204
PARTISAN REVIEW
my new life? Go away to your own hunting grounds . Go away to the
frost of the stars in your black-and-white spacecraft. Go away and
never come back. Not even in dreams. Not even in my body's long–
ings . Not even in the plaster of the walls and the creaking of the
floors . Go away from the woodcut and the cowl. Why not cross the
snowbound wilderness, knock at the door of the first hut , and ask for
light and warmth? Marry your bespectacled secretary. Or any of
your admirers. Take a wife and make a home . Make sure there's a
real log fire in winter. A little garden. Roses. A dovecote. Perhaps
you will have another son , and when you get home from work in the
evening you can sit down with him at your black desk , cut out pic–
tures for him from the
Geographical Magazine,
touch his hair and mess
it up with gum. Your wife will run her hand over your tired brow.
Massage at night your neck muscles , strained from writing and
loneliness. You can put a record on . Not Vivaldi or Albinoni–
perhaps some pensive jazz. There will be a rainstorm outside . Water
rushing in the gutter. From the next room you will catch scents of
talcum powder and shampoo, bedtime smells of the child . You will
both lie there in your bed , listening to the roar of the wind through
the tight-closed window. Each reading a book . Or else you will talk
to her, in a whisper, about Napoleon's campaigns. Soon the light
will go out and her fingers will start wandering among the curls on
your chest. You will close your eyes . Then I shall come too and slip
between you like a rustling. And in the darkness you and I will laugh
together without making a sound. My genie and my bottle.
It is now almost six o'clock in the morning. I have been writing
to you all night. I will have a shower, dress , and make breakfast for
my little girl and my husband . There is happiness in the world ,
Alec, and suffering is not the opposite of it, it is the thorny path
along which we have to creep on our bellies to that forest clearing,
bathed in a fine lunar silver, which is calling to us and waiting. Don't
forget.
Ilana
