Dvr.H.Adler

No 30765
173 Hen.Tnpt Coy
R.A.S.C(P)
M.E.F.

22 Aout 1942

My dear,

Yesterday soon after posting you a letter I received one from you. It is your last from Palestine. It is your day of the blues.

I am writing your these lines seated in my lorry parked on the side of the road. It is very hot and I have a dry throat. I’ve been here an hour already. I’m waiting for orders. During the past hour I have done nothing but listen attentively to the tempest loosened within me. I don’t know whether that is happy or unhappy, that my heart cannot speak directly, but must, to express itself, get help from other organs.  The mouth, despite the [indecipherable] of a civilised language can only copy faithfully  what is going on in the heart. In the best of cases, it is a good copy. But nothing more. For my part I believe that my fingers caressing your cheeks, my arms holding you tightly against me would have told you much more than words. When I say to you “I love you”, well, it is because I can’t find any other words. But I know that it is not all. There is more.  Or rather we others, civilised people, we don’t yet know how to define in one word the situation where a heart demands insistently, imperatively, to be tied, to be merged with another particular heart. Or else we are too blasé by fine literature which swells with pompous words like a clown with his guitar.

How do you expect, my dear, that I can be content with “I love you” when all the time I have your beloved face, the face I saw near the barbed wire, before me?

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How do you want (veux-tu) that I can be content with those words when all my body calls for your constant presence, when my heart wants to  lock itself up with yours and refuses to beat without you? How can I be content with this word, that I also use for  coffee or beer, when I know, I know very well, that without you I would fall into a terrible vacuum…

What you mean for me – I don’t know how to say except with the short, simple word – everything.

But to get back to your letter. For me it is THE letter. God! How it affected me. When I read it for the first time, all pale and with  tightened throat, I read it again, and having done nothing else since.  Now, seated like that next to my steering wheel, I am again entirely overwhelmed with so much  tenderness and sadness, of so much love and profound intelligence which emerges from that letter and which blinds my eyes with moisture. What a pity that it came to me so late. I would have like to read it before our recent meeting. It would have saved us much suffering and added to our joy.

You tell me for the first time in this letter that you have loved me for a long time. Well, all my anguish came because I didn’t believe that.  It seemed to me impossible that it could be. Inferiority complex? We’’ll see!  I think I knew myself. Now, I affirm that I  have not got one and I find  myself  quite well  in the skin of a man who is neither too proud or too modest.  What you take for an inferiority complex is something else.  It’s a fairly fine nuance, but I will try to explain it to you.

You see, cherie, apres moi ou plutot pour moi,   you are a perfect woman, a woman for whom my heart yearned unhappily throughout the long years of struggle, of suffering of misery. Don’t smile

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And don’t contradict me. I said a perfect woman and I stick to it.  Moreover, you will understand. What is it, in fact, perfection? Is it an absolute truth, an immutable fact, a notion that has remained fixed throughtout the ages?  No, since perfection is born in human imagination and that is influenced by outside circumstances, Leonardo da Vinci saw perfection other than Picasso. Humanity loves the good and  goes after the good. But that good is real. Percetioj is terrestrial and not celestial. It is human and not angelic. I don’t want to and I can’t raise myself above my own imagination. So much the better for I don’t have the least tendancy to fall into stupid and stupifying mysticism.  Here I am on the ground and it is on this ground, a man among others, that you with all your weaknesses, all your faults, are just the same the perfection to whom all my being tightens(?) without cease.  I love no god. I love man, that you are, that’s all. I am happy too that you no longer see in me any god. I am in fact the least like a god. I have neither a divine face nor a limitless spirit. A simple man.  My supereme happiness is that you love me like that. Entirely. I  wouldn’t have wanted you to love only my spirit: it is very limited. I wouldn’t have wanted, either, that you loved only my body: I can see nothing beautiful there. (A secret: I am terribly frightened that if, from the intellectual point of view you can more or less be in love with me for a certain time  – from the bodily point of view, on the other hand – oh sacred idee fixe!- you don’t love me. That is  a nightmare!)  I would like that all of me suited your soul…

