She untied the bundle and started to leaf through the papers.  Something small fell out and clinked on the table.  She recognized it.  It was the locket she had given him when he left for Africa.  She tried to open it, but it was stuck. She banged it on the table to loosen the clasp and tried again, until her fingers hurt.  Finally she went to the writing desk, got the letter opener, and managed to pry it open.

Her miniature was still in it, not much faded or altered, and yet almost unrecognizable.  The face was hers, but somehow foreign. She had the impression that she was looking at both herself and at a stranger.

He had painted it himself.  She had almost forgotten what a good painter he was, her Nazarene, her intended.  He had captured her youthful innocence and eagerness, making her look almost beautiful.  Had she really been beautiful back then, or was she beautiful only in his eyes and through his brush?  She marveled at how that young smiling face seemed to glow, radiating an innocent confidence and an unbounded optimism for the future that she and her Nazarene were going to create together and share for a lifetime.  But was it all real: the smile, the hope, the beauty?  Did it come out of her or from him?  Or had she just been posing even back then?  She still smiled now, she told herself, as much as she did back then, maybe more.  But did she smile as radiantly, as beautifully, as genuinely?  If the smile had been genuine. Had it?  Had she been more genuine?

If only Victor had chosen to exploit his artistic talent!  All their acquaintances praised his paintings.  Some tried to commission him to paint family portraits.  Many offered to buy one of his nature landscapes, at which he excelled, she thought.  To her it seemed that he could commune with nature and capture all its power and beauty, both what was visible to the eye and what was deep and hidden from common sight.  He could have become a successful artist and stayed home in Belgium with her.  And a musician!  He played so well!  Composed too!  Their friends always urged him to play whenever there was a piano around.  They raved when he tried out his own compositions.

Pipe dreams!  How many rich painters or musicians did she know?  Not many.  Not any.  Still, she now mused regretfully and a little reproachfully, he could have stayed home and become successful—and yes, even rich—in any number of occupations: as a lawyer or magistrate, as an educator, or a journalist, as a politician or diplomat.  He had so many natural talents: “our own Renaissance man!” their acquaintances called him.

Instead he had gone off to Africa.  To die.

She looked with a mixture of admiration and reproach at the face of her younger self trapped in the cameo.  No, she concluded, she didn’t smile as brightly and as wholeheartedly nowadays, despite the fact that she lived comfortably in her richly appointed house with her successful, wealthy husband and their two adorable children—now napping peacefully in the nursery, the little dears!—or maybe just pretending to be asleep, those little rascals!—just as she had pretended to do at their age, preferring to daydream in the shuttered penumbra rather than give herself up to sleep.  Was that youthful, hopeful smile on her young face lost and gone, buried out there with her Nazarene, somewhere in the jungles of the dark continent?

She riffled through the stack of yellowed papers.  The courier who had delivered Kurtz’s bundle explained that there had been a mix-up.  This packet, erroneously labeled “Journalism,” actually contained Victor Kurtz’s personal papers and his correspondence.   The mistake had only been discovered recently, when a journalist investigating the ivory trade in the Congo had come to the Company’s offices to inspect the reports and articles on the subject written by Kurtz, who had been both a participant and a chronicler of the African trade in ivory.

This now finally explained her own perplexity and disappointment when she had gone through the papers previously delivered to her years before.  It was now clear that the file presented to her back then was the wrong one.  It was the one that the journalist was now seeking, containing Kurtz’s journalistic notes and drafts.  The bearded sailor who had delivered the packet said it contained Kurtz’s personal correspondence, most of it with her, his “intended.”  He—what was his name?  M-something: Monroe?  Morrow? No, Marlow; Captain Marlow!—had known Kurtz personally.   The Captain had been out there in the jungle with her betrothed.  He had tended to her poor Nazarene when he got sick and was with him when he died.  She had been grateful and anxious to read Victor’s letters, to find out what happened to him out there in the Congo. The packet, however, didn’t contain the private letters she expected, but outlines and drafts of Victor’s newspaper and journal articles, most of which she had already read in their published form.

