STORIES
Maria Lehmann
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUTH WITHOUT TALENT
I know whose hands
will
run the toothcomb through this.
All right: I'm a fraud, an impostor, a traitor -
if
you insist. And
you, gentlemen, what are you?
O.K. When Zerin was arrested and disappeared it was me,
Mole, who got the vacant bungalow in the Writers' Village. That,
I suppose, was my reward for writing clever articles in the
Writers'
Journal
on "Abstractionism,'" "Cosmopolitanism" and sins like that,
or, more likely, for being "in" with Push and Catar, the
Journal's
two guiding spirits.
So I moved from the corner behind the sagging curtain I had
occupied ever since my sister had to put me up (Mole, the war–
orphan!) where I had written secret poems that made me go on liv–
ing,
and had crawled under the bedclothes not to have to listen to
my sister and her one-legged war-hero husband "doing it."
This
brother-in-law of mine, by the way, sits at home all day, every day,
making toys from wood I'm positive he's nicked somewhere and,
in the process, produces every conceivable noise with every organ
he's got left, not excluding some resounding farts, while I, his cap–
tive audience behind the curtain, lie, half-suffocated, under the
featherbed, trying to write propositions on the role of the poet in a
socialist society! Whereas "Zerin's bungalow" had a door and a
window I could open and shut when I wanted and a desk with a
lamp that shone on my hand while I sat writing. Even now, thinking
back on it, I feel a little tremor of exultation. For so little, for so
much, will a man sell himself: a lamp, a desk, a window_
(As
if you
bastards didn't know!)
