Mercy

by Andrea Dworkin

  lost his boyish charm although he always liked to play but

  inside it was a life-or-death hate o f authority, he made it look

  like fun but it was very dark; a psychiatrist rescued him, got

  him discharged. His parents were ashamed. He joined real

  young to get aw ay from them; he didn’t have much education

  except what he learned there— some about cooking and

  explosives; some about how to do hard time. He learned some

  about assault and authority; you could assault anyone; rules

  said you couldn’t; in real life you could. M om m y and daddy

  were ashamed o f him when he came home; they got colder,

  more remote. Oh, she was cold. Ignorant and cold. D addy

  too, but he hid him self behind a patriarchal lethargy; head o f

  the clan’s all tuckered out now from a life o f real work, daily

  service, for money, for food, tired for life, too tired to say

  anything, too tired to do anything, has to just sit there now on

  his special chair only he can sit on, a vinyl chair, and read the

  newspaper now, only he gets to read the newspaper, which

  seems to take all day and all night because he ponders, he

  addresses issues o f state in his head, he’s the daddy. D ay and

  night he sits in the chair, all tuckered out. H e’s cold, a cold

  man whose wife took the rap for being mean because she did

  things— raised the kids, cleaned the floor, said eat now, said

  sleep now, said it’s cold so where’s the coal, said we need

  money for clothes, terrible bitch o f a woman, a tyrant making

  such demands, keeping track o f the details o f shelter; and she

  got what she needed i f she had to make it or barter for it or steal

  it; she was one o f them evil geniuses o f a mother that kept her

  eye open to get what was needed, including when the Nazis

  were there, occupying, when some didn’t get fed and

  everyone was hungry. Daddy got to sit in the special chair, all

  for him. O f course, when he was younger he worked. On

  boats. Including for the Nazis. He had no choice, he is quick to

  say. Well, not that quick. He says it after a long, rude silence

  questioning w hy is it self-evident that there was no choice or

  questioning his seeming indifference to anything going on

  around him at the time. Well, you see, o f course, I had no

  choice. N o, well, they didn’t have to threaten, you see, I

  simply did what they asked; yes, they were fine to me; yes, I

  had no trouble with them; o f course, I only worked on a boat,

  a ship, you know. Oh, no, o f course, I didn’t hurt anyone; no,

  we never saw any Jew s; no, o f course not, no. M om m y did, o f

  course; saw a Jew ; yes, hid a Je w in a closet for several days,

  yes. Out o f the kindness o f her heart. Out o f her goodness.

  Yes, they would have killed her but she said what did the Jew s

  ever do to me and she hid one, yes. Little Je w girl became his

  daughter-in-law— times have changed, he would note and

  then he would nod ponderously— but it was the hero,

  m om m y-in-law, w ho’d say things like “je w it dow n” because

  she did the work o f maintaining the family values: fed the

  family materially and spiritually. But m y husband wasn’t one

  o f them; the worse they were, the purer, the more miraculous,

  he was. He wasn’t o f them; he was o f me; o f what I was and

  knew; o f what I thought and hoped; o f the courage I wanted to

  have; o f the will I did have; o f the life I was leading, all risk and

  no tom orrow; and he was born after the war like me; a child o f

  after. So there was this legal thing; the law decrees; it made me

  their daughter-in-law more than it made me his wife. There

  was it and them on the one hand and then there was us: him in

  exile from them— I thought he was as orphaned as I was; and

  braver; I thought he was braver. I embraced him, and he

  embraced me, and neither o f us knew nothing about

  tom orrow and I never had. I didn’t wait for him like some

  middle-class girl wanting a date or something in ruffles or

  someone wanting a husband; I wasn’t one o f them and I didn’t

  want a husband; I wanted a friend through day and night. I

  didn’t ask him what he liked so I could bow and scrape and my

  idea wasn’t to make him into someone safe, denatured. He

  was an anarchist o f spirit and act and I didn’t want no burden

  o f law on him. I just wanted to run with him, be his pal in his

  game, and hold him; hold him. I indulged an affection for him,

  a fraternal affection that was real and warm and robust and sort

  o f interesting on its own, always sort o f reaching out towards

  him, and I felt tender towards him, tender near him, next to

  him, lying next to him; and we were intense, a little on edge,

  when we holed up together, carnal; our home was the bed we

  were in, a bed, an empty room, the floor, an em pty room,

  maybe not a regular home like you see on television but we

  wasn’t like them on television, there w asn’t tw o people like us

  anywhere, so fragile and so reckless and so strong, we were

  with each other and for each other, we didn’t hide where we

  had been before, what we had done, we had secrets but not

  from each other and there w asn’t anything that made us dirty

  to each other and we embraced each other and we were going

  to hole up together, kind o f a home, us against them, I guess,

  and we didn’t have no money or ideas, you know , pictures in

  your head from magazines about how things should be—

  plates, detergents, how them crazy wom en smile in advertisements. It’s all around you but you don’t pick it up unless you got some time and money and neither o f us had ever

  been a citizen in that sense. We were revolutionaries, not

  consumers— not little boy-girl dolls all polished and smiling

  with little tea sets playing house. We were us, unto ourselves.

