The Ravishing of Lol Stein Read Free

At last they had found the way to the real door and had begun to move slowly toward it.
    Lol had gone on screaming all sorts of things that made perfect sense: it wasn't late, it was only the early summer dawn that made it seem later than it really was. She had begged Michael Richardson to believe her. But as they kept on walking—they had tried to prevent her but she had wrenched free—she had run to the door and hurled herself against it. The door, latched to a jamb at floor level, had resisted her efforts.
    With lowered eyes, they moved past her. Anne-Marie Stretter began to descend the stairs, and then he, Michael Richardson. Lol's eyes followed them across the garden. When she could no longer see them, she slumped to the floor, unconscious.

L OL , M ADAME S TEIN relates, was taken home to South Tahla, and remained in her room, without once leaving it, for several weeks.
    Her story, as well as that of Michael Richardson, became a subject of common gossip.
    During this period, they say, Lol's collapse was marked by signs of suffering. But what is one to make of suffering which has no apparent cause?
    She kept on repeating the same things: that it wasn't late, it was only summer that made it seem so.
    She uttered her own name with anger: Lol Stein—she always referred to herself by her full name.
    Then, more explicitly, she complained of being unbearably tired of waiting that way. She was bored, so bored she wanted to scream. And, in fact, she did scream that she had nothing to think about while she was waiting, she demanded, with childlike impatience, an immediate remedy for this deficiency. Yet none of the distractions that had been offered her had in any way affected this condition.
    Then Lol stopped complaining altogether. Little by little, she even stopped talking. Her anger waned, grew discouraged. The only times she did speak was to say how impossible it was for her to express how boring and long it was, how interminable it was, to be Lol Stein. They asked her to try and pull herself together. She didn't understand why she should, she said. The difficulty she experienced in searching for a single word seemed insurmountable. She acted as though she expected nothing further from life.
    Was she thinking of something, of herself? they asked her. She didn't understand the question. It seemed as though she took everything for granted, and that the infinite weariness of being unable to escape from the state she was in was not something that had to be thought about, that she had become a desert into which some nomad-like faculty had propelled her, in the interminable search for what? They did not know. Nor did she offer any answer.
    Lol's collapse, her state of depression, her immense suffering—time alone would be the healer, they kept saying. Her collapse was judged to be less serious than her initial delirium, it was not expected to last very long or result in any basic change in Lol's psychic constitution. Her extreme youth would soon bring her out of it. Her condition was easily explainable: Lol was suffering from a temporary inferiority complex for the simple reason that she had been jilted by the man from Town Beach. She was presently paying—it was bound to happen sooner or later—the price for the strange absence of pain she had experienced during the ball itself.
    Then, although she still remained aloof and uncommunicative, she again began to ask for something to eat, for the window to be opened, to be allowed to sleep. And before long she began to enjoy having someone beside her to talk to her. She agreed with everything that was said and related in her presence, with every assertion made. To her, every remark was of equal importance. She was an avid listener.
    She never asked for any news of them. She posed no questions. And when they thought it necessary to apprise her of their separation—she only learned later of his departure—the calm way she reacted was taken as a good sign. Her love for Michael