Archive for category: Chapters

Paul’s silence companions me. I’m out shopping or pushing Johnny’s pram down the quay, and I picture him working, or sitting there staring past his pipe and his three-fingered shooter in his parlour chair, or dandling Johnny in the air, or walking the streets of the city around us. I never hear him when I’m imagining him. Even when I picture him on his own with Gus’s crowd, or with his artist allies, or with the tobacconist on the corner, I see him but never hear him. When he isn’t talking, he’s taken himself out of the time that words use, and we’re both in the present, which is a place I never imagined living. His silence, whether we’re together or not, is where my other senses erupt and where my feelings can come out and play in safety.

Words are what Emil does. When we were children our rooms were across the hall from each other at the far end of the apartment from mommy and daddy’s rooms. His was full of books, and he taught me to read when I was three, without telling anybody. He would write me stories about my doll, or I’d make them up and he’d write them down for me. He was a gentle little man even then, always picked on at school for it. I’ve seen him cry – twenty years ago – and I’ve seen him laugh at something funny. When you see him now, you see him formed and hardened. He wasn’t either when I was little, so don’t tell me or anyone, or let anyone tell you, that I don’t know him. I know him differently, even if I’m the only one who does. He’s plenty of things by now that I’m glad I’m not. For example, he obeys mommy still, and I loathe her and have stopped feeling guilty for wanting to murder her. But I don’t want to forget – and I still need to remember – that I knew him before he became what he is.

A city like this, the way the Inner World rotates, he’s one of the easiest people to find. The year I meet Paul, he’s a brilliant young journalist. Three days a week on page three of the New Socialist Man, you’ll know what he thinks of the latest play at the state theatre, or about Kraus’s new polemic against motor cars. Then two days a week they print one of his photographs instead – he was the first journalist in the city to pick up a photograph camera. He’s one of those people whom you always know what he’s going to think, what his mood will be, which way he’ll be looking, and that’s a large reason why I don’t fear him. He can’t change, he’ll never know how. Some people don’t. They’ve let the world swallow them. Some people get battered by it (like me), some punch it back (like Paul), and some let it disappear them (like him). Whether a gift or a punishment, to always know up from down, is something I don’t know. If people actually want stasis, Emil has found it; all I know is that even if most people do, I hated when people tried forcing it on me.

Emil isn’t a likable man – he was too much of a martinet to be a likable boy – and as for his inversive tendency, I don’t care. All else do, I don’t. I just told myself, after I guessed right (he’ll never tell, I’ll never ask), it was none of my business. He needed someone in his life who didn’t care, and I decided it would be me. And of course Paul guessed more or less right away. Even before they met he had guessed. Something in my face? In my description of him? If Emil’s too embarrassed to tell anybody, there’s nothing I can do. He must have decided it was easier to live with internalized hatred than with society’s. When I look at him now, I see what I’d be like if guilt had ruined my life along with his. That kind of destruction leaves you standing but hollowed out. He must have a few instincts left, but I never see them and I don’t know anyone who has.

If he ever discussed it with me, I’d tell him, ‘Emil, I know.’ He must have read Weininger’s book by now, everyone did last year. It was a sensation: yes, at last, someone’s explained women to us. Shall I quote for you? The woman as sexual and nothing more. The embodiment of instinct, passive but predatory. The woman as dangerous but inferior, idolized and voracious. Placed on this planet solely to weaken and destroy men. Does that remind you of anything, Emil? The stares of dread you receive, the loathing you hear in every silent look, women have been noticing it for years, but its all wrapped in what we call civilization. Society is men’s way of hiding their fear of women, and it hates inverts for their women’s tendencies, for betraying men. And if you’re Jewish besides all that, well, die inside if you think you must, Emil, learn to pass. Oh yes, you’ve done that well enough, joining the shell people in a shell world that rewards you an emotional pittance for the monolithic self-denial you’ve always practised. The world is full of choices you’ll never make because you’ve always made the best ones too hard for yourself.

