Tell Me a Riddle (19 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 77
78,000 in one minute (whisper of a scream)
78,000 human beings
we'll destroy ourselves?
*
''Aah, Mrs. Miserable," he said, as if she could hear, "all your life working, and now in bed you lie, servants to tend, you do not even need to call to be tended, and still you work. Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?"
The body threshed, her hand clung in his. A melody, ghost-thin, hovered on her lips, and like a guilty ghost, the vision of her bent in listening to it, silencing the record instantly he was near. Now, heedless of his presence, she floated the melody on and on.
"Hid it from me," he complained, "how many times you listened to remember it so?" And tried to think when she had first played it, or first begun to silence her few records when he came nearbut could reconstruct nothing. There was only this room with its tall hooked pillar and its swarm of sounds.
No man one
except through others
Strong
with the not yet
in the now
Dogma dead
war dead
one country
"It helps, Mrs. Philosopher, words from books? It helps?" And it seemed to him that for seventy years she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic, within her, that it had coiled infinite mile on mile, trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard,
*The italicized passage contains references to the ships that transported slaves from Africa to America, to the trains that took millions of Jews and other Nazi victims to the concentration camps, and to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
 
Page 78
and spokenand that maliciously she was playing back only what said nothing of him, of the children, or their intimate life together.
''Left us indeed, Mrs. Babbler," he reproached, "you who called others babbler and cunningly saved your words. A lifetime you tended and loved, and now not a word of us, for us. Left us indeed? Left me."
And he took out his solitaire deck, shuffled the cards loudly, slapped them down.
Lift high
banner of reason (tatter of an orator's voice)
justice
freedom
light
Humankind
life worthy
capacities
Seeks
(blur of shudder)
belong
human being
"Words, words," he accused, "and what human beings did
you
seek around you, Mrs. Live Alone, and what humankind think worthy?"
Though even as he spoke, he remembered she had not always been isolated, had not always wanted to be alone (as he knew there had been a voice before this gossamer one; before the hoarse voice that broke from silence to lash, make incidents, shame hima girl's voice of eloquence that spoke their holiest dreams). But again he could reconstruct, image, nothing of what had been before, or when, or how, it had changed.
Ace, queen, jack. The pillar shadow fell, so, in two tracks; in the mirror depths glistened a moonlike blob, the empty solution bottle. And it worked in him:
of reason and justice and freedom . . . Dogma dead:
he remembered the full quotation, laughed bitterly. "Hah, good you do not know what you say; good Victor Hugo died and did not see it, his twentieth century."

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