“We got to talking one night, and I learned that he had come to France to flee the war in his old home. You remember the war?”
“I know there was a war. I was kind of young.”
He laughed. A bitter sound. “Of course. I don't remember it very much myself. It didn't involve me, and I was only a teenager. But when the Soviet union collapsed, Yugoslavia split apart in a civil war and went back to its component pieces. Dominic lost everything. He had to flee his hometown—I forget where it was—and his daughter was raped and his mother was disappeared because she lived in the wrong village. The war devastated the countryside. Dominic was Croat living in Serbian territory. He had to leave. He left everything behind and fled to France, and he was barely scraping by there. I asked him what he would do if he had unlimited money and could go back to Croatia and he told me he would buy a cafe in Dubrovnic and become a famous chef. So I bankrolled him.”
He trailed off, though he didn't stop pacing. His eyes took on a faraway look, as though he were gazing into some other time and place. I waited for him to finish the story, but he said nothing. At last I frowned. “And?”
Malcolm paused and glanced at me, as if he had forgotten I was there. Then he smiled. “And,” he told me, “he's not a famous chef yet, but he's living a better life now. He doesn't have to serve alcohol to degenerates like me.”
Oh yeah. That had been a sex club. I tried not to get sidetracked by curiosity. “I already know you can be generous,” I said. “Why are you telling me this?”
He raised his eyebrows. “That wasn't the point of the story. The point was that I know my problems are paltry in the grand scheme of things. I will never lose my home to an invading army. My neighbors will never turn on me and shell my city.” He paused in his pacing and pinned me with his dark cherry wood eyes, the same color, I realized, as the wood paneling of the interior of this yacht. Our eyes locked to each other, he stalked across the floor to me. “I understand, Sadie,” he said. “I will never be disappeared by a militia and dragged into the woods where I'll be shot in the back of the head and left to rot in the fallen leaves. I will never be an anonymous skeleton in the forest. I know that.”
He'd already anticipated this line of attack. Hell, it had probably been the very first thing he had told himself if he ever tried to talk himself out of his dumb plan. I felt cold inside, as though someone had slipped ice beneath my skin. “So?” I said. He loomed over the chair, staring down at me. Then he sighed and tapped his chest.
“I'm still hollow in here. Knowing and feeling are two different things. I know my struggles are nothing. Betrayal by my own dear brother? What does it matter? The things that cause me pain... they change nothing. There is nothing here to change.”
Reaching down, he stroked my face. “I'm afraid you have set yourself up for an impossible task, Sadie.”
I tried not to show my trepidation. I was starting to believe him. But there wasn't anything I could do about it now. I'd vowed to try my best to reach the person under the armor. I knew he was there. But he was right—knowing and feeling are two different things. If I couldn't reach his heart—and there had to be something there, otherwise he wouldn't have felt any pain at all—then I could never draw out the man I truly wanted to know.
I could never talk him out of killing himself, I realized. But earnest words are never the only thing in a woman's arsenal.#p#分页标题#e#
I could also be flippant.
“Don't worry about me,” I said. “You forget. I was an artist before I was a personal assistant. I'm like a world expert at banging my head against a wall.”
A half-smile graced his lips. “Is that so? I wasn't aware art was so difficult.”
“That's 'cause you're doing it wrong,” I replied. “You have to dig deep.”
“There's nowhere to dig,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “Then show the world how shallow you are. You have to dig really deep to demonstrate that.”
“Really?” he said.
“Really,” I replied. “Because there is nothing harder than making a piece of art that someone can just look at and say, 'yeah, that says absolutely nothing.'”
He pursed his lips. “What about abstract art?”
“You'd better believe that says something,” I told him. “For a lot of abstract artists, it was a rebellion against fascism, or a comment on modern life. Nothing makes much sense after a war so huge it ripped everyone up and changed the entire world. There was a lot of commentary on breaking free of old strictures and shit like that that didn't make any sense in a senseless world.”