Henri to Yvette.

19 July

My sweet darling,

Today I will try to write you a practical letter about our reunion. I have lately received six letters from you; filled with your love for me, each more tender than the last and each filling me with the healthiest joy and the most perfect happiness.

I am waiting – at the end of my strength, darling, because I want already to have you beside me, and see your gaze, brother of mine. I love you and I want to live with you. I want it  from the deepest part of my soul.  I have always lived with your face and the image of your heart close to me, or rather within me.

I would have gone on like this. But now since you want me, since you desire me as much as I desire you, now that your nights are filled with the same intensive and beautiful life as mine, now that I want you right now and for ever with me- without departures, without separation, drinking the +obliterated by stamp+ from the same peaceful source. I just said to you that I want to be practical and nothing more. And you well see that the first lines I wrote – bah, the first! – I launch myself straight away to the sky and try to express the inexpressible: a love that has never been before, the love I have for you darling.

On the other hand, Yvette, is there anything more practical for me than to want, with all the power of my soul, to live with you each moment of my existence. But almost all my practical life for the last five years was nothing else. The whole time was filled with one thought only, one feeling one sensation: you, Yvette.

Oh little one, you know it well, don’t you. You know that no one knows how to love you as I do. I am the happier of the two of us, because I love you. Oh darling, my dear, darling, the pity is that you cannot feel all this joy, all this vitality that flows ceaselessly and which raises you up to the celestial heights because I love you as I do!

Look, I have been thinking – I do nothing else- of our life in that future which is so close, and so terribly hard because it is only close instead of being right now at this very moment. I can’t come to Vienna. I wrote you a long letter outlining my plans. But after you what you wrote I understand that you had not yet received it. Furthermore I realize that my letters and telegrams reach you very haphazardly. Like the telegram with “the miserly kisses”. That telegram, it’s ages ago that I sent it, and well before my recent renaissance. After my first letter from Poland, sent to Champdossin de Belmont, I suddenly received a telegram from Vienna: ”I am in Vienna 1 Dorothergasse trois baisers, Yvette”. I had not then received the letters from Palestine (those of the springtime of our life). But oh darling, after that telegram, when I knew you were so close without that cruel sea dividing us, I so much hoped, I so fervently prayed, with a religious fervor, I so much wanted you to love me. You were dans ma gorge, Yvette.

I replied the same day, to No.1 Dorothergasse: “Hello, darling, thanks for the miserly kisses.  Considering everything in my heart, you see, three kisses were particularly few.  After that, I wrote you a letter, a little mad and still to No.1 Drothen….  explaining how I imagined these three kisses. Explaining to you my great thirst which would only increase with all the water of your mouth, darling.

Then I received the letters from Palestine (five). And the tenderness there gave me a fever and I asked you if you loved me. (You see, it is I who made the advances. That’s the rule. Am I nice, darling, guarding the wifely pride? You joke, me too. I am smiling now. With so much love…) And that was still to No.1 Dorothergasse. Then, at last I had your two first letters from Vienna. And I was nothing but joy, storm, bundle of nerves, pining, tumult and music. The announcement of your victory, that victory that I was waiting for through a century of days and nights filled with nightmares and plaintive melodies, that victory I tell you threatened to strangle me with all its weight of happiness.

I was drunk. I ran through the street and boulevards. I saw no ruins, no people, no sky, and no children. I saw nothing but you, you, you, and you. And you were so huge that you hid the rest of the world. In my heart there was nothing but you. And I felt you and my heart right to the ends of my fingers. Everywhere, in the air, in the world and in my body, there were only these two: you and my heart. I could not write. I could only telegraph. One telegram after the other. And the text was the contents of my whole being:  “darling, I love you.” Oh dear little Yvette, my little red headed wife, my beautiful one, my beloved, “good morning darling” I did nothing but repeat that, to sing it- and that was the most human of all music.

And I continue to murmur your name and I don’t stop saying “good morning darling” and I would have so much wanted this melody to invade your soul with the sweetness that I have for you.

Then I wrote and proposed that you leave your work and come here. I can very easily arrange your visa.  You will come and you will decide.  Here we would talk and we would weigh up everything. Why would you not live in Warsaw? I have not yet got an apartment but in a months time I will have a fine apartment of two rooms with kitchen and bathroom. And I plan to furnish it. And I want it to be a hearth of love for you, for us. If you come in a month, perhaps it will be done. And you will enter your dwelling place and you will correct your Henryk-the-Barbarian. Darling, what dreams I am making now for that apartment! Ouri? That’s what must be decided here.

If you come here and stay with me, perhaps in the springtime we will have a girl. And Helene will come and visit us. And we will prepare her a room decorated with flowers and books and our hearth invaded by love. The problem is Ouri. I love him and I know that it will be difficult for him to live here. Besides, I really would prefer that he be in France – that country of my eternal nostalgia- and that he be a real little French kid.  But you see I too will leave without doubt for Western Europe on a mission. That is in view.  And then, come first, perhaps I will decide to leave the country straight away and come back to France with you.  We will see. Come. You will have plenty of time to get back to Paris by October. Or perhaps you would rather go first to France and see Helene, Ouri and Jacqueline and then come to Warsaw?

Write me everything. I await impatiently your response. Will I get the visa? From which Consulate, Vienna or Paris? And for what date? Write to me when you have decided and you will receive the visa very quickly, by diplomatic bag. Should I take two rooms for us or one only for me?  Should I do the furnishing or wait for you? Darling I begin to wander. It’s time for me to finish because these down to earth questions will perhaps shock you. But I, you see, I think of these down to earth matters with the pure soul of a poet. Because it is all for you. Because I love you – one cannot more. To love more, that would be to die- and we must live.

Yvette, my dear little beloved wife,

I embrace you madly,

Your Henri