A Book of Memories (13 page)

Helene simply enclosed my lips with a bite, and this final decisive act, the only possible response to my little game of studied aloofness, luckily blurred the last sober bit of my consciousness, or so I believe now, after the fact, yes, I believe that the pain caused by this bite was the last sensation whose meaning and significance I could still register with some clarity, and which later enabled me to slip into a now barely remembered state of oblivion, for not only had her mouth abandoned all shyness and reticence by then, it also let me know in no uncertain terms that she wanted me, all of me, and would stand for no more delay or fuss, so it made no sense for me to play the seducer highly skilled in the techniques of love; she wanted me just as I was, she clung to me and would have me forget how I thought I should behave, all she wanted was to press her hips to mine, and not even the formidable layers of lace and silk undergarments could prevent us from feeling each other's body heat
— although that, while making me very happy, strangely enough also aroused in me a feeling of humiliation, for by seeming to take control of our fate and by proving that my tongue's predictably unpredictable games were clumsy experiments compared to the eloquent testimony of her teeth, she may have cast doubt on my manhood or anyway deliberately offended my male vanity; as if exchanging roles, she became manfully aggressive, which of course I enjoyed very much, though in light of her decisiveness I appeared to myself as girlishly teasing and flirtatious and thus had to overpower her; my instincts, my conditioning refused to accept the exchange, and perhaps the deeply unconscious motive behind that bite was to arouse in me this wish to reassert myself; even my hatred returned, I felt like snatching her off me as one tears leeches off one's body; I grabbed her hair, the soft material of her dress, maybe even grazed her skin, and with a single jerk of my head I withdrew my mouth from hers; reaching lower with my hand, I grasped her buttocks and thrust her groin brutally against mine, letting her know in the most indelicate possible manner what I had been concealing in my pajama pants, under my robe; with lips and teeth, with bites of my own, I was now ready to take possession of her mouth, pushing in my tongue unimpeded, to which she responded, already on the floor, most tenderly, with even hand strokes and caresses of her tongue—I have no idea how we ended up on the floor, for by then I seemed to have lost the thread of our story, and perhaps this is the juncture after which only her gestures, features, the taste of her saliva, the smell of her perspiration, and the look of her fluttering eyelids allow me to surmise what might have happened to me.

She was lying on her back on the bare floor and I, propped on one elbow and bent over her, watched her closed eyelids, her almost motionless face, while my body was racked by deep, inexplicable, tearless sobs.

I sank my free hand into the red hair spread out before me, and almost as if the hand wanted to remind itself of that old, that very old promise, I began to pull her hair, actually pulling her closer to me by the hair; her face slid almost lifelessly on the floor.

This sobbing was like the memory of a childhood sickness, torrid, shivery, blurred, and it was as if we had been in the deepest of deep darkness and then stumbled upon a sunlit clearing, this room, where familiar yet strange-looking furniture stood silently about, and the heavy rug bunched up by our feet made a high mountain, and every wrinkle and pattern on the wallpaper remained unbearably still; this glaring, empty sight irritated me so much that I had to lay my head on her chest, carefully of course, it was the first time I'd touched her body; I had to close my eyes so that, feeling my own hot breath in the white ruffles of her dress already burning with her body heat, my tremulous sobs could take me back to the darkness from which I had been torn by this silence.

But she seemed to ignore my crying, made no attempt to console me
— maybe I killed her, I thought then.

Among the ruffles and lace my lips eventually found her neck, and then I had to open my eyes again; I treasure even now the color of her skin and the smoothness that my mouth and tongue could also feel, for the silence in us might have been very deep, but my mouth, like a foreign body, like a slowly advancing snail, wanted to taste everything it had been forced to abstain from until then; that's why I had to open my eyes again, for though I could take in the sensation of her skin, it might be of some help if I could also see what I had so fervently desired and yet could not make my own, even if this would not compensate for the lost moments.

