Visions of Isabelle Read Free

their underwear. They pause, then enter. She waits a moment then tiptoes down the stairs. The stone is cold against her bare feet. At the bottom she discovers the drawing-room door is closed. She inches her way across the hall, kneels at the keyhole, presses her eye against cold brass.
    She sees her brothers standing beside Trophimovsky, muttering together in muddled tones. Vava is lying on his back, extremities spread, snoring loudly, twisting in his sleep. Saliva trickles from his mouth, oozes into his matted beard. The room is a shambles–broken glass and shards of pottery are scattered about. The mural is disfigured by gashes of red, as if cans of paint have been hurled at the walls.
    "How I hate him!" Nicolas' whisper, furious and cold, cuts to her ears through the heavy wood. He plucks a hoe from the pile of garden tools and raises it above his head.
    "I could kill him now and set us free," he says, and turns to Augustin as if for consent. The eyes of her brothers meet; Isabelle trembles with fear.
    "Shall I kill him?"
    "Could you, really?" Augustin asks.
    "It would be easy. I could make it look like he fell on his rake. In the morning when Mama comes down she'll think he killed himself by accident."
    "She'll weep–"
    "Nothing new."
    "What would happen to us?"
    "We'd go home! To Russia!"
    Augustin ponders the problem.
    "Don't do it," he says.
    "I will," says Nicolas. "Someday I will."
    He heaves the hoe into a corner and the two of them start toward the door. Isabelle presses herself back against the wall, is nearly crushed as her brothers come out.
    Later, when they have gone and all is quiet upstairs, she slips inside and looks down at Vava raging in his sleep.

ECLIPSE
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    O n the morning of April 15, 1893, Isabelle Eberhardt rises from her bed and makes her way to an austerely framed mirror that hangs in an alcove off her room. This room, in the back and on the second floor, is strangely shaped as if made up of all the spaces left over after the creation of the other rooms of Villa Neuve. Isabelle likes it–the odd corners, alcoves and diagonally slanting walls are always a feast for her wandering eyes. She spends hours here, reading, studying, dreaming of distant lands.
    She is sixteen years old, her hair is cut short like a boy's, and her ears stand out a little from the sides of her head. Looking at herself she is pleased–she appears intelligent, youthful, brave and, when she chooses, severe. A young person not to be trifled with, she thinks, a person who can hold their own in a duel. She is particularly happy about the way her eyebrows are set–slightly off-center, each one curved into a different arabesque. She gazes at her reflection a long while, wonders for a moment how she may look in ten or twenty years, and is in the midst of a fantasy in which she sees herself dancing, the center of attention at a great ball, when she hears a sound, glances to the side and catches a flash of Augustin's hand pulling her covers over his head.
    He hasn't seen her, is too busy hiding in her bed for some ambush he evidently plans to spring, perhaps when she changes into her clothes. She smiles at the mirror, finds it charming the way her smile breaks the brooding, intelligent cast of her face, and then continues with her fantasy, a dizzying waltz in which she is swept around and around at dazzling speed by a tall lean nobleman wearing elegant white silk gloves (she cannot see his face, but can feel the texture of the gloves) until the room, the gilt, the crystal, even the jewels of the women blur into sparkles and streaks of light.
    Fantasy concluded, she sets about for a way to properly deal with Augustin. She begins to hum a Russian folk song abstractly, hoping to deceive her brother into believing he has not been seen. As she hums she moves closer to her bed, and then, with the speed and energy of a panther, she leaps, landing directly on Augustin's back. Quickly she pulls a blanket over his head,