What about her face when she talked to him?
I believe I could read guilt on it.
Liar.
We both felt terribly guilty, I guess. So we worked hard to collect more signatures. But we loved to lie together beside the fire. Our tiny circle of light seemed so far from everything. I told her stories. She made up a blues called “My Golden Bourgeois Baby Sold His House For Me.” No, that’s a lie.
What did you do during the day?
We hitch-hiked all over the Laurentians. We’d go down to a beach crowded with sun-bathers and we’d start singing. We were brown, we had good harmonies, people liked to listen to us even if they didn’t open their eyes. Then I’d talk.
“I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m not even talking about politics. I’m talking about your bodies, the ones stretched out on this beach, the ones you’ve just smeared with sun-tan oil. Some of you are over-weight and some of you are too thin, and some of you are very proud. You all know your bodies. You’ve looked at them in mirrors, you’ve waited to hear them complimented, or touched with love. Do you want what you kiss to turn to cancer? Do you want to take handfuls of hair from your child’s scalp? You see, I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m talking about bodies, which are all we have, and no government can restore one finger, one tooth, one inch of normal skin that is lost because of the poison in the air.…”
Did they listen?
They listened and most of them signed. I knew I could be Prime Minister because of the way their eyes listened. It didn’t matter what was said as long as the old words were used and the old chanting rhythm, I could have led them into a drowning ritual.…
Stop this fantasy right now. What were the bodies like on the beach?
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
