22 我明白你喜欢自由

I am not blaming you, my beloved, no, I am not blaming you. Forgive me if a touch of
bitterness flows into my pen now and then, forgive me—my child, our child lies dead
in the flickering candlelight; I clenched my fists against God and called him a
murderer, my senses are confused and dulled. Forgive my lament, forgive me! I know
that deep in your heart you are good and helpful, you help everyone, even a total
stranger who asks for help. But your kindness is so strange, it is open to all to take as
much of it as they can hold, it is great, infinitely great, your kindness, but it is—
forgive me—it is passive. It wants to be appealed to, to be taken. You help when you
are called upon to help, when you are asked for help, you help out of shame, out of
weakness, and not out of joy. You do not—let me say so openly—you do not like
those who are in need and torment any better than their happier brothers. And it is hard
to ask anything of people like you, even the kindest of them. Once, when I was still a
child looking through the peephole in our door, I saw you give something to a beggar
who had rung your bell. You gave him money readily before he asked you, even a
good deal of it, but you gave it with a certain anxiety and in haste, wanting him to go
away again quickly; it was as if you were afraid to look him in the face. I have never
forgotten your uneasy, timid way of helping, fleeing from gratitude. And so I never
turned to you. Certainly I know that you would have stood by me then, even without
any certainty that the child was yours. You would have comforted me, you would have
given me money, plenty of money, but never with anything but a secret impatience to
push what was unwelcome away from you; yes, I believe you might even have asked
me to do away with the child before its birth. And I feared that more than anything—
because what would I not have done if you wanted it, how could I have denied you
anything? However, that child meant everything to me, because it was yours, yourself
again but no longer as a happy, carefree man whom I could not hold, yourself given to
me for ever—so I thought—there in my body, a part of my own life. Now at last I had
caught you, I could sense your life growing in my veins, I could give you food and
drink, caress and kiss you when my heart burned for that. You see, beloved, that is
why I was so blissfully happy when I knew that I was carrying a child of yours, that is
why I never told you, because then you could not escape from me again.
To be sure, beloved, they were not such blissful months as I had anticipated in my
mind, they were also months of horror and torment, of revulsion at the vileness of
humanity. I did not have an easy time. I could not work in the shop during the final
months, or my relative would have noticed and sent news home. I did not want to ask
my mother for money—so I eked out an existence until the baby’s birth by selling
what little jewellery I had. A week before he was born, my last few crowns were
stolen from a cupboard by a washerwoman, so I had to go to the maternity hospital
where only very poor women, the outcasts and forgotten, drag themselves in their
need. And the child—your child—was born there in the midst of misery. It was a
deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to
each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that
crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans. I suffered the
humiliation, the mental and physical shame that poverty has to bear from the company
of prostitutes and the sick who made our common fate feel terrible, from the cynicism
of young doctors who stripped back the sheets from defenceless women with an ironic
smile and felt them with false medical expertise, from the greed of the nurses—in
there, a woman’s bashfulness was crucified with looks and scourged with words. The
notice with your name in such a place is all that is left of you, for what lies in the bed
is only a twitching piece of flesh felt by the curious, an object to be put on display and
studied—the women who bear children at home to husbands waiting affectionately for
the birth do not know what it means to give birth to a baby alone and defenceless, as if
one were on the laboratory table! If I read the word “hell” in a book to this day, I
suddenly and against my conscious will think of that crowded, steamy ward full of
sighs, laughter, blood and screams, that slaughterhouse of shame where I suffered.