468
PARTISAN REVIEW
a hand would be held out to him.
As
he grasped it, the center would
retreat and he would remain tied off by the darkness, watching the
figures move more clearly now in their absurd posturings.
Ht: remembered now, Auerbach, the time he had once been in
a subway and the train had emerged from the tunnel. He had been
seated near a window, resting his elbow on the ledge, leaning and
peering out at the darkness. The train had passed a large expanse of
vacant lots, and suddenly it was as if the concept of time and move–
ment had been lost. Auerbach saw a bonfire in one of the lots.
Splotched shapes that seemed to be children hovered near it, and
he saw one of them standing detached from the others holding his
hands out to catch the warmth. And suddenly he saw the boy's shoul–
ders grabbed, propelled from behind into the center of the fire. Then
time entered him again and as the train passed he tried to raise
himself from the seat. The thought had come that he must run back
through the aisles to catch the last sight. It was the moment that he
must catch and hold, where the child was not frozen in blocked terror
and the dim sense of his own fear was no longer menacing. Each day
in the subway, for months afterwards, Auerbach sought the conclusion,
sometimes in the tunnel lights which flashed past him as the train
rose on the elevated above the city streets.
It was as though here too time must stop. He rolled his pencil,
watching it skid along the table. He, Auerbach, knew now how the
story ended. It was not lost high over the streets of the city, for him
it did not die, but was perpetually preserved. From the beginning he
could trace it, the shape and the touch of it.
After all, what did it amount to? Somehow it must be ended,
his thesis, and he was competent enough to handle it, play around
with it, shape in the footnotes. The solid feeL of it in his hands, and
then the slow, modulated pitch of his voice before the examining
board. "And Mr. Auerbach," the name to be twanged out by a
gentile voice, his eyes to meet sharp noses and thin faces, "what would
you say is the major concept your research thesis has given you?"
"Gentlemen," he should answer, words framed like blank verse,
"history since the great year of 1789 has been a long, a steady and
ofttimes a hard march to the great goal of human freedom." And as
he thought now of the moment when he would open his mail to hold
the culmination of all his years, Auerbach remembered his own be–
ginning.
Auerbach remembered it now, the first book of history he had
owned as a boy. His mother had given him
mon~y
for
it,
after he had
