Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/5

Then she turned towards the window, a square cut in the slanted ceiling, reaching up to heaven.

"It's Spring," she thought, "and it's my birthday, my twentieth birthday. But what's the difference?" she asked herself glumly, "nothing to wish for, nothing to hope for, a dull life in a dull world. In this attic room of mine it is cold and nasty; the air is stuffy; three walls of the room are quite correct; the fourth one is warped and crooked like a cowed beast, its yellow fangs grinding in its helplessness.

"He wants me to go to bed with him," her mind wandered on, as though independent of her own volition. She tried to rise, but her courage failed her, her pale amber fixed on the broken wall. The shadows that framed her deepset eyes gradually widened, covering her face with a dull gray. She lay prone, silent, only a nostril twitching faintly. Around the yawning wound of the wall random cracks cut through the sickly yellow of the wallpaper. Pale patches of discoloration took on fantastic forms, coming to life under the girl's gaze, like projections of her own thoughts.

On previous occasions her memory had not been tinged with morbidity spotted with lurid griefs. Then her thoughts, like homing pigeons had sped back in a straight unwavering flight to the days of her childhood in Lapov, the Polish village whose fresh green landscape beckoned her with irresistible longing.

Her homesickness left no room for any other emotions, and she would find in the cracks and discolorations of the wall, the outlines of her home, her father's house, at the outskirts of town, where the houses thinned out towards the valley. Beyond was the cemetery, and in the valley, where the town roads branched off, a yellow hut, its tin roof painted red.