Promethean.

They ate supper at one of the hundreds of tables, near the lake, over which the fireworks arced and rained, platinum and diamond and gold.

One wine bottle was empty, so they ordered another.

The light splashed on them. On the upturned flowers of so many faces.

He no longer turned his head aslant. Fire burned on his skin. His eyes were wide, as if to devour the sky and every light of Preguna. He bathed in the sun of the light.

It was simple to enter the palace of delight, this memory of great happiness, liberation and reward. But from the palace there was only one gaping exit, a descent to tumult and despair.

She had never been able, afterwards, to relive the joy of the carnival. Because, following through shining room after shining room, she must come to the last doorway and the roaring descent.

However, just as Árpád must sometimes have dreamed he walked the city arrogantly in daylight, his face like that of any other attractive man, so now and then in dreams Anna could be returned into heaven.

In the dreams, heaven did not always finish in the same way. Very often she was able to wake up before the full gamut had been run.

Even if she did dream of the night’s ending, she had never dreamed it quite as it had been.

Her brain wouldn’t permit her, perhaps, to suffer that more than once.

By tradition, the carnival ended with the sounding of the three o’clock bell from the cathedral.

Then a silence fell on the revellers. Then there started a handful of outbursts of rebellious noise. Then again, silence. Like all creatures of the night, they must slink away before the dawn began.

Here and there, a last slow dance was played by an exhausted band, some unmasked and kissed, exchanging mementoes and promises.

Yet everywhere they rose, the celebrants, from their gilded Mass, in floating islands of dismissal. And like the sparks of the dying fireworks, humanity went drifting away, dissolving down the darkness into the reality of another world less real than heaven-on-earth.

Árpád and Anna walked slowly, as so many couples did, worn out, tipsy, soft with premonitions of sleep.

She did not think. Had not thought it out. It wasn’t so much that the theatre of the night had convinced her, fooled her. For it had revealed only what she had always known.

“I’m so tired. Thank God you don’t have to get up. We can sleep till noon.”

“Yes,” he said.

Already his voice was distant. But only, in the way of a voice which was tired.

“What a lovely night it’s been.”

“Yes.”

“Darling,” she said.

They had been holding hands. Now his hand dropped hers. She recalled how he had put the unwanted rose the woman gave him, into his water glass on the table. That had been more tender than this.

Almost, she began to ask him what the matter was.

Later, she could scarcely believe her stupidity.

Had her stupidity, even, been wicked? As if she had let go her baby out of a window through carelessness, simply because she was looking at a bird in the sky.

She knew. Everything at once. She said, nevertheless, very carefully, as if testing the words in case they were too hot, “You must be so tired.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make some chocolate when we get in. The Italian chocolate you like. Shall I?”

“If you want.”

“Mm,” she said, in a quiet cheerful little voice, and chunks of terror surfaced in her bloodstream and around her heart, beginning slowly to asphyxiate her.

They walked on.

A tram rumbled by, its windows unlit. It was like a lumbering hearse on wires.

The remaining figures in the streets resembled ghosts. And yet she wanted to run to them and beg them for their help. They would do nothing. They had already done enough.

When they reached the apartment house, he went up the stairs ahead of her. He left her to come after him, or perhaps to go away.

What she did was silly and pitiable. She dawdled on the stair, pretending she had some trouble with her shoe, as if everything were ordinary. As if nothing had happened. Or ceased to happen.

When she reached his floor, the door of the room stood ajar. There was just space for her to squeeze inside. This gave her a moment’s hope. She had thought, she realized now, that he would close the door – not lock it, but shut it tight. As if she didn’t belong there at all.

But when she entered the room, which had been his, and next theirs, no lights were lit, only the faint upflung glow of the street came in, and the dimmest pearl, not white or grey, was beginning on the sky.

In the semi-dark, Árpád knelt at the book cabinet, and she saw he had pulled out the books already and put them, quite neatly, on the floor.

Anna shut the door at