There she still stood, her knotted hands on the table, a grin widening her flat features. There she still stood.
"Aunt, please leave me alone, please do."
Perhaps she went on talking a little, perhaps she leaned over to kiss me, perhaps I heard words falling from her lips like pellets of lead: "country—trial—sacrifice." The door closed upon my slaughtered love.
I know I tried to stand up—it was like trying to lift a tombstone—and drag myself to the window to lean my forehead on the pane; but something pulled at me from deep within, something cold and incomprehensible, like a slimy slug, like a deep gash in living flesh. And a strange dizziness, not entirely physical, threw me back into the armchair.
The walls of this black hissing pit into which I fell were the walls of my dining-room, the very same walls papered in a scallop design, and I saw a cloud of tiny coal-black butterflies, mere specks, whirl without end from the blackened lamp-chimney.
My being turned into something enormous and gaping, which fed constantly upon a great wound. I was so overwhelmed with a senseless horror that at moments during the night his death seemed quite normal and natural. But when I withdrew my hand from under my head a multitude of serpents wriggled about within me, and I felt suffocated again and began to tumble through emptiness, while little pointed teeth bit my blood and left behind a penetrating icy poison.
It has ever been the same, Lord God. Suffering is too monotonous.... When a bit of sense and ordinary life returned and cried in my ears: "It is over. Never more," I felt that suffering is too monotonous; and when a clamor of revolt sounded in my being: "They have killed him!" I felt that suffering is too monotonous.
And when the dawn came tapping at the window and creeping toward the table, drab and livid, when I rose from my bruised knees, and when the humming and buzzing began in the indifferent house, I still felt that suffering is too monotonous.
IX
Your beloved is dead.