The Griensteidl is a journalists’ café, right beside the Mighty Palace. I used to meet him there, I knew his table, surrounded by a circle of ferns, under the highest part of the ceiling below the grand skylight. The voices around us sounded like twittering birds. I didn’t have much experience by then of Paul around other people except me. Now we sat at my brother’s place waiting for him while he drew me sitting on the table in one of Emilie’s summer frocks. I looked older those days. The summer had smoothed me down, added mental weight to me if not physical. I was starting to feel as tall as I looked. When I saw myself in the mirror at Emilie’s after coming back, I’d never imagined myself like this – stronger, cleaner lines, sharper around the eyes. I was starting to look as old as I felt, and I wanted more.

Paul is always full aware of the crowd he’s in. I’ve never seen him in a place like this – in a coffeehouse that draws this kind of privileged crowd (journalists, professionals, bureaucrats from the Mighty Palace across the street). I’ve only seen him in the places he’s chosen, never in ones that the circumstances choose for him. Like he always does, he looks exactly like himself – that is, he looks unbowed by the people around him, sure of his own nature, which is no one else’s but his own. If anything, a place like this is something he remembers as at one time beneath him. When he chooses to, he remembers he was born to the plutocracy. He can always return to that mode in himself, to those memories of entitlement, and summon that steady downward stare – which is something I’ll realize one day though I haven’t yet.

One day, she may tell me how. The first night we spent together should have signalled me her nature – not the way she followed me into the forest without a word or look, not her first moment of swoon, or the firelight on her hair, or the way she sat so still there when the Hungarians found us – I was registering those while we lived them. Remembering how other women had acted like that, and other ways. No, it was later, in the stove darkness, that she cut her own self out of the flock, while I was fumbling for my trousers between bouts number two and three – in the middle of that – and she told me where they were: not they’re under your boots but they’re FOLDED under your boots. I don’t know, in the mood we’d put each other in by then, how she did that when I wasn’t looking, and they still had a crease three days later, in the woods. She was already controlling the madness between us. She was as controlling as she was mad, the calibration as exact as it had to be, always. She’s always been her madness and its keeper both. Once a week ever since, I’m telling you then, I go into the studio and all my week’s drawings are stacked on the edge of the desk in the order I made them, and the stack that was there before is – I know – wafted away downstairs while I wasn’t looking. I go into my paper files ever since, the ones in the parlour cabinet that holds nothing else, the cabinet with all my thousands of past drawings in it, and she’ll be watching me the way she does, making sure I don’t try to put anything back once I’ve looked, because I’d ruin her system. And each sheet I look at has the day/month/year of when she filed it written in her fly-speck code that hasn’t changed in eight years, below a neatly dotted line in the lower right corner. I tell her sometimes, ‘the cottage that night after the thunder, the men in the lokal after lightning struck the village steeple,’ and she’ll reach in with one eye and one hand and yank, there’s the folder, fourth sheet from the bottom, big guy, and God help if I move to put it back when I’m finished with it.

We’ve moved into the canal flat, the first rainy night since the housewarming and her red dress. The way the lights are when I come back from the walk, and the table lit by candles just so, and my three-finger chalice on the low table by my chair, and from the dress she’s wearing, I tell myself she’s planning a sailing expedition for two, but that isn’t quite it. Not quite it yet. Since that bout of swoon the night of the party, we’re holding our breath when we look at each other, waiting for signs that what we know is also true. Over a roast chicken and potato cakes, her only menu, and a bottle of French Bordeaux, she opens the file of 1906 drawings, the first ones I made of her. You love a woman, you smile and tell yourself sure, okay, at the things you know how much she wants to do. There’s the first drawing I made of her in Gus’s garden, and there are the ones I made of her by firelight that night, and I smile at the memories that show on her. And the ones from that summer, when I was so short of tools for it that I pared down my strokes and worked as small as I could, and there … the Great Wheel. I can tell from her look that these are the ones she wanted to see, which tells me how much she wants grandfather to know that we’re likely to be three by next Christmas. This was the drawing I made before I knew him, when he’d seen me but before we’d been introduced. I only had a minute to watch the two of them without me, and there they are, Emma in her simple, sun-fading dress, and grandfather with a thunderous look that was the first he threw me. They’re sitting side by side turned to each other at whispering distance, as different as any two people could possibly be but bound together by a look, and the Great Wheel behind them, spinning slowly just behind their awareness. The faces are simple, I’ve focused just as much on the wheel and how it has almost framed them together. I can tell you: I’ve never told a visual lie. One day we’re going to show grandfather this one and he’ll remember that day as well as Emma does, before all that came from it.

