Chapter 12

1.

And another year or two later, I was in Paris on business; and one morning on the landing of a hotel, where I had been looking up a film actor fellow, there she was again, clad in a gray tailored suit, waiting for the elevator to take her down, a key dangling from her fingers.

'Ferdinand has gone fencing,' she said conversationally; her eyes rested on the lower part of my face as if she were lip reading, and after a moment of reflection (her amatory comprehension was matchless), she turned and rapidly swaying on slender ankles led me along the sea-blue carpeted passage.

A chair at the door of her room supported a tray with the remains of breakfast—a honey-stained knife, crumbs on the gray porcelain; but the room had already been done, and because of our sudden draft a wave of muslin embroidered with white dahlias got sucked in, with a shudder and a knock, between the responsive halves of the French window,

and only when the door had been locked did they let go of that curtain with something like a blissful sigh; and a little later I stepped out on the diminutive cast-iron balcony beyond to inhale a combined smell of dry maple leaves and gasoline…

***

2.

Every night after that I carefully soaped Malkele from her long graceful neck down to each and every toe. Though her limbs were atrophied and her spine bent slightly backwards, her small breasts remained girlish and as lovely as her face.

Soaping Malkele, slowly, gently, quietly, became for us our kaddish for our obscured childhood and for our dead mother and father. This soaping was our only defense against the looming Nazi death machinery.

During the day we longed for those few moments of slippery tenderness. My own muscles craved it as much as hers. Yes, yes, we were, after a fashion, Malkele and I, lovers.

But we obeyed the final taboo— we never, to be cold and German about it, fornicated. I washed her hair. She still cursed and threatened me. I soaped every inch of her body. I caressed her pointy nipples with the palm of my hand.

I dried her and helped her into her nightgown. I carried her to her bed. I brushed her thick reddish black hair in the candle-lit bedroom. Once she whispered to me, "To what are Chopin's Preludes preludes?" and I kissed her. '

Sometimes after that, I lay with her. We kissed each other's lips and we embraced, but I never entered her. That restraint, which I adhered to religiously— Malkele, I am sure, would have welcomed me, though even she was never bold enough to ask …

If we should omit these most private details from the historical record, there is no way to appreciate fully the richness of life for two young Jews, surviving temporarily, with false identifications as Pavel and Maria Witlin, on the Aryan side of Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

***

3.

On an outing of our family association, I once cored an apple, saw to my astonishment (and with the aid of my obsession) what it looked like, and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had.

"Oh shove it in me, Big Boy," cried the cored apple that I banged silly on that picnic. "Big Boy, Big Boy, oh give me all you've got," begged the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our storage bin in the basement, to drive wild after school with my vaselined upright.

"Come on, Big Boy, come," screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.

***

4.

I pushed aside my pillows and turned onto my stomach. My feet hung off the end of the bed, my toes hooked over the edge. The way I do.

And through my cotton nightgown, I put two fingers of my right hand on my clitoris and thought of him. Standing in a room, coming toward me, watching me undress.…

(It must always be through a nightgown or a pair of underpants. I've wondered if this is because of the greater friction. Surely that must be part of it, but there is something more, perhaps the thrill that first came to me as a small girl, pressing my fingers against myself, the cloth interceding between my fingers and my vagina, interceding between shame and pleasure).…

One Sunday morning in boarding school I found my roommate lying on her back on the tile floor of the shower stall.

Her legs … were splayed on either side of the spigots, the water cascading between her slack muscular thighs.… She remains to this day the only woman I've ever known who spoke freely of her own masturbation. She urged me to try it.

I didn't have the courage to tell her that I had found my own way. Women will talk about anything— sexual jealousy, dishonor, the lovely advantages of eating pussy or sucking cock— but they will not tell you about fucking themselves.