CHAPTER 108
Time passed, and my wife’s mother became ill. The doctor who examined her told us it was incurable. I nursed her devotedly, both for her own sake and for the sake of the wife I loved. In larger terms, however, I did so also for the sake of humanity itself. I had long felt an urgent need to act in some way, but I remained at an impasse, sitting idle as the years passed. Isolated as I was from the human world, I felt for the first time that I was doing something of real worth. I was sustained by what I can only describe as a sense of atonement for past sin.
In due course my wife’s mother died, leaving my wife and me alone together. I was all she had left in life to trust and depend on, she said to me. At these words, tears filled my eyes to think that she had to trust someone who had forfeited all trust in himself. Poor thing, I thought, and I even said as much to her. “Why?” she asked, uncomprehending. But I could not explain. She cried then. “You’re always so cynical and watchful of me,” she said bitterly. “That’s why you say such things.”
After her mother’s death, I did my best to be kind and gentle to her, and not simply because I loved her. No, behind my solicitous attention lay something larger, something that transcended the individual. My heart was stirring, just as it had when I nursed her mother. This change seemed to make her happy. Yet behind her happiness I sensed a vague uneasiness that sprang from puzzlement. Even if she had understood, however, she would hardly have felt reassured. It seems to me that women are more inclined than men to respond to the sort of kindness that focuses exclusively on themselves, even if it is morally questionable from a stricter perspective, and that they are less able to fully appreciate the kind of love that derives from the larger claims of humanity.
Once she wondered aloud to me whether a man’s heart and a woman’s could ever really become one. I replied evasively that they probably can when you are young. She seemed then to be gazing back at her own past, and at length she gave a tiny sigh.
From around this time, a horrible darkness would occasionally grip me. At first the force that would suddenly overwhelm me seemed external, but as time went by, my heart began to stir of its own accord in response to this fearful shadow. In the end I came to feel that it was no external thing but something secretly nurtured all along deep within my own breast. Whenever the sensation came upon me, I questioned my own sanity. But I had no inclination to consult a doctor, or anybody else for that matter.
What this feeling produced was, quite simply, a keen awareness of the nature of human sin. That is what sent me back each month to K’s grave. It is also what lay behind the nursing of my dying mother-in-law, and what bade me treat my wife so tenderly. There were even times when I longed for some stranger to come along and flog me as I deserved. At some stage this feeling transformed into a conviction that it should be I who hurt myself. And then the thought struck me that I should not just hurt myself but kill myself. At all events, I resolved that I must live my life as if I were already dead.
How many years has it been since I made that decision? My wife and I have lived in peace together all that time. We have in no way been unhappy, quite the opposite. But this one thing in me, this thing that for me is so vital, has always been for my wife a place of incomprehensible darkness. The thought fills me with pity for her.