And here’s the first drawing that I made of him after we spoke the first time, when he was waiting for me to prove something, to prove the first thing I knew I was going to have to. You could tell what he was waiting to know. First of all, that I wasn’t an axe murderer or wanted for embezzlement in Bremenhaven. Him looking direct at me, waiting for me to finish with him, and I see his doubts and fears and his protectiveness when I look up, but when I look down at the sheet all I sense is the look they gave each other when she walked up to him, the love and the worry, but the love is an old one newly attached to her, and the worry is older than the two of us. When I turn the sheet around to show him, he’s sitting with Emma, just her shoulder in the drawing, and the Great Wheel behind him, and his weathered face looks proud with age and also younger from her presence. And when he looks up from that, his stare tells me I’ll smile at you later, if only it’s possible. He isn’t going to stop being doubtful about this for a long time yet.

She’s always visited him on Sunday mornings, never missed once. Those are the only times we’ve been apart that summer. The only moments of herself that she hides where I can’t get my hands on them. It’s the animal in her that always comes back to me, and it’s something else that visits her grandfather. She needs to let him know where she is, and I’m leaving her alone about that, until she tells me one morning, ‘I want you to meet someone.’ I shrug and think, ‘That’s cute.’ I don’t know what difference first impressions make. People who live on first impressions aren’t feeding very well. I already love her, though I wouldn’t know how to tell her and it won’t be the point of us for a long time yet. She’s just there, which makes me glad beyond reason, and she’s still there each morning, which is becoming a huge relief when I think about it, which I’m starting to do. I don’t know what my days that summer would be like without her, and I have to tell myself sometimes, when I wonder why she’s still there, that I don’t have to know. And anyway, I make her laugh, which is something I didn’t know I could do, and something I can tell she isn’t used to doing. It sounds more like a cough, and her face contorts a little with surprise. Her most flattering look back then is this composed inward stare, those brief seconds she isn’t thinking about me at all.

They meet on Sunday noons near the eastern gate to the Great Wheel, always at the same bench in a cordon of bushes near the duck splash. She stops me and asks me to wait, and goes to find him, and then comes back and beckons. A solid-looking old guy in a fisherman’s cap and a grey wool sweater, parked on a bench with a raised newspaper in his fists while I approach. He stands up and in front of her when he sees me and says across his shoulder to her while I’m still walking up—

‘Emma, what have you done?’

She remembers his words as sad, I remember them as angry. She’s told me nothing about him yet, and she’s told him nothing about me, not even that I exist, until this moment.

‘This man is why you’ve looked so tattered the past month,’ he says. ‘Where do you take her, you?’

I tell him about the hut in my brother-in-law’s deer park. This is no moment for reasons or explanations. He’ll get those when he asks for them; for now he only wants my facts and I’m telling him no more.

‘Your name?’

‘Paul Karsch.’

‘You both look exhausted. So, now I know why her tan’s been so deep. Karsch is a name in this empire. Do you have anything to do with that family? The Karsches of L.–––?’

‘Josef and Friedemann, my father and uncle.’

‘How on earth …’ he gasps. ‘Emma, what have you done. So, you, is it true about the horse?’

‘I’m the only one who knows what happened.’

‘Yes, by all means, say as little as possible. And keep looking at me that way. That’s all you can do until I’ve stopped staring a hole in you.’

While he does that, families go by on the path. Shopkeepers out for the day – silent for the moment – clockwork children sucking penny sweets, bench dwellers in tattered blankets, bullied awake and into movement by the pleasure crowds.

‘Do you love her?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know what love is.’

