44
PARTISAN REVIEW
who smiles at you? But just try and tell her that you arc fifty centimes
short. Ah! Try to tell her that you do not have enough money. That
nice person will immediately change into a tigress, will call the police,
handcuff you, and send you to the guillotine.
And us? What in the world did we do? We murdered, built concen–
tration camps, that's true, but we were reaching for the characters in the
Dickens novels. We wanted a better life, a different humanity - nobler,
purer. We wanted every city to be a capital. We wanted broad, well-lit
streets.
What exactly did we destroy? An evil world, full of suffering, pain,
anger, and boredom . An impenetrable, opaque world. Streets coiled like
snail shells. Gardens, jungles of shrubs. StuffY July evenings, the shouting
of drunkards, the unconscious singing of birds , narrow and tangled
streams, mountain chains scattered without order on the map, twisted
borders stealing like thieves between countries. Sled races, the frosty smell
of snow, the rosy checks of servants, apples lying still on white paper in
basements, locks made of massive metals, expensive restaurants, in which
food was piled high in pyramids and waiters walked stimy like man–
nequins. Parks and forests full of lovers in June. The mocking, repeated
whistle of the thrush, echoed in every vale. Judges - old men in wigs,
with eyes red from little sleep - called to pardon or to kill, a task
greater than they could handle . Beautiful diplomats , eaten by syphilis.
Drivers, sleeping with mouths wide open, waiting for their masters.
Children whipped at school. Execution squads composed of helpless
soldiers who would have preferred the gardener's job of grafting trees.
Whores freezing in alleys. The vibrating shouts of onion venders at the
market, where the crowd, it seemed, would immediately explode
municipal boundaries and take off across the fields and fencerows for
another country.
What exactly did we destroy? A boring history with its small con–
quests, a history which neighboring world powers drank slowly, gulp by
gulp, instead of intoxicating themselves with a real, absolute victory; a
history with its low triumphal arches, recalling bourgeois furniture. We
destroyed the world damned by prophets, hated by poets, the wormy
apple.
In
the fall, swallows flew south. Smoke traveled to heaven, creeks
steamed at daybreak, wagtails ran along the beach swaying like living
fans. A train sometimes stopped at night in a field, and the heavy puffing
of the steam engine flushed birds hidden in invisible trees. Tall poplars
marked the road. A hawk hovered under clouds, a storm approached,
hail and plumes of lightning. A fat policeman had difficulty buckling the
belt under his stomach. Jewish neighborhoods and synagogues, the harsh
God of the Jews, a polyglot who also knew Yiddish. The despair of
beggars who had to leave their modest dwellings because they could not
