308
PARTISAN REVIEW
it was what slowly eats life away. How it wanes. What was good and
evil, permanent and fleeting, and what reassures a person and hurts too.
Were we still the masters of our bodies?"
Next to Lea from Leuwarden that last moment on a Wednesday morn–
ing in September
1944,
I thought about the secret art of accepting a per–
son for what he was and wasn't, or what he could be, things a person
doesn't ask or talk about because he doesn't know who he is himself and
if he does then he keeps it to himself.
It
was truth and illusion, a fantasy
only a little better than a lie and at the same time the truth because there
isn't any other; everything that a person has and doesn't have and what
he can and can't do and what he wants and doesn't want. Why? Because.
A thousand reasons. What does it mean to be honest? Is it worth it in
every situation? When is it better to forget? We'd have
to
deal with that
in a couple of hours on the trip, each one of us in a different wagon.
She had returned to the absentmindedness people have when they get
ready to go on a long trip, or people who live somewhere for a long time
and when the time finally comes
to
leave they don't really know where
they're going. Like somebody who still has the feeling the door isn't shut
even after he's checked it ten times. The trip awaiting her would take her
from warmth to winter;
to
the east. Who knew how many times the
train would get held up on the way? She was thinking of how warmly
she would have
to
dress, what shoes she would take.
"I also wanted you to know how strong you are. And how you are
better." I didn't have to lie. "How it'll help you if you look after your–
self like you did here."
I felt the presence of many people in her, especially certain people,
one of whom was her benefactor, Gotlieb Faber. I wasn't trying to find
out what she had paid for that help or what share Viii Feld had in all of
it, or her father who had played his part, too. I selected to just put the
name "many" on it.
She kissed me. I didn't want her
to
explain anything. I felt her tongue.
The warmth and moisture of her mouth. Her face. Her lips. I put my fin–
gers into her hair. Then I handed her my handkerchief. I didn't ask anything.
"Sometimes it's the only thing that you can get from a man," she said.
Her beauty was sadder that morning than it had been last night.
More had happened than I had wanted to.
It
was something different
than I had wanted, something that I could learn
to
live with. Everything
that I had taken she had let me take, and what I had been able to give
her she gave back. But that's how she was withering away like a person
who is sick. Her eyes held the fear of a catastrophe bigger than herself,
than the two of us, bigger than the world that she had lost an idea of
