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By Root 12331 0

forever. ‘We must die!’ he begun to rave in the dark. I heard him say in a kind of long groan, ‘Death is a necessity,’ and then he kept groping across me toward the table as if he was hunting for the poison. But strange, you know, all this lasted only a few moments. He was very weak, it seemed to me, I was able to hold him back with my arms and I pressed him down and said over and over again, ‘Darling, darling, go to sleep, everything’s all right, you’ve had a nightmare.’ Foolish things like that. But somehow what I said and done have this effect on him because quite soon he was asleep again. It was so dark in that room. I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was cool now.

“We slept for hours and hours and hours. When I finally woke up I could tell from the way the sun shined in the window that it was early in the afternoon. The leaves were bright outside the window, as if the whole woods was on fire. Nathan was still asleep and I just lay there beside him for a long time, thinking. I knew that I couldn’t keep buried any longer the thing that was the last thing on earth that I wanted to remember. But I couldn’t hide it any longer from myself, and I couldn’t hide it from Nathan either. We couldn’t live together unless I told him. I knew that there were certain things I could never tell him—never!—but there was at least one thing he had to know, otherwise we couldn’t continue on, never get married surely, never. And without Nathan I would be... nothing. So I make up my mind to tell him this thing which was not a secret really, but just something I had never mentioned because the pain of it was still more than I could bear. Nathan was still sleeping. His face was very pale but all that craziness had gone away from it and he looked peaceful. I had the feeling that maybe all the drugs had left him, the demon had gone and all the black winds, you know, of the tempête, and he had returned to being the Nathan I loved.

“I got up and walked to the window and looked at the woods—they were bright and flaming, so beautiful. I almost forgot the pain in my side and all that had happened, and the poison and the mad things Nathan have done. When I was a little girl in Cracow and very religious I would play a game with myself which I called ‘the shape of God.’ And I would see something so beautiful—a cloud or a flame or the green side of a mountain or the way light filled the sky—and I would try to discover God’s shape in it, as if God actually took the form of what I was watching and lived in it and I was able to see Him there. And that day when I looked out the window at those incredible woods that sweeped down to the river and the sky so clear above, why, I forgot myself and for a moment I felt like a little girl again and begun to try to see God’s shape in these things. There was a wonderful smell of smoke in the air and I saw smoke rising far off in the woods and I saw God’s shape in that. But then—but then it came to my mind what I really knew what was really the truth: that God have left me again, left me forever. I felt I could actually see Him go, turning His back on me like some great beast and go crashing away through the leaves. God! Stingo, I could see this huge back of Him, going away in the trees. The light faded then and I felt such an emptiness—the memory coming back and knowing what I would have to say.

“When Nathan finally waked up I was beside him on the bed. He smiled and said a few words and I felt he hardly knew what had happened all these last hours. We said one or two ordinary things to each other, you know, sleepy waking-up things, and then I bent down close to him and said, ‘’Darling, I have something I must say to you.’ And he begun to come back with a laugh. ‘Don’t look so—’ Stopping like that, and then he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You thought I have been some kind of unattached woman from Poland who was never married and so on, with no family or anything in the past.’ I said, ‘It has been easier for me to make it look like that, for I’ve not wanted to dig up the past. I know it has been easier for you, maybe,