Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

it is another world.

*

He is barefoot. The living room is warm. The living room is

filled from corner to corner with furniture, three sofas, the

three sides of a square, a huge wood table filling the square.

The bedroom is just a double bed, the rest of the room empty.

There is a tiny dining room with a big round table, set for

two. The kitchen is a cubicle, dingy, things hanging everywhere. It is all carpeted. The living room is claustrophobic, there is barely any room for moving, walking, pacing, the three

sofas and the wooden table that fills in the space of the square

are like one thing, one huge, heavy thing, bedlike. You can

get laid anywhere in this room but on the floor. There is a

sound system of incredible sophistication: four speakers, two

on the floor, two hanging from the ceiling, he can virtually

mix his own records by adjusting dials. He has an extra pack

of cigarettes there for me, my brand not his. There is a bowl

of grass. We sit. He gets me a drink, vodka with ice. He has my

brand. He drinks Scotch. I am very nervous. I don’t take off my

coat. I sit and drink. The whisper of the telephone will not do

here. He has to speak up. I am sitting on the far edge of a sofa,

as far away as I can get. He is squarely in the middle of the

middle sofa. He has his bare feet up on the large square low

table that the sofas surround. The sofas and table are inexplicable. I have my coat on. I smoke feverishly. Little philosophers of repression: it is not desire. I am wearing my heaviest motorcycle

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boots, my plainest black T-shirt, my basic denim, hanging,

ragged. He wears denim, a leather belt, a white undershirt. His

eyes sort of stare in at his moustache. We smoke. We drink. I

am waiting for the woman from Nicaragua. I am hot. I take

off my coat. I put it beside me, between him and me, a pile, an

obstacle, not subtle. I drink. We chitchat. There is sofa everywhere. One cannot stand or walk around. It is for lying down on. I ask when the woman is coming. Oh, he says, not missing a

beat, she just called a while back, I tried to get you but you had

left already, she couldn’t make it tonight but the next time she is

back in the country we will get together, I want you to meet my

sister too. A grown-up woman cannot pretend to be a virgin.

*

He knows what I love and what I need and what I do not

have. He knows I love music. He knows I live in the cold, in

the wind. He knows I haven’t been able to buy steak. He puts

on music. His record collection is sublime: it is an ecstasy for

me: the sound embraces and pierces: his taste is exquisite: he

makes me a concert: we don’t have to talk: I am happy in the

music: he leaves me alone and makes dinner, runs out now

and then to change the music, each piece more beautiful, more

haunting, more brilliant than the one before it: he knows music:

he educates me tastefully and then leaves me to listen. He

interrupts to tell me stories about himself, how when he was

sick certain pieces of music healed him, the story is long and

boring, I listen quietly feigning interest, he will now play those

pieces for me: they could make the dead walk: they are the

deepest layers of sex, the deepest sensual circles transmuted to

formal beauty, ordered, repeated in unspeakably beautiful

patterns, sound on sound, sound inside sound, sounds weaved,

sounds pulling the body into an involuntary happiness unrelated to human time, real life, or narrative detail: sounds deeper than sex: sounds entirely perfect and piercing. He

doesn’t put on one record and leave it. He changes, weaves,

composes, interlaces: just enough, just not quite enough, it

leaves you wanting, wanting, needing more.

Dinner is ready, two steaks. We sit next to each other at the

big round table. Now he is close enough to whisper. I will tell

you, he says, why I am publishing your book, he is whispering,

I have to strain closer to hear; I will tell you, he says, whisper­

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ing, why, the real reason. He is whispering, my ear is almost

up against his lips to catch the passing breath, the words just

barely discernible on the edge of breathing out. I will tell you,

he says, why. Meat juice and fat glisten in his moustache and

zing past my ear.

*

He was a schoolboy, probably around fourteen. A teacher and

some older boys gang-raped him for hours and cut him up all

over with knives.

*

He tells it slowly, detail by detail: the way raped people talk:

once one starts the whole story must be told, nothing can be

omitted. I see it.

*

I am shaking in pain and rage. I cannot talk. My skin is

crawling in terror. I see it.

*

I see it. I see the boy. I see him, the boy, the child. I see him on

the table where they did it. I see the torn membranes inside

him, the bleeding, the tearing destruction. I see the knife cuts. I

feel the pain. I see that he was a child. I see that he was raped.

I don’t look at the adult male beside me. I shake in pain and

rage. I am numb with anger: for him, for us: the raped.

*

He says he sees the man sometimes, the teacher. He says he

did the one thing the man would find unbearable: talked to

him. He says to me: that’s something you will never understand. I say: never. I swear: never. I take an oath: never.

*

I am publishing your book because I know it’s true.

*

I am numb. I want to cry but I do not cry. I don’t cry over

rape any more. I burn but I don’t cry. I shake but I don’t cry. I

get sick to my stomach but I don’t cry. I scream inside so that

my silent shrieking drowns the awful pounding of my heart

but I don’t cry. I am too weak to move but I don’t cry. I

haven’t a tear for him. I sit there, immobile, watching the boy

on the table. I see him.

*

He clears the table. We go back to the sofas. I sit far away

from him. I am quiet: stunned, like from a blow to the head. I

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sit and stare. That is why, he says. It is more than a pledge: it

is a blood oath: he has run our blood together. He has gotten

my loyalty: a loyalty above personality, liking, not liking,

wanting, not wanting, outside time and daily desires. He puts

on Madame Butterfly before she commits suicide. My pain is

insane. I do not notice his horrible and cynical wit.

*

I am of course now very gentle with him: in the past I have

been harsh but now I know this, I have seen this, the boy,

raped, I know why he cares about my writing, it is a secret