Free Leavetaking by Peter Weiss

features strongly emphasized. Then just her face, a face that became ever more immense until finally the whole sheet was filled with her dark profile and her huge, spying eyes. Next to the first page, which reveals that I had given much attention to the structure of the female body, was a pair of scissors wide open in readiness to cut, and, as if to soothe my fear of the menace, I had painted a jumping jack head between the gaping blades of the scissors and on the sprawled-out puppet legs put long boots. It was as if my own knowledge was frightening me, and then the princess’s face began to look like my mother’s, the domineering dark eye, that was my mother’s eye, the eye that missed nothing. On another page of the Bible was depicted the building of a pyramid. Amid whiplashings by the guards the slaves lugged massive stones up the sloping ramps, here and there one broke down and perished in the dust. My fantasy was nourished by this picture’s emanations, I lived among guards whose thongs lashed me to pieces, I savored all the sorrows of humiliation and later, when I found
BenHur
, I experienced as a chained galley slave the pleasures of direst distress. There was the captive warrior, who, bound naked to the back of a stag, was driven into the thorn thicket. There were the gladiators who wrestled with lions in the arena, there was the Foreign Legionary who lay wounded in desert sand, beset by prowling hyenas. The pictures that I found in the Bible, all these pictures of persecutions and tortures, of plunderings and murders, of slanders and penances, all these formed the groundwork for new visions which blended with my destructive games. I read of steel warships blown to pieces by grenades, of torpedoes launched from a U-boat in which the crew listened with bated breath as it steered toward the enemy ship’s side, leaving behind it a telltale trail of foam on the water’s surface, I read of the bloody bodies of the wounded, of comrades rescuing each other from the flames, of heroic captains who stuck to their posts on the bridges of their sinking ships and allowed themselves to be sucked down with the wreck into the depths of the ocean, I read of adventurous pirateering expeditions that landed on distant shores, I read of fights in snowstorms on high and rocky mountain peaks, of troops who charged out of their trenches at night in downpours of rain, to butcher each other in close combat in the mud, I saw the picture of the Lancers who rode out in the pallidly luminous dawn, and in brief doubt I asked myself where these Lancers were riding to, and why, as the song said, they rode to an early death, and I foresaw their folly, I felt something of the intangible horror that was the purpose of all myreading, when I saw the picture of the Indian prisoners brought to execution bound to the mouths of cannons and read the caption underneath that said that with such a death not only the body but also the soul is destroyed. There are scenes in a book of which I hardly know the title or author, scenes that are as unforgettable to me as scenes from
The Red and the Black, Hunger, Pan
, and
The Idiot
. There is a river in a jungle and from one bough that stretches far out over the river hangs an Indian, ready to throw himself onto the approaching canoe, a moment of extreme suspense. There is a room in a house in a provincial town, I do not know what happened in this room, nor who is in this room, there is only this room with a cupboard, a bed, and closed shutters, perhaps it is Sunday and everyone in the house is sleeping, and someone is eavesdropping here in this muffled room and is planning something and is full of expectation. There is the island on which the shipwrecked of the Pacific have landed, their reed huts rise, clearly outlined between the tall, slender palm trunks. My thought of flight to far-off lands was concentrated in this picture. The curious thing was that, considering the out-of-the-way places and sights,