hyena-laughter and robes smelling of red blood and heavy wine,
compliant....

You no longer saw yourself, because you had been swallowed up in a
living craw.

* * * * *

Where were you, my sisters from everywhere, women of Europe, you, Trude
and Clara and Mania? What were you doing? Were you weeping?

You saw, didn't you, that bloody sky with forked black signs, that
summer swooning away, that day?... Why was not your voice heard in
denunciation of the universal slaughter?

Why was not my own voice heard, when there were outcries in my throat,
tears in my flesh?

III

I am becoming horribly accustomed to going about the empty apartment
alone. I find I no longer think of the scowling walls, the dumb silence,
the dim windows. They wrap me in a vague acquiescence. Habit is exerting
its awful power.

I seem to be gliding down a slope where there is no one at the bottom to
warn me that there may be a precipice ahead or tell me whither this
strange existence leads.

My days are regulated according to the rules I myself have made to apply
only to myself; I go, I come, I turn the key in the lock; I loiter; then
I rush at my work. Sometimes the mirror casts a sudden image which runs
away busily at my approach. My shadow and the creaking under my tread
are all I have for company.

Yet this is not the first time I have lived alone. There once was a room
with a flowered quilt, a moth-eaten carpet and a rickety door which
opened like the lid of a devil-in-the-bandbox on the mahogany wig and
scarlet smile of Mme. Noel. But everything was so different! I brought
nothing to that virgin space except the desire to fill it; my body knew
nothing; my inner being cried out for too many things to be able to hold
any of them, and had I dared, I would have stretched my arms out through
the window to embrace the air of life....

My solitude now is like rotten fruit; it scorches my entrails like a
fiery drink. It is a strange solitude.

Two men peopled my life and fertilized and vivified it. But wasn't that
very long ago and somewhere else? Come, try to remember....

I do not know; they are neither dead nor alive. To be sure they are
hungry and thirsty and get bored as living people do, but they are
locked up in the earth's carcass like the real dead; and it may be that
at this very moment when I am imagining them warm and active, they are
already stiff and cold. To be absolutely truthful, to go