74
PARTISAN REVIEW
door at three in the morning until you rouse your prey, then express
such concern over the nightmare yells and cries he did not even
know were coming out of his sleep, that helplessly he opens the door
to thank you .
But that was a New York dream . I found the light; I sat on my
bed and remembered hearing the French I needed in order to ad–
dress the boomerang-thrower, only in my dream fluency to pass to a
stage in which
he
spoke to
me.
Till all the interference in my solitary
situation left me in that empty apartment, and the sounds of knock–
ing that had brought me stumbling through rooms I hardly knew
faded from me with the French I had found but now lost, though not
its sense .
For the boomerang man from the Bois had told me what I
could not have learned had I not already known it: that if it was
worth telling, it was worth keeping secret , how he shied those pieces
of himself down into the late autumn, his aim at some distance from
him, his boomerangs quarrying not prey but chance which was to
cast that old and various loop beyond routine success , dreaming the
while of a point where at its outward limit the path's momentum
paused upon a crest of stillness and by the logic of our lunatic hope
did not return. In this way , although he will not hear me, he is still
there when I go , and here when I come back .
Yet if this is unbelievable, I tried something more down-to–
earth. One cold afternoon I spoke ; I approached the man and said in
French that I had not seen a boomerang thrown "since" thirty years.
He answered. He had been throwing them that long and longer, he
said. I asked if he had hunted with them . He looked me up and
down, his eyebrows raised, his forehead wrinkled. He had not , he
said . And were these the same old boomerangs he had always used?
Only this one, he said, raising the one in his hand. Speaking for all
of us, I asked if his aim was accurate, though not having the French
noun for "aim" (which proves to be
but),
I asked if, when he threw
(lance')
he was
toujours exact.
In English, then , he said , "American?"
We smiled briefly; we nodded. "You jog," he said slowly , "I throw
boomerangs."
"I used to throw a boomerang as a child," I said in French .
He was looking downrange , shaking the boomerang in his hand
downward at arm's length, first one big shake, then a series of
diminishing shakes . "Moi aussi," I heard him say .
Like a knife-thrower pointing at his target , he launched his toy.
Like a passerby, I continued on my way.