‘Do you want to know? Do you hope for love? Because I tell you, if you do, then everything’s forgivable, no matter how it looks, or ends, but if you don’t …’

He’s put on a stone face, and I can tell it’s a labour for him – that he’d rather be angry about this but that he’s holding it back for Emma’s sake in the faint hope he shouldn’t be.

‘I’ve never asked the question that way,’ I tell him. “It’s something I’m finding out lately.’

‘Be gentle to her,’ he tells me. ‘Start there. What are you two doing? Oh, we still have our Sunday mornings. But until this one she’s told me nothing about a man in her life, though of course I’ve been guessing. And now you. Sit with me there.’ And Emma sits on his other side.

‘The Weekly Truth,’ he tells me, and he shows me the paper he’s reading. ‘I never miss it. It makes me feel powerful. Yes, it’s good to be reminded that we own all the banks and railways, that we control the government through bond issues, that the next war is going to be started by a cabal of Jewish cannon founders. Quite a future my people have. Do you know any Jews?’

‘Like they were friends or something? No. It doesn’t make any difference to me that Emma’s a Jew.’

‘But it makes a difference to her, and to me, that you’re not one. When I leave my little island, I’m every Jew – that’s what Christians see. That’s what you’d see if you saw me on Procession Street. But here, on this bench on a Sunday, I can read my paper and tell myself I’m a Jew alone. No one but me can tell me what I am.’

I’ve seen The Truth handed out on street corners, though I’ve never read it. It’s a hate sheet for Catholic shopkeepers.

‘I didn’t know that paper was trying to move up,’ I tell him. ‘Usually it’s about Jewish prostitutes and the diseases you get.’

‘There’s still plenty about that, too. Karsch … that’s an old name. It sounds like a boulder does when you drop it on someone’s head. Which is what you just did to me. If there’s an angel inside you, tell him to come out now. You’re a Catholic.’

‘Yes. I came here from early mass.’

‘So you believe in your God truly?’

‘Faith means not having to know the truth. I still have to know.’

‘Faith is not having a desire for the truth. That’s what I think when I look at people who don’t want to know us. And you’re an artist. Do you paint church art? People like me have an interest in knowing.’

‘I’ve enamelled some wall tiles for a new church outside the city.’

‘The asylum church?’

‘That one. Flowers, mostly. That was last year.’

‘But none of the apostles or that such? It’s alien to me, the way churches fill themselves with pictures and statues. One isn’t supposed to see the One you turn to. When people despise us, it’s not because we’re Christ killers. No, that’s too easy, and perhaps the more ignorant followers fall that line. No, when your authorities hate us, it’s because you’re so sure you’ll see Him one day, and we insist it isn’t necessary. So tell me, which of our houses signifies the regression?’

‘When I attend mass, it’s because I hope there’s a reason for it. When I just go inside a church, on my own, it isn’t to look. It’s for the quiet.’

‘An aural equivalent of not seeing Him? Well … You showed her your cross, and knowing where you must wear it … When I see a cross, all I can tell myself is “I won’t be next.”’

I lift the chain from my collar and show him. Charlotte and I were given the same one the same day – tiny, carbon steel, as if was the family jewel. It’s the steel not the shape we were meant to feel against our skin.

‘All the Christian talk of faith,’ he says, ‘as if that is all you need to go to Heaven. Christians value salvation over virtue. That’s what’s so frightening to people who’d rather put their hope in virtue. They end up at the mercy of people who make everything about blind belief.’

‘I know,’ Paul says. ‘Salvation isn’t up there, it’s down here. Salvation is only possible on earth. That’s what virtue means to me – looking for salvation in the moment. Christ was put on earth to die. That’s why the discussion about who to blame for his death doesn’t make sense to me. Even if Jews killed him, how could anyone blame Emma for what God intended? Or the rest of you? It’s silly. I remember what the priests told us in school. So maybe later on you have to challenge the doctrines in your mind. Maybe most people I’d want to know have already done that. You’re a grandfather looking out for his granddaughter, okay. But if you’re making this a religious question, there are other ones.’

