Dvr. H Adler

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

September 1942

Yvette,

I read once, in the work of a talented Roumanian author Panait Istrati, the joyous cry: “Leaving is living”.

That corresponded to my state of mind. I have travelled much in my life and at each journey, begun a new intense life.  I love that. To see new countries and new things, to study the manners and customs of different people, to try for a time to live their lives. My heart was on holiday every time I mixed with the crowd honteuse at a railway station about to journey towards the unknown. My spirit is always interested in those things not yet experienced. A vein of vagabondage? Perhaps. But I don’t regret it.

But this time, when the hour of departure came, an immense sadness invaded my soul. It was much stronger than at Tel Aviv where the bus tore me away from you. This time all my being was in open revolt. I felt terrible bad to be forced to go so far from you. Everything in me called you back and refused to submit to the necessity.  This is the first time, cherie, that I have understood that to leave is also to die a little. For leaving you was as if I left a little the world.  I felt each kilometre weigh unhappily on me, each of the hundreds that would now separate me from my beloved  woman, from my dear Yvette; she – yes she- who gives me the courage to keep going in the company of men who stifle me, by filling me with joyous hope of a happier future-.J’ai beau avoir conscience  that my love for you is so profound and  lasting that neither time nor space an alter it in the smallest way –

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J’ai en mal.  It is precisely because I love you so  strongly that j’ai mal.  I carry you inside me,  what I mean is my heart is filled with you. But my hands?  They crave you ceaselessy, ceaselessly pushed by the terrible heart, they seek you and want to caress you, to fondle you. My eyes  seek always  your clear and frank gaze to see in it the reflection of my love. My lips constantly long to touch softly and tenderly your smooth skin, your head, your arms, your feet – the whole of your body.   My spirit craves your continual presence to  rest on your deep humane intelligence.

And the heart is a tyrant. And then on a mal.

Cherie, there is a strength inside me that prevents me  from acting irrationally. It is that revolutionary consciousness which has forged my soul. That iron discipline which was necessary to me through the years of struggle and which has many times saved me from black despair, now again supports me in the immense suffering caused by the sad certitude of not being able, for a long time to come, to  rest under your freshness.  The world is at war. Humanity is bleeding. The barbarous fascists, who have broken all human  bonds, use all their force to destroy our great cultural treasure,  everything most dear to us all. We wont allow it. Each of us has a part to play in this struggle. I have mine. The duty of a man and a revolutionary.  Besides, my little one, my dear ittle Yvette, how could we love each other if the world collapsed?….

I am faithful to my ideal- the only just, the only beautiful- and I am sure that you also love me for that. Isn’t it true that  from now on we will march side by side, heart against heart- bound by the ties of the most profound love, the most noble friendship, bonds which, quite simply,  merge our two bodies into one, our two souls into one – along the narrow, steamy roads of human misery

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to hold high the flag of  revolt and salvation? It is no longer a gentle hope. It is  my courage   For I believe with all the power of my soul and  of my body, that your love for me  equals mine for you and that nothing –  n’est ce pas,rien?- will be able to separate us. Not  kilometres , not days.  Not suffering, not joy. I believe it. I want to believe it.

Cherie, I have dreamed of you all my life. I have found you.  And I love you, for all that sad time when I did not know love and for filling all the life that remains to me.  My love is so great that it envelops all that I was, that I am and that I will be.  I love you. Let me say it to you – it comforts me. Cherie, I don’t want to lose you becaue I don’t want to lose myself.  Tell me, tell me without hesitation, that UI will not lose you, that you will be mine forever.

I have not said all that I can about my discipline. That discipline has not transformed me into a dry man.  The heart inside me remains warm, vibrant, humane.  Misery penetrates the steel  shell of revolutionary struggle.  I suffer colossally because you are not now near me and mine alone. It is a pitiless truth, a cruel fact, that makes me sick all day and that little by little devours me entirely.

I left and my journey was sad.  The wheels that rolled on the rails with an infernal noise and carried me away from you, submitted my body to  worse tortures. As if this mass of iron rolled over my heart and wiped it out with its weight.

And do you know, Yvette cherie, that among all the names of the stations which passed before my eyes, was also the name of the local station where you are? You can understand, con’t you, what that meant for me? But the worst thing when I found myself in Cairo with three long hours in front of me.

