II
Only a few months since the first day of the war, yet I cannot recall one thing about it.
What I know is, that until the end it will remain the outstanding day of my life, the day of days. No matter what happens later, we who have lived through it have drunk at one draught the dregs of all the centuries, we have borne all the thunder of the heavens on our shoulders. Those who ask "Why exactly us" do not know that misfortune is always waiting to extort its tax.
I do not speak of the older people, those of the other generation, of the other age: they have not been touched.
But we, we on that day!
After all, I can recall several words and impressions, but they are no more illuminating than the way my folks used to describe the day I was born. "You looked like a little red monkey, you didn't cry much, your grandmother was the first to kiss you, it was a dreadfully hot evening."
And I can also recall Mr. Barret's gray stony face, his huge, petrified figure, when he entered the office where we were talking and regaining a little hope. "It's here!" he discharged from the doorway. None of us gave any sign of understanding. "It's posted on the bulletin boards!" he shouted, and advanced into the room like a weapon about to descend.
As a field of wheat catches fire stalk by stalk until the whole is in a blaze, so we caught fire in our stupor, each spiked to the ground by his own flame.
Fire! Fire! Moments of scarlet, strangled breathing, souls cowering in bosoms, horror, too much horror already, wide-open eyes staring into space....
I remember I had to lean against the wall, and other trifling incidents, but my impotent dismay, my realization of all the folly let loose upon the world no more come back to me than the taste of the first gulp of life at birth.
I must have kept a clear brain and steady legs, because I ran straight home.... What street, what hell, where was I?... I had no eyes for the street nor ears for the humming in my head, nor consciousness even of the daze that was driving me on.
We met in front of the house whose quiet walls still enclosed our happiness. We passed under the porte-cochère heavily, passively, like beasts driven to slaughter, and the staircase was an ascent to Calvary. I do not think we exchanged a single word. When the door closed upon us we embraced without kissing, and my cheek against his shoulder was wet with tears that were not of my shedding.
It had occurred to me that he might leave for the war, but like every other thought this one too was promptly chilled and crushed. Nor can I say that it was the idea of his going that made me suffer the most. I was stupefied beyond the power to suffer. I was just as ready to burst out laughing or tear off my arms. I let myself be touched, handled, and moved like a stone thrown into space. But contact with him restored me a little, a very little, to the realization of what I was going to lose.
The days succeeding were spat from a volcano; nothing remains of them but ashes. You learned new words; a whole language born of the moment slipped from your tongue; countries became persons with distinct individualities, gestures and features. You actually fed on what appeared in the newspapers, picking up items like grains of manna. Men alone counted—men, men. Life was in their hands, life and the fate of the world. So and so many killed—abstractions with which the world juggled in figures. Death, a human divinity after all, settled down familiarly. Nothing was like anything that had gone before.
People began to talk of glory....
A day came: his departure.
I got his things ready as I always did before a trip, from a list, with my usual mania for taking along too many things. After filling his bag with all the necessaries, I stowed a tiny bottle of my perfume in it, a cigarette-case, his last birthday gift, some dried flowers, and our baby's photograph. I childishly pictured his exclamation of delighted surprise when he would remove his shirts and the picture would fall out.
Before he left the house, hardly recognizable in his uniform, he kissed his son savagely and pressed him long and hard, bending low to hide his tears.... On the way he spoke mostly of the child—commonplaces to deaden his pain. "Don't let him be too much of a bother. You must be strict with him, you know." I saw he was entrusting his share in his survival to me, and it was better to avoid reference to a parting that marched on to death.
Regiments were springing up on all sides, troops of men with innocent eyes and faces shining with pride; sons, brothers, lovers, changed into statues of men, in a confusion of brass bands, cheers, red and gold, clashing of arms, and tramping of feet.
If only this were hell in its completeness! But he was not there. He had left six days before without my being able to say good-bye to him.
There was the last kiss, the fixed, tangible second when you part for good and the yard of space between you actually counts. You were two bodies clasped, then you became only one body, two arms ... a soul locked in a leaden coffin.
There were the wretched minutes when you summon all your illusions to your assistance. "Nothing can possibly happen to him ... of course not to him...."
I returned, dragging my misery like a chain. I was one of the vast herd which fretted the surface of the earth like a canker, moulded and moved by a deadly maniac hand.... Never before has there been such a herd.
Being a woman, I felt withdrawn from the herd, exactly as I had felt on the first day of the war that humanity was cut in two—men and women.
I was impotent, curdled, set aside. Like the other women I passed by the young men with orders to die and only a few days to live, though their bearing was of men who had long to live. I passed by the other women, useless flesh of the earth, faint-hearted flesh for grieving....
I went.... In another sense it was the herd that passed by, that she-thing, in countless numbers, dancing bacchantes with hideous hyena-laughter and robes smelling of red blood and heavy wine, compliant....
You no longer saw yourself, because you had been swallowed up in a living craw.
Where were you, my sisters from everywhere, women of Europe, you, Trude and Clara and Mania? What were you doing? Were you weeping?
You saw, didn't you, that bloody sky with forked black signs, that summer swooning away, that day?... Why was not your voice heard in denunciation of the universal slaughter?
Why was not my own voice heard, when there were outcries in my throat, tears in my flesh?