‘What a luxury. For a Jew in this world, all questions end up being tribal. We can try another. What are you doing to my granddaughter?’

His look demands I look back. But he hopes he can like me, I can tell. He hopes he can do that, and I can tell that this first few moments, he’s hopes he can trust me with her. He hoped for that almost as soon as he saw me. In fact, he was thinking about liking me the minute he saw Emma after she met me, before he knew I existed. This won’t be the first time he knows something before we do.

I take a breath and volunteer the first thing he hadn’t asked me. ‘When I looked at her the first time, I didn’t think anything. Then I got to know her for an hour and told myself, “Whatever she saw before me, it was always worse than me.”’

‘In Galicia – I was born there – a young cavalry officer is every Jewish parent’s nightmare. You were cavalry, correct?’

‘I was a cadet in the Seventh Hussars for fourteen months, the Chernovohrad barracks. I won’t make any excuses.’

‘You haven’t met her parents.’

‘I don’t know anything about them. Emma hasn’t talked about them.’

‘You’ve been too busy? None of that, thank you. I’m telling myself that perhaps you’ll be kind to her and tolerate her foibles and treat her with respectful decency. On the other hand, looking at you two, it’s too late. Emma, I can’t believe you’re looking for happiness this way. You, have you heard the proverb “Trust but make sure”?’

‘It’s the Russians who say that,’ I tell him.

‘You could be in horrible trouble if you’re treating her badly,’ he says. ‘So could Emma. Paul, when you love a woman, you have to love her more every day. That’s the only way you can make your love real. If I said, “Over for dinner next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and after that.” What would you say?’

‘I’d say yes.’

‘Then start tonight,’ he says. ‘And next Sunday, and the next. But for now, sit with me and show yourself.’

It’s happened once or twice a year since I met Paul – Emil approaches me wearing his deputation face some afternoon when Paul isn’t there and makes a prepared speech about how mommy wants me to get help for something. Which is how she relays to me that she thinks I’m unredeemably troubled (though we hardly ever see each other) and that it isn’t her fault. I don’t know why I said yes this time, to seeing Mister Professor again. Yes I do. I’m not afraid of what I might tell a nerve doctor, in fact, I’m proud of all I could tell. And even if I wasn’t proud, too much else is happening in my life to ponder what he could think or say. Without any inner doubts to betray, and with Paul and Johnny to keep me outside my own head, my mind is safe from other people.

Actually, mommy doesn’t think I’m crazy (I can read her mind better than she can read mine these days). Now she’s the frightened one. I don’t know why parents can be so afraid to let their children go – it isn’t as if she ever liked me – and Johnny is what that permanent abandonment will look like to her. When he’s sixteen, I hope he forgets he has a mother. Better that than him thinking he has to keep listening to me. He’s going to escape the pain, cruelty, and lies I grew up with. All the love I can give, I want him to go out and spread it around – I want him to know how to do that. I want him to know every minute how he actually feels, good or bad, so that he doesn’t have to waste a precious life guessing, or feeling nothing at all. When I think of my own luck, I don’t want him to have to be as lucky. Grandfather took this pin eight years ago and pricked a hole in my shell, and another one at the other end, and blew gently, and I came out, all floppy and ungainly but in one piece and wondering how I survived so long without air.

Truth, it isn’t my psyche that needs help. I don’t want to tell Paul, though if anyone else already knows, he’s the one. I need all the good moments we can have together more than a hard discussion. After his SilverDome show, when the weather’s better, when we’re sitting on a quay bench or in the Singing Swan on a quiet afternoon, I’ll tell him, about this sense of weakening, the pain in places I didn’t used to think about, the energy I have to gather for an hour to spend in five minutes. I’ve stopped getting better. I’m not afraid of it. Sad, yes, but I’m only afraid for the people who’ll have to watch if I start to show it. But does it mean I’m getting worse again? That’s the one I still can’t ask myself.

