6
PARTISAN REVIEW
main street towards the block-long building. The snow made a
speed in the air, the people hurrying made another speed, men
walking with women, bunches of men hunched over, blowing
fiercely and darkly along in the wind together. Jock took her
arm and she bent over the baby and they were caught up in a
group entering the wide door with the wind blowing against
them, all their bodies hunched the same way. They fell inside
the building without the wind and as in a bas relief intent faces
climbed swiftly up the ramp.
Jock said, "I was here once at a walkathon and it's nuts
sitting downstairs, you gotta sit upstairs and then you can see
downstairs.''
Leah clutched the baby and climbed, it pulled her down in
front to carry him. They came out on a giant shell a block
long and they sat down on the side and already below was a vast
ocean of dark people, and the sides of the shell were filling
rapidly, people pouring in swift black rivulets.
They found a seat half way down and she laid Dave on
her knees. It was warm, people were all around them. "Jeez,"
Jock said, "this is going to be a lousy bum show."
"Shut up," Leah said, "it's warm anyhow, so many people
make it warm anyway."
Men and women kept coming down the aisles, a heavy
woman walked slowly. She was pregnant, her slow 'feet, search–
ing only for food and shelter, worked hard, broken on the flesh
loom of childbed, at stove, at work.
Below the dark clothes
the veins were burst, erupted like the earth's skin, split by the
terrible axe of birth. Leah shuddered. I will get like that.
She shifted Dave so his feet dug into her empty stomach. "Sit
still,""]ock said, "do you want to go?"
A man was talking. She was afraid he would wake Dave
but he slept without stirring, . his head falling back a little and
his mouth open. She didn't listen to the words very much, she
looked at men's bodies, they always told her something.
"LISTEN," a man was saying, and she leaned back but
his voice kept striking in every part of her. "TONIGHf IS
PART OF THE STRUGGLE." He began to tell about things
she knew about, how they were hungry, how they could not get
jobs, how they must fight together. Jock looked at her and he
also knew it was spoken to them. She leaned forward shoulder
with Jock to look at the man. He spoke in a very precise speech,
was it Scandinavian, Finnish like her father who had been a
