Review
The story (1962) belongs to the inter-war period. It is the expression of an abstract idea in concrete terms, suggesting the force with which quite abstract notions and vague impressions can impose themselves on the imagination, demanding to be recognized as no less real than “reality”.
This is the story about disappearing woman – a story which in other contexts has seemed puzzling, if not downright insubstantial, but which is greatly improved by being viewed as an allegory of the life of art. Jelena like Eurydice is a supremely beautiful woman, but the narrator does not live for her illusory visits because he desires her, but because life itself is transformed when she arrives. Life is infinitely rich and significant in her presence, and he is happy with no cause; without her, he despairs, in a wasteland of insignificance. She is really all the artist’s nighttime visions contained in a single figure, and she is gloriously beautiful than anything that could actually exist. The narrator concedes from the start that she is only an illusion, but this is a fact he has recovered from ‘like an illness you only catch once in a lifetime’ and his whole imaginative efforts is to glimpse the illusion as often as possible – to win his Eurydice again and again over the threshold between dreams and realities. Orpheus must continually expect her, or she will never come. She is always and only the product of the artist’s lyre. As such she is immortal, for art is immortal; but if he views her as daylight reality she slips back over the threshold, and becomes part of that world of transience where Hades has entire dominion.
Fragment
From the Very Beginning
In the silent and still air of the summer day there appeared from somewhere an unexpected and invisible movement, like a single, errant wave. My half-open window knocked several times against the wall. Tak-tak-tak. Not raising my eyes from my work, I merely smiled like a man who feels confident in his surroundings and who lives peacefully in a state of contentment not interrupted by surprises. Without a word or sound, with a single movement of the head I gave a sign that the ploy was a success, that she can enter, that I am expecting her joyfully. She always comes that way, with some sort of charming mischief, with music or with fragrance. (With the music of a random, lonely sound which seems unusual and significant, with the fragrance of an entire landscape or the northwind which portends the first snow). Sometimes I hear a hardly comprehensible conversation, as if at the gate she were asking directions to my apartment. Sometimes I see only her willowy and inaudible shadow flash by my window and again I neither turn my head nor raise my glance, so certain am I that it is she and that she will now enter. In that split second I experience an indescribable and unspeakable joy.
Of course, afterwards she never enters, nor do my eyes catch sight of her, whom they have never seen. But I have become accustomed not to expect her really but to submerge totally in the bliss induced by the endless moment of her arriving. I have gotten over the fact that she won't show up, that she does not exist, as one gets over an illness which one goes through only once in life.
Observing and recalling for days and years her appearance in various shapes, always strange and unexpected, I succeeded in finding in them a certain regularity, some order. Above all, the illusion is connected with the sun and its path. (I call this an illusion for the sake of you to whom I am telling all this; personally, it would be both ludicrous and insulting to call my greatest reality by that name which really means nothing. Yes, she appears almost exclusively from the end of April to the beginning of November. During the winter she very rarely shows up, and even then in connection with sun and light. As the sun grows, her appearances become frequent and more lively. In May they are rare and irregular. In July and August almost daily. But in October, when the afternoon sun is fluid and when one drinks it endlessly and tirelessly as though drinking thirst itself, she hardly moves away from me while I sit on the terrace covered by the netting of sun and shadows of leaves. I sense her presence in the room by a hardly audible rustling of the pages of my book or by a barely noticeable creaking on the parquet. But most often she stands invisible and inaudible somewhere behind my shadow and I live for hours in the awareness of her presence, which is much more then the eyes and ears and all the poor senses can give.
But when the sun's path begins to shorten and when there are fewer leaves, and a lighting-fast squirrel, whose fur is already changing, darts on the shiny-smooth bark of the trees, the apparition begins to pale and to disappear. Increasingly rare are those minute sounds which I had become accustomed to hearing behind me in my room, and the jokes known only to the carefree youth and to the eternal world of dreams. The invisible and dies without a sign or a farewell as apparitions and phantoms disappear. She never existed. Now she is not.
Taught by long experience, I know that she sleeps in my shadow as on a wondrous couch, from which she arises and greets me irregularly and unexpectedly, by logic which is difficult to comprehend. Moodily and unpredictably, as one can expect from a creature which is both a woman and an apparition. Just as it happens with woman of flesh and blood, from time to time with her, too, suspicious and anxiety and melancholy come into my life, with no relief or explanation.
(...)