If nothing else, I’ll get to nap on Mister Professor’s couch again. I won’t mind another hour of that. I always enjoyed hearing him talk – that smooth clear baritone, like chained thunder. Poor man, I was mean to him. I used to act out a lot of things on him, just to get him to react, but he never did. Then I got tired of it and told him one day that I was going to refuse to come back. I’d meant that to be my ultimate insult to him, but he must have been relieved, though he didn’t show it.

 

The next few months. I remember a lot, but it’s a ball of time. Emma can give you dates if you must. She has a head for dates that’s a magic trick. For anything with numbers. 1812, 1683, 1759, those ones are easy. But try 17 July 1907. No problem. She’ll tell me we had a bowl of fish soup for dinner at the Miller’s Daughter and then slept on a bench in the Plant Garden after the gate was locked, in a copse of lime trees, her head on my lap, in her blue-striped house dress and with my sweater over her shoulders. Name a date and she can recite the day for you, so what happened will never be a problem – it’s there. But why it happened? I’m no good at that, because I just don’t expect time the way she does. I’m the one she found that year to make it stop.

 

That’s the first thing I know about Paul that he doesn’t have to tell me – he has an older sister. When I wrap myself in her cape and step outside, she and her husband have galloped off. Five hundred metres down a path through woods bumpy with hoof prints, I see the gates of a hunting lodge – a castle, except it’s in a valley, but the stone is the same, the surrounding flint wall the same. I learn later that Paul could have just knocked, and Charlotte would have put us up for the night, or a year. And, he’s welcome to half her money – the inheritance – though Paul’s never taken any of it. It’s a point of honour that he breaks in when he visits, that he kicks down a door like last night, or shatters a basement window. Even when he’s expected. A point of honour? No, I’m beginning even then to learn how he thinks. It’s a running joke between them. They’re always playing running jokes on each other. It’s also a way to torment her husband, Count Freddie, which they both love to do.

With the river and the forest and the entrapping hills all around, it’s always a dark and misty place. It’s always just raining at Schloss Freddie. Inside the gates I see a half-dozen minions with faces like potatoes stitched together and heads shaved with an axe three days ago, chewing their words until they dribble out. When they see us, they cross themselves in unison. A cart pulls up with two shot wild boars lashed side by side, his and hers. A tottering raven blocks our path, another soars up to a battlement and starts to laugh.

We walk through an oak side door into a box room, and Paul leads me – he knows every corner – up a flight of stone steps to a vaulted alley dark with guttered torches. The ground storey is mostly empty. In the ballroom is a fencing piste down the centre and stacked ranks of barbells, Indian clubs, medicine balls, on the walls either side of the burning hearth. They quarter themselves upstairs, in the rooms beyond the minstrel’s balcony, one wing his, the other hers.

Paul points to the wall above the hearth: ‘Don’t worry about that.’

Mounted on the wall is the Iron Ring. Do I need to tell you? Of course I know it – if you’re a Jew, you keep watch. You don’t admit you do, but we all do. This one’s a closed circle with another circle outside it, broken in four places and with a cross joining the four pieces. It’s the insignia for the Iron Brotherhood – in other words, Jew Haters of Budapest. There are a dozen societies like it in the empire, but this is the big one across the river, the one with the old money behind it. The lumpenprols, the howling shopkeepers, the parkbench mutterers, they have their own groups with their own leaders and newspapers and reading circles. This one is for the outer gentry, the ones who already have the powers. They don’t demonstrate, which is the worst news – if they did, you’d know where they are and what they’re doing and saying about you next. I remember this one from Budapest the winter before but I’ve never seen it in the Dream City.

Paul points me towards a door at one end. ‘And I go this way,’ he says, and goes through the opposite.

I climb stiff-legged four flights of stairs. I’m dribbling blood again. Do I have hypertension? He worried about it hurting, but it didn’t. I bled, but it didn’t hurt much. It was just too new to be anything but new. No other word for it but that – new. The first time was going to have to be like something, so all right, it was like this, and nice at the end, oh yes. I think I surprised him how soon it was nice. I’ve already forgotten what it felt like, and I wonder, Why is that what I do?, and I’m already yearning for him to help me remember. I feel foolish in this summer frock. A tribe of maidservants are pacing the halls in a white-piped grey smocks – lady wrestlers, most of them, and I can smell the hay in their hair. One of them points me at a door. On the other side of it, a hot bath is running. When I hang my dress on a chair and climb in, Charlotte appears through the opposite door. Two maidservants come in after and begin to scrub me with coarse red sponges.

