52
PARTISAN REVIEW
Wasn't that your brother who was shot down in the field, people
asked.
I don't have a brother, I said angrily.
Wasn't that your brother? - the one they shot down? school
children teased.
My brother? Whose brother? I don't have a brother.
They jeered and threw stones at me. Chanted: He deserved it,
he deserved it, the traitor, he deserved every bullet they gave him!
I don't have arry brother,
I shou ted.
It is said, and if you climb high enough you can ascertain for
yourself, that The Wall zigzags and curves back upon itself, by no
means describing a perfect circle around the Forbidden Zone.
Strange. Hard to comprehend. Unless the workers who built it were
drunk, or playful. Or subversive.
To caress - just once - the blank face of The Wall. To get that
close. To lay your hands upon it. Just once! In dreams, the most
shameful and turbulent of dreams, where one is clambering up The
Wall-and being riddled by the guards' bullets at the same time (for
death too, at such a time, in such a manner, would be exquisite): in
dreams we scale The Wall nightly, and keep our secrets to ourselves.
The Wall, where small yellow butterflies impale themselves
upon the barbed wire . A great fist in my chest. Broken glass beneath
my feet. A delirium that must be love ... Of course there are lurid
tales: men and even women shot down and dragged away and never
heard of again, and never spoken of again. Because they stared too
hard at The Wall. Might have seemed to be studying it, memorizing
it. Adoring it. (Do I know anyone who has disappeared? I know no
one. Disappearing carries with it the obliteration of memory, after
all.
Everything
connected with a traitor is lost.)
A very strange tale, too wild to be credible, about a family in a
balloon who drifted across The Wall. Seven people including a
baby. Romantic but implausible ... Wouldn't a large ballon make
an irresistible target?
(Someday, it is whispered, we
will
overcome The Wall. And
mate with those men and women on the "other side." As we are
destined to do. As we had done in history. We will breed a race of
