The Collected Stories of Colette Read Free Page B

his circle of friends, rising up as one, scorned Clouk to the point of dropping him altogether. Only the sisterly and melancholy friend named Eva stood by the sniffling, phlegmy Clouk, calling him “poor thing.”
    “You poor thing, I can’t stand seeing you like this anymore. Let’s go have a smoke.”
    “A smoke of what?”
    “Opium.”
    “Oh, no . . . no opium.”
    Clouk still remembered, after one try—three pipes following a heavy dinner—a severe case of indigestion. But his consoler’s authority left him no room to argue, and less than an hour later Clouk, undressed, shivering under a kimono, was lying down on a thin mattress covered with a white mat, cold and smooth to the touch like the skin of a lizard.
    Across from him, on the other side of the lacquered tray, he could see Eva fussing about, stout and heavy in her Japanese dress, with her dyed hair hanging across her unpowdered cheek, suddenly affectionate with that bizarre motherliness of women opium smokers: “Wait, you’re not comfortable . . . This cushion here under your head . . . Oh, he’s so pale, a real Pierrot . . . You’ll feel better in a minute . . . I’ll turn off the ceiling light. As you can see, it’s not set up as an opium den; most of the time, it’s my little living room.”
    Clouk, lying on his side, clenched his teeth to keep himself from shivering, or crying, or talking. His eyes wandered from the ceiling hung with fabric to the cheap plaster Buddha, dark against the bright wall, then returned to the three luminous, living blazes formed by Eva’s face and deft hands in the shadows. The little oil lamp, beneath its crystal hood, also caught his eye and he blinked, bothered by the short flame, without the strength to turn his head away . . .
    “Wait,” said Eva, “I’ll cover the flame for you. Would you like the butterfly, or the spider, or the little moon?”
    With the tips of her fingers, she turned the tiny screens of colored glass, jade, and horn around the globe of the lamp. Clouk was silent, intimidated, and tired, and the screens passed between him and the flame like the figures of a new and incomprehensible game . . .
    Hearing the drop of opium sizzle, he leaned back on his elbows. His hands were shaking so badly as he took hold of the bamboo that he burned his first bowl somewhat, and his throat filled with acrid smoke.
    “Very clever,” said Eva without impatience. “Here, let me fix you another.”
    Clouk, having lain back down, breathed in the smell of the opium, surprised to find it agreeable, comestible, soothing.
    “You understand . . .” he began despite himself.
    Eva merely nodded and he ventured on. “You understand, don’t you? I haven’t been eating or sleeping much lately. When you’re worrying yourself sick . . .”
    She interrupted him by offering him a second pipe, which he exhausted with one long inhalation, without taking a breath, and his consoler, who knew the price of silence, whistled softly to express her admiration.
    Lying back on the mat, Clouk repeated slowly: “You understand that since . . . since it happened, it’s been as if I have nothing of my own. It’s strange, I can’t get it into my head that I still do have things of my own, even my money, since . . . well, since then. You see, I . . . I’m worried . . .”
    Already intoxicated, Clouk spoke with childlike sweetness. Several more times he said, “I don’t have anything of my own . . . of my own . . .” then was quiet, and stopped the pathetic shivering, the tightening of his stomach muscles, and the flexing of his toes. He sat up for a third pipe and lay back down once more, happy to be thinking again at last, lucidly assessing his lovelorn misery, assimilating it to his utter destitution. A mellifluous murmuring of rising water filled his ears, and his entire body, healed, experienced the sensation of a lukewarm bath, whose liquid density would lift him . . . He