ARNOST LUSTIG
299
like the sun, the stars, and the forest, like mountains and abysses. The grasp
I felt from within her a man could dream about until he dies. Or only
dream. We were the same in everything else. All of a sudden what we were
doing didn't have anything in common with how she didn't want to give
someone pleasure or how she wanted to stop or spoil the act or pretend like
it wasn't happening; how she never acted like a customer of hers thought
she would or how they wanted her to. She left me to figure her out on my
own. Neither her nervousness nor implacability bothered me anymore. I
knew she couldn't be only one person. No one is ever just one person.
Maybe my presence made her become aware of things she didn't want to
think of in spite of the daylight, to see and hear things she no longer wanted
to think about. I heard her exhale deeply, then sob and start crying.
I remembered what my older friend of sorts, ViIi Feld, the man who
was the reason I had come to her, had said (and how the two thought–
ful creases about the ridge of his nose had almost taken on an expres–
sion of fury), that she was hysterical and neurotic in a thousand ways
that almost wiped out what was good about her and how there was no
way of knowing what to do when she got crazy.
It
had always
astounded him and he could have done without it.
She wanted to see me in the morning light. I did, too. I didn't tell her
how pretty she was anymore; she could read it by the expression on my
face, by the way I was smiling. Did she want me to sing to her? She lan–
guored in her beauty like someone who inhabits a world they leave and
come back to, a world in which they either get older or take with them
on their way to destruction. She had the look of a cave where the only
light comes in the morning when the stars are leaving. Her beauty was
like a smoldering sun, a waning moon. I took in the parts of her body
that she bared and what she showed only
to
me. I already knew from
one of the camp inmates called Black Joe about the difference between
somebody being naked for everybody or just for one person. She was
naked only for me. In that moment it meant everything.
I felt what people feel when they are happy when something has hap–
pened. I knew what I had achieved even if the part of her with ViIi Feld's
name on it wasn't as big as I had thought it had been. He wasn't the only
thing I was trying to live up to anymore. He paled in retrospect. Some–
thing in me had evened up with him. Maybe I matured in that moment,
by one of those thousands of invisible steps towards being old, through
new experiences on the passage to death. Some shifts come all at once,
unexpectedly. Didn't I know that even they can be beautiful? There were
probably a thousand ways a person could go to his death and what had
happened was my way. Something that was only mine became a part of
