Rituals Read Free Page A

further into an unfamiliar, rebuffing mask. There was no doubt that it saw him and therefore excluded him, because it was at the same time looking at someone else with the love that was no longer intended for him but for the only other person she had been looking at while the photograph was taken — the photographer.
    "Nice noodle, that girl's got," said Lyda. She sat up. He saw that her breasts were now silver, too. The stuff was everywhere, on his face, his chest, her face, everywhere!
    He stood up, saw his silver figure walk past the mirror, and got dressed.
    "I don't want to get used to you," said Lyda, and it sounded like a point of order at a meeting.
    He waved to the silvery, now suddenly tearstained blotch of her face and went out into the street of silent, death-feigning houses with their sleeping people. He drove straight to the city park and by a pond tried to wash the silver, the outward sign of his removal from Zita's life, from his hands. But he did not succeed, and it only became worse. Five o'clock passed. Nature, in which animals do not know one another and no one loves anyone, awakened.
    A photographer, he thought, and remembered that he had first met Zita at a photographic exhibition, standing in front of a portrait of herself. He had seen the photo before he had seen her, and he did not know who betrayed whom, the woman in the photograph, the woman who stood before it, or the other way around. Some photographs, like that famous one of Virginia Woolf at the age of twenty, in which she looks sideways, are so perfect that the living being they represent seems a fabrication, something made so that a photograph may be taken of it. Inni had realized that if he wished to become acquainted with the woman in the photograph, he would have to address the woman standing in front of it, and this he had done. The photo hung in a rather dark corner, but he had at once been sucked towards it. Power emanated from it. It seemed as if that face, which could never really belong to a living human, had existed for thousands of years, independent of all else and completely absorbed in itself — an equilibrium.
    He remembered clearly that he had begun to feel slightly dizzy as he approached her. She had walked away from her portrait, which made it easier, and stood by a window, a very soft layer of light all around her, alone. She had the total equanimity of someone who had been made solely to be different from the others without ever being conscious of it, a different order of being that consisted of only one member — her. And so he had entered her world without ever becoming a member of it, and he had wrought damage in it while refreshing himself on the perfect equilibrium. And now he was about to be punished for it.
    Slowly it grew lighter. He shivered with cold. A large heron flew over, lurched, and then landed in the reeds with clattering wing movements. For the rest all was silent, and it seemed to Inni as if he were standing still for the first time, as if since that first meeting with Zita he had never stopped walking and had come all the way here in one long haul, in one movement, in order to stand by this pond with silver smudges on his hands and, who knows, on his face, too. He decided not to remove them and to go home at once.
    If everything he was thinking was true, he would have to be punished now, and the sooner the better. Nothing was sure any longer. This, then, was chaos, and chaos was what frightened him most in life — the chaos into which he would be flung back if she left him.
    *       *
    It did not turn out the way he had thought. Of course Zita was in love with the photographer and of course she had slept with him. He had been her first man since she had been with Inni, just as Inni had been the first man in her life. With the absolute certainty of someone who lives by laws, she now knew she would have to leave Inni, and because she loved him and knew of his dread of chaos, this grieved her. But