W HEN AN airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky like stones. They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing. The passengers don’t notice a thing. Flying feels the same whether the engines are working or not. It’s quieter, but only slightly: the wind drowns out the engines as it buffets the tail and wings. At some point, the earth or sea look dangerously close through the window. But perhaps the movie is on, and the stewards and air hostesses have closed the shades. Maybe the very quietness of the flight is appealing to the passengers.
That summer was the glide path of our love. Or rather, of my love for Hanna. I don’t know about her love for me.
We kept up our ritual of reading aloud, showering, making love, and then lying together. I read her War and Peace with all of Tolstoy’s disquisitions on history, great men, Russia, love and marriage; it must have lasted forty or fifty hours. Again, Hanna became absorbed in the unfolding of the book. But it was different this time; she withheld her own opinions; she didn’t make Natasha, Andrei, and Pierre part of her world, as she had Luise and Emilia, but entered their world the way one sets out on a long and dazzling journey, or enters a castle which one is allowed to visit, even stay in until one feels at home, but without ever really shedding one’s inhibitions. All the things I had read to her before were already familiar to me. War and Peace was new for me, too. We took the long journey together.
We thought up pet names for each other. She began not just to call me Kid, but gave me other attributes and diminutives, such as Frog or Toad, Puppy, Toy, and Rose. I stuck to Hanna, until she asked me, “Which animal do you see when you hold me and close your eyes and think of animals?” I closed my eyes and thought of animals. We were lying snuggled close together, my head on her neck, my neck on her breasts, my right arm underneath her against her back and my left hand on her behind. I ran my arms and hands over her broad back, her hard thighs, her firm ass, and also felt the solidity of her breasts and stomach against my neck and chest. Her skin was smooth and soft to the touch, the body beneath it strong and reliable. When my hand lay on her calf, I felt the constant twitching play of muscles. It reminded me of the way a horse twitches its hide to repel flies. “A horse.”
“A horse?” She disentangled herself, