312
PARTISAN REVIEW
a man and a woman, get close; what is born, dies, or survives from
them. What marks them for a long time, invisibly and visibly.
Something in her had fled. I wanted to stop it or change it or at least
lessen its effect but the light had already moved outside of her. She
returned to her kingdom of shadows where she could be alone. Where
there was only a single lie and a single death, connected with the only
name of that one person. No one could go there to help her. Was she
thinking about the people who had thrown away the possibility not to
shoot, or about the people who still had a cyanide pill up their sleeve
just to make sure, like Godieb Faber had had? Was the help of my plea–
sure and energy to no avail? I thought about how a woman always risks
something more than a man, even if in everything else they are the same.
She had begun to distance herself from me without moving an inch,
like a part of the universe, a star that first falls and then disappears;
something that separates a person from the rest without taking a step.
How all the people are strangers to one another and that doesn't change
even for the very closest. Maybe she was thinking about what would
happen if everyone, all men and women including the old people and
children, had guns to shoot back with. Or was she thinking about some–
thing else? I don't know where her mind could have wandered.
"It
would be a thousand to one," I said.
"Maybe ten thousand to one. You know what kind of odds the Ger–
mans have."
"You can't change some people," she said. (She really was thinking
about something else.) "We all got born somehow. What can you do if
it's your nature?"
"It
would probably be hard for you to change that, and all a person is
who doesn't shoot is a coward," I told her. "Maybe one person can stick
up for himself when his back is to the wall but few do it in advance.
Their nature has got to have something to do with it. Or a different kind
of hope. How and for what you were raised and what things you expe–
rienced . The next place will be different for sure."
"Some things you can only answer for yourself," she said.
Maybe she was thinking about her friend in the British
Air
Force, or about
how many more airplanes and pilots Germany had and how they hadn't
brought England to her knees yet. Maybe she was thinking about the young
men her age who were fighting against the Third Reich but had already fallen
while she, in the meanwhile, lived on, or about the soldiers who had already
been taken out of the war due to becoming wounded, crippled, blinded, or
deaf. There was no end to her imagination, just like there was no end to mine.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked .
