392
PARTISAN REVIEW
Communist environment.
It
was taboo to touch a broom, peel potatoes,
wash the floor, make dinner. Such seemingly inconsequential actions
could lead to only one thing: the annihilation of her higher substance,
the substance that was her greatest and-why beat around the bush?–
only treasure.
If
she were to make herself a soft-boiled egg or fry a
schnitzel, then the dignity of an entire era would collapse with a crash,
the Middle Ages would finally grind to a halt.
Fortunately there was someone to wash the windows and floors, do
the shopping, make lunch and dinner: Helena, the maid, the servant, the
serf. Helena got up every day at
4:00 A.M.
and took the early streetcar–
full of desperadoes with eyes red from exhaustion-in to work. She
worked as a janitor in the city's center for rat control and perhaps as a
result she herself looked a little like a rat: she had a narrow snout, a
straight nose, and small, bright eyes. She was short and deft, restless and
meddlesome. No one ever did battle for this Helen beneath the walls of
Troy. When she left for work at dawn, the rest of the apartment house
had not yet woken up; most of the town's inhabitants were still sound
asleep. Mrs.
C.
was undoubtedly asleep, I was sleeping, and so was my
roommate, an enigmatic engineering student two years older than
myself. The entire house woke up only around seven-thirty when
Helena returned with the brisk air of one who had done her small part
in exterminating the city's rats. Helena came home from work just as
bleary civil servants were approaching the city's many office buildings,
and as the rats lay down to sleep in their lairs.
Helena was called upon to deal with the outside world, with history and
nature, with pigeons and crows, with cats, with the milkman, mailman,
and chimney sweep, with soot and milk. She was the one who handled
concrete objects; she inhaled dust, polished the doorknobs and scoured the
kettle. She was always in a rush, no time to rest, she hurried and scurried.
She slept in the kitchen, on a couch covered with a brown bedspread by
day. At night she pored over the local paper by lamplight; this was her only
chance to contemplate the varieties of human folly. She would put on her
wire-rimmed glasses and scrutinize the events listed in the crime column:
someone had murdered someone else, out of love or envy, for money. I
think she sighed then with relief, since this meant the world had not
entirely lost its earlier, prewar imagination and wasn't yet reduced to meet–
ings of the one party's central committee. Mrs.
C.
handed down instruc–
tions, managed the expenses, and, like any minister of finance, complained
about costs and Helena's unconscionable overspending.
From time to time horrific quarrels erupted between the mistress and
her galley slave for no apparent reason; as in an arsenal, the slightest
