PARTISAN REVIEW
to live. She tries to warn him of the bomb, but he holds her mouth
fast because women bite. Women do such things.
She hears a crack, two, three, and the policeman falls from her.
Kropotkin stands over them with his pistol and strips the dead man
of his identity card to add to his collection. He appears unconcerned
about the bomb and indeed the ticking has stopped and there is no
explosion.
"It was a test."
She fumbles in her narcosis and dreams now of Kropotkin's grin
on the day of his execution. Her masses of hair tumble behind her
as she rides to the secluded wood on her bicycle. These are the woods
of the 1940s where her Mother has described the lurkings of rape
and masturbation and now, as then, she drifts to them in fascina–
tion. The willows overhang the small ponds polluted now with dead
frogs where she once walked with Father Munch when the War had
ended, as they say. In this thickness she has discovered her secret
anguish and kept it to herself, for herself. All the dreadful mini-deaths
of the woman she has unlocked here. And Father Munch walks here
no more. The world is without men once again and the crackle of
times long ago is with her.
She comes upon a lake and swims in it naked to limber her
body and, on its banks, she performs her ballet lessons, thrusting her
legs to the air in postures of angular composure. Her dance is private
and yet the world holds its breath in the camouflaging leaves.
She finds the sisters in the appointed place and a calm Kropot–
kin, manacled to a tree, blows her a mocking kiss. She has kept them
waiting, is reprimanded and finally asked to carry out her task. She
is handed his own pistol and she goes to him at his tree. He looks up
as she holds the gun to his head, challenging her in a final moment.
A
softness, like hair, touches her in her secret places and a laughter
overwhelms her. She sits down by a pool, with her feet in the cool
water. A sister collects the gun from her as Kropotkin shrieks her en–
during weakness to the decades. He goes to
his
death believing this
as the sister spatters his brains about the forest. Perfidia, similing back
over her shoulder, no longer feels the need to bury his eyes separately
and far away. There is nothing to live up to, nothing at all to prove.
