Visions of Isabelle Read Online Free PDF

singing, playing chess, even helping Old Nathalie with her knitting of winter sweaters. Vava stayed secluded in his office where they could hear him shouting at the chemical additives and precious distillations, cursing them for not blending as he had foreseen. The tension was frightening. They all tried to stay out of the old man's way, but were forced inside by the chill, at times so cold that Isabelle's cheeks became numbed at the merest contact with the wind.
    A break was bound to come, and when it did on Christmas Eve, it was with unexpected deviousness. Vava's eruptions were always public spectacles–he savored his performances and sometimes, in a joking mood, would remind them of a particularly fierce one and laugh with them at the memory. But this time he struck behind their backs. He slipped into the drawing room when they were all asleep, stripping the tree of all its ornaments, singeing and then scraping away the needles until all the branches were bare, painting the denuded tree an angry red, hoisting it up by its stump to the ceiling and from there allowing it to hang upside down, decorated with ornaments of his own–grotesque little figures crudely crafted out of paper and cork which appeared to be devils, monsters, ghouls.
    Old Nathalie, unfortunately, was the first to find it in the morning and she began to scream. The others converged upon her and stared, amazed, at the incredible sight.
    Vava had disappeared; at least they could not find him. Finally, after their initial horror, and after the boys had dragged the ruined tree out the back door, Isabelle saw him walking across the snow, looking haggard and a little scared, timid about coming too close to the windows to see the effect of his terrible prank. She never forgot that sight of him, for he appeared most vulnerable then–the nasty demon skulking with fear and shame in the Christmas snow. When he finally did come in, and with a grand smile asked how they liked his little joke, Old Nathalie turned her face and fled upstairs.
    "What's the matter with her?" Vava asked, and indulged in a meager laugh.
    Later, thinking about it, discussing it with Augustin, Isabelle was horrified at the amount of anger in his act, the treachery, the scheming, for the plan must have taken him the whole night to carry out. Just considering the meanness and rage that it would take to sustain an attack like that made her depressed and also worried about his sanity.
    By January the mood of Villa Neuve was dark. The three boys were constantly away on errands in town that seemed to Isabelle to be the flimsiest of pretexts for something else. Old Nathalie had taken to her room with a debilitating cold and Vava was wracked with a ruinous cough. Isabelle immersed herself in the darkest works of Russian literature: Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground , Gogol's The Overcoat and The Nose –books and stories that doubled her gloom. She felt cut off from everything, even from Augustin who would not, no matter how longingly she pleaded, tell her about his activities in Geneva. There were hints, of course–he could not resist feeding her inklings of depravity, suggestions about strange people, plots, conspiracies, women, drugs But he refused to be specific about any of these things, and she found him, on the rare occasions when he was home, deep in whispered sessions with Nicolas and Vladimir–conversations which would cease the moment she came near. Vladimir's behavior confused her the most, for he had always been a lonely boy, without outside friends, and devoted to Vava and his grandiose gardening schemes. Now he evaded the old man with a craftiness that defied her conception of his character, and she saw in his eyes the special gleam of a man who has secret knowledge and from that takes strength.
    On February the seventeenth, Isabelle turned seventeen.
    Augustin took her into town, brought her to a Viennese pastry shop and there she was surprised by the