PARTISAN REVIEW
389
glisten damply and persecute her in their bite. Another sister protests
on her behalf. The choice has been made. He is to take no part in the
selective process, but restrict himself to training. There is to be no
vying for power or intercommunal combat. To replace her would
• mean a severing of respect and commitment. The sisters assent. He
bares
his
teeth once morc. Perfidia attempts to whitewash any
intentions written on her face. She stands to him, but her belly con–
tracts in the signal that her period has begun. He can see this and
bends to her agony, examining her fingernails.
"It
is lucky for you. Five days from now you must perform and
I
will have stopped bleeding. In that time you will also stop using
tobacco or picking the skin from behind your nails. You will also go
I
,
into solitary confinement in three day's time, take all your instruction
and exercise alone and you will be known now, for better or worse,
(
I
as
Rosa Luxemburg."
The broad shoulders of the forties contracted, then flamed into
the conical breasts of the fifties. Perfidia never got her gown and
silently went into mourning for it. Her decade had run down and
given way to whitewashed times. A mediocre moan hung on the
wind, a tuneless echo, low and dishonest. One day during these
terrible times she began to bleed from the loins and, at last, the
\ prophecy had come true. She had brought this upon herself and
( nothing would change it. She crept through the halls of the 1950s, a
hungry voiceless spirit. Toothless men embraced her in the streets
and she carried their whiskey-breaths to her terror-caves. They fum–
bled in her underwear in dark parks and their fingers clung to her
regions long after, in her solitude. And, in an era of perpetual accusa–
tion, Perfidia said nothing.
Father Munch spent these days before the smiling image of a
bald man who had led him to battle, and adopted the fear of the
moment. He felt accused. The fingers on the screen pointed at him,
a broken soldier, as the war penetrated the bowels of the Eastern
jungles. Then, as quickly, he willed a cancer in his brain and waited
for the times to take him. His demise was silently laid at Perfidia's
doorstep and, for retribution, she conceived a skinful of ugly protru-
sions. This was intolerable to Mother Munch who, having long since
given up the notion of a future for herself, began to groom the
