Burning the Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

respect. I knew many of the stories by heart, “The Fisherman and His Wife” by the Grimm brothers, and “The Honest Woodsman” who was offered first a gold, then a silver ax-head to replace the one he had lost but refused them, saying his was only steel, and was rewarded with all three.
    There was Dickens, Byron, the Bible, Tolstoy, folktales from many nations, and poems. The texts may have been somewhat modified, softened—I think I realized it even then—but only as regards those things too brutal for young readers. The word “out,” for instance, was omitted from a sentence in which a cruel woman cut out a sparrow’s tongue, leaving the sensitive child with the impression that the tongue had been slit. The books were richly illustrated. In volume four or five was Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West.” It was four pages long. I knew every word, and every detail of the illustrations. The hero of the poem, the colonel’s son, slender and dashing, wore a pith helmet with a white cloth wrapped around it and had a lanyard on his pistol. He may have been confused in my imagination with the Prince of Wales, who was the darling of the times.
    The ballad centered around an epic hoof-drumming chase. A colorful outlaw—I met him later in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, lame and untamable—with a band of men has stolen a horse from the British garrison on India’s northeast frontier. The horse, moreover, a mare, is the colonel’s favorite. The colonel’s son, a troop commander,sets off in hot and lone pursuit. In a treacherous pass he at last catches sight of the mare with the bold thief, Kamal, on her back and a relentless race begins. He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide … even Tolstoy later described bullets’ gay sound. Day fades. Hooves pounding, they ride through the night. His horse nearly spent, the colonel’s son falls at a water jump and seeing this, Kamal turns back, knocks the pistol from the fallen rider’s hand, and pulls him to his feet. There, face to face they stand and, after exchanging threats, confess to the bond that is now between them, rivals who have given all. Their code is the same, and the qualities of manhood they admire. They take a sacred oath as brothers and Kamal dispatches his only son to serve henceforth as bodyguard to his foe. Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar, he predicts, when I am hanged in Peshawur.
    I did not invent any games for the poem or pose before the mirror as one of its figures; I only stored it close to my heart. In the end, I suppose, I found the poem to be untrue, that is, I never found an adversary to love as deeply as a comrade, but I kept a place open for one always.
    Of the cardinal virtues, it was fortitude the poem held high, perhaps with a touch of mercy. Fortitude, I saw, was holy. My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it. I was white-skinned, sheltered. In the street I ran from gangs of toughs. Tunney, Dempsey’s most famous opponent, soaked his fists every day in brine to make them invulnerable, my father had told me, to toughen them, and it was in some sort of brine that I hoped to steep myself.
    ——
    It was my father who handled my sexual education. He did this by taking me to the family doctor, who had an office on Park Avenue with two exposures and an impressive desk. We sat, the three ofus, and the doctor began by asking me—he wanted an honest answer, he said—if I played with myself. I did not understand. He then elaborated somewhat. “No,” I said, which was true. He seemed almost disappointed but nevertheless undertook to describe how life was created. The egg, he explained, could not produce a baby chick all by itself. Something else was needed. I sat listening though not certain what he was talking about. He had a rugged face and silvery, Airedale hair. My father—I remember him always as having a comfortable double chin—was dutifully listening too.
    The other thing that was