She ended up assuming that that was all that had been left behind and eventually talked herself into being glad to have them as a legacy of Victor’s lofty thinking.  There was some gratification in having at least some testimonials of his idealism, even if those drafts of public documents and philosophical, intellectual musings were not addressed to her or meant for her to see.  They did not provide the sentimental legacy she craved—a testimonial of their love.  In the end, she had tucked the bundle away in a trunk in the attic, put it out of her mind, and had gone on with her life.

When the courier from the Company made it clear that the sailor Marlow had delivered the wrong materials, she retrieved the neglected packet from the attic and made the swap.  Now she thumbed through the papers pensively, nervously, almost afraid.  Did she really want to expose herself to her old lover’s intimate thoughts, especially those pertaining to her, to the two of them?  Would his words revive uncomfortable old memories or resurrect dormant feelings and buried expectations?  Would they make her regret her later choices, her marriage, making it seem a betrayal, or if not a betrayal, a compromise, an accommodation of convenience?

Three years after the bearded sailor delivered Victor’s file she had finally accepted Henri’s marriage proposal, marrying into a rich family with commercial ties and a long-standing friendship with her own family, and had become the well-to-do and respectable Mme. Du Bois and then, before too long, the doting mother of her sweet Margot, no longer a toddler, and her still-chubby-cheeked little Lucien, just beginning to toddle.  Did she want to revisit the past of a different life, of a different her?

For several minutes she looked out the window without seeing anything.  She sighed and brought her gaze back to the bundle and began to pore over the papers, trying to decipher the faded ink on the musty sheets: all that was left of Victor, of their relationship: the dusty frayed residue of a life once so vibrant and full of promise.

On top was a tattered, yellowed birth certificate: Victor Alexandre Kurtz, born in Nazareth, Province of East Flanders, Kingdom of Belgium, to an Anglo-Belgian mother and a Franco-Belgian father; then diplomas and awards for his academic achievements at schools in Nazareth, and later at the Lyceum and then the University in Ghent.

There were awards and honors from his school days and his university years.  She read the letters of commendation from his instructors and mentors, who praised his superior intelligence, high moral character, and commitment to civil service.  All agreed that he embodied the best virtues and promise of his generation.  He had been a brilliant student, her Nazarene—as she liked to call him, despite his futile objections.  And there had not ever been much doubt that he had an equally brilliant career in front of him—in front of them, for they had pledged to be devoted to each other and to go through life together.

In the longest letter of recommendation, his university thesis director enthusiastically endorsed Victor’s application for service in the remote and still largely unexplored regions of Central Africa, claiming that his best student was uniquely qualified to represent and promote the lofty ideals of the nation, as so eloquently articulated by their beloved King Leopold II.  It was Belgium’s duty and destiny, as an advanced, enlightened, civilized country, to liberate benighted African natives from their superstitions and wretched conditions, and that mission was to be accomplished  by recruiting the brightest and the best of the young Belgian generation.  And no one, he concluded, was better or brighter than young Mr. Victor Kurtz, and no one more suited to carry out King Leopold’s exalted crusade.

A misguided crusade, she now judged!  Hadn’t all that rhetoric about humanitarian altruism turned to greed and exploitation, as protesters now claimed?  But who was she to throw stones in the Belgian glass house?  Her husband Henri had increased their wealth considerably by investing in the ivory and rubber trade that the King’s “humanitarian” enterprise had made possible.  She had parted ways with many of her old friends when they claimed that the idealistic crusade embraced by Victor and many others of his generation had degenerated into an exploitative commercial enterprise from which she and her family had benefited and prospered.  Was her well-being and that of her fellow wealthy Belgians worth the sacrifice of her Nazarene and the other “crusaders”–not to mention the suffering of the natives who ended up being forced to labor for Belgian profit instead of being redeemed and elevated by Belgian civilization?  It was better not to think about it.

