Andrea Dworkin: Ice And Fire

was completely silent. We never saw anything or heard anything. No door ever opened or closed. No Latin poured out, no bells chimed, no music pierced the early dawn or night.

The wooden cage was hoisted in the back alley closest to the

convent, and you could see it from there, hanging over the

tops of the houses, a place of gothic mystery, Catholic, eerie.

From the telephone pole, hoisted up, inside the wooden cage,

you were raised above the stone walls and the ghastly trees:

and with your hands tied there you were the witch: and the

Catholics could see you.

They had things called nuns, women dressed all in black, all

covered up, and we thought they walked around in twos and

never said a word and had their heads bowed and shaved and

their hands together in prayer. But we didn’t know. We weren’t

supposed to go too near it, the convent, and we were afraid of

disappearing in there for life, because once you went in you

could never come out. There were ghosts there too. We didn’t

know if anyone in there was really alive. When you saw the

top of the convent and the menacing trees above the backs of

the row houses and the wooden cage with a slight figure inside

it hoisted high on the telephone pole and tied there with a rope

and the afternoon began to fade and it got dusky or cloudy

and there were just the silhouettes of things, the starkness of

the cage and the figure in it, the tautness of the rope, the city

ugliness, barren, of the telephone pole, all against a sky that

had begun to lose light, reigned over by old European stones

and impenetrable trees, you knew you were near something

old, chill, something you knew but didn’t know: something

God was supposed to protect you from: something on the edge

of your memory, but not your memory. When it got late in the

day or the sky darkened with clouds or oncoming rain, the

silhouettes were awful drawings of something you had seen

before: maybe in a book: somewhere: and you stood completely

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still and watched and prayed for the wooden cage to come

down, for the figure in it to disappear, not be there, that slight

figure, for the convent to go away, to be somewhere else: and

especially for the dread boys, the crowd, to notice the coming

dark and be afraid of what they had done. We were overcome

watching: the great shadow of the convent and its thick trees,

its cold walls of stone, and the great imposition of the wooden

cage and the caged figure on the darkening sky. It was eerie

and unhappy: and one was drawn and repelled: drawn to the

convent and the cage, wanting to run inside the house.

We were all supposed to stay away from Catholics. The

convent represented their strangeness and malice: the threat of

their ghostly superstitions. A holy ghost lived there and they

drank blood and ate cookies and kneeled down. They wanted

all the children: and at night you could disappear into those

walls and no one would ever see you again. Standing outside

the great stone thing, even in broad daylight, even with traffic

all around, because one side of the convent was right on a very

big street at a very big intersection, a child was frightened of

the unscalable cold stone and the height of it. We could never

find a way in or out and the walls were too high to climb. I

wanted to see it and go into it but I was afraid even to stand

near it. Once another girl and I stood on that street corner for

hours collecting money for a charity and if you got enough

money you got to go to a special dinner in a restaurant and I

just thought about the traffic, how regular it was, and the sun,

how bright it was, the people walking on the street, how they

looked and dressed, because behind me was the penetrating

silence of those stone walls and I was cold and afraid. I could

feel it behind my back and I could feel the cold stones there

and I could feel the giant height of the wall and I could feel the

reaching coolness of the shadows from the great trees. Then a

car stopped to give us money after we had been there for hours

and this girl I was with went up to the car and then she got

real frightened and wouldn’t say what the man said to her and

said we had to go home right away and was really scared and

since it was right next to the convent I knew it was something

really bad so we went right home and she talked to her mother

who talked to my mother and I kept asking what had happened

and what the man had done to her. Finally my mother said he

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asked her to get in the car with him. It was very terrible and

ominous to get into the car. The air was heavy with warning

and fear and my own inestimable incomprehension. There was

this edging of my fear away from the convent to the man in

the car and to getting into a car. I thought he must be Catholic.

The girl would never speak of it or answer anything I asked.

My mother said never to say anything about it. I asked if he

had hurt her. My mother said: he didn’t get the chance.

*

There were Jewish blocks and Catholic blocks and black

blocks. We were supposed to stay off the black blocks, though

it was never put that way. We were always just showed how

to walk, down which streets, and told where not to go, which

streets. The streets we weren’t supposed to go on just had that

in common: black faces, black children. The Catholic streets

and the Jewish streets were all inside the same area, alternating,

no mixing. But I liked to go where I wasn’t supposed to, and I

often walked home alone down the Catholic streets, because

no one could tell by just looking at me exactly. I would make

new routes for myself down streets my friends didn’t go on.

Sometimes I went down black streets, because I wanted to.

Then, getting closer to the one central elementary school,

where all kinds of children converged from every direction,

there were blocks that we all had to walk down because we

were all going to the same place and it was just a fact that no

matter who lived there we all had to walk by or through,

however timidly.

Our street was bounded on one end, the one going to school,

by a busy street with lots of cars and across that street was a

Catholic block, Polish. We were supposed to walk up half a

block before crossing that busy street and continue going

toward school on a Jewish block, and usually I did. But coming

home I would want to walk down the Catholic block because

it was different and it seemed more direct. I knew I shouldn’t

but I didn’t exactly know why I shouldn’t except that it did

seep in that they were different from us and we weren’t

supposed to marry them. I wasn’t even ten yet because I was

ten when we moved away.