386
DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ
crete accomplishment. Still, she feels more like a witness giving evi–
dence to her days.
She also learns that woman is now emancipated am! that she
must take her place alongside man in the creation of diplomatic chan–
nels to the Natural State. She must employ the tools of femininity
to summon up pathways to power which end of necessity at a better
world. All this she must do in the understanding that the elements
of her search and vision will certainly be hostile to her, that she
must establish her values and hold them to her bosom, that force and
determination are gestures of survival in the landscape of stress.
Yet she is pinned to the wall by migraine. The yea rs wash over
her
in
waves of pain and she walks the tombs of the Academies in
simulated catatonia. Her troll-lover is antisocial, this she knows.
She stands in gloomy courtyards in moments when he has taken hold
of her eyes and casually dreams the stones to dust. H e has loaned her
the will to destroy all this and she carries her secret to the peripheries
of knowledge - and escapes. Mother Munch will not hear of it and
conjures up her riot squads. The)' trace Pcrfidia to the borders but
she has disappeared inside herself, dropped to the depths of her well
with her troll-lover who presses her eyeballs to a blindness in the
darkness. Mother Munch goes into mourning for her own life, for the
perpetuation of her image.
Prince Kropotkin has pushed open her door. She has lain between
sleep and torment all night. She did not expect him, yet she has left
the door ajar. She did not want him, yet she has left the door ajar.
The pain leaps about her face like li ght.
Her eyes begin to focus in the light now violently swi tched on.
She sees a second man, vague. H e has escaped the amlies to the East
and joined the Movement. H e has contacts in military munitions
warehouses. A history of such Comrades tells her she must be his
whore. She rushes toward sleep. The sheet is pulled back, and she is
exposed sweating and unkempt. Kropotkin indicates where he has
shaved her brows, then proceeds to massage her body. He bridges five
years. She sweats, cannot summon, yet again, the language to distract
him.
He offers her with a simple gesture of moving away. In her
half-sleep she blocks comprehension of it.
Kropotkin stands at the window, looking for his police-shadow,
