Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

The apartment was five flights up. The numbering of the floors

was European. The ground floor was not the first floor, it had

no number. The first floor was up a steep flight of stairs. The

fifth floor was at the top of a huge climb, a mountain of stone

steps, a hiker’s climb up. It was not too far from God. Each

day an old, old, heavy Ukrainian woman, bent, covered in

heavy layers of black skirts and black shawls, black scarf tied

tight around her head hiding her hair except for white wisps,

washed the stairs, bottom to top, then cleaned, the banisters,

top to bottom. She had her bucket and a great mop of stringy

ropelike mess, and a pile of rags: stoop-shouldered she washed

and rinsed, washed and rinsed, dusted and polished. There

was no smell of urine. In each hall there were three toilets, one

for each apartment on the floor. The toilet was set in concrete.

The cubicle was tiny. It didn’t lock from the outside, but

there was a hook on the inside. Each tenant cleaned their

own.

The apartment was newly painted, a bright Mediterranean

pink, fresh, garish, powdery. You walked in right to the kitchen, there was no subtle introduction, it was splintered, painted wood floors, no distinct color, a radiator, a grotesque,

mammoth old refrigerator with almost no actual space inside, a

tiny stove, and a bathtub. There was a window that opened

onto a sliver of an airshaft. There was a room on either side of

the kitchen. To the left, on the street, above the teeming blue

soldiers and desperate fire trucks, there was a living room,

small but not tiny. It had a cockroach-ridden desk, one straight-

backed wooden chair, and I bought a $12 piece of foam

rubber to sleep on, cut to be a single mattress. I bought a

bright red rug with a huge flower on it from Woolworth’s, and

laid it down like it was gold. Under it was old linoleum,

creased, chunky, bloating. There were two windows, one

opening onto the fire escape, I couldn’t afford a gate and so it

had to stay closed, and the other I risked opening. I found a

small, beautiful bookcase, wood with some gracious curves as

ornament, and in it I put like a pledge the few books I had

carried across the ocean as talismans. The room to the right of

the kitchen, covered in the same cracked linoleum, was like a

small closet. The window opened on the airshaft, no air, just a

triangular space near a closed triangle of concrete wall. The

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room was stagnant, the linoleum ghastly with old dirt ground

into the cracks. The room was smothering and wretched. The

walls sweated. I didn’t go into it.

The toilet in the hall was outside the locks on the apartment

door, outside the huge steel police lock, a steel pole that shored

up the door in case of a ramming attack, outside the cylinder

locks, outside the chain lock. I carried a knife back and forth

and I slept with a knife under my pillow.

The glare of the lightbulbs was naked. The pink paint flaked

and rubbed off to the naked touch. The heat enveloped one,

the skin burned from the hot water in the air. I immersed myself

in the bathtub: in the heat one never got dry: and lived between

the desk and the mattress on the floor: writing and sleeping:

concentrating: smiling at the red rug with the big flower. I

learned to be alone.

*

The apartment was painted Mediterranean pink, the paint was

powdery, I found some remnants of cheap cotton in a textile

store and tacked them up over the windows: light came in

unimpeded, the heat of the burning sun, the red searchlights of

the military, the red alarm of fire, danger, must run, must

escape, will burn. The walls between the apartments were thin.

There was a thin wall between me and the man in the next

apartment, a tiny man of timid gentleness. I heard long conversations and deep breaths, discussions about the seasoning in soups and the politics of anal warts, both subjects of his expertise. At night I would dream that there was a hole in the wall, and everything was like a play, the extended conversations, a two-person domestic drama: I knew I was sleeping but I believed the hole was real: and I knew I was sleeping but

the conversations must have been real, in their real voices with

their real inflections, as they sat there in my view. We had no

secrets and at night when I would scream out in terror at a

bad dream, I would alarm my neighbor, and the next day he

would ask me if anyone had hurt me: late, timid. Above me

the man would get fucked hard in the ass, as his expletives and

explications and supplications and imperious pleadings would

make clear. The two male bodies would thump on the floor

like great stones being dropped over and over again, like dead

weight dropping. Sleep could not intervene here and mask the

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sound for me in flashy narratives of story-within-the-story,

play-within-the-play: the screams were too familiar, too close,

not yet lost in life rushing forward.

I slept when I was tired. I wrote. Sweat poured out. I took

long walks. My dreams were like delirium. I did not have hours

or days. I simply went on. There was a great, soft stream of

solitude and concentration and long, wet baths, and timid trips

to the toilet. Oh, yes, I had a terrible time getting money and I

don’t want to say how I did it. I lived from day to day, stopping

just short of the fuck. I had odd jobs. I did what was necessary.

I was always happy when I was alone: except when restlessness

would come like a robber: then I would walk, walk.

*

The pink walls and the red carpet with the huge flower were

my indulgences. The rest was austere, the heat prohibiting

excess, poverty offended by it. The single mattress was like a

prayer.

I came alive again: in solitude: concentrating: writing.

*

Yes, there were men and women, women and men, but they

were faded: they were background, not foreground, intrusions,

failures of faith, laziness of spirit: forays into the increasingly

foreign world of the social human being: they were brief

piercing moments of sensation, the sensation pale no matter

how acute, sentimental no matter how tough: namby-pamby

silliness of thighs that had to open: narrow pleasure with no

mystery, no subtlety, no subtext: pierce, come; suck, come;

foretold pleasures contained between the legs, while solitude

promised immersion, drenching, the body overcome by the

radical intensity of enduring. *

I met my beautiful boy, my lost brother, around, somewhere,

and invited him in. I saw him around, here and there, and

invited him in. Talking with him was different from anything

else: the way the wind whispers through the tops of trees just

brushed by sunset. It made me happy. I invited him in. My

privacy included him. My solitude was not betrayed. We were