"I'd like to tell you something," I heard her whisper, and with my mouth I began to move toward her lips, to make her not say but breathe her words into me; I was in no hurry
—with my teeth I first caught her sweet, pointed chin, so nice to hold, so firm I could easily bite into it and, like a dog offered a finer bone than the one already in its mouth, I was terribly confused by the choices before me, but her mouth was waiting, and that decided my course of action, though by then my eyes must have closed again, because all I remember is that I got a whiff of her breath along with her words: "Please undress me."

In the meantime, we had left my sobs somewhere behind; again something was lost forever.

Her voice must have brought me back to my senses, things began to clear, because I remember being amazed, not at what she had asked me to do but at her voice; she uttered those words so naturally
—those words being the extent of her consolation—that I couldn't imagine her asking me to do anything else. Still, this voice wasn't the voice of a grown woman; it was as if unwittingly she had regressed to a time whose allure I'd also felt while sobbing just moments earlier, and by doing that she seemed to be making me a gift of that unknown time, wrenched from her own past, the same gift I had offered to her with my own, childlike tears. Thus, it wasn't amazement I felt at that moment, or not only amazement but wonderment, and admiration for her little-girl state, for the sublime quality inherent in our nature that enables one human being to bestow on another an experience rooted in times long gone.

And this odd, childlike, timelessly deep and lightsome state, unique perhaps because we had become vehicles of the tension between an indistinct past and an uncertain future, not only held us in its grace while we rather ceremoniously undressed each other but extended its spell
—deepened by the gestures of mutual intimacy and trust—to the time when, half-lying, half-sitting among the ridiculous piles of our scattered clothes, we finally laid eyes on each other's naked body.

I was looking at her, but at the same time I also stole cautious, stealthy glances at myself, noting with some stupefaction what I had already felt quite clearly, namely that my member, so firm and rigid in its demand for a place of its own only moments before, was now shrunk to its smallest size and was lying on my thigh with infantine disinterest; though I tried hard to steal a glance at my body, she noticed the furtive look, for unlike me, she held her torso and head quite erect and stared at nothing but my eyes, as if trying consciously to avoid having to look at her body or at mine; we were holding each other's hand, and I had the feeling it wasn't her girlish modesty that made her so shy; she was trying, as I had done while undressing her, not to be distracted by details: when I undid the hooks concealed in the lace-trimmed folds in the back of her dress, loosened the strings of her corset, pulled off her pearl-studded, fine leather shoes and pink knickers decorated with tiny bows, and her cleverly fastened long silk stockings, when, in brief, concentrating on those little hooks and buttons and strings and knots, I purposely refrained from taking in piecemeal the hitherto unknown regions of her body unfolding before me, for I wanted it in its entirety, to contemplate her whole body undisturbed; yet now, when all her naked body was revealed to me, it seemed too much for my eyes to encompass, too beautiful to absorb; I had to look everywhere, everywhere at once, and at the same time I would have liked my eyes to rest on one particular part of her, to find a single place on her body that might be unique; and perhaps she was right (if one may speak in terms of right and wrong in such a case) in looking only at my eyes, for as sentimental as this may sound, there was more complete nakedness reflected in her beclouded blue eyes than her skin was able to offer; and that is as it should be, since the shapes and curves of the body, under the even coating of our skin, can communicate to us something of themselves only through the language of the eyes.

