220
MARIA LEHMANN
I did nothing. I no longer even bothered to tame Zerin's
poems,
find–
ing it increasingly painful to listen to the strictures of editors who
still homed, without fail, on the little that originated with me. Spongy
with idlesness and fear, I slowly turned round the abyss, telling my–
self I was safe.
There was another, no less disturbing, aspect to this recklessness:
I no longer found it in my heart to disfigure what was, after all, the
one thing I'd come across in my life that was "pure." (Why "pure"
in inverted commas, prey? Pure, just pure). Like a cardsharper,
turned gambler, I was losing my grip and my winnings.
Official reaction, lukewarm at the
best
of times, became hostile
the more magnificent, but also sombre and "negative," the poems I
released grew, in fact, the more truly "Zerinian." My past services,
my impeccable record of shifting and twisting to order, no longer
seemed to count. Possibly "they" sensed that my former accommodat–
ing self was being usurped by something more sinister than one
hopes to find in a contributor to the
Writers' Journal.
And as if to
prove possession by some demon, I had taken to tramping the streets,
endlessly, aimlessly, like an animal that flees from a slaughter–
house the exact location of which it doesn't know. The state of
euphoria was over. Why hadn't I foreseen that the very day I dried
up (and, ·after all, the number of Zerin's poems was limited) I'd be
accused of willful refusal to publish, of "internal emigration"? How
could I not have seen that the poems I had so far kept back -
hymns
bled clean of anything but despair and defiance - were in fact not
publishable? Unless I wanted to go the way Zerin had gone. I wasn't
ready for that.
There was still one hope: being let loose on a lecture tour
abroad. "Mole, the genius, representing his country." In that case,
I promised myself, I'd become a messenger boy on a motorbike, yes,
roaring down those crazy motorways they had in those places.
God,
what bliss, no longer haltered, chafed by my own mediocrity, I'd
race.... No, too dangerous! I'd better be a liftboy. A liftboy, sitting
in his little cage, going up, going down, going up. . . . Dear God,
since I wasn't fit to be a poet like Zerin, let me be a liftboy! It
was then that I noticed the two men tailing me.
That night, going "home," I stumbled over Jochum, sprawled
in front of "Zerin's bungalow." Poor hyena! I helped him up, stink-
