310
PARTISAN REVIEW
shadows that scared her inside.
In
the premonition that she lacked an expla–
nation for. She had more fear in her than faith, more uncertainty than self–
confidence, more anxiety than levelheadedness that could drive the fear
away. She was eighteen years old. I understood her words in a different way
than she meant them. She was taking my words in her own way too.
In
the morning light of the little attic in the old people's home near the
firehouse on L Street in Terezin, the Greater Fortress, at the end of Sep–
tember
1944,
next
to
the beautiful and sad Lea from Leuwarden, recently
married, without having spent her wedding night with her husband, with
her long legs and face of porcelain, with her faultless skin stretching over
every millimeter of her body, I thought how people would talk about what
had gone on here some day and how it would all sound so far away and
impossible, and how they would shake their heads in disbelief (at the self–
ishness or selflessness, the loyalty or infidelities, the betrayals and failures,
at the truth and lies and self-delusion, at everything that has crippled
people's spirits and backs for so long already, at what people run to and
in what they seek relief and why, at the people who protected themselves
or killed themselves, along with their whole families, or who gave in and
obediently filed onto the trains to the east without a fight, humiliated and
confused, who didn't even try
to
escape, not only because of the punish–
ment those heroes got, but also because they didn't have anyone or any–
where to run to, aware of what was waiting for them at the end of the
tracks and the ramp; at the fear and secrets of people, the old and the
young, at the free love, the women for sale, and at not belonging any–
where) and I would know that each person had been taken somewhere,
each had gone some place and somebody knew who he had been, and that
they had been the children of known and unknown fathers, of known and
unknown mothers. One of them had a daughter in Leuwarden who col–
ored my last night in the fortress of Terezin with the shade of things never
to be repeated, of everything that can happen only once. She leaned
toward me again before I started getting dressed and kissed me.
I watched her as she put on her traveling outfit. She had young, firm,
eighteen-year-old breasts.
In
the morning light I could see light blue
veins rambling over her left breast like little paths of a map or a river,
through which fear, shame, sadness, and blood flowed. Her skin was
almost translucent. Her heart was pumping under the strongest vein. I
noticed how her nipples leaned off
to
the sides of the shallow hollow
between her breasts which called to mind large cone-shaped drops that
descended into the smooth, soft skin of her throat.
"It's good luck to set out on a trip on Wednesday," I said.
"I heard about it Sunday."