  We found a small place without any floor at all, you had to

  walk on the beams, and he built the floor so the landlord let us

  stay there. We planned the political acts there, the chaos we

  delivered to the status quo, the acts o f disruption, rebellion.

  We hid out there, kept low , kept out o f sight; you turn where

  you are into a friendly darkness that hides you. We embraced

  there, a carnal embrace— after an action or during the long

  weeks o f planning or in the interstices where we drenched

  ourselves in hashish and opium until a paralysis overtook us

  and the smoke stopped all the time. I liked that; how

  everything slowed down; and I liked fucking after a strike, a

  proper climax to the real act— I liked how everything got fast

  and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after,

  when we was drenched in perspiration from what came

  before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made you

  supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and

  hurt before you touched them, could feel a breeze a mile away,

  it hurt, there was this reddish pain, a soreness parallel to your

  skin before anything touched you; I liked how you was tired

  before you began, a fatigue
that came because the danger was

  over, a strained, taut fatigue, an ache from discipline and

  attentiveness and from the imposition o f a superhuman

  quietness on the body; I liked it. I liked it when the embrace

  was quiet like the strike itself, a subterranean quiet, disciplined, with exposed nerve endings that hurt but you don’t say

  nothing. Then you sleep. Then you fuck more; hardy; rowdy;

  long; slow; now side by side or with me on top and then side

  by side; I liked to be on top and I moved real slow, real

  deliberate, using every muscle in me, so I could feel him

  hurting— you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens

  into a frisson o f pain? — and I could tease every bone in his

  body until it was ready to break open, split and the m arrow ’d

  spread like semen. I could split him open inside and he never

  had enough. I had an appetite for him; anything, I’d do

  anything, hours or days. In my mind, I wasn’t there for him so

  much as I was the same as him. I could feel every muscle in his

  body as if it were mine and I’d taunt each muscle, I’d make it

  bend and ache and stretch and tear, I’d pull it slow, I’d make it

  m ove toward me so much it w ould’ve come through his skin

  except I’d make him come before his skin’d burst open. I didn’t

  have no shyness around him and I didn’t have to act ignorant

  or stupid because he wasn’t that kind o f man who wanted you

  to overlay everything with the words o f a fool like you don’t

  know nothing. Some was perverse according to how these

  things are seen but that’s a concept, not a fact, it’s a concept

  over people’s eyes so much you wish they would go blind to

  get rid o f the concept once and for all. It’s how the law makes

  you see things but we were different. We were inside each

  other; a fact; wasn’t perverse; couldn’t be. We turned each

  other inside out and it binds you and there w asn’t nothing he

  did to me that I didn’t do to him and w e’d talk and cook and

  roam around and drink and smoke and w e’d visit his friends,

  which wasn’t always so good because to them I was this

  something, I didn’t understand it but I hated it, I was this

  something that came into a room and changed everything.

  There were these guys, mostly fighters, anarchists, some

  intellectuals, and when I came into the room everything was

  different. I was his blood and that’s how we acted, not giggly

  or amorous, but I think I was just this monstrous thing, this

  girlfriend or wife, that is completely different from them and

  cannot talk without making them mad or crazy, that cannot

  do anything but ju st must sit quiet, that does not have any

  reason to be in the room at all, not this room where they are,

  only some other room somewhere else to be fucked, sort o f

  kept like a pet animal and the man goes there when he’s done

  with the real stuff, the real talk, the real politics, the real w ork,

  the real getting high, even the real fucking— they go somewhere together and get women together to do the real

  fucking, they hunt down women together or buy wom en

  together or pick up women together to do the real fucking;

