The Ravishing of Lol Stein Read Online Free PDF

toward her non-knowledge of South Tahla.
    This one place in the world where, it was thought, she had, in time past, lived through a painful experience, or what they called a painful experience, is by slow degrees erased from the very fiber of her memory. Why these rather than other places? No matter where she is, it is as though Lol is there for the first time. She no longer experiences the invariable distance that memory provides: she is there, in the present. Her presence renders the town pure, unrecognizable. She begins to walk in the sumptuous palace of South Tahla's oblivion.
    When she returned home—John Bedford admitted this fact to Tatiana Karl—and resumed her place in the midst of the order she had created, she was happy, as fresh as when she had got up in the morning, was more relaxed with the children and more inclined to let them have their own way, even going so far as to take their side against the servants, in order to make them more independent of her, and to cover up their mistakes; when they were insolent to her, she forgave them, as always; slight delays and deviations from her fixed routine, which in the morning would have irritated her no end, passed virtually unnoticed after she had returned from her walks. Moreover, she began to discuss this order with her husband.
    She told him one day that he might be right, that this methodical order was perhaps not what was needed—why she didn't say—and that she might change her ways sometime in the near future. When? Sometime later. Lol left it vague.
    She used to say every day, as though she were saying it for the first time, that she had gone for a walk to such and such a place, and mention the section of town, but she never described the slightest incident she might have witnessed. John Bedford found his wife's lack of candor about her walks perfectly natural, especially since she was reserved about everything she did, about all her activities. It was rare for her to offer an opinion, never once did she relate a story or incident. But did not Lol's contentment, which seemed constantly greater, prove that she found nothing bitter or sad about the town of her youth? That was all that mattered, John Bedford must have thought.
    Lol never mentioned any purchases she might have made. Nor, in fact, did she ever make any during her walks in South Tahla. Nor did she ever so much as comment on the weather.
    When it was raining, those around her knew that Lol would watch from the windows of her room to spot any sign of the weather's clearing. I suspect that it was there, in the monotony of the rain, that she found that "elsewhere," that uniform, insipid, and sublime "elsewhere" which she cherished more than any other moment in her present existence, that "elsewhere" she had been looking for since her return to South Tahla.
    She devoted her entire morning to her household, her children, to the observance of that strict order which she alone had the strength and ability to impose, but when it rained too hard for her to go out, she did absolutely nothing. This domestic fervor—she tried to conceal it as best she could—vanished completely when it came time for her to go out, or when she decided to go out even if she had had a particularly difficult morning.
    How had she spent these same hours during the ten preceding years? I asked her that question. She really didn't know what to reply. At Uxbridge, had she spent these same hours doing nothing? Nothing. And that was all? She didn't know how to express it: nothing. Behind the windows? Perhaps that too, yes. But then again . . .
    Here is my opinion:
    Thoughts, a welter of thoughts, all rendered equally sterile the moment her walk was over—none of these thoughts had ever crossed the threshold with her into her house—occur to Lol as she walks. It would seem as though it was the mechanical movement of her body which summoned them forth, all of them together, in a chaotic, confused, and ample surge. Lol receives them