Yann Andrea Steiner (8 page)

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Authors: Marguerite Duras,Barbara Bray

Tags: #Jewish, #Literary Criticism, #Women Authors, #History

BOOK: Yann Andrea Steiner

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And suddenly the light subsided, and time did, too; already, abruptly, twilight invaded the sea and the forest.

The child walked.

He didn't wait for her. He knew she would come.

He moved forward.

And she had gotten up. She had begun walking far behind him. Then she had begun following him again. She had reached the cliff.

Now and then the girl drew nearer to him. He heard her
footsteps and smiled and cried at the same time, tears of mad joy.

In the dark room we remain standing, apart from each other.

We close our eyes. We look at them; we see them. We weep for their happiness.

We cannot share this joy. We don't want to. We can only weep for it.

You continue to tell me the details of their walk along the cliff.

You say, “He must have reached the other side of the cliff. She is very close behind him.” You say, “They are in a state of horrified happiness.”

You say, “He doesn't turn around. She doesn't want to catch up to him yet. She is white as chalk. She is afraid. But she is laughing. She is so young and at the same time like a dead person. She knows this.”

I ask if you hoped ever to find them in the streets of some city, someday, who knows?

You say yes, you hoped for it as you had never hoped for anything else.

You say, “They are leaving us.”

You say that it's done.

You say, “Now, even if she wanted, she couldn't remain on that cliff. She would be arrested by nightfall. She has to follow the child.”

For him, for the child, she is singing very low that at the clearwater fountain she had rested and that never ever would she forget him and that never would she leave him. Never never never.

We have gone back inside the Roches Noires hotel.

We went out on the balcony. We didn't say anything. We wept. We are weeping.

The south suburb camps arrived at the end of the afternoon, when it was still light out. They called the roll for the new children. The same first names came back over and over. The name Samuel came up again.

And again I wept.

And then you stopped talking about both the child and the counselor. You spoke about that woman, Theodora Kats. You asked me again why I hadn't written anything else about her.

You wanted to understand this about me, only this.

I said that I had managed to speak of her only up to the discovery of that hotel in the Swiss Alps. And there, the book had ended.

That Theodora was too much for a book.
Too much
.

You said, “Too little, perhaps.”

Perhaps Theodora wasn't a book.

Perhaps it was too much â that whiteness, that patience, that obscure, inexplicable wait, that indifference â it was too much. The writing had shut down with her name. Her name alone was all the writing there was about Theodora Kats. With it, with that name, everything was said.

And the whiteness of the dresses and of her skin.

Perhaps Theodora Kats was something as yet unknown, a new silence of writing; the silence of women, and of the Jews.

Designed by David Bullen Design.
Typeset in Fairfield Light.
Printed at The Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont.
The paper is 60 lb Cougar Opaque Natural Vellum.

English translation copyright Â© 2006 Mark Polizzotti
Originally published by P.O.L. Editeur, Paris, France.

First Archipelago Books Edition, 2006

eISBN : 978-1-935-74422-1

I. Polizzotti, Mark. II. Title.
PQ2607.U8245Y3613 2006
843'.912 â DC22 2006042880

Archipelago Books
25 Jay Street, #203
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.archipelagobooks.org

Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
1045 Westgate Drive
St. Paul, MN 55114
www.cbsd.com

This publication was made possible with support
from Lannan Foundation and the New York State Council
on the Arts, a state agency.

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