88
PARTISAN REVLEW
to be offering. He waited for him, happy, as in a dream. So that it
seemed only natural to tell the events of his life in answer to the
questions this newfound cousin kept asking him.
"Were you afraid there?"
"Yes, in the evening."
"Did they beat you?"
"Seldom. I hid from them. I wasn't scared of them."
"What scared you, then?"
"The evenings. Beautiful evenings. Fields, fields, stretching as far as
the eye could see. Very beautiful evenings."
"Is that what frightened you?"
"Yes. A desert all around. Crows. I don't know. Silence. The fields
went on forever. The silence too."
The cousin paused.
"I see. You were terrified by the vastness of it all. And the others?"
"They prayed, they whispered. Some cried. I was alone."
"What was the hardest thing?"
"The food."
The conversations were followed by long walks, during which the
teacher found out everything he wanted to know. Sometimes he wrote
things in a notebook with a shiny blue cover that he would whisk out
from his shirt pocket.
"Did you ever cry?"
"When Grandfather died. He was the closest to me."
"Were there happier days too?"
"Yes, when Mara got sick the first time . They took me to Uncle's
so I wouldn't catch it."
The boy paid attention to him as to an older brother; he gave him
his full trust. He forgot that the others, too, had walked him
to
the
threshold of friendship, and then suddenly had revealed their true faces.
They enjoyed the sight of the extreme suffering of others, it amused them
... He had forgotten. He didn't have the time to prepare himself and
was caught unawares by his cousin's other face .
The speech sounded good; they practiced it every day. It contained
everything he had told his cousin, but arranged differently; it was shorter,
with new words. "Silence all around," he had said; it became "a vast si–
lence," no great improvement even if he didn't understand it.
Then, suddenly, the teacher became harsh, turned cold and somber
like a raven.
"It's no good, it's not good at all! You've got to speak louder! If
you don't nobody will hear you. Louder, louder, do you understand?"
This shouting caught him by surprise, paralyzed him. But he quickly
found his voice again, hoping to appease the maniac: " ... our brothers,
