PARTISAN REVIEW
259
and having Arvida's naive and astute voice lift and light Grand–
mother out on the porch step in the surrounding darkness as
if
the
riches out of the hands of a witch luminous lucciola from the grass
with far steadier direction longed-for not surprising and leaving its
light in the room by two childless women - she married, could not
have any; on my part, it was a mistake, inspired by -
but fear
of
having my by me unknown looks thrown in my face. When they im–
proved, mercury dropping to a short, pug-faced Garbo, it was too
late - who hadn't expected as our parents put it "necessarily to like
each other" made me wonder as spinsters will how come we were not
gentler. For in the brown light of the bayberry candles after supper
over the winestained tablecloth Arvida said the words: "Do you re–
member Grandmother on the porch step in the light at the end of the
driveway when we would come from Trekanten with Edvin at night
with laprobes and the bag of rolls?"
I think, by the way, that it is of utmost importance that "Uncle
Harald"
is
dead, his message being from the "beyond," a hint, an
experience. Editor's note: - No, he is not dead. Recently, he asked
my brother to take over the estate. He seems to have said no. None–
theless a familiar disguise began to steal, paralysi5like, over my fea–
tures. Since we must believe in messages even when the messenger is
an unsympathetic c.haracter, I wrote this In Memoriam, moved by
a will to
rise.
His name was Sigvald Pedersen, and he came from Denmark
during the war because his friends and he had blown up a German
factory. One of them had been killed to his knowledge, that is, in
his presence. He studied Greenland lichens. - Students ate at ab–
solutely dismal socalled "dining-rooms," where you helped yourself
from a central table (the scene of many humbly bent backs and
stretched bare wrists), spearing thinly sliced cucumber with chopped
parsley. He stood at the comer of my table and said: "What is the
Ankarean for "minced meat with onion?" Now, the Danish for this
sounds grotesquely silly, the Ankarean quite stiff and humorless. He
said he liked brown and had been noticing me and following me for
some time because I was dressed in brown. At this I had an instant
flashback of myself walking next to a tall concave elm hedge in the
professorial suburb where I lived, the
tips
of its myriad-dented, sloping
leaves protruding through an imaginary chicken wire fence, some of
