Ugly and white and ruined by offices.
What did you do at night?
She helped me to her bare breasts and the clothed outline of her body.
Be more specific, will you?
The mountain released the moon, like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain. I was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.
A bat swooped over the fire and thudded into the pines. Norma closed her eyes and pressed the guitar closer. She sent a minor chord through his spine and into the forest.
America was lost, the scabs ruled everything, the skyscrapers of chrome would never budge, but Canada was here, infant dream, the stars high and sharp and cold, and the enemies were brittle and easy and English.
The firelight grazed over her, calling out a cheek, a hand, then waving it back to the darkness.
The camera takes them from faraway, moves through the forest, catches the glint of a raccoon’s eyes, examines the water, reeds, closed water-flowers, involves itself with mist and rocks.
“Lie beside me,” Norma’s voice, maybe Breavman’s.
Sudden close-up of her body part by part, lingering over the mounds of her thighs, which are presented immense and shadowed, the blue denim tight on the flesh. The fan of creases between her thighs. Camera searches her jacket for the shape of breasts. She exhumes a pack of cigarettes. Activity is studied closely. Her fingers move like tentacles. Manipulation of cigarette skilled and suggestive. Fingers are slow, violent, capable of holding anything.
He flicks his sight like a dry fly and whips back the shape he’s caught. She makes an O of her mouth and pushes out a smoke ring with her tongue.
“Let’s go swimming.”
They stand, they walk, they collide in a loud rush of clothing. Face each other with eyes closed. Camera holds each face, one after the other. They kiss blindly, missing mouths, finding them wet. They fall into a noise of crickets and breathing.
“No, this is too serious now.”
Camera records them lying in silence.
There are distances between each word.
“Then let’s go swimming.”
Camera follows them to the shore. They go through the woods with difficulty, the audience has forgotten where they are going, it takes so long the branches will not let them by.
“Oh, let me see you.”
“I’m not so pretty underneath. You stand over there.”
She moves to the other side of an orchard of reeds and now they cross every picture like lines of rain. The moon is a shore-stone someone lucky has found.
So she emerges wet, her skin tightened by gooseflesh, and the whole bright screen enfolds him, lenses and machinery.
“No, don’t touch me. It’s not so bad then. Don’t move. I’ve never done this to anyone.”
Her hair was wet on his stomach. His mind broke into postcards.
Dear Krantz
What she did what she did what she did
Dear Bertha
You must limp like her or maybe even look like I knew nothing was lost
Dear Hitler
Take away the torches I’m not guilty I had to have this
“Will you walk me down to the village? I promised I’d telephone and it must be late.”
“You’re not going to phone him now?”
“I said I would.”
“But after this?”
She touched his cheek. “You know that I have to.”
“I’ll wait at the fire.”
When she was gone he folded his sleeping bag. He couldn’t find his right moccasin but that didn’t matter. Sticking out of her kit-bag he noticed a packet of Ban the Bomb petition forms. He crouched beside the fire and scribbled signatures.
I. G. Farben
Mister Universe
Joe Hill
Wolfgang Amadeus Jolson
Ethel Rosenberg
Uncle Tom
Little Boy Blue
Rabbi Sigmund Freud.
He shoved the forms down her sleeping bag and headed for the highway, which was streaked with headlights. Nothing could help the air.
What did she look like that important second?
She stands in my mind alone, unconnected to the petty narrative. The colour of the skin was startling, like the white of a young branch when the green is thumb-nailed away. Nipples the colour of bare lips. Wet hair a battalion of glistening spears laid on her shoulders.
She was made of flesh and eyelashes.
But you said she was lame, perhaps like Bertha would be from the fall?
I don’t know.
Why can’t you tell Shell?
My voice would depress her.
Shell touched Breavman’s cheek.
“Tell me the rest of the story.”
7
Tamara had long legs, God knows how long they were. Some -times at the meetings she used up three chairs. Her hair was tangled and black. Breavman tried to select one coil and follow where it fell and weaved. It made his eyes feel as though he had walked into a closet of dustless cobwebs.
Breavman and Krantz wore special costumes for hunting Communist women. Dark suits, vests which buttoned high on their shirts, gloves and umbrellas.
They attended every meeting of the Communist Club. They sat imperially among the open-collared members who were munching their sandwich lunches out of paper bags.
During a dull speech on American germ-warfare Krantz whispered: “Breavman, why are paper bags full of white bread so ugly?”
“I’m glad you asked, Krantz. They are advertisements for the frailty of the body. If a junkie wore his hypodermic needle pinned to his lapel you’d feel exactly the same disgust. A bag bulging with food is a kind of visible bowel. Trust the Bolsheviks to wear their digestive systems on their sleeves!”
“Sufficient, Breavman. I thought you’d know.”
“Look at her, Krantz!”
Tamara appropriated another chair for her mysterious limbs. At the same moment the chairman interrupted the speaker and waved his gavel at Krantz and Breavman.
“If you two jokers don’t shut up you’re getting right out of here.”
They stood up to make a formal apology.
“Siddown, siddown, just keep quiet.”
Korea had swarmed with Yankee insects. They had bombs filled with contagious mosquitoes.
“Now I have some questions for you, Krantz. What goes on under those peasant blouses and skirts she always wears? How high do her legs go up? What happens after her wrists plunge into her sleeves? Where do her breasts begin?”
“That’s why you’re here, Breavman.”
Tamara had gone to
