audible; the sound of the flowing water reminded me of a stuck fly persistently beating its wings. My head was getting heavier by the minute, my limbs were stiffening, and eyelids were closing against my will. Suddenly I heard her voice, bright and sonorous.
“Aren’t you hot?”
Of course I was, and could have said so, but my throat felt as if suddenly filled with jelly. All I could produce was a hesitant “aaahhhr”, hardly the sort of eloquence with which to impress a girl. Convinced that she did not understand what I meant, I gathered all my energy to explain that of course I was hot, very hot, who wouldn’t be, and wasn’t she as well? But she spoke before I opened my mouth.
“There is shade on the dam. Shall we go there?”
For a while there was silence. During this period, which seemed longer than it probably was, the church clock struck half past twelve. In the meadows behind us, the loaders had resumed work, someone was yelling at a horse. The carts were moving again. The grass around us smelled of dry soil.
“Where?” was the first stupid word I managed to utter.
I knew perfectly well where the old dam was. It was no more than twenty yards away, and hardly a dam at all, just a wall with a flat top, keeping water from the side branch on which there had once been a watermill. The branch was now dry and overgrown by thick bushes, but near the dam there were wide, three-foot walls, overhung by trees. Many a time had I rested in their pleasant shade.
“I’m going,” she said.
As she deftly rose to her feet I noticed that the grass had left shallow furrows in the skin of her thighs. (The sight of those gentle marks on her smooth, unblemished skin is what after all these years I remember most, more even than her eyes, lips, or face. I can close my eyes and see those marks as clearly as if they were before me.) As she set off with her girlish swagger toward the dam, I engaged in a brief struggle with myself as to whether to stay or follow, which I promptly lost in favour of the latter. She parted the branches before us and held them so they wouldn’t rebound in my face. She was a head taller, although she couldn’t have been much older. I was fourteen, and she – fifteen?
“Isn’t it nice here?” she asked when we reached our destination. The stiffness in my throat was slowly turning into a full-blown anxiety. I knew how cool the shade on the wall was. The top of the concrete mass, too, was delightfully cold as I stretched out on my stomach. She stretched out next to me; the wall was just wide enough for two. Our breathing seemed a little fast for the amount of energy put into our effort to negotiate the short distance.
“Now we’re hidden,” she said. “No one can see us, right?”
Suddenly, almost interrupting herself, she exclaimed, “What’s that?” And she pressed her forefinger hard at my ribs, right at the centre of my large birthmark.
“Just a wart,” I said, jerking away; she was pressing so hard that it hurt.
“Are you ticklish?”
“No!” I said firmly.
“Let me try,” she became curious, and she started to tickle the soles of my feet which swayed in the air next to her. My reaction, not unpredictable, delighted her.
“You see!” she shrieked with delight. “And what about here?”
Before I could get away she began to tickle my ribs, the most ticklish part of my body. The involuntary laughter that erupted from my throat sounded much too wild for the way I felt generally. I twisted and tried to push away the exploring fingers of her soft hands, but to no avail. As the muscles of my belly began to hurt from excessive laughter I tried to get hold of her fingers to immobilise them. But she snatched them away every time with great skill, tickling me with a delight which soon began to resemble a desire to torture.
In the end I had to resort to begging. “No more, please, no more!”
She stopped. My head was spinning. I was no longer sure where I was. But the initial distrust had been broken, I ceased to feel her presence as a threat, we sat up and looked at each other relaxed, like very close friends. I could almost feel the joy surging up from my depths, and all the feelings of stiffness had dissipated.
We lay down again, next to each other. Although I’m not a great talker even now, and was even less so at the age of fourteen, I suddenly blossomed into a real babbler. But she had much more to say even so. She talked at length about the adventures of her Grandpa Dominic, a sea captain who had retired to the village of his birth, and with whom she was spending her holidays so that he wouldn’t be alone all the time. She boasted that in the city, where she lived with her parents, more things happened in a day than in my village in a year. The village, she said, was a terrible bore.
I talked about the school, and how I felt out of place there, as if condemned to spend years among a tribe of savages, and especially about Father, my hero, who was engaged in conducting far-reaching scientific experiments in the basement. In a year or two, I said, he would allow me to join him, and eventually I, too, would become a doctor.
“Good,” she said, “then you’ll be allowed to examine me, like your father.”
I could not hide my surprise. “My Father examined you?”
She nodded.
“Where?” I asked in a broken voice.
“Here,” she said, putting her hand between her legs. She parted them slightly, so that she could cover the triangle of her bikini pants with the palm of her hand.
“Why?” I insisted hoarsely.
“Because it hurt,” she said, somewhat surprised. “You never hurt?”
“Not there.”
“Well, I do. Women are different,” she announced, as if being one already.
“And what did my Father ...” I failed to complete the question.
“My goodness,” she expressed surprise at the fact that I seemed to know so little about these things. “He rubbed ointment into it. White ointment. He pushed it deep inside and spread it all around.”
“Inside?” my voice broke again.
“Yes, with two fingers,” she extended her middle finger and fore finger. “He did a very good job. Took him more than ten minutes. Now it doesn’t hurt any more.”
Just as I was about to ask if Nurse Mary was present during the treatment, two little girls came running along the upper wall of the dam. They paused, pointing at something in the water and arguing, then carried on and disappeared.
“They were naked,” breathed Eve and fell silent.
I wasn’t shocked by the fact that the two little girls had nothing on. I was shocked by Eve’s use of the word. She seemed to have invested it with a disturbing weight. After some time she asked, and her voice, too, had become slightly hoarse:
“Would you dare to bathe naked?”
It must have been the word dare that helped my vanity to surface above the turbulence of my feelings.
“Of course,” I said, as if throwing the words away. “Wouldn’t you?”
“If
