4
PARTISAN REVIEW
timorously in winter from their warm caves full of a good animal
smell.
Not one light in entire sections of the city. Prehistoric
shadows.
People lived in houses of glacial cold. Each livable corner
was like an animal's lair: the ancestral stench penetrated the skins
of the furs which they never took off or which they wore in order
to go into the next room to tear wood from the floor to
ke~p
the
fire going:- or to get a hook:- or to empty the filth accumu–
lated during the night on frozen piles of dung, these too covered by
the delightful frost of which each crystal was a marvel of purity.
The cold came in unhindered through broken window-panes.
The city, divided by large straight arteries and winding
canals, surrounded by islands, by cemeteries, by great and empty
terminals, extended to the end of a narrow gulf, enclosed in a
white solitude.
(But the nights reigned, unreal or starry, implacable and
calm; and during these nights, skiers, armed with large Mauser
pistols, carrying fifty pretty pointed bullets, a flask of whiskey,
two kilos of black bread, twenty pieces of sugar, a Danish passport
in good order, a hundred dollars sewn into the lining of their
trousers, entered resolutely, with huge strides, that desert where
nothing was worse than to encounter a man; and women, clutching
their children by the hand, old men, cowards, all bowed under the
great wind of terror, more deadly even than the winds of the Pole,
also came into this desert of ice, led by traitors and spies, moved
by hate and fear, hiding their jewels, as convicts hide their money
in prisons, in the private, filthy folds of their flesh.)
Seen from high up, from the red-starred aeroplane, which
flew slowly over it in the mornings, the Neva was like a slender
white serpent, shooting toward the desert an opened jaw from
which darted two thin bluish tongues.
The people left in the suburbs were hungry. No more smoke
rose from the factory chimneys: and when, by chance, one sent up
smoke, the women, mufHed in rags, gathered together at the door
of a communal store, watched, with dejected curiosity, as the
strange clouds rose. "They're repairing guns there. They receive
a special ration there.... How much? How much?--400 grams
of bread a day, yes, but there's none for us, it's only there for
