552
PARTISAN REVIEW
favorite chick, which he cradled against his breast and rocked like a baby.
Father said:
"If we have a little bread left over, or a cupful of soup-"
And my mother:
"I've sent
him
some already The boy took it up, and some groats from
yesterday too; we must go on saying it's for the chicks so as not to offend
him. But what will happen in the long run?"
Father replied:
"We must do whatever we can, and hope."
My mother said:
"There you go, talking like the radio again. Stop it. The boy can hear."
Every evening the three of us sat in the kitchen, after supper and the
start of the curfew, playing Monopoly. My mother would clasp a glass of tea
in her hands, absorbing its warmth even though it was summer. And we
would sort stamps and stick them in the album. Father liked to recount var–
ious facts about each country we came across. My mother soaked the stamps
off the paper. Mter twenty minutes I fished the loosened stamps out of the
basin of water and laid them out to dry on a sheet of blotting paper. The
stamps lay there face downward like the photograph of Italian prisoners of
war captured by Field Marshal Montgomery in the Western Desert: they sat
in rows on the burning sand, with their hands tied behind their backs and
their faces hidden between their knees.
Then Father would identify the dried stamps with the help of the thick
English catalogue that had on its cover an enlarged drawing of the stamp
with a black swan, the most valuable stamp in the world, even though its
face value was only one penny. I would pass Father the transparent hinges
on my outstretched hand, my eyes fixed on his lips. Father talked about
some countries with polite loathing; others commanded his respect. He
would talk about the population, the economy, the principal towns, the nat–
ural resources, the archeological sites, the political regime, the artistic
treasures. He always spoke especially about the great painters, musicians, and
poets, who, by his account, were almost all Jews, or ofJewish descent, or at
least half-Jews. Sometimes he would touch me on the head, or on the back,
groping inside himself for some stifled affection, and suddenly he would
say:
"Tomorrow you and I shall go to the newsdealer. I'll buy you a pencil
case. Or something else, if you like. You're not happy enough."
Once he said:
"I'm going to tell you something, a secret I've never told anybody.
Please keep it just between the two of us. I'm a bit color-blind. These things
happen. It's a hereditary defect. It looks as though you'll have to see some
things for the two of us. Yes indeed; after all, you are imaginative and intel-
