For days after this Mischa does not talk. He cannot play the ‘cello, he cannot move his hand freely, and there are things he doesn’t want the Voice to know. But he feels that the Voice is watching, feeling his way deftly into his secrets. He feels that the Voice is not convinced at all that it is the hand which causes Mischa’s suffering. He feels slowly surrounded with intricate questions, pressed closer with unexpected associations. He feels like a criminal, but he cannot remember the crime. The Voice envelops him in questions. The Voice has become a digger. Mischa feels a great anguish, as if he had committed a crime and were now concealing it. And he cannot remember what it is. He feels the place where it is buried. What is buried? There, under the flesh, as it were, at the very bottom of a murky smouldering mud well, there is something buried. Something which the Voice pushes him towards. An image. What? An image of his mother, his magnificent Medusa mother standing in her room. He is a little boy of eight or so. He had not been able to sleep. He had limped quietly to her room and knocked very faintly at her door. She had not heard his knock. He had opened the door very slowly. He knew his father was not there, that he was out hunting. His mother was standing before him, very tall, and in a long white robe, her nightgown. And on this white robe there was a blood stain. He had seen the stain. He had smelled the blood on her. He had cried out hysterically. He ran out of her room to look for the father. He picked up a riding whip. His father was returning from the hunt. He was standing at the door, taking off his leather coat, laying down his gun. There was a blood stain on his sleeve. The animals he had killed were lying in the hall. The dogs were still barking, outside. Mischa went up to his father and struck him, struck at the man who had stained his mother’s white robe with blood, who had hunted her as he hunted the animals.
As he told this he held up before him the stiffened hand.
He thought the Voice would speak about the hand, but the Voice asked him: “And the lameness?”
Mischa winced and turned his face away. Behind this that he told lay his secret. Behind the facade of the image, the scene which he saw so clearly, lay a terrain of broken, pointed, cutting fragments, and on this a dead leg. A heavy dead leg, like some discarded object. But not buried. It had always lain there, unburied. Dead. He was more aware of it than of anything about his life. The dead leg rested right across the whole body. Wooden. He had nailed his hand on it. The life, the present, the colors, the music, women, were all hung around this dead leg, like furniture, pictures. Not alive. There had never been any Mischa. Mischa was in that leg, imprisoned, bound in it, lying on an abandoned plot, and the intense presence of it turned everything else into a transparent film: behind every form of transparency lay the leg which carried him. A casket in which he had enclosed his faith, his impulses, his desires. The pain of lameness, of knowing, even as a child, that one carries a fragment of the death in one. To live with a dead fragment of oneself, as if carrying a tomb around with one. The fierce graspingness of death already setting in. To be crippled, humiliated, left out of games, not to be able to ride horseback. The lameness concealed at concerts, but not before woman. The wounded look in the fixed glance of the mother when she watched him walk. Her love for him not joyous, heavy with compassion. When she kissed others she radiated an animal pride, her nostrils quivered. When she kissed Mischa it was as if part of her died at the very touch of him, in answer to the part in him that was dead. Mischa trembled when he had to walk across a room. He hated women because of his lameness, because they too closed a fierce part of themselves when they approached him, made themselves more tender, more attenuated, and looked at him as his mother had looked at him. He was ashamed. So terribly ashamed. The Voice said very gently: “You preferred to offer your hurt hand to people’s eyes. You offered the whole world your hurt hand. You talked about your hand. You showed your hand so no one would notice the lameness. The hand did not shame you. The hand that struck your father was rightfully, humanly punished by immobility.”
Mischa was weeping, his face turned to the wall. Now that he looked at the lameness, the leg seemed to become less dead, less separate from him. The leg was not so heavy, not so gruesome, as this secret of the pain he had enclosed in it, his fear and pain before the leg. Every nerve and cell in him tense with the fear of discovery, tense with rigid pretending, dissolved in new tears before the fact which appeared smaller, less dark, less oppressive. The crime and the secret did not seem so great as when he watched over its tomb. The pain was not so much like a monster now, but a simple, human sorrow. With the tears the great tension all through the body softened. He was a cripple. But he had committed no crime. He had struck his father, but his father had laughed at the scene—and his mother too. They had hurt him more than he had hurt them. The tears were like a river carrying away the rigid tension. The walls he had erected, the nightmares he had buried over and over again in his being, the tightness of fear, the knots in his nerves, all dissolving. Everything was washed away. And the big knot in his hand, that was loosen teno. It was the same knot. The muted hand that could no longer draw his mother’s voice out of the ‘cello. The static hand that could no longer strike. The crippled hand for the world to look at, while the real shamed Mischa walked surreptitiously before them hoping to conceal his dead leg from the world.
Exaltation lifted him from the couch, out of the room. He was running out of this room filled with knowing eyes, through the softly carpeted hall, passing all the rooms filled with revelations, to the red lights that bore him down to the street.
In the street he did not feel the sea of ice, slush and sleet. The warmth in him was like a fire that would never go out. He was singing.
Under his feet, in the underground drug store, Djuna sat eating at the counter. The young man was mixing his sallies with the drinks: “Are you a show girl too?” he asked her. The sea elephant, owner of the place, swam heavily toward her with a box: “I kept this box for you, I thought you would like it. It smells good.” The sea elephant sank behind the counter, behind waves of perfume bottles, talcum powder, candy packages, cigar boxes. She was left with the sandal wood box in her arms.
She carried it through the lobby. The lobby was full of waiting people, lumped there, waiting without impatience, reading, muttering, meditating, sleeping.
Every time she passed through the lobby her throat tightened. Behind every chair, every palm tree, every sofa, every face half-seen in the dim light of the lobby, she feared to recognize some one she knew. Some one out of the past. She could repeat to herself as she passed that they were all lost, that in the enormous city they had lost her tracks. She had crossed the ocean, destroyed their addresses. Stretches of long years and of sea lay between that first half of her life. The city had swallowed them. Yet each time she crossed the lobby she felt the same apprehension. She feared the return of the past. They sat in the lobby waiting, waiting for a crevice, a passage-way back into her life. Waiting to introduce themselves again. They had left their names at the desk. So many of them.