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There is no need to comment on that. No need for poetic descriptions. The facts speak for themselves. Quite simply,  it was terrible, my desire to go and see you, to touch you.  Yvette, my little one, I didn’t come to see you. I regret it and will always regret it.  But if you understood and you will understand, when you are fully conscious of my love for you, when you, when yu understand that no one has ever loved you as I love you -–if you understood the superhuman strength that I had to employ not to come and see you – you would excuse me, and would love me more.

Three days before my passage through Cairo, I had a converstion painful but full of dignity, with our friend Dov.  I also received a short word from you. I understand you and share your suffering.  For the two of us the situation is clear and I call on all the gods that it might be for him also.

I said to Dov, as we talked, “It is hard, I know. But let’s try as hard as we can to prevent our friendship from melting away under this great sun.”  It is harder for me- yes,  in spite of the opposite appearance- than for him.  I know. Everything is very good between us now. At Cairo we drank your health in cognac.Strange?  Not, in any caase, as it would be in calssical literature.  But I don’t have the least wish to plunge into crazy analyses of the human spirit.  I love you, you are my life, I cannot  do without you – that’s why all analyses, all ethics are useless. I want you for myself even if that produces unhappiness in others.

I received a word from you where you ask me to leave you in peace. That would not be anything new for me. I understood it much earlier. When I was in Cairo, I felt the how immense my effort must be to satisfy your need. I write you this

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letter without having received any news from you since those few words written in haste on a tiny bit of paper. I don’t know now in which direction your feeling are developing.

For me, you are going through a profound crisis.  I hope with all my heart, cherie, I hope it with  the same ardour as I hope to see myself on the victorious barricades of the triumphant Revolution, to find you  mine again, mine alone. I want you to accept lovingly all the tenderness for you that fills my heart. I want you to feel yourself incomplete without me, as I do without you. I want you alone to uncover, under the mask of my  nervous ill nature, all the stupid goodness  which fills me from  head to toe.   I want us to merge one with the other not in the other world but in this one, here on this earth. I want our love to be a granite rock against which break all the waves  of  bitterness that today’s daily life gives birth to. I want….. I want so many things!  I wish it.  In your little note you promise me a letter: I wait for it with boundless impatience. But do you know, cherie, I want to confess to you a very intimate secret. Listen. It would be untrue and stupid of me to tell you that I wait  for sad news. No. Deep inside of me, where no one can penetrate, where even I have great difficulty in reaching, there is something clear, sweet, something which constantly elates me, something which makes my heart beat stronger and sends an electric current right through my body, something which makes me laugh joyously and sing, which makes my hands tremble and gives me “the strength to keep going till the evening” – and that is the keen feeling that you love me. Yes! That Yvette, the most beautiful woman and companion loves me! Oh Yvette, that is enough to make me as happy as the happiest of kings. That satisfies me for all my life. I am then happy. I would have wanted (j’aurais voulu alors) to get down on my knees and embrace this good earth which has supported me until this happy day. I would have wished them to embrace the passers by,  entreating them humbly  to excuse my happiness and to bless it.

Cherie, read this letter carefully. You will no doubt preceive in it some notes of sadness. But no. Look more carefully. Listen to me with your heart.  That sadness that you see is only the the highest expression of sublime joy. It is cheerfulness. It is an Allelujah on grave notes. It is, like Schubert’s Ave Maria which brings tears to your eyes because of this, shall we say, peaceful sadness with which it expresses its  grateful joy.  Do you understand me? I am not sad. I am grateful to Yvette who has permitted me to express with sadness my joy, caused by our love. And then, when one day we are at last together,  you will read my joy in my shining eyes, my fingers  touching your hair, my hot kisses  which will cover your body, my trembling muscles.  We two will plunge then into absolute happiness and will become as one. Do you get my meaning, Yvette? Then don’t be scared by my sadbess. It’s nothing more than love, my little one.

For the last two days I have been in the middle of the desert. The effect it has is curious. It is terrible. The heat and the vast  empty  naked expanse fills me with despair. I will write you about it, or I will tell you one day how it is. But now, I want to tell you only this. I am happier here (despite this sadness!) than the others. For I alone have found  the freshness of shade in this desert. It is your image that I carry in my heart. It is in its shade that I refresh myself. It is Yvette’s face, your face and your eyes apercus une seule fois pour un instant quelque part– your clear eyes that see me only-  which give me the strength to master the desert.

I love you

Your Henri