(SE BALAsz-RAK6CZY
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that is the one who bears the wounds, how can anything happen? So I
sit there in my corner, smoking. Thank God for cigarettes! And for my
room, my beautiful room in which I fold myself as in an old embroi–
dered shawl.
3.
L.
says my room's too cluttered - that it's more like a warehouse than
an office. But I love it.When I shut that door behind me I feel I enter
into myself And at the same time, I enter into my childhood - the best
pan of it - hiding in that room in an unused wing, full of ancient bric–
a-brae. My parents' rooms were terribly bare. They tried to pretend the
past didn't exist, so they had its artifacts - its memories - banished to
that distant place. And there I made my nest. Oh the daydreams!, the
stories I told myself1 And they could not touch me.
Not that anyone was ever cruel - in the usual sense, at least. Mother
was almost too affectionate. Nevertheless, I was alone. Two things, I
think, kept me going. First, that glorious room full of things: gilded
throne-like chairs from the time of Francis Rik6czy, Spanish
varaguenas,
labyrinthine with secret drawers. And old paintings: an Annunciation
with Donors, a View of Rome. It was a place to dream myself into ex–
istence.
And then there was Katje, sweet, sweet refuge. When I was very
small and she didn't yet live with us, I remember her visiting one cold
winter night, wrapped in a wool coat with a squirrel-fur collar. I can
feel that fur on my face, wet with snow, and Katie's yielding cheek. And
then she did come to stay, and so there was always Katje. But, if I am
truthful, in my depths the loneliness remained.
I lived in that room as a child, and I live with it now inside me. I
have recreated it too in my office, literally and figuratively. And so I have
become that room for others - a place of refuge, full of memories and
old things. Katje's memories are there, too, mingled with my own. She
was born, I think, in about 1816, though her earliest memories were of
the twenties. And she herself was full of even older memories - reminis–
cences of uncles who'd fought at Jena and who remembered learning
with horror of the entrapment at Varennes. And then, in her own long
lifetime, revolutions, vast, imponderable events. The sea boiled, and in its
midst stood Katje - a beacon and a rock. She shines for me still.
Perhaps
r
never loved anyone but Katje ... Katje and children. That
thought dismays me.
4. I have not written here for two whole weeks. Even now, I have the
feeling of facing a blank wall. Not completely blank perhaps. Over there,