She’s wearing a long loose dress of no style, some thin chartreuse material I don’t recognize. She’s Paul in a dress – the same long jaw and raven hair – with a loose chignon, knife slash of a mouth, eyes that are both dark and bright, steely and warm. Paul’s eyes.

‘Ha. Found love last night, did you?’ she says. ‘You’ve got the look he likes.’ She lifts my dress from the chair and stares at it front and back. ‘Emilie’s boutique – she doesn’t work on me, too bad. I’m just too dark. It will be clean and pressed before you go. Can’t go home to mommy with the tide going out like that. I can’t do much for your shoes. What did he have you walking through?’

She barks something in Hungarian. The two maids unpin my hair and loosen it with their fingers, and begin pouring water with a ewer.

‘Is Paul Hungarian?’

‘Us? No – ’ That predator goddess laugh. ‘We’re Sudeten Czechs. But I know enough Hungarian to run this place, and the others. No one actually speaks Hungarian in this world. A couple of peasants, maybe. And Count Freddie, but he doesn’t have any choice if he wants to lord it. How old are you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘That young?’ She pinches my bicep lightly and studies the gap between finger and thumb. ‘Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul …’ she sighs. ‘Ha.’

Now she’s sitting on the tub’s edge, daring me to be embarrassed, as if I haven’t been naked in front of a hundred women before this. So I brush the bath bubbles from my surfacing breasts and stare back.

‘Nice, you,’ she says. ‘It’s the hair that got him first, I’m sure. Your own? It’s warning time. Do you know what Paul is really attracted to in women? What really turns him on? What he loves in women more than anything else? Variety, Emma. A slim-hipped Ninth Quarter princess isn’t new for him. Daddy’s got money, mom’s a harpy, everything proper at home – I mean, looks proper. He likes them a little bruised. I’ve never seen him bruise one himself. No, around Paul women do that to themselves. He’s got a conscience, you see. This much of one. Just enough to spoil him for real cruelty. He’ll never be king of the world with a conscience like that. So when did you meet him?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘There is no original sin, whatever Paul would tell you,’ she says. ‘There’s only the sins people invent in the moment. Self-will like Paul’s and mine isn’t the same thing as depravity. Believe me, if you ever see depravity, the real thing, you’ll know it without having to be told, and he isn’t capable. Listen, beanpole, if you don’t know how to wash yourself out I’d better show you. Properly, you should do it right away, but Paul wouldn’t have told you how. If you don’t want any little fledglings next spring, you’d better get in the habit. The bidet’s best.’

‘I don’t have to do that.’

‘Yes you certainly will.’

‘No I don’t.’ I rub my forehead. ‘The maturing follicle prompts the release of higher amounts of estrogen. The hypothalamus responds by secreting gonadotrophin, which makes the pituitary produce luteinizing hormone. High levels of LH trigger ovulation within –’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m saying its all right till Thursday, then next week we’d better not, then it’s all right again for a week, then for a week he won’t want to.’

I wait for her face to move.

‘O-kay,’ she says. ‘A Flöge dress, so you must be one of Gustav’s models. Paul usually just talks them out of a coffeehouse, or they’re sisters of his friends. If you’re none of them, how did you end up in our forester’s hut?’

I tell her.

‘Paul can never think of a reason not to do something,’ she says. ‘He’s like me that way, okay. Right, so, drag a fresh one into the woods and show her what she didn’t know she wanted, and he was right, wasn’t he? Some men actually are, about us wanting that. Who knows who told them? They just aren’t very good at giving it to us.’ Laugh, one. ‘Very good, beanpole. You’d better know how to run, that’s all. Towards him, away, that’s your choice. But one or the other. Around him, it’s things that stand still that get run over. There’s a robe. Come.’