I am writing these lines as my friend Dov is close by. It would be a lie to say that this doesn’t affect me. On the contrary I am excessively moved by it and  talking of this by the very different sentiments which fightfor the possession of me. Above all, when I know that at this actual moment a cruel, painful struggle, a struggle which makes me profoundly sick and leaves me quite queer-  rends his soul. Don’t try to deny it. I knew it since I glimpsed him in the hospital corridor. His pallor, his voice, his gestures- all told me, nothing clearer, that all of a sudden I had  wrenched him from a solitude where you thought to find a man for your flying heart.  For the rest, during the whole morning that we were together I was witness to this struggle. During the whole morning, except for two or three minutes, where seated in the most beautiful corner of the world I held your head close to mine and you  cast on me a loving gaze, a gaze where all memory was wiped out and you saw no one but me. Precious minutes!  It is my most valuable possession.

Dov is now with me. I am not forgetting him. This thought is alive and always present in my spirit.  I avoided giving him advice before his departure. I tried not to think of it. In vain. It’s not a matter of doing the right thing. It’s a matter of  being truthful with him.   However it is not jealousy. No cherie. It is envy. There is a difference.  Envy him because he is with you now, he sees you

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he feels you, he is bathed in your clear glance. I know that you are, both of you, very  hurt. But I am in the same boat. Does your heart truly know what it wants? I hope with all my strength, strength equal to my love for you, that you are not making a mistake.  For such a mistake would be  a misfortune for you. And how could your misfortune bring happiness to me? No!  It’s not even necessary to prove that, is it, cherie?

It is three o’clock in the afternoon. No doubt you two are sitting somewhere, looking at each other and discussing the situation; analysing it as suits “superior beings” (decidedly your old  good man  of the “love without reason” was right!), asking each other how it happened and whether it is true etc etc.

Me, I disente with the road. I drive quickly and when I cant do that any more, right in front of me, in the  window above the steering wheel I see always Yvette. Oh, I am not  complaining.(Before I was horrified at that, know it.) at the moment when you permit me to love you….

Listen, there are people who know hw to write love letters. I don’t. I ask myself whether in general I know how to write, after your last letter. You tell  me  some memories. Thanks. I also recall them.  I recall a letter I received from you when you were still in Palestine. You proposed to me, gently, to lead me on the large and joyous “Royal Road” of friendship.  I felt as though I had received  a – (illegible). It was not your fault. It was the fault of my love for you. I also remember our walk along the sea shore. The café. You, me and that melodious, langourous music of an  American  song. We talked about all sorts of things, what do you say? It is the accompaniment of melody at once very sad and enthusiastic. I will sing it again. Yvette, my little Yvette, there I wanted to finish. There is something that I wanted to ot to mention, but you see that I can’t. You say in your letter that you know you are wrong to love me. Why? Do you still think it? Is it because of my character that seems so wicked? But you must understand, cherie, that my character for you can only be gentle (sweet? Doux)  Is it your own sincere feeling, or is it the result of something one has heard said?

In any case, don’t believe those people who say “Henri, there’s an interesting intelligent fellow etc”. The same goes for character. Above all that’s a particularly relative trait. Dream a little, have you ever seen a man who spends his life doing good, or all his life doing evil?  The worst man has an object which encompasses all his goodness, not the least  that of a “good, brave chap”.

And then, it is curious but I think that I am not wicked. I am only an invalid suffering from lack of tenderness. But that has all gone. Because now I have found you, havent I?

I love you, Yvette…

Henri.

 

I have re-read the letter. I don’t like it. I detest it.  I talk rubbish. It seemed that I am strong in the logical or rather dialectical manner of thinking. Oh well, this letter proves the contrary. What is happening to me? Weird! I begin with a complex and I forget it—- Strange. There it is! I am called to work.

h