Now she was bound to her word. The lie would surely collapse, and she with it, if she did not succeed in redeeming the ring. She had set the time limit herself, and all of a sudden a new feeling was added to her confused fears, a kind of happiness to know that the moment of decision was so close. The day after tomorrow. Now she knew how much time she had left, and she felt a curious calm born of that certainty mingling with her fear. Something rose in her, a new strength. The power to live and the power to die.

 

The knowledge that, at last, her decision was certainly so close began to bring unexpected clarity to her mind. As if miraculously, her nervous stress gave way to logical thought, her fear to a crystal-clear calm suddenly enabling her to see everything in her life as if it were transparent, and to value it at its true worth. She weighed up her life as a whole and felt that it was still a heavy weight, but that if she could only hold on to it in the new, intensified, more elevated frame of mind that these days of fear had shown her, if she could begin it again from the beginning, pure and sure and straightforward, she was ready to do so. But to live the life of a divorced woman, an adulteress, stained by scandal—no, she was too tired for that, and too tired to continue the dangerous game of buying respite for a limited period. Resistance, she felt, was unthinkable now. The end was near; she might be given away by her husband, her children, by everything around her, and indeed by herself. Flight from an apparently omnipresent adversary was impossible. And confession, the one thing that could surely help her, was out of the question; she knew that by now. There was only one path still open to her, but it was a path from which there was no return.

Life was still alluring. Today was one of those typical spring days that sometimes break vigorously out of the bonds of winter, a day with a blue sky so high and wide that it made you feel you were breathing easily again after many dismal, wintry hours.

The children came running in, wearing clothes in pale colours for the first time this year, and she had to force herself not to shed tears in response to their happy jubilation. As soon as the sound of their laughter and its painful echo in her mind had died away, she set about carrying out her own decisions with determination. First she was going to try to recover the ring, for whatever happened to her now, she did not want any suspicion to fall on her memory. No one must have visible evidence of her guilt. No one, least of all her children, was ever to guess at the terrible secret that had torn her away from them. It must appear to be pure chance, and no one’s responsibility.

First she went to a pawnbroker’s to pledge an inherited piece of jewellery that she almost never wore, thus providing herself with enough money, if need be, to buy back the ring that could betray her from the woman who had taken it. Then, as soon as she had the cash in her bag, she went walking at random, earnestly hoping for what, until yesterday, she had most feared—to meet the blackmailer. The air was mild, the sun shone above the rooftops. Something in the wild wind chasing white clouds swiftly over the sky seemed to have infected the people walking in the street, all of them at a lighter, livelier pace than in the bleak days of winter gloom. And she herself thought she felt something of it. The idea of dying, the idea she had caught in flight yesterday and clasped firmly in her trembling hand, became a monstrosity, eluded her senses. Was it possible that a word from some dreadful woman could destroy all this, the buildings with their bright façades, the surging of her own blood? Could a word extinguish the never-ending flame with which the whole world blazed in her fast-breathing heart?

She walked and walked, but her head was not bowed now. Her eyes searched almost eagerly for the woman she expected to see. Now the prey was in search of the hunter, and just as a weakened, hunted animal, feeling that escape is no longer possible, will turn suddenly with the defiance of despair to face its pursuer, ready to fight back, she too wanted to see her tormentor face to face and fight back with the very last of the strength that the will to live gives desperate creatures.