Mitz. Sigrid Nunez
up another berry and began to cram it into her mouth. While the others laughed, Virginia looked away. Virginia was squeamish about gluttony. (“I don’t like greed when it comes to champing & chawing & sweeping up gravy,” she once told her diary, raging against a certain dinner guest.) But Virginia was too fascinated to avert her eyes for long. Something human, all too human, about that naked little face—Virginia had always imagined the faces of elves looking perhaps like this. Elfin face, body and tail of a rodent: it was this combination that made Mitz such a wonder. You looked at her and thought, How grotesque. And the very next instant, How adorable. And then, How grotesque, again.
“Where did she come from?” Leonard asked.
“South America, originally,” said Victor. “I found her in a junk shop. I bought her for Barbara.” At this Barbara said nothing, but the way she rolled her eyes spoke loudly enough. Virginia understood. A healthy monkey was a strange enough gift for a woman expecting a baby. A sickly one . . .
“Funny thing about this species,” said Victor, perhaps also reminded at that moment of his wife’s condition. “The males help the females to give birth.”
Virginia’s jaw dropped. An astonishing picture rose in her mind. “How—what—?”
“We don’t think we want to know,” said Barbara, rolling her eyes again and gently patting her domed midriff (the child was due in September).
A footman arrived to clear the table. Glancing at Leonard, Virginia saw that he was frowning, and she thought she knew exactly what his thoughts were: A junk shop! What had this poor creature been doing in a junk shop? Victor was right: Mitz was not healthy. That halting walk probably did mean rickets. Her coat was not sleek as it should have been, but rough and dry-looking, with a few bald pink spots where sores might have healed. The fur round her neck was worn away and the skin was chafed. Apparently, Mitz had once been chained . . .
Berries devoured, every last trace of cream licked away, Mitz uttered a string of cries—a shrill, gibbering monkey-sentence that rose at the end, like a question. As no one could interpret, no one could answer. She searched the four faces hovering against the darkening sky, and whatever it was she wanted she seemed to find in Leonard’s long thin bony one. She jumped in his lap.
“You’ve made a friend,” said Barbara. And Victor said, “I’ve never seen her take so quickly to anyone.”
Virginia was not surprised. The Woolfs (or the Woolves as they were more commonly known) had been married for twenty-two years, and in twenty-two years Virginia had had many occasions to witness how animals took to her husband. He was a great lover of animals, and if he had found a sick monkey languishing in a junk shop she was sure he would have rescued it just as Victor had done. Though she was also sure he would never have tried to pass it off as a gift.
Mitz perched on Leonard’s knee. With the tip of one finger, he was rubbing the top of her head in a circular motion, in a way she seemed to like. Her eyes closed. She wrapped her tail tightly around her. She dozed.
Brandy was served. Leonard lit his pipe and Victor his cigar. Conversation resumed. Conversation was mostly serious that night and kept coming round—as was no doubt the case at many another dinner table—to the same topic. Three weeks earlier, in Germany, hundreds of people had been slaughtered. This had confirmed many people’s worst fears about Hitler, who had come to power the year before. These days the possibility of war was on everyone’s mind. For the Woolfs the 1914 war remained a searing memory. One of Leonard’s brothers had been killed in that war and another badly wounded (in the same attack, as it happened, and hit by the very same shell). Another war such as the 1914 war and, Leonard said, civilization would be destroyed.
The breeze that had cooled them while they ate had turned sharper. Barbara snuggled deeper into her shawl. Virginia draped a cardigan over her shoulders. Within the house, servants were going from room to room, closing windows, drawing curtains. Mitz smacked her lips in her sleep—dreaming of berries and cream?
Leonard looked at his watch. “Good heavens,” he said. It was past ten. The Woolfs had to be going. Leonard stood up, waking Mitz, and as he tried to put her down, she clung to his sleeve, his trouser leg, his shoe.
“I believe she’s fallen in love,” Victor said, and everyone laughed.
Before the Woolfs drove home, they were taken back into the house to see the library. Victor had a very fine collection of books, many rare editions, encased in red morocco. The Woolfs admired a volume of Wordsworth and a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Most of the books had been bought recently—it was Virginia’s The Common Reader that had awakened the bibliophile in him, Victor said. Again Virginia bit her tongue, saving her criticism for her diary: “Ah but that isn’t the way to read . . . Too easy; sitting at Sotheby’s bidding.”
On the way back to London Virginia kept yawning. They did not usually stay out so late. She and Leonard talked about the evening, poking fun at their friends (the garden, the books), just as rich people so often fear literary people whom they’ve wined and dined will do on their way home. Still, there was much to be envied about the Rothschilds. Not the wealth, for the Woolfs disdained wealth, but the future, the baby coming in September, their whole lives ahead of them. In a word: youth.
Twenty-two years before, when they were first married, Leonard and Virginia had thought they too would have children.
They drove with the top cranked back. The road was empty, the fields were black. It was midnight, the nineteenth of July, 1934.
The Woolfs lived at 52 Tavistock Square. The house, which had been their home for ten years, had four floors. Leonard and Virginia lived on the second and third floors; the ground and first floors were let to the firm of Dollmann & Pritchard, solicitors. In the basement was an old billiard room that Virginia had taken over for her studio. There, amid a disorder that never ceased to amaze her husband, she could be found of a morning, sunk in a big old tattered armchair with a plywood board across her knees, dipping her pen into the inkpot that she had glued to the board, writing.
In the basement was also where the Woolfs had their press. The Hogarth Press, which the Woolfs had begun in 1917 (having agreed that nothing could be more fun for a writer than to publish his or her own books), had grown with the years into an important business. The Woolfs published some of the best writers of their day, and they published their friends (sometimes but not always the same people).
The Woolfs had a routine that seldom varied. Every morning at about nine-thirty, right after breakfast (which Leonard always served Virginia in bed), they went to their separate rooms to write. They wrote from nine-thirty until one. The Woolfs had spent so many mornings of their lives in this way that by 1934 they had written more than a score of books between them. At one, they joined each other for lunch. Sometimes there would be a guest. It might be Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, or one of Vanessa’s children; or it might be one of the Woolfs’ many friends: Maynard Keynes, or E. M. Forster, who was called Morgan, or Tom Eliot, or Vita Sackville-West. Often these days (too often, Virginia complained) it was garrulous Ethel Smyth, whose visits always left Virginia worn out and hoarse, partly from shouting into Ethel’s ear trumpet.
After lunch the Woolfs would read their mail and the newspapers. Afternoons were usually devoted to typing out and revising that morning’s work or taking care of business related to the Press. When the weather was fine (and often even when it was not), Virginia liked to include a long walk in her afternoon schedule. Walking was one of her deepest passions. She had inherited this passion, along with her passion for literature, from her father, Leslie Stephen, a famous walker in his day. Virginia could remember him setting out early in the morning with a packet of sandwiches and not returning until dusk. Virginia herself liked to walk for at least one or two hours. For her, a walk, even through the most familiar streets, was an adventure. She loved seeing people, looking into their faces, and imagining their lives and making up stories about them. Sometimes when she walked she would go into a kind of trance—as