Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

feel the tenderness so acutely— it balances on just a sliver of

memory— I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than

to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second

when each knows what the other will say or without a thought

our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver

of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls

framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long

nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is con-

sumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond

boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die. Or I remember my brother, so little, just in one second, all joy, a tickle-fight, we are squared off, each in a corner of the sofa

(am I wearing my cowgirl outfit with gun and holster?), father

is the referee, and we are torrents of laughter, rapturous

wrestling, and his curly yellow hair cascades. He was radiant

with delight, lit up from inside, laughing in torrents and me

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too. My childhood was this golden thing, eradicable, intense

sensations of entirely physical love remembered like short,

sweet, delirious hallucinations, lucid in fog. Now I love no

one, except that tender man now in the next room dreaming

without memory, a blessed thing, or not dreaming at all: that

curled-up blond muscled thing recalling every miracle of love

from long ago. I was happy then: don’t dare deny it.

I don’t love now, at all, except when I remember to love the

blond boy, the stranger not even related to me, not part of

anything from before, who sleeps in the next room: a tall blond

man: when I remember to love him certain minutes of certain

days. Don’t look for my heart. The beasts have eaten it. What

is his name?

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Our women writers write like women writers,

that is to say, intelligently and pleasantly,

but they are in a terrible hurry to tell what

is in their hearts. Can you explain why a

woman writer is never a serious artist?

Dostoyevsky

*

I came back from Europe. I lived alone in a pink apartment on

the Lower East Side across from the police precinct. I wanted

to be a writer. I want to write. Every day I write. I am alone

and astonishingly happy.

The police cars ram into the crushed sidewalk across the

street. The precinct is there. Men in blue with guns and

nightsticks swarm. Garbled sounds emanate from radios on

their hips. They swarm outside the impressive stone building,

the precinct headquarters. Red lights flash. A dozen cars swerve

in or swerve out, crash in or crash out, are coming or going,

burning rubber on the burning streets, the smell of the burnt

rubber outlasting the sound of the siren as its shrillness fades.

The police cars never slow down. They stop immediately.

They start up at once, no cautionary note, the engine warming.

They pull straight out at top speeds or swerve in and almost

bang against the building but somehow the brake gets the

weight of the cop and the sidewalk is crushed on its outer

edge.

The sirens blare day and night. The cars bump and grind

and flash by, day and night. The blue soldiers mass like ants,

then deploy, day and night. The red of the flashing lights illuminates my room, like a scarlet searchlight, day and night.

The police are at war with the Hell’s Angels, two blocks

away. The motorcycles would collect. The swastikas would be

emblazoned, the leather would defy the summer heat, the

chains would bang like drums through the always-percussive

air hitting the cement. You could hear the anguish of the

motorcycles, hear the anguish of the streets, as the burning

rubber scarred them: the police cars would pull out fast and

there would be a din of dull anguish sounding like distant war,

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there would be the pain of acute exploding sounds that made the

buildings move and shake and your body was shocked by it even

before your mind could understand that you had not been killed.

There were fires too, loud red fire trucks: real fire, the

building across the street next to the precinct building burning,

the top two floors burning, the building right next to mine

burning. The red lights would flash like great red searchlights

and the sirens would scream right into the blood: and there

would be fire.

Across from the precinct in a gravel lot the police parked

their regular civilian cars and boys played basketball.

The street seemed to be overrun with uniforms, fires, guns,

cars careening in and out. The red searchlights and sirens made it

seem that the Martians had landed, or the army, or war had come,

or giant insects, or man-eating plants. Each day was a surreal

drama, an astonishment of military noise and civic emergency.

It was not the usual exile of the Lower East Side: condemned

into a circle of hell from which there was no exit, no one ever

left alive, no sign anywhere of what others call “ the social

order” ; instead, the social order swarmed and crushed sidewalks, was martial and armed; the social order put out fires that continued to burn anyway from one building to the next,

flaring up here, flaring up there, like one continuous fire,

teasing, teasing the men with the great hoses and the heroic

helmets. It was not the usual Lower East Side exile: one was

not marooned forever until death with only seawater to put to

one’s parched and broken lips: one could scream and maybe

someone with boots and a gun and a uniform and a right to

kill would take time out from the military maneuvers of the

swarming militia and keep one from becoming a corpse. One

hoped, but not really, that a single woman’s scream might be

heard over the military din. Right next to the precinct, in the

building next door, a burglar crawled into the apartment of a

woman in broad daylight, the middle of the hot afternoon,

simply by bending the cheap gate over her fire escape window

and climbing in the open window. The army did not stop him.

When he set the fire that killed her as she napped that afternoon, the red searchlights did not find him; the sirens, the hoses, the trucks, the helmets, did not deter him.

*

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