Jerusalem, October 1974

Dear Dotty,

I've been reading about how the Slavs descended into the sea with their spears in their boots. And I've been thinking about how Cracow is changing, in a rash of new orthographic and linguistic mistakes, sisters to the progress of words. I've been thinking about how you stay the same and how Isaac and I are losing each other more and more. I don't dare tell him. Whenever we do make love, no matter how good it is or what we do, I can only feel on my breast and my belly the mark of that bayonet. I feel it in advance; it's come between Isaac and me in our bed. Is it possible that in a matter of seconds a person can sign himself with a bayonet on another person's body and leave his portrait forever imprinted on another's flesh? I have to keep hunting for my own thoughts. They're mine not when they're born but when I catch them, if I manage to do so before they escape me. That wound resembles a mouth, and whenever Isaac and I make love--if fact, as soon as we touch--the tip of my breast falls into that scar as if into a toothless mouth. I lie beside Isaac and look at the spot in the dark where he is sleeping. The smell of clover screens the smell of the barn. I wait for him to stir; that is when dreams thin out, and then I can wake him up, because he won't regret it. Some dreams are costly and others are rubbish.

I wake him up and ask, "Was he left-handed?"

"I think so," he tells me drowsily but readily, and I see he knows what I mean. "They captured him, and in the morning they brought him to my tent to show him to me. He had a beard, green eyes, and a head wound. It was the wound they really wanted to show to me. I had done it with my rife butt."