Johanna’s voice was plaintive and monotonous, like a lamentation. Her eyes wavered, but always fixed on the ground, as if the whole structure of’ her life lay there, burnt and tattered, and she were watching its consummation.
I was looking straight before me, through and beyond the dark, the lights, the traffic, beyond the buildings. Eyes fixed, immobile like glass eyes, as if the curtain of tears had opened a new realm.
Johanna’s phrases surged and heaved like a turgid sea. Unformed, unfinished, dense, heavy with repetitions, with recapitulations, with a baffled, confused bitterness and anger. I could find nothing to say for the moment—because Johanna was talking about God. Yes, Johanna was talking about the god in man—the god she had sought in Hans.
“I wanted to serve him,” she was saying, “I wanted to make him great, because I felt that he was good, that he was so infinitely better than myself… I felt that I was vile and foul, a liar and a beast. But Hans! Jesus, there was something so good, so charitable in him. He had such an immense compassion… And then when I read what he had written about me—the drabness, the cheapness of my life… No, he’s no god, I know that now! I know that he is treacherous. Only the other night, Djuna, after you left, the other night when I came back to him, I came back to confess everything. I wanted to make myself clean again, I wanted to kneel before him—I did get down on my knees—and have him forgive me. I felt then, as I had often felt before, that he was the most wonderful being I had ever known, that he was the only truly human being I knew. I felt him to be holy—truly. He was like a saint to me. I felt so humble, so less than nothing. I came back to worship at his feet… But what happened? I came back to find him hard, indifferent, cynical. He almost laughed in my face. I seemed so insignificant to him that even my devotion, my worship of him, meant nothing to him… No, he’s no god to me… not any more! I am the god now. It’s I, I, who am the god! Not him! The sacrifices I made for him have made me great. I am bigger than he is now! I have known what it meant to sacrifice one’s self, but now I don’t need to sacrifice myself any more. I’m beyond that… beyond him. Once I needed a god to serve. I needed Hans so—he was a god to me—and I had to serve some one. But he failed me. I have served some one who is less than I am…”
She seemed to contemplate for a moment with great self-pity the isolation which this death of Hans as a god had brought upon her. The light of the street lamp struck her and it revealed the gesture of defeat so vividly that I found nothing to say.
This seeking of god in the dark city, this aimless wandering through the streets touching men and seeking god… this was a fear I had known too… seeking god in Hans, in live men, not in the past, not in the distance, but a god with arms, a god with a living breath, a god we wished to possess for ourselves, alone, in our own isolated woman’s soul. God was still inextricably woven with man and with man’s creation. Yet between this realm, this dark immediate realm which Johanna was weeping over, with her eyes fixed on the ground, I saw another sphere in the form of a circle. One circle issuing from the other. And I wanted to tell Johanna that we were moving from one circle into another, moving and rising, and that Johanna was only suffering from the pain of being thrust out of one circle into another, one groove into another, and that this leap it was which was the most difficult to make. The pain of parting with one’s faith, one’s old love, when one’s desire is rather to renew this faith and preserve the passion. But Johanna was weeping because Hans had said: “leave me alone,” or “let me work,” or “let me sleep.” And I found it impossible to explain to her what a struggle was required to emerge from the past clean of haunting memories and regrets. Impossible to explain to Johanna the inadequacy of our souls to cut life into final, total portions. Impossible to tell her that this pain, this great pain could be healed more quickly with a knowledge, a vision into the next circle. Impossible to answer Johanna’s great need of a frontier against which she might lean as upon a closed door, closing a door upon all pain. I could not take Johanna’s hand and make her raise her head and lead her into the new circle, raise her above pain and confusion, above ess of the city. And these sudden shafts of light upon us could not illumine the realm beyond, where the circle of pain closed and ended and one was raised into another circle. I could not help Johanna emerge out of the immediacy of her pain, leap beyond the strangle-hold of the present.
And so we continued to walk unsteadily over the dead leaves of his indifference, weeping together over an injustice which was as irremediable as the fall of dead leaves on our path. And I was kissing her because there was no other way to atone for a crime I had not committed, a crime ordained by the flux and continuity and mobility of life.
Johanna, Johanna, I wanted to say, will you walk thus with me when it is I who comes to the end of a circle, when it is I who shall be thrust out of the circle of Hans’ love?
When we met under the red light of the café we recognized in each other a mood of irony. We would dance together on our irony as on the chiming sparks of a dizzy star. We would laugh at him now, running with seven-leagued boots over the universe, laughing.
“He’s working so hard, so hard, he’s in a daze,” said Johanna. “He talks night and day about Death. I went to sleep the other night while he was talking to me.”
I was lonely, deep down, to think Hans had been at his work for two weeks without thinking of or noticing either of us. And my loneliness drew me close to Johanna.
“He was glad we were going out together,” continued Johanna rapidly. “He said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time; he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”
A feeling of immense loneliness invaded Johanna.
We walked, as if we had wanted to walk away from our mood, as if we wanted to walk into another world. We walked up the hill of Montmartre, with houses lying on their sides like heather. We heard music, music so off tune that we did not recognize it as the music we heard every day. We slid into the shaft of light from where this music carne—into a room which seemed built of granified smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling, and a wooden, pock-marked Christ. Gusts of weary, petrified songs so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of rubber, like the elastic, cloud-like bouncing rubber-soled night.
“We hate Hans to-night. We hate man.”
The craving for caresses. Wanting and fighting the want. Both frightened by the vagueness of our desire, the indefiniteness of our craving. A rosary of question marks.
Johanna whispered:
“Let’s take drugs to-night.”
e pressed her strong knees against me, she inundated me with the moist brilliance of her eyes, the paleness of her face.
I shook my head, but I drank, I drank. No drink equal to the taste of war and hatred. No drink like bitterness.
I looked at Johanna’s fortune teller’s eyes, and at her taut profile like a tiger sniffing his prey in a bamboo sea.
“It takes all the pain away, it wipes out all the ugliness, all the foul, dirty reality.”