Providence

Providence

(20. Jan. 1920,  Milena Jesenska, Narodni Listy)

It is now quite some time ago that I saw, down by the river, a drowned man, already bloated, with black limp hair and green fingernails, people crowded around him, shouting, walking, swimming rafts and dismay, that in connection with suicide is always a bit embarrassing and preposterous.  Another time I saw from the riverside a man who jumped off a bridge into the water, went down like a stone, came up again, screamed, and then went down completely; for a short time the traffic, several trams, a lorry,  stopped because of him, then he vanished from the world. In a little street in Vienna I once saw a murderer on the run, he was shot with a revolver, fell, propped himself up with an arm on the cobbled stone, bent several times in pain and then just lay there, the pale face turned directly at my window, it was such an unbelievably vacuous, ordinary face, that I could not believe I saw the face of a murderer who, furthermore, had himself been shot just now. Another time I saw a skinny ugly girl with salient collarbone, in a dirty leotard who slipped and fell from the cupola, and though she was uninjured, she stretched her body like an injured bird down on the mattress . Our horror was so complete, that the news that she was alive did not relieve us.

Today I saw a little scene out of the tram window. On the sidewalk two people were standing, a man and a young girl, probably right after an argument. The girl turned away, as if she wanted to flee, as if in rightful exacerbation and anger she wanted to leave for ever. But she could not even make two steps. She turned back, slowly and bashfully, and then touched the man’s elbow over and over again with her little hand, while the man was spitefully savoring his victory. The outline of a girlish, wide hat and the tearstained, swollen face of the girl got stuck in my mind. The face that, for better or worse, unguardedly delivered itself to the ugliness, a very weak face, so touchingly, childishly terrified and scared! When the tram rounded the corner, the girl was still standing behind the back of the man, completely lonely and cast off, confused by the smiles of the passerbies, frozen and helpless. I thought: the only emancipation from such a situation would have been a punch with the little fist right into the face of the man, if there exists such a thing as emancipation from the little defamations rooted in dependence. Yet I know that she never did it, that she never would have been able to do it. That instead she went home and her degradation would be growing beyond all measures.