58
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Child!" Arabella clasped her hands. "Do you really mean to
separate us? Can't you see how your yellow-belly likes hanging
around my neck? Child, the snake and I love each other!" She took
the head of the yellow-belly in her palms and kissed it on the mouth.
"Child, I confess that I myself am quite a yellow-belly and if you are
truly a young naturalist, you must study both of us ."
Something like a ball of lightning flew over Shoreline Road and
hung over the main square of Pompeii , over the City Council build–
ing, and over the most powerful and majestic sculpture of Historic
Titan.
"We are all yellow-bellies!" enthusiastically shouted our entire
company: oh, that magnetic Arabella!
What was hanging in the distance over the square did not hang
for a long time. It struck and scattered in a zillion sparks. Then, for
a second, a phosphorescent light appeared and illuminated the main
square. One could see the statues of various epochs falling: a border
guard, a woman tractor driver, a tank driver, an astronaut . . .,–
and how the principal, most powerful statue began to fall down .
It
became frozen in my memory just like that-in the state of leaning
and falling-because the phosphorous disappeared and the crash of
the statue's fall was muffled by the swelling uproar in Pompeii:
orchestras, shouts, laughter, and the crackling of fires. A thought
flashed through my mind-and how is mine, my personal HT,
doing there, what has happened to him?
"No victims!" exclaimed one of Arabella's retinue.
"An extraordinary phenomenon of nature, comrades! A vol–
canic eruption with no loss of life.
It
is the counterpart to the neu–
tron bomb: material goods are destroyed, people remain whole.
That's precisely what I reported to Rome on the hot line: no losses of
human life; courage is making a stand against the elements!"
By his entire appearance, this man, dressed in an official two–
piece suit, with our beehive pin in his buttonhole, was supposed to
personify the stability of our all-embracing administration, but a
small muscle was twitching in his face, and a bottle of cognac was
sticking out of his jacket pocket.
Arabella encouraged him with her soft palm, caressing his
neatly combed hair from one side of his head to the other.
"Poor child, deserted in the midst of the fiery elements! This
morning you were still reigning in your City Council office, and
now you are all alone! We won't leave you! Take heart!"
