Out of the Line of Fire (16 page)

Don’t stop, don’t stop Wolfi, she whispered.

I began to feel an extraordinary sense of power hearing her moaning, and as I glanced up I saw her running her hands lightly across her breasts. Images of Elena glimpsed between the dancing silhouettes of dark pendulous leaves came flooding back [Durch tanzende Silhouetten dunkler herabhängender Blätter flüchtig gesehene Bilder von Elena überschwemmten mich noch einmal]. Her young body glistened.

Suddenly she grasped my head and pulled it sharply against her. Sie rieb sich in mein Gesicht [She ground herself into my face]. Her whole body seemed to coil, like a crossbow being cocked, and then she exploded in a series of sharp percussive shudders whose aftershocks coursed through her entire body and set her breasts quivering against the luminous air above them.

Oh God, oh God, she whimpered.

As these aftershocks finally began to die away, her body began to relax. I watched as the contours of her sex slowly began to resume their former shape. I felt awed by the power of her ecstasy. She had seemed projected for a moment into another dimension, a dimension in which the normal laws of cause and effect, of time itself, seemed held in abeyance. This violent implosion was almost frightening, as though she were matter encountering anti-matter. I sensed the strange otherness of this creature whose sexual response seemed to manifest itself in every corpuscle, every cell, every nerve of her body, and against which my own largely localized response seemed puny and inconsequential. I felt that this difference symbolized the mystery and essential unknowability of woman. And yet I also knew that from this day on I would be irresistibly drawn to and fascinated by this process of a woman’s withdrawal into a world of private ecstasy, the crossing of whose border was so shatteringly manifested [dessen Grenze zu überschreiten eine so überwältigende Wirkung hervorbrachte]. I kissed her lightly again, but she gently pushed me away.

No, no Wolfi. Wait. It’s too sensitive. You have to wait a moment. But you were wonderful, really wonderful. Come and kiss me.

I came up beside her and she wrapped her arms around me and gave me a long, languorous, affectionate kiss.

Wonderful, wonderful Wolfi, she said again dreamily.

I felt elated and proud as she absent-mindedly caressed my back. I lay alongside her, one hand playing with her dark hair. The other lay across her breast tracing the rise and fall of her breathing.

We must have dozed for a few minutes and I awoke to feel her stirring beside me. She got up a little unsteadily and stretched her arms up behind her head. I watched her sleepily. Here was a nymph, someone who didn’t belong to this world. She belonged to another world, the world of myth. This was the world into which she was projected in her moments of ecstasy, into the realm of the gods.

She yawned, gave a slight shiver and disappeared for a moment into the bedroom. She returned with two soft towels, one of which she threw to me.

Come on, she said, let’s have a lovely hot shower and go to bed.

The water reinvigorated both of us and as I ran the soap over her back and chest she squealed with delight.

God, it’s ridiculous, she said. When I make love I’m totally okay. Any other time I’m unbelievably ticklish. Crazy isn’t it.

She let the water run over her head for a few seconds, then turned the shower off. We dried each other and she wound her towel up around her head and we went back out into the bedroom. She pulled the covers down and told me to get in. I lay there with my head propped up on my elbow as she went back to her dressing table and sat in front of the mirror to dry her hair. Her slender back and torso in half profile accentuated the curve of her breasts. I thought she was incredibly beautiful. I could see her face in the mirror and from time to time her reflection looked fleetingly across at me and smiled.

She finished and came over and slid in beside me. I could feel myself absorbing the warmth radiating from her body. She kissed me and rolled onto her back pulling me over on top of her. She opened her legs, reached down and guided me into her. Her arms and legs encircled me as we began to rock slowly back and forth.

Slowly Wolfi. Slowly, slowly.

She kissed me again, lightly, grazingly, infinitely softly. I looked into her face to catch a glimpse of a fleeting smile pass across her lips as she closed her eyes. It was a look of ineffable nostalgia, as though suddenly she had become aware of the transience of her own youth, of her own ephemeral beauty.

It was already after six when I said goodbye to Andrea, and forgetting that it was Wednesday and that my grandmother would be at my parents’ for dinner, I had caught the bus to her apartment. It was only after I had climbed the stairs and breathlessly knocked on her door that I realized my mistake so that by the time I arrived home, having been obliged to wait twenty minutes for another bus, it was getting on for eight and the evening meal I knew would be well underway.

When Omi came to dinner, dinners were formal. The table was set with candles and flowers and my mother spent the entire afternoon giving the silverware a thorough going-over. But what really characterized these meals was the truly magnificent set of bone china that was used exclusively for such occasions. It had been handed down to my Omi by her mother on her wedding day and, in turn, had been given to my mother when she married my father. Now it would be laid extravagantly out. Its use, however, merely added to the already considerable nervous tension which surrounded these meals. It was as if each piece had been sanctified, and while none had ever been broken in its 150-year history the slightest harshness of contact inadvertently produced between spoon and bowl or knife and plate was enough to have my father menacingly glower in your direction. Its use seemed to be my father’s only real concession to stupidity, as though he were deliberately tempting providence by allowing these hallowed objects to be desecrated by the heathens with whom he was forced to live. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but, in any case, my early childhood memories of these meals are coloured by a feeling of oppressive terror as I observed out of the corner of my eye my father’s set jaw and scowling forehead.

Omi on these occasions, however, was the source of an apparently deliberate and constant clatter. She would flamboyantly wield her knife and fork momentarily above her head as she emphatically made some point or other and then would swoop down to batter and attack whatever lay on her plate. My father was never able to disguise the look of pained incredulity on his face when my grandmother made some particularly horrendous gesture. But this just seemed to fill her with a sense of malicious delight, a delight that expressed itself, sometimes for no apparent reason, in the spontaneous eruption of her high-pitched laughter, as though the desperate absurdity of it all had suddenly overwhelmed her.

My entrance into the dining room where my family was gathered around the meal table and the scene that followed must have been truly sensational. My father, seated at the head of the table and impeccably dressed in top coat and bow tie, despite the heat, was caught slightly stooped as he lifted his spoon to his mouth. His lips had already begun to pucker, reaching out for the now suspended yet still steaming broth, a few tiny droplets of which escaped the rim of his spoon and elliptically sped around to their nadir where, momentarily, they looked like liquid nipples suspended from Andrea’s now proverbial breasts, before releasing themselves back into the bowl from whence they had come. Tiny beads of perspiration had formed or were forming on my father’s forehead due to a combination of the rather sultry night and the proximity of his head to his already mentioned soup bowl.

The fact that they were eating soup was a bad sign. It meant that they had waited for me to arrive home and when I had failed to appear would have been ushered to the table with some exasperated remark by my father.

Omi sat to my father’s right and as I entered she gave a quick half-smile in my direction, glanced at my father and continued eating. Elena sat opposite her. Both her forearms rested on the table and in her hand she held her empty spoon. She too glanced quickly at me over my mother’s head and then looked rapidly around the table, first at my grandmother, then at my father and then back at my mother who faced away from me and was obviously still unaware of my presence. She was in the midst of saying something to my grandmother when she caught my father’s eye. He sat back in his chair and lowered his hand. My mother turned and gazed anxiously at me. I looked alternately at each of their faces, smiling. The clock on the mantelpiece continued ticking. I rose a little on my toes.

I am a man, I announced.

My mother’s anxiety gave way to a look of perplexity. My father’s expression remained unchanged. I was ecstatic. Still beaming, I repeated what I had said, enunciating each word clearly.

Ich–bin–ein–Mann!

Omi, who had been watching my father out of the corner of her eye from the moment I made my announcement, turned to me and smiled. Then in a perfect imitation of my father’s pedantic voice she asked me the very question he had asked me a thousand times before.

Yes Wolfgang. But how do you
know
you are a man?