But all that: the evolution of Belgian intervention in Africa and her reluctant and then marginalized awareness of why and how it was taking place, came later.  The plans that she and Victor had debated and made had taken shape before the creation of the Congo Free State as King Leopold’s private domain, before the Force Publique had been formed to maintain order, and long before, as critics now charged, it came to be employed instead to terrorize and exploit the native workers it was supposed to protect.  The King’s declared mission back then had been to benefit the African natives.  And so, imbued with patriotic fervor and idealistic optimism, and totally ignorant of what African societies were like in reality, her Nazarene had dutifully sacrificed a portion of their future, his and hers, to go off to the jungle to sow seeds of civilization for the betterment of the natives and for the glory of his country.  Had she really believed that too?  Had she been complicit in sending him off on his civilizing mission . . . or on a fool’s errand?  She looked at the miniature in the locket again.  Was it the smile of a fool, or of a hypocrite?

She came to her own letters to him.  She was surprised to see how many there were.  All the letters she had written to him seemed to be there.  If they had all reached him, why hadn’t he replied?  Why had he stopped writing to her?  As she flipped through her unanswered letters she was flooded with fluctuating, conflicting feelings: resentment, mortification, recrimination, sorrow, self-reproach, and relief.  Yes, guilty relief.

She reread her letters to Victor, her Nazarene, her intended, with an ambivalent sense of nostalgic longing for her lost youth, a vague feeling of embarrassment—both for what she had been like when young and for what she had become in middle age—and an apprehension of uncovering suppressed revelations that might be better left hidden, where they couldn’t threaten her peace of mind. 

In the first few she declared her devotion and outlined her plans for their future life together after his return.  Later letters expressed puzzlement and concern at his failure to respond, and finally desperate supplications for him to let her know that he was still alive.  So much joyful hope in those first letters, echoing the smile in the locket, followed by worry and then despair, which eventually subsided into the abiding melancholy that still enveloped her now!

At the bottom of the pile she found a pocket notebook with barely decipherable jottings: names, dates, itineraries, memos.  There was also what appeared to be a rough draft of the last letter she had received from him after his arrival in the Congo.  It described his long voyage and his living and working arrangements.  She smiled sadly when she saw the erasures, additions, notations, and re-phrasings, particularly numerous where he tried to express his feelings for her and where he tried to articulate his impressions of the jungle, of the emotions and thoughts it elicited from him.  Her brilliant Nazarene had also been tongue-tied about certain things—as perhaps were all true poets, as he had once expounded to her, because they were the ones who struggled the most with language and labored to find the right words to convey what was true and important but inexpressible.  She noted that many of those sections had not made their way into the letter he had transcribed and mailed to her.  So much unsaid!  And so much more unwritten!

Appended to this draft were other occasional fragments, written over months, then years, possibly as drafts of other letters he initially intended to write to her, but never did:

#

17 Nov.—Such a challenge!  Much wrong that must be corrected; terrible cruelty and injustice by the Whites inflicted on the Natives.  Great fear and ignorance on the part of the Blacks.  Can it be overcome, corrected?  Much improvement needed, in many sectors: education, health, building, transportation, and religion: the teaching of the true Gospel.  Where to start?  Much work ahead, but confident that it can be done and will yield good results.

~

March 10—Disappointment: work going very slowly.  Hardly any improvement or progress in any sector.  Conditions remain woeful.  Many Europeans here corrupt, greedy to amass wealth. 

The jungle interferes, seems to oppose all I try to do; seems to laugh at me sometimes, at my puny strength, at my inept, childlike attempts to bring about change.  Is it worth the struggle?  It all seems futile, so futile!

#

The children’s chatter and squealing brought her back to the present.  Her little Margot and Lucien were awake.  She went to the nursery to supervise their grooming and dressing and to schedule their afternoon activities.  She and the nanny took them to the playroom.  She played and sang songs with them before returning to the parlor to resume poring over and deciphering Victor’s scribbling;

#

May 23, my birthday—Baudelaire knew: “Grand bois, vous m’effrayez comme des cathédrales.”  The Jungle, huge, dense, oppressive emptiness.  Stifling in its overwhelming abundance that fills up its dark emptiness; impenetrable, dark, hostile.  It abhors improvement, change; reclaims every square foot cleared and cultivated.  It stifles all I try to do.  Can’t fight it any longer.  Feels as if it has forced itself relentlessly into my soul, and I’m struggling against myself.  I hate it.  I hate myself.

