ICE AND FIRE
By the same author
Nonfiction
W om an H ating
O ur Blood: Prophecies and D iscourses on Sexual Politics
Pornography: M en Possessing W omen
Right-w ing W omen:
T he Politics o f Dom esticated Fem ales
Fiction
the new w om ans broken heart: short stories
ICE AND FIRE
A Novel
by
Andrea Dworkin
Seeker & W arb u rg
L on don
First published in England 1986 by
Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited
54 Poland Street, London WI V 3DF
Copyright ©
by Andrea Dworkin
Reprinted 1986
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Dworkin, Andrea
Ice and fire: a novel.
1. Title
823'. 91 4[F]
PR6054. W/
ISBN 0-436-13960-X
Pages 52-56 first appeared, translated into French, in La Vie
en Rose, No 18, July-August 1984.
Filmset in Great Britain in II on 12 pt Sabon
by Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Billings & Son Ltd,
Hylton Road, Worcester
For Elaine M arkson
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
I have two first memories.
The sofa is green with huge flowers imprinted on it, pink
and beige and streaks of yellow or brown, like they were
painted with a wide brush to highlight the edges and borders
of the flowers. The sofa is deep and not too long, three cushions, the same green. The sofa is against a wall in the living room. It is our living room. Nothing in it is very big but we
are small and so the ceilings are high and the walls tower,
unscalable, and the sofa is immense, enough width and depth
to burrow in, to get lost in. My brother is maybe two. I am
two years older. He is golden, a white boy with yellow hair
and blue eyes: and happy. He has a smile that lights up the
night. He is beautiful and delicate and divine. Nothing has set
in his face yet, not fear, not malice, not anger, not sorrow: he
knows no loss or pain: he is delicate and happy and intensely
beautiful, radiance and delight. We each get a corner of the
sofa. We crouch there until the referee, father always, counts
to three: then we meet in the middle and tickle and tickle until
one gives up or the referee says to go back to our corners
because a round is over. Sometimes we are on the fl oor, all
three of us, tickling and wrestling, and laughing past when I
hurt until dad says stop. I remember the great print flowers, I
remember crouching and waiting to hear three, I remember the
great golden smile of the little boy, his yellow curls cascading
as we roll and roll.
The hospital is all light brown outside, stone, lit up by electric
lights, it is already dark out, and my grandfather and I are
outside, waiting for my dad. He comes running. Inside I am
put in a small room. A cot is set up for him. My tonsils will
come out. Somewhere in the hospital is my mother. I think all
night long that she must be in the next room. I tap on the wall,
sending secret signals. She has been away from home for a
long time. The whole family is in the hospital now, my father
with me: I don’t know where my brother is— is he born yet?
7
He is somewhere for sure, and my mother is somewhere,
probably in the next room. I remember flowered wallpaper.
I haven’t seen my mother for a very long time and now
I am coming to where she is, I expect to see her, I am
close to her now, here, in the same hospital, she is near,
somewhere, here. I never see her but I am sure she is lying
in bed happy to be near me on the other side of the wall
in the very next room. She must be happy to know I am
here. Her hair was long then, black, and she was young.
My father sleeps in the hospital room, in the bed next to
mine.
*
The street was home, but, oh, these were kind streets, the
streets of children, real children. The houses were brick row
houses, all the same, two cement flights of stairs outside, the
outside steps, from the sidewalk. The lawns were hills sloping
down the height of one flight of steps, the lower one, to the
sidewalk. There was a landing between flights. Some of us had
patios: the big cement truck came, the huge tumbler turning
round and round, and the cement was poured out and flattened
down, and sticks marked the edges until it dried. Others had
some flowers: next door there were shabby roses, thorns. Each
house was the same, two floors, on the first floor a living
room, dining room, and tiny kitchen; up a tall flight of stairs
three bedrooms, two big, one tiny, a bathroom, a closet. The
stairs were the main thing: up and down on endless piggyback
rides on daddy’s back: up to bed with a piggyback ride, up
and down one more time, the greatest ride had a story to go
with it about riding horses or piggies going to market; up the
stairs on daddy’s back and then into bed for the rest of the
fabulous story; and I would try to get him to do it again and
again, up and down those stairs, and a story. Each house had
one family, all the houses were in a row, but two doors were
right next to each other above the cement steps so those were
the closest neighbors. The adults, mostly the women, would sit
on chairs up by their doors, or sit on the steps up by the doors
talking and visiting and watching the children, and the children
of all the houses would converge in the street to play. If you
looked at it you would see dismal brick row houses all the
same at the top of two flights of cement steps out in the wea
8
ther. But if you were a child, you would see that the adults
were far away, and that the street stretched into a million
secret hidden places. There were parked cars to hide behind
and under and telephone poles, the occasional tree, secret
valleys at the bottoms of lawns, and the mysterious interiors of
other people’s houses across the way. And then the backs of
the houses made the world bigger, more incredible yet. There