I am equally unable to explain just how we ended up in that peculiar position, for I cannot claim to have been conscious enough rationally to guide my movements; even the scraps of memory, the thought fragments flitting through my mind, annoyed rather than comforted me, as did the sudden realization that Frau Hübner might still be eavesdropping at the door and the coachman was still waiting on the street, at this moment giving feedbags to the horses; and I was troubled also by the fleeting reminder that Helene was so impossibly young, not yet nineteen, and if she yielded to me now, and if I likewise failed to restrain myself, then I, too, would have to give myself over to her; and at that moment I suddenly became conscious of all the difficulties of our possible life together were I to be the first to expose, if only for an instant, her dark and dormant senses to the light and that were to become the only bond between us; it was as if I was facing a helpless puppet with no existence of its own, whom I would have to bring to life so that it could ruin mine; and precisely because this act would be the only, albeit the deepest, bond between us, I should not do it; no, I mustn't lose my freedom, for if I did, I'd end up killing her; I also had to think of my exciting little adventure the night before, which, though inconclusive, hinted that my own senses might take me in directions she couldn't be expected to comprehend and where she certainly couldn't follow; thus I was liable to expose her, and myself, to the gravest of dangers, except that as we sat on the floor, naked, in need of each other, holding each other's hand, I did not feel rushed, I simply longed to pass over each and every part of her, see her in full, take in everything she had ever been and would become with me, and I knew she was mine; so those portentous thought fragments only served to strengthen my desire
—there was still something between us, then, that needed to be conquered—and she must have felt the same way, that's why her glance did not stray to my body; like one who has just received a gift but is not yet sure it's really hers, she was very tense, though we seemed most relaxed there, on the floor, our positions somewhere between sitting and squatting. She pulled one leg under her, and with the other, which she bent at the knee so that it almost touched her nipple, she supported herself, laying her groin wide-open; locks of her massive hair fell on her little-girlish, fragile shoulders, and under the lighter red triangle of her pubic hair the lips of her vulva parted softly; and when I stole a glance at myself, catching sight of my own genitals resting softly on my thigh, I might as well have been Pan resting in the woods, on dewy grass; but more significant than this was that I was sitting in exactly the same position as she: one leg under me and supporting myself with the other; we were mirror images of each other; and her waist and breast were similar somehow, the sloping line of her breast bearing a striking resemblance to the curvature of her waist, as if the two curves were obeying creation's selfsame command.

Almost simultaneously, we began crawling toward each other on the floor, our hands proving to be of great help, she pulled me and I pulled her. However solemn and meaningful the moment may have appeared, the simultaneity of our desire to move could not but strike us as amusing; by then my eyes had located the reassuring focal points of her lovely body, though these were not isolated, single points, or some totality of what I was seeing; somehow I perceived her breasts, her waist, and her open vulva all at once, and I could afford to pick out these details from the whole because as I coolly surveyed the whole I could be certain I would not be disappointed, I was getting exactly what I had wished for, her dress had not deceived me: a perfect body came into my possession, and almost as if the attraction of those remaining, still distant points of her body had made me move, I began to laugh out loud, and heard as well as saw that she, too, had burst into laughter, so we actually began to laugh at the same time; and the fact that we both knew that we both had had the same thought, and found our simultaneous move and laugh comical, made this laughter so loud that it turned into an unrestrained roar, yes, we were roaring, I can still hear it, as if, with our gales of laughter, a huge wave of some irresistible force was crashing down on us. When my mouth was above her breasts I hesitated for an instant, catching a glimpse of her ripely glistening gums, because I couldn't decide which one I desired more, I may have wanted both, and the laughter shaking my whole body now reminded me somehow of my sobs of a moment ago; I placed my palm on her vagina, my fingers ready gently to penetrate the adored lips of her flesh, into softness, into wetness, into the depths; on my back and shoulders I felt her hair spreading over me like a tent; and perhaps the back of my neck was the spot she had been looking for, because as I carefully took her hardened nipple into my lips, she pressed her lips to my neck and also put her hand between my thighs; and now all at once it was quiet; as I recall this now, I cannot but think that then, there in that room, we must have been sitting in God's hand.

Slowly the Pain Returned

And now here I was again, standing in our hallway, perhaps at the very same time of the day, catching sight in the mirror of a coat hanging on the rack.

Looking at it like this, in the dim light, reflected in the mirror, I couldn't tell what color the coat was, only that it was made of a heavy, coarse material, the kind that repels water but attracts every bit of lint and fuzz.