306
PARTISAN REVIEW
My Grandma Olga used
to
say that I was born as a love child but no
one had ever called me a 'friend of the heart.' We had come a long way
since yesterday. I sensed what would be different inside me forever.
"You say nice things to me. The very nicest."
"You do the same."
Then she said, "I've already done anything and everything to survive."
"I've also done everything I could just to live. Don't we all?" I kissed
the inside of her palms. "It's what you foretold in the cards."
Next door the old people began stirring. Had the time come? Both of
us could imagine them. People holding their heads firmly if bowed
against their will, with backs that nothing and nobody would ever
straighten out again, weakened by their last night in the fortress and
unprepared for many days' journey by train where they would be
squeezed by the hundreds into a space for forty. Men and women alike
would take their aging bodies, their sunken chests, scrawny muscles,
and knotty calves with them, their lined skin and wrinkles and bold
heads. They would take their duck necks covered with age spots, their
protruding bones and knuckles, along with all of their pain and scars.
The motion of the train would be their only movement on a trip to
destruction until they reached their final destination.
"I don't want to live like a pig," she said.
"Nobody wants to," I answered.
"I know it's not enough to only not want it," she added.
In the distance a whistle blew on the train tracks: two, three times.
The wagons were already ready. I didn't want to talk about the train or
the tracks or the trip or what the east probably meant for us. How was
it that one word could contain all the evil of all the ages from the past
through the present to the distant future? It was a new gauge of fear, a
new gauge of evil. Something that maybe hadn't alarmed people, or, on
the contrary, that had come like a shadow either in the same or a new
shape. Who knew? I still didn't know that it was that way, that a new
standard of evil had arrived with the Germans, or that evil rarely mani–
fests all of its dimensions or shapes all at once. Did the worst always
come slowly or quickly? Could you see them or was it invisible?
"It's a pleasure to look at you," I said.
"The train's all assembled now," she said. "You should go get your
things. Even the engine is there. Two of them. Fifty wagons. They're
sturdy. They don't want us to get stranded along the way."
She was sizing up the situation like a blind person or like somebody who
knows more than they let on by noises and sounds, probably like the old
people were doing. She was bound
to
them from the opposite side, by her
