Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [49]
She was late. They ended up going to tea at five o’clock; Hedges was busy reading English newspapers. They sat at a table overlooking the river, the menus in their hands long and slim as airline tickets. She seemed very calm. He wanted to keep looking at her. Hummersalat, he was reading somehow, rump steak. She was very hungry, she announced. She had been at the museum, the paintings made her ravenous.
“Where were you?” she said.
Suddenly he realized she had expected him. There were young couples strolling the galleries, their legs washed in sunlight. She had wandered among them. She knew quite well what they were doing: they were preparing for love. His eyes slipped.
“I’m starving,” she said.
She ate asparagus, then a goulash soup, and after that a cake she did not finish. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps they had no money, she and Hedges, that it was her only meal of the day.
“No,” she said. “William has a sister who’s married to a very rich man. He can get money there.”
It seemed she had the faintest accent. Was it English?
“I was born in Genoa,” she told him.
She quoted a few lines of Valéry which he later found out were incorrect. Afternoons torn by wind, the stinging sea … She adored Valéry. An anti-Semite, she said.
She described a trip to Dornach, it was forty minutes away by streetcar, then a long walk from the station where she had stood arguing with Hedges about which way to go, it always annoyed her that he had no sense of direction. It was uphill, he was soon out of breath.
Dornach had been chosen by the teacher Rudolf Steiner to be the center of his realm. There, not far from Basel, beyond the calm suburbs, he had dreamed of establishing a community with a great central building to be named after Goethe, whose ideas had inspired it, and in 1913 the cornerstone for it was finally laid. The design was Steiner’s own, as were all the details, techniques, the paintings, the specially engraved glass. He invented its construction just as he had its shape.
It was to be built entirely of wood, two enormous domes which intersected, the plot of that curve itself was a mathematical event. Steiner believed only in curves, there were no right angles anywhere. Small, tributary domes like helmets contained the windows and doors. Everything was wood, everything except the gleaming Norwegian slates that covered the roof. The earliest photographs showed it surrounded by scaffolding like some huge monument, in the foreground were groves of apple trees. The construction was carried on by people from all over the world, many of them abandoned professions and careers. By the spring of 1914 the roof timbers were in position, and while they were still laboring the war broke out. From the nearby provinces of France they could actually hear the rumble of cannon. It was the hottest month of summer.
She showed him a photograph of a vast, brooding structure.
“The Goetheanum,” she said.
He was silent. The darkness of the picture, the resonance of the domes began to invade him. He submitted to it as to the mirror of a hypnotist. He could feel himself slipping from reality. He did not struggle. He longed to kiss the fingers which held the postcard, the lean arms, the skin which smelled like lemons. He felt himself trembling, he knew she could see it. They sat like that, her gaze was calm. He was entering the gray, the Wagnerian scene before him which she might close at any moment like a matchbox and replace in her bag. The windows resembled an old hotel somewhere in middle Europe. In Prague. The shapes sang to him. It was a fortification, a terminal, an observatory from which one could look into the soul.
“Who is Rudolf Steiner?” he asked.
He hardly heard her explanation. He was beginning to have ecstasies. Steiner was a great teacher, a savant who believed