ARNOST LUSTIG
309
and that increasingly filled her with a fear she found shameful. It had
been that way for a long time. The early morning wind sounded like old
people chattering, their words and screams. Like the echoes of old chal–
lenges and promises of new ones.
Next to Lea of Leuwarden, I remembered what Rabbi Cytron used to
say at
24
Belgicka Street, about the light between the sun and the earth
and about the twilight that wasn't day or night. About the dark that dis–
perses and in which everything disappears. About what a person is,
what he has or hasn't done and what even a dwindling echo gradually
fades into before everything becomes an echo itself.
"It's already day," she said. "And a cold one. It'll be windy."
"Wear your warmest things... ."
She was already cringing.
"I feel naked no matter what I put on. It's like being naked inside.
Everything is outside of yourself. Nothing will ever warm you up again.
Cold is everywhere. It doesn't matter how thick a shawl you've got or
how warm your boots or stockings are. It's the worst. So much has
already happened so many times to so many people. You have to be
careful if you ask somebody for something more. It's out of our hands.
There always has to be two to try anything."
I kept silent.
"It's good that it came on a Wednesday."
"You don't have to make it bigger or less than what it is," I said. "It's
just a trip that we're all going on."
I adjusted her feeling about numbers-that there had to be two or three
of everything-in my mind. Or even four, if I counted Gotlieb Faber-and
he probably wasn't just a selfless idealist, even
if
he had killed himself so
that he wouldn't put anyone else in greater danger, except himself, than
getting sent on a transport. (I could never figure out whether he took his
life because of a guilty conscience, or out of weakness, or just the opposite,
because he still had the strength to at least do something. Why then?)
"So many people vanish from us and we from them," she said.
Had she read my mind?
There were remnants of the last touches of night in her face . A bridge
made of morning rays that she traipsed along from dusk to daybreak.
Everything that was beyond words.
"Three is a lucky number, and it's yours too," I said.
All of a sudden I sensed death or dying behind her small porcelain face
that I couldn't fight with mere words. It seemed like she was falling asleep
or into a dream that she wouldn't have the power to wake up from again.
It was in the tone of her alto voice, in the vessel or cage of her body, in the
