History by Elsa Morante, Lily Tuck, William Weaver Page B

initial sensation of a confused theft, an instant's duration. In her memory, actually, there was a total blank, from the moment the boy had started kissing her face, whispering carina carina, to the other moment, earlier, when he had showed her the photograph.
    However, the whole previous period, not just the fri hour before her attack, but the entire past, in retrospect, also presented itself to her recollection as a point of arrival, still confused in an immense remote ness. She had set sail from the crowded and vociferating continent of her memory, on a boat that in this interval had gone around the world, and now, return to its port of departure, found it silent and calm again. There were no more shouting crowds, no lynching. The familiar objects, stripped of all emotion, were no longer instruments, but creatures, vege table or aquatic, algae, coral, starfi which breathed in the sea's repose, belonging to no one.
    Even the sleep of her aggressor, stretched out there before her, seemed to rest on the leprosy of all experiences-violence, fear-like a healing. li:t moving her eyes (cleared by the recent spell as if by a bath of lumi transparency), she saw on the ground, at some distance from each other, her run-down shoes, which she had lost, along with her hat, while writhing unconsciously in the German's arms. But not bothering to pick them up, seated, inert, on her bare heels, she fi her widened eyes again on the sleeper, with the stupid look of the maiden in fairy tales, staring at the dragon which a magic potion has made harmless.
    Now that his lover had escaped him, the boy had embraced the pillow and was hugging it tight, stubborn in his possessive jealousy of a moment before. However, his face had meanwhile taken on another expression,

    6 0 H I S T O R Y . . . . . . 1 9 · ·
    intent and grave; and Ida, almost without realizing it, immediately read there the subject and the plot of his dream, if not the details. The dream was suited to a boy of the age, roughly, of eight. There were important matters under discussion : the sale of bicycles or accessories, where he had to deal with an untrustworthy character, no doubt an eccentric sort, a Levantine smuggler perhaps, or a Chicago gangster, or a Malayan pi ra . . .
    This character was trying to cheat: and consequently the sleeper's lips, of a parched pink, wild and a bit chapped, protruded in an ilkoncealed pout. His eyelids hardened, flutteri the gilded lashes, so short they seemed dust. And his brow furrowed in concentration, below the clumps of hair, darker than his lashes, smooth, suggesting a cool, damp softness, like the coat of a little brown kitten just bathed by its mother.
    It would have been easy, now, to kill him, following the example of Judith in the Bible; but Ida, by nature, couldn't conceive such an idea, not even as a fantasy. Her mind, distracted by its reading of the dream, was darkened by the thought that perhaps the intru would go on sleeping until late in the evening, and Nino, corn horn , might surprise him, still here. Nino, however, with his political ideas, might even be proud of this visit, and would hail the German, his mother's rapist, as a companion . . . Instead, as suddenly as he had fallen asleep, the German woke abruptly, as if at a trumpet's brutal blare. And immediately he looked at the watch on his wrist: he had slept barely a few minutes, still he didn't have much time to get back to the transit camp for roll call. He stretched : not with the arrogant bliss of boys when they release themselves from sleep, but rather with the disgust of an anguish and a curse, as if he had
    discovered again the chains of prison attached to his limbs. The twi shadows were beginning; and Ida, having risen, with her barefoot and trembling body, approached the light socket, to insert the plug. The wires were loose, and the light of the bulb fl Then Gunther, who in Germany was an electrician by trade, took from his pocket a special clasp knife (the envy