"My Prison-Cure in America", Chapter 15
Adapted from Annemarie Schwarzenbach, by Cleo Varra
Read previous: #14. With Their Searchlights And Their Guards
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WHITE PLAINS, NY-- 1941
It didn't occur to me that I could become tired, although I was so weak that my knees gave out and almost failed me. I was so weak I thought, I might no longer have any body at all. My breath might as well have been a tiny pulse, or a gust of wind stirring a handful of wet grasses. Or I could have been one of the hares or the foxes: I could see in the dark, and when I kept my eyes closed, signs and voices reached me: —Don't stop, don't ask questions—- birdsong, grasses rustling— Don't cry-- Stand still!-- and I stood very still.
Until two wood pigeons flew down in front of me, and I laughed out loud, and then I was running and I wanted to cry.
***
Thinking back on it now, I tell myself it was fear that drove me. Because if I had believed I was free, I would have been playing back into the hands of the people pursuing me.
Oh, but I had walked so lightly!
I could have sung. I could have wasted my breath.
I could have laid down, and the smooth bark of a tree would have touched my face.
With every step that I took something came towards me: a handful of fragrant leaves from the bushes; a small bird; a soft wave of grass; and everything around me had been alive.—
The ground that rolled beneath me, and whose end I could not see, sometimes felt as if it were the incessantly surging world sea. The sky sometimes seemed like it was only a black landbridge, reaching out into the sea. Everything was still around me and yet trembled, and my heart was exposed and very sensitive.
***
—But, I couldn’t judge the distances in front of me. And, once, for a long time, I thought that I’d been walking towards a shepherd’s bonfire. Then it had grown taller and I’d thought, it could have been a forest fire.
But I hadn’t stopped, because the longing that drove me was too great.
And finally, I saw that I’d been mistaken: it was nothing but the horizon, blazing over the edge of the world. Fantastic clouds rose at its end, mingling with the blue crests of hills.
*****
I only stopped walking after I'd found the long, straight avenue leading back into town. The street was dark where I stopped. Ahead of me, in a dim circle of light, I was able to make out a couple of buildings: maybe some houses in gardens; a coffeeshop or two, a hotel with an open terrace.
I told myself, no one knows you here. You don’t need to speak,— you’re not branded on the forehead— but I felt such apprehension that I had to sit down on the dusty gravel, half in the grass at the edge of the broad right lane.
As I sat, I watched a high row of wonderfully slender trees, their tops swaying, rising up like a wall of flames and casting long shadows over the white lines of the road. I watched a light fog, hovering over the grass. I’d heard the wind, rustling softly through the grass; then I could feel it on my lips. I opened my mouth, and it blew through me.
It was very gentle.
It rose against my eyelids like smoke, like the gradual twilight; veiled. I felt a gentle swell, rising, embracing me and sending out little breaths: and it blew through me, it calmed me. It stirred and it held my breath, it filled up my lungs.
And my eyes had wanted to roll back in my head, but I set them firmly over the land: over the road, at the end of which I suddenly could see the sky: like an enormous, steely-blue vault, enclosing seas and hosts of clouds, and hurling out from over its immovable walls star trails and streams of silver, all of rushing light.
I stayed like that for a long time, immersed: without curiosity, but amazed.
I had finally returned to the city that morning, and no one recognized me or stopped me in the streets.
***
My heart was empty and light. It was as if the frightening burden of my sorrow were sinking slowly, slowly, to be caught in the bosom of the earth.
*****
Next: #16. How Did I Stop?
