his neck extended and Margaret, holding on to him, was jerked forward. She reared up from her chair. Prell tried to prevent the tray in his arms from falling, and this confounded his self-defense.
But soon the tray smashed to the ground. He fumbled and caught the cream pitcher, but the teapot broke on the ground and the hot water splashed over Margaret’s feet, scalding her ankles. It must have scalded Prell as well, for he cried out in pain and pulled away from Margaret’s iron grip forcefully. With one heavy arm, he swiped at her shoulder.
But Margaret held his face ever more tightly on either side with her thumbs and forefingers, and her ears rang. She pushed hard into his jowls and temples. Her fury surged to a peak, and for some reason, Prell finally went limp under her hands.
“How could you?” Margaret let out again.
“How could I what?” Prell breathed hard.
A sound came out of Margaret’s mouth. And then another. “How could you have lost faith?” she stammered at last.
“Let me go,” he said.
But she held his face longer, and the power was in her and had gone out of him, as a rabbit freezes at the end of its life. He was doubled over, cradling his cream pitcher.
But then at last he turned his face up, and Margaret looked into his eyes, eyes that darted and flicked about, the navy-blue orbs revolving, and she felt a ripping in her chest. She saw, buried far beneath the reflective sheen of his pupils, in the embers of the rods and cones there, the eyes of the infant she had lost.
The moment collapsed. Prell let go of the pitcher and punched at her stomach with his fist, and although he did not hit hard, her stomach made as though to burst in pain.
She released him. He lumbered heavily upstairs to the toilet, roaring threats of litigation. Margaret felt she was burning into black strips; she did not know what she had done, where to put her shame. She had read—it was Jung who had written—that the more evil is contemplated, the more it enters you, and she wondered under what circumstances she could ever learn how to live, she who had betrayed, or had been betrayed by, every hope and every idea and every icon of redemption, she whose very understanding of these things was in rubble.
THIRTY-FOUR • Reconciliation with Vitaly
The morning that followed was very still. Margaret gave a tour. All the while, she quivered. She reached and touched the hands of the customers who came along, and they felt the beseeching tremor in her fingers. They looked Margaret in the face and saw the enormous question there. She was reading their features with her eyebrows peaked like gables, as if she wanted to know the hour and minute they were born. When she had a moment to herself, she tried to soothe her uncertain heart. She thought: I did not kill him yesterday, and I will not kill him today.
In the afternoon, she went to the university.
I will not kill him, she told herself. Not now, and not tomorrow. In a heat of feeling, she spoke with devil-may-care directness to Vitaly Velminski, protégé of Meitler. She managed to convince the smooth and pretty young man, with whom she was not even acquainted, to take a coffee with her in the cafeteria, under the wide modern skylights, under the reaching, new-green trees.
They spoke of humanism. They spoke of capitalism. These were the wires that were fashionably live at the time.
At some point it was a question of whether a free-market society is more attracted to sacrificial lambs than a socialist one. Margaret’s idea, which she outlined to Vitaly chokingly, with embarrassed excitement, was this: Older societies, she said, are still religious and altruism is ritualized, and socialist societies redistribute the burden of excess riches through taxation! But other societies, neither religious nor socialist, have hardly any idea what to do with the sleeping guilt that laces the fringes of wealth-amassing hearts, and so the more a little child, a perfect lamb, will be needed for the nailing, for the rendering up to the pedophiles—for the various slaughters, and the people will vaunt their communal obsession with the sacrifices, and find absolution there.
Vitaly, his usual cool and unflappable self, inclined his head in response. He mentioned many interesting names, thinkers who had combed the beach of such a theme for all its many shells.
Margaret spoke hotly, her eyes ablaze, looking often