PARTISAN REVIEW
215
nostrils," says Babel's old Cossack. Yeah, but supposing some people
don't wait for the tickling? Like our boys, who can smell yesterday's
fart
in
tomorrow's wind (or the other way round) and rather do the
tickling themselves. Anyway, only a babe-in-anns would try to hide
anything whatsoever
in
the hollow back of a hard-cover
book.
Well,
Zerin seems to have been just such a babe for as I was pulling his
dictionaries etc., off the shelf, prior to losing them in some unob–
served dustbin, one slipped, hit me on the head and shed something,
a tight little roll that, fumbled open, uncurled into flimsy little sheets,
covered with tiny, almost illegible, writing. (Our Boys, no doubt
considering Zerin a very fiend of cleverness, can never have looked
there.)
Whereupon I ran to the door to bolt it and to the window to
draw the curtain. And read, by the light of "my" lamp what Zerin,
in his childlike way, had treacherously committed to eternity.
It
took hours to decipher and even before I'd finished I found
myself grizzling like an infant. I'm not exactly the crying kind, well,
anyway, not since the boys, shouting "Mole," had shoved handfuls
of sand into my mouth and made me swallow. But that night I
cried - and it wasn't only for Zerin.
I would pass these poems off as my own. Since - though it
had cost me plenty of tears to see it - my own "secret" poems were
nothing but childish, inferior muck and not worth living for. Zerin's
were. Worth dying for, too - if it came to it.
Well, anyway, that's what I thought then.
So,
in the locked,
bolted, darkened room, I sat and copied - every line of Zerin's sixty
or
SO
poems, sweating with fear I might overlook as much, as little,
as a comma. Then, at the witching hour, I flushed Zerin's
poems
down the lavatory. (Oh yes, if it weren't for the untrammeled access
to those holes
in
the canalization system, life as we know it would
come to a stop.)
Next I set to "correcting" the copies, scribbling words in the
margin and in between lines, any words I could think of in my
jittery haste,
all
the time giggling at my own barbaric inventiveness.
Those
words were of course crossed out again, not too meticulously,
the point of the whole procedure being to suggest an author pruning
his
way through mountains of "foam" towards perfection. And, Lord,
there was perfection here!
I know, none of this is going to be believed. Most likely, you