  and then in some one room somewhere hidden aw ay is the

  w ife or girlfriend and she’s in this sort o f vacuum, sealed

  aw ay, vacuum packed, and when she comes out to be

  somewhere or to say something there is an embarrassment and

  they avert their eyes— the man failed because she’s outside—

  she got out— like his pee’s showing on his pants. We’d go to

  these meetings late at night. These guys would be there; they

  were famous revolutionaries, famous to their time and place,

  criminals according to the law; brilliant, shrewd, tough guys,

  detached, with formal politeness to me. One was a junkie, a

  flamboyant junkie with long, silken, rolling brown curls,

  great pools o f sadness in his moist eyes, small and elegant, a

  beauty, soft-spoken, always nodding out or so sick and

  wretched that he’d be throwing up a few times a night and

  they’d expect me to clean it up and I w ouldn’t, I’d just sit there

  waiting for the next thing we were all going to discuss, and

  someone would eventually look me in the eye, a rare event,

  and say meaningfully, “ he just threw u p , ” and time would

  pass and I’d wait and eventually someone would start talking

  about something; I didn’t get how the junkie was more real

  than me or how his vomit was mine, you know. When the

  junkie’d come to where we lived he would vom it and sort o f

  challenge me to leave it there, as he had fouled m y very own

  nest, and he’d ask for a cup o f tea and I’d clean it up but I

  w ouldn’t get him the tea and I tried to convey to my husband

  that m y hospitality was being abused, our hospitality, o f

  course, that I wasn’t being treated fair, not that some rule was

  being broke but that the boy was being rude to me; I told my

  husband to clean it up finally but he never did it too good. I

  told m y husband who I still thought was m y brother that I

  didn’t want the junkie to come anymore because he didn’t

  treat me in an honorable w ay and I said I wasn’t born for this.

  So there were these fissures coming between us because the

  fraternal affection was with him and the junkie from the old

  days together, not him and me from now, and I was shocked

  by this, I couldn’t grasp it. I went into the rooms with him but

  it came down on him how bad it was from the men and it came

  down on me that I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near

  where they were. I kept going to the rooms because we kept

  hitting targets all over the city and w e’d need to get o ff the

  streets fast and he’d know some place he wanted to be, one

  friend or another, and they’d all be there; it would contradict

  the plan but he’d say it was necessary. Some were on the run

  for recent crimes but most were burned out, living in times

  past, not fighting no more, most stopped long ago and far

  away and they were just burned out to hell. Yeah, they were

  tired, I respected that; I mean, I fucking loved these heroes; I

  knew they were tired, tired from living on their nerves, from

  hiding, from jail, from smoke, from fucking, which came first

  for some but last for others. Some had children they had

  deserted; some lived in the past, remembering stray girls in

  cities they were passing through. They were older than me but

  not by a lot. I wanted their respect. I hadn’t given up and I did

  anything anybody else did and I wasn’t afraid o f nothing so

  how come it was like I wasn’t there? I mean, I was too

  honorable to be anything other than strong and silent, I tell

  you; but I thought silence made its own sound, you count on

  revolutionaries to hear the silence, otherwise how can the

  oppressed count on them? Every lunatic was someone we

  knew that we dropped in on or stayed with while we were

  running— or m oving just for the sake o f speed, the fun o f

  flight. We went to other cities, hitchhi
king; we lived in small

  rented rooms, slept on floors. We went to other countries—

  we begged, we borrowed, yeah, we stole, me more than him,

  stealing’s easy, I been stealing all m y life, not a routine or some

  fixed act, just here and there as needed, from stores when I was

  a kid, when I was hungry or when there was something I

  wanted real bad that I couldn’t have because it cost money I

  didn’t have— I never minded putting money out if I had it in

  m y pocket— I mean, I remember taking a chocolate Easter egg

  when I was a kid or m y proudest, most treasured acquisition, a

  blues record by Dave Van Ronk, the first man I ever saw with

  a full beard like a beatnik or a prophet; I took money when I

  needed it and could get it easy enough; pills; clothes. M o n ey’s

  w hat’s useful. He began dealing some shit, it w asn’t too hard

  or dangerous compared to running borders with other

  contraband but it got so he did it without me more and more;

  he spent more and more time with these low life gangster

  types, not political revolutionaries at all but these vulgar guys

  who packed guns and just did business; he said it’s just for

  money, what’s it got to do with you or with us, I’ll just do it

  fast, get the money, it’s nothing; and it was nothing, I didn’t

  have no interest in money per se, but it got so he did the

  running, he was free, freedom and flight were his, he’d pick up

  and go, I didn’t know where he was or who with or when I’d

  meet them they’d be lowlife I had no interest in, just toadies as

  much as some corporate businessmen were and I’d feel very

  bored with them and they’d treat me like I was a skirt and I’d

  feel superior and because I didn’t want no part o f them I didn’t

  challenge it, I’d just put up with it and be relieved when he did

  his shit for money elsewhere; he hunted money down, he

  hunted dope down, he drove the secret highways o f Europe at

  a hundred miles an hour, without me, increasingly without

  me, and I stayed home and dusted walls, waiting, I waited,

  while I waited I cleaned, I dusted, I washed things, I made