Ladders to Fire Read Online Free PDF

attain love or
ecstasy or a perfect moment, I expect it to be followed by pain.”
    Then Lillian leaned over and kissed Djuna warmly: “I want to protect you.”
    “We give each other courage.”
    The mist came into the room. Djuna thought: She’s such a hurt woman. She is one who does
not know what she suffers from, or why, or how to overcome it. She is all
unconscious, motion, music. She is afraid to see, to analyze her nature. She
thinks that nature just is and that nothing can be done about it. She would
never have invented ships to conquer the sea, machines to create light where
there was darkness. She would never have harnessed water power, electric power.
She is like the primitive. She thinks it is all beyond her power. She accepts
chaos. She suffers mutely…
    “ Djuna , tell me all
that happened to you. I keep thinking about your hunger. I feel the pangs of it
in my own stomach.”
    “My mother died,” continued Djuna .
“One of my brothers was hurt in an accident while playing in the street and
crippled. Another was taken to the insane asylum. He harmed nobody. When the
war started he began to eat flowers stolen from the florists. When he was
arrested he said that he was eating flowers to bring peace to the world. That
if everybody ate flowers peace would come to the world. My sister and I were
put in an orphan asylum. I remember the day we were taken there. The night
before I had a dream about a Chinese pagoda all in gold, filled with a
marvelous odor. At the tip of the pagoda there was a mechanical bird who sang
one little song repeatedly. I kept hearing this song and smelling the odor all
the time and that seemed more real to me than the callous hands of the orphan
asylum women when they changed me into a uniform. Oh, the greyness of those
dresses! And if only the windows had been normal. But they were long and narrow,
Lillian. Everything is changed when you look at it through long and narrow
windows. It’s as if the sky itself were compressed, limited. To me they were
like the windows of a prison. The food was dark, and tasteless, like slime. The
children were cruel to each other. No one visited us. And then there was the
old watchman who made the rounds at night. He often lifted the corners of our
bedcovers, and let his eyes rove and sometimes more than his eyes… He became
the demon of the night for us little girls.”
    There was a silence, during which both Lillian
and Djuna became children, listening to the watchman
of the night become the demon of the night, the tutor of the forbidden, the
initiator breaking the sheltered core of the child, breaking the innocence and
staining the beds of adolescence.
    “The satyr of the asylum,” said Djuna , “who became also our jailer because when we grew
older and wanted to slip out at night to go out with the boys, it was he who
rattled the keys and prevented us. But for him we might have been free at
times, but he watched us, and the women looked up to him for his fanaticism in
keeping us from the street. The orphan asylum had a system which permitted
families to adopt the orphans. But as it was known that the asylum supplied the
sum of thirty-five dollars a month towards the feeding of the child, those who
responded were most often those in need of the thirty-five dollars. Poor
families, already burdened with many children, came forward to ‘adopt’ new
ones. The orphans were allowed to enter these homes in which they found
themselves doubly cheated. For at least in the asylum we had no illusion, no
hope of love. But we did have illusions about the adoptions. We thought we
would find a family. In most cases we did not even imagine that these families
had children of their own. We expected to be a much wanted and only child! I
was placed in one of them. The first thing that happened was that the other
children were jealous of the intruder. And the spectacle of the love lavished
on the legitimate children was terribly painful. It made me feel