Seven words was all it took. Seven little words and that veil of incomprehension was whipped forever away.

I have just slept with a prostitute, I proclaimed.

[Ich habe gerade mit einer Prostituierten geschlafen.]

The scene which now unfolded was as though the detailed depiction of the family gathering in the eighteenth-century painting which hung on the wall behind them had suddenly come to life. My mother slumped to the table, overbalancing the water-jug which stood beside her left elbow, sending it crashing against the base of one of the silver candelabra, spilling its contents as it did so and breaking a large fragment from its delicately fluted lip. She cradled her head in her arms and began to sob. One had the impression that the water which had now reached the overhanging edge of the white lace tablecloth and had begun to drip in a quick syncopated patter to the floor issued not from the overturned jug but from my mother herself. Elena rose to comfort her but produced instead an even more violent convulsion of tears as she laid her hand across my mother’s shoulders.

My father’s expression, in the meantime, continued unchanged, but as my mother’s sobbing subsided he looked down at the table, momentarily appearing as if he were about to say something. Then he looked up again, picked up his napkin, began to fold it, decided against this and threw it instead into the middle of the table. He shifted his chair back, rose, adjusted his coat, took one look at us all, turned, and walked out.

Omi just sat there looking at me, a beatific smile on her face.

I turned myself and went up to my room.

We were never to use that ancient crockery again.

Later that evening, as I lay on my bed thinking about the day’s events, I heard a soft knocking at my door. I got up and opened it. Elena stood there nervously.

Can I come in for a minute, Wolfi?

I gestured with my hand for her to enter and I pushed the door to. She sat on the edge of my bed and I sat in the chair beside my desk. Neither of us spoke as she looked around my room as though for the first time. I asked her how my mother was.

Oh she’s fine now, she said, although she keeps muttering something about her poor baby.

She laughed.

God, what a night, she said as if to herself. And then again: What a night.

I watched her hesitate for a moment as she formulated something in her head.

Wolfi, she asked tentatively, tell me about it…

What?

You know. You and the prostitute. I mean, what was it like? How old was she? Was she attractive?

I told her more or less what had happened, leaving aside the role my grandmother had played and how much Andrea had looked like her. She just sat there, occasionally smiling and drawing her shoulders up and pressing her hands together as she imagined some minor detail to herself.

God, how did you have the courage? she said when I had finished. You must have been crazy. And then to come home and announce it! To stand there and say: ‘I am a man’. I mean, what a sensation.

She stood up and did a little pirouette with her arms clasped about her.

Oh Wolfi, that was
so
romantic. Wunderschön war es.

As I walked her to the door she turned suddenly and embraced me, kissing me on the mouth.

You’re a hero Wolfi, she said. A real hero.

After that night things were never to be the same.

*

Philosophers since Descartes had been accustomed to maintain that all knowledge is based on the contents of one’s own mind. Idealists like Bradley and phenomenalists like Mill took as indisputable the fact that the existence of the objects of perception consists in the fact that they are perceived. Mach however denied that what is immediately perceived
is
a state of mind. Descartes had presumed, wrongly according to Mach, that in being aware of ‘representation’ we are simultaneously aware of the act of representing to ourselves. This is where Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of mind enters. It is an attempt to intuit directly the essence of various mental acts. The end point of all this however is that we can know nothing except our own mental states. There is no such thing as an external reality which exists independently of the mind which perceives it.

There is no such thing as X, asserts that there
is
such a thing as X which does not exist, against which all things that do exist in some way fail.

Should this read:

There is no such thing as, X asserts that there
is
such a thing as X which does not exist, against which all things that do exist in some way fail.

This is more logical.

(I must confess that even before I had reached this point in my first reading of the material Wolfi sent me, I had already begun to suspect that there was more amiss in Wolfi’s family than either the breakdown of his parents’ relationship or the unsatisfactory relationship between him and his father. My suspicions were intensified when I discovered between the previous bundle of papers and the next a photograph carefully wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. It was a photograph I recognized instantly.