298
PARTISAN REVIEW
a crutch, and that the only clean spots on their bodies were the whites of
their eyes. But when you looked at their eyes a second time you saw
that they were not ordinary human eyes, nor like the soft, scared eyes
of rabbits, but wild, reckless, fearless, heartless-like the eyes of a fam–
ished, diseased leopard-cub, whose one enemy is man.
Stumbling down the hill from Durer and the young generation of
Niirnbergers, you passed the corner of a wrecked alley, where you stopped
suddenly and stared again; for here, in the center of what was once
Julius Streicher's city, still nailed to its shattered wall, was the ink-blue
plaque bearing the alley's ancient name:
]udengasse.
A few hundred yards further north, picking your way over a
smashed bronze breast and arms, over rusty bedsteads, bottomless ket–
tles, and a cracked overturned bathtub, you heard the sound of voices–
which was strange, for people did not speak above a whisper in the
Old Town. Glancing up, you saw a setting straight off the Elizabethan
stage: men and women seated in chairs in a room on the third floor of
an old house which had lost its fac;ade. The face of the house-its front
wall, windows and all-had simply fallen away; so that as long as warm
weather lasted the house's many occupants could sit comfortably in
their sitting-room, gossiping in their chairs, surrounded by all their own
familiar objects, and pretend they did not know that if they took three
steps forward they would fall into chaos.
On every visit to the Old Town I returned to this spot. It was the
only place in Niirnberg where you felt a few people were sitting where
they'd always sat. Unlikely as it may sound, this "house"-with its in–
terior open to the elements and the human eye-had window-boxes (on
the floor, like footlights on a stage) filled with pink and purple petunias;
and on a circular table in the living-room, in front of an upright piano,
stood a china vase of marguerites and cornflowers. I grew so fascinated
by this family's public private-life that I used to stand, hidden by the
rubble, and watch them live. With the evening sun turning the whole
gaping apartment gold, a heavy big-boned woman would waddle across
the crowded room, open a door into the kitchen and light what looked
like a kerosene stove. I couldn't believe-from where I stood, a witness
to all-that she would return to the door and close it (From habit of
a lifetime? To be alone? To shut off the smell of cooking?) but she did.
And when she'd placed a pan on the burner, and something in the pan,
she slowly, painfully, lowered her bulk on to a wooden chair and, as
people are more apt to do when alone, promptly let her chin fall on
to
her expansive chest. While the family talked and argued and gesticu–
lated in the living-room, a door in the background would open, a blond
girl, her hair aflame from the sun, would stand on the threshold, all
the heads would turn, and you almost felt like referring to your program
to see who the heroine was, in real life.
One evening I scrambled up behind the house, to have a look at
