Visions of Isabelle Read Online Free PDF Page A

curious passersby who could not believe that such a house was warm inside. Isabelle was one of those who paid, or rather she was the guest of her three brothers who escorted her on occasion into town. After the visit to the igloo she went to a café with Augustin while Nicolas and Vladimir disappeared on a mysterious errand. When Nicolas returned he was with someone new, a friend from Turkey whom he introduced as Rehid Bey.
    As the three youths talked, of politics, anarchism, Michelet, Bakunin, she studied the newcomer with extreme curiosity. He was slender, about her own height; his neck was wrapped in a long embroidered scarf, and his hair, or what she saw of it creeping around the sides of a matching Alpine cap, consisted of dark brown silky locks. But it was his eyes and eyelashes that she found most extraordinary–the eyes huge and soft dark brown, and the lashes lengthy, arching upward and downward with attenuated and, to her, delightful grace. However it was far more than these soulful eyes that interested her–really, and she said it to herself at the time, it was a very special aura, an almost sublime radiance that surrounded this young man whom she dubbed at once "the brown-eyed Levantine."
    At one point in the conversation, to which she barely listened, being bored by politics and particularly by what she considered the absurd intensity of her brothers and their extremist views, the eyes of Rehid Bey came to rest upon her own. She could not be certain if he was really seeing her. He acknowledged nothing, but at the same time gave off such a warm and mellow glow that Isabelle suddenly gasped as if she had been struck. At that moment of contact between their eyes, a flash of heat swept across her cheeks, moisture broke out upon her brow, and a tingling spread from a point at the base of her neck coursing in waves of delicious sensation to the tips of all her limbs. The cup of black coffee she had been holding slipped from her fingers, crashed upon the cobblestone walk below. Though people in nearby chairs turned around, her brothers barely glanced at her, for they were in the midst of making important points.
    Rehid Bey offered her a cigarette from a thin, elegant silver case.
    "Thank you," she said.
    "You are extremely welcome," he said, and this time, when his eyes met hers, she was certain she filled his sight.
    This encounter with the "brown-eyed Levantine" ricocheted in her mind through the Christmas holidays, which were, in this particular year, even worse than she remembered from before. Old Nathalie wanted a Christmas tree–she timidly broached the subject on one of those rare occasions when the family ate together at one time. "It will warm the house," she said, but Vava dismissed the idea with a snapping of his jaws. She brooded for a few days then brought the matter up again.
    Isabelle was amazed; she had never seen her mother in such an insistent mood. The clash was frightening, for the more violent Vava became, the more he pounded down his fists, kicked at chairs, threw pots against the walls, the more tranquilly Old Nathalie repeated her demand.
    "But this is against everything I've been saying to you for twenty years," Trophimovsky said.
    "I don't care," she said. "This is what I want."
    Finally he shrugged and Vladimir was dispatched to cut an evergreen from the back of the house. When it was finally set up, decorated with candles, little wooden images of angels and stars and a crèche at its base arranged in a bosom of boughs (a bizarre sight before the long-abandoned fresco which, due to age and dampness, had begun to peel), Vava refused to enter the room. All the work was done by the children who found the whole business laughable but wanted, more than anything, to see their mother pleased. So in the evening the five of them, mother, three sons and sixteen-year-old Isabelle, sat in boredom beside the tree and the precious De Moerder icon (finally dusted after so many years), reading,