26

UP JACOB’S LADDER TO A STRANGER’S HOME

As soon as that was done she decided to look up the strange man who had offered her his help, and immediately proceeded to carry out her resolution. She wanted to confess to him that she no longer knew what do with herself. She had no clear picture of him; a person one has seen through tears that dried in his company is not likely to appear the way he really is. So, on her way, she thought about him. She believed she was being clearheaded; but actually her thinking was still imbued with imagination. She hurried through the streets, bearing before her eyes the light from her brother’s room. But it hadn’t been real light at all, she thought; it was more as if all the things in the room had suddenly lost their composure, or some kind of sanity they must ordinarily possess. But if in fact she alone had lost her composure, or her sanity, then that too would not have been limited to herself, because something had been set free in the things, a liberation that was stirring with miracles. “One moment more, and it would have peeled us out of our clothes like a silver knife, without our having moved a finger!” she thought.

But gradually she felt herself calming to the sound of the harmless, gray water pattering on her hat and coat, and her thoughts became more measured. Perhaps the simple clothes she had hastily thrown on helped as well, for they directed her memory back to schoolgirl walks without an umbrella and to guiltless states of mind. She recalled an innocent summer she had spent with a friend and her parents on a small island in the north: there, between the hard splendors of sea and sky, they had discovered a nesting place of seabirds, a hollow filled with white, soft feathers. And now she knew it: The man she was drawn to reminded her of this nesting site. The idea pleased her. Back then she would hardly have permitted herself, given the rigorous sincerity that is part of youth’s need for experience, to abandon herself, as she was now deliberately doing, with such illogical, indeed juvenile, willfulness, to an unearthly dread at the thought of that softness and whiteness. This dread was related to Professor Lindner; but the unearthliness was related to him also.