~

Fall—Forced to start trading ivory; found large cache, so-called elephant cemetery. Hypocrisy.  Reality.

~

Winter?  Who can tell here?  Maybe Spring, a new beginning.  The truth, finally!  Fighting the Jungle all this time when it was I who was wrong, with my silly civilized notions of good, morality, justice.  How misguided!  No wonder the Jungle scoffed.  Such nonsense!  The Jungle has shown me that darkness and the emptiness are the only reality; forced me to recognize that horrible truth within myself.  How could I have been so blind to such horror?  The persistent echoes of civilization–our pathetic illusion of meaningfulness–continued to confuse me and cloud my judgment.  Must now rid myself of such folly and see the world more clearly.

~

Date, calendars, time: irrelevant.  Discovered the greatness in emptiness and darkness; power previously unimaginable.  No restrictions, no barriers to my thoughts or actions.  My will is all.  It is greater than the Jungle.  Everything, everyone at my disposal, subject to my unlimited desire and power.  Nobody, nothing to stop me: no laws, no obligations, no morals, no virtues, no consequences.  Respect, fear, awe of power no longer infect me, only others, my inferiors.  Awe and fear of ME, of my unrestrained power.  MINE!  The horror I felt and feared is no longer located outside of me; it is in me.  I have become the horror, the terrible god of cathedrals and of jungles!

~

The eternal infernal buzzing is driving me mad!  Clouds of flies feeding on the decomposing heads impaled around the compound.  Move again – new compound – order brutes to plant impaling poles far away from my tent.

#

Horrified, she closed the notebook and set it on the table.  She was not sure what it all meant.  The images evoked by those last scribbles made her shudder.  Could these things have been written by her Nazarene, the man with whom she intended to share her life?  What had happened to him out there?  And what would have become of her, of them, if he had not died out there, if he had returned and they had married as intended?

She went to one of the French windows and gazed out at the garden and the yellowing woods beyond.  The lovingly tended garden, not as replete with colorful flowers this late in Autumn as during the Spring and Summer months, still had some residual roses and chrysanthemums among ornamental cabbage and berry bushes.  She noted some withered blooms that would have to be trimmed.  It looked reassuringly orderly, efficiently and attractively designed and carefully maintained.  It contrasted nicely, soothingly with the wild woods beyond the stone hedge.

The days were getting shorter and dusk fell unexpectedly early.  The image in the window pane was doubled: her own reflection and that of the richly furnished parlor superimposed on the view of the world outside.  She stood there for a long time, lost in memories, conjectures, reproach—of him and of herself—and regret mingled with relief.  Eventually, as it became darker outside, all she could see in the window pane was the reflection of the gas-lit room behind her and her own image within it.  The view of the garden and the woods outside had disappeared into the darkness.

She rang for the maid to draw the curtains and rekindle the fire in the hearth.  She then gathered the bundle, went to stand by the fireplace and waited for the logs to glow and for the flames to dance and hiss.  One by one she tossed Kurtz’s papers into the flames, and finally his notebook, watching them turn to floating dark ash and flitting sparks: “Adieu, Victor!  Adieu, my Nazarene!”

Only the locket remained in her hands.  She scraped away more rust around the edge and pried open the glass pane.  She removed the painted miniature of her younger self, caressed it gently with her bruised fingers, and flung it into the flames. 

She would have the locket refurbished and replace the miniature with a portrait of her and the children, and give it as a present to her husband on their next anniversary.  Not a painting this time—the children wouldn’t stand still long enough—but one of those “photographs” that had become so popular.  Monsieur Du Bois would like that better.  He liked to keep up with the technological developments and the progress of their enlightened, civilized society. 

She pulled up a chair to sit closer to the fireplace, enveloped in the warmth and glow of the hearth.  Oh, the comfort!