I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg Page B

after another, until it was like a continuous procession, and I kept having to …apologize,’ but I never knew for what or why. Once I greeted my best friend and she turned from me. When I asked why, she said, …After what you did?’ She never spoke to me again, and I never found out what had happened.”
    “Are you sure that you are not hiding some truth here—something you needed to do that angered these friends?”
    “I’ve tried and tried to imagine, to think, to remember. I have no idea at all. None.”
    “How did you feel about this happening?”
    “After a while it was just a grayness and the surprise of the inevitable.”
    “Surprise of the inevitable?”
    “Where there is no law but this awful destruction, coming and always coming closer—the Imorh—the shadow of it is always inevitable. Yet—and why I don’t know—I keep suffering from its oncoming and from being hit and hit over and over from directions which I don’t expect.”
    “Perhaps it is only that you are looking to be shocked and frightened in this world.”
    “You mean arranging deceits?” Deborah felt the ground beginning to go dangerous.
    “But you had to make the deceits yourself, did you not? Or understand nothing.”
    A picture came to Deborah from the years when she was only waiting for the end. She had been removed from the anti-Semitic camp, but the color of life had been set and only the despair could deepen. She was always off by herself sketching, they had said, but she never let anyone see the pictures. She had begun to carry that sketchbook around everywhere, clutching it like a kind of shield, and once, among a laughing, idle group of boys and girls, a picture had dropped out of the book without her knowing it. One of the boys had picked up the paper. “Hey—what’s this? Who dropped it?”
    It was an intricate picture with many figures. One by one the members of the group disclaimed it: no, not mine, not mine, no, no … down the line, and finally he looked again at Deborah.
    “Is this yours?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, come on—admit it.”
    “No.”
    As Deborah looked at the boy more closely, she sawthat he was trying to help her—that if she would admit the work and take her “punishment” in the laughter of the others, he would defend her. He wanted to be a benefactor, but she did not know at what cost to her.
    “Is it yours?”
    “It is not mine.”
    “You see—” she told the doctor bitterly, “they made me repudiate my art.”
    “But don’t
you
see that the boy was begging you not to repudiate it, and none of the others laughed, really. You were only afraid that they might laugh. You alone made yourself lie.”
    She looked at the doctor, angry and fearful. “How many times does one tell the truth and die for it!”
    She got up angrily, went to the doctor’s desk, and took a sheet of paper and began to draw an answer to the seeming accusations of all of them: the doctor, who seemed to be blaming her; the Collect and its endless disapproval; the words of so many. She drew furiously for a while, and when she was finished, she handed the picture to the doctor.
    “I see clearly the anger, but there are symbols here which you should explain. Crowns … scepters … birds …”
    “Those are nightingales. So lovely. See, the girl has all the advantages, all that money can buy, only the birds use her hair for nests and to polish those crowns, and they burnish the scepter with her bones. She has the finest of crowns and the heaviest of scepters and everyone says, …Lucky girl, with all that!’”
    Dr. Fried saw her patient turning and running, turning and running in her fear. Soon there would be no place to go and she would have to meet herself as she planned her own destruction. She looked at Deborah. At least the battle was being fought in earnest now. The old apathy was gone. She began to feel in herself a rising hope and with it an excitement that was like no other—the echo coming out of so deep a