“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I’d be embarrassed, I suppose.”
“But you aren’t in front of my Father.”
“He’s a doctor.”
I felt that a reversal of roles had taken place and that my fear had moved into her, which made me almost burst with self-assurance.
“I wouldn’t be embarrassed,” I said. “Why should I be?”
“Because someone might see what you have.”
“Everybody’s got that. Including my father. And your grandpa.”
I could feel a slight tremor in my voice, but I did manage, half in despair, to put the decisive question. “Would you be embarrassed if someone saw what you have?”
Promptly, as if she had waited for it, she replied, “I wouldn’t mind showing it to someone who showed it to me.”
She fell silent and I could feel her body tensing up. The ball was now in my court. The anxiety, mixed with uncontrollable expectation, was almost too much to bear. My throat muscles worked as if I was about to start yodelling. But when I finally uttered the words they sounded quite normal.
“If you wouldn’t tell anybody,” I set a condition.
“Don’t be a dummy,” she said. “Of course I wouldn’t. And neither should you.”
A brief silence followed, with each of us waiting for the other to speak.
“Who’ll be first?” she breathed, and looked my straight in the eyes.
Quickly, I averted mine, swallowed an excessive amount of saliva and stared at the upper end of the wall.
“Tell you what,” she came up with an idea. “One of us lies on the back without moving, eyes closed. The other pulls off his pants and looks at the thing. Then he puts his hand on it and holds it there for, say, a minute. The other can keep his eyes closed. Shall we?”
I nodded and she agreed to be first.
She removed her bra and stretched out on her back. It was not difficult to pull off her bikini pants; she lifted and twisted her pelvis to help me. She kept her eyes closed. But mine were open wider than ever. Seeing her naked, the first naked girl I had seen lying before me, was like being hit on the head by a soft, yet powerful hammer. Her body was slim, smooth and tanned. I remembered a sentence from one of the books habitually read by Mother: “Her nipples resembled two rosebuds.” Eve’s nipples resembled more than anything two large birthmarks, very much like the one on my ribs.
I placed my hand on the “thing” between her legs. The brownish lips surrounded by a downy growth of short curly hairs felt unlike anything I had ever touched. They seemed firm and yielding at the same time. I imagined my Father’s fingers rubbing ointment deep inside her, and a lump appeared in my throat. I kept my hand there for what seemed like a minute, but was probably longer. She didn’t mind. Her cheeks were deeply flushed, her breathing unusually fast. Every now and then she would push the “thing” against my hand in a gentle rubbing motion.
“Tell you what,” I whispered. “I will lie on my back with eyes closed. You undress me and touch me in the same way.”
I stretched out on my back, closed my eyes and waited. I lifted my pelvis to help her remove my bathing shorts. I kept my eyes tightly shut, but when for a long time nothing happened I decided to look what was wrong. I was struck by a terrible fear that she didn’t like what she saw. Just then I felt her fingers gently wrapping themselves round my “thing”. This was the first time that fingers other than mine were embracing the part of me to which, in Mother’s opinion, I was devoting too much attention. The fingers felt soft and cool, maybe because my “thing” was so hot and hard. The fingers began to move up and down in the way mine always did.
Suddenly I heard her whispering into my ear, “I know a game we could play.”
“What game?” I pretended not to know what she meant.
“The game adults think is reserved for them,” she said.
“That’s not allowed,” I heard myself saying the stupidest thing that came to my mind.
“Man should be free or dead, says my grandpa. He should know, he’s been a sailor for thirty years. He’s seen things you wouldn’t think possible.”
“All right,” I said.
I had been dreaming of such a moment for so long that I could not understand my sudden hesitation and fear.
She stretched out on her back next to me and asked me to lie on top of her. When I did so, she parted her legs, and I found myself lying between them.
“Now put your thing into mine,” she whispered into my ear.
I tried, but it was more difficult than I thought, and I was unsure to what extent I had succeeded. “Is that all right?”
“Of course not, you dummy,” she berated me. “Stop poking around the entrance. Push it right in, push harder.”
I moved away to get a thrusting distance. Quietly I took a deep breath and then with a sudden motion jerked forward, only to feel horrible pain as I hit something unyielding and my “thing” bent in the middle. Eve, too, uttered a small cry of pain.
As I prepared for another try, I raised my eyes and suddenly saw, standing on the upper end of the wall, my Father, hands in pockets, watching us. I froze. Father came closer and, towering above us, looked at me with a strange glow in his eyes. Now Eve, too, became aware of his presence.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
Father pulled his right hand out of the pocket, bent forward and struck me on the face so hard that I fainted.
4
I am not sure to this day for how long I remained unconscious. It could have been minutes, or it could have been half an hour. But during those moments I experienced once again what I had hoped would become a rarity: a highly unusual, vivid dream. In this dream I saw my father lying on the upper end of the dam completely naked, as naked as I had ever seen him. With him was Eve, who was also naked, but that did not surprise me, since I had seen her undressed only a moment earlier. What I found most unusual were their respective positions. Father was lying on his back with both legs outstretched. Eve was crouching above him as though she had just mounted an animal for a ride. She wasn’t just crouching: supporting herself with both hands against Father’s chest, and with Father’s hands tightly clasping her hips, she rhythmically bounced up and down, with an occasional grinding movement in between.
In my dream I had no idea why she was doing that. Her gasping and occasional moaning pointed to a degree of pain, and the expression on her face was tortuously twisted. Yet in spite of that she seemed to me more beautiful than ever, especially when she raised her face, fringed with sweat-soaked blond curls, and under tightly shut eyelids stared into the depths of herself. Usually she opened her eyes only when she lowered her head to look at Father’s face, but on one occasion she opened them with the head still raised and looked straight ahead. The eyes seemed dead, glassy, as if staring into emptiness.
Then,
