ARNOST LUSTIG
301
happened. In that way we were joined by the best that a man and a
woman have for each other. She didn't have to say any of the things she
didn't want
to
say and what she had
to
say before like so many other
people whose word was penetrated by a lie to such a great extent that
the lie cast a shadow on the truth at the same time it swallowed it and
always split the soul of everyone in two. The fact that everybody's soul
had become a combination of truth and its opposite, which gave a two–
sided face to everyone's existence and didn't matter anymore.
I didn't have the strength or intention to argue or contradict her. She
couldn't do the same to me either. She didn't look like she was dying.
Then she mounted me again like I had mounted her body and everything
started again because nothing had stopped- and for a little while she
granted me the greatness that only a woman can give a man, even if he
is just barely maturing in that moment and maybe, just for that reason.
For a few moments it seemed like a non-moving race, the meeting of two
bodies erasing guilt and innocence, skin, hearts, and souls touching. Fear
evaporated in it. What had only been in the stars up to that moment was
now on earth, here. How a person is fated to another. What he was born
for. The moment when everything is and is not, many times larger, many
times more evident, but always for the two who are touching. It was a
moment when two people seem as inseparable as they were yesterday,
and how they would be strangers to each other in a little while again.
"You are alive," I said. "You are beautiful."
"I am alive," she repeated. "Maybe."
"You can believe me."
"I know what it's like."
"Tell me."
"If
you don't have hope, you don't expect anything. Good is bad and
worse the worst you get."
"It's not like that," I objected. "It's like a line that you hold on to.
Some invisible road that you don't know about yet."
"You and I," she said.
"You and I were two people just like all the you's and I's of all the
people who have existed up to that moment everywhere on earth, and
it joined us with them, and with the people who would one day exist
until the end of human time."
"I'm living and dying at the same time- I can't help it," she said.
"And sometimes I'm not dying but I don't live like I am right now. All
I can do is scream. And I'm ashamed of it. Not only because of the
people next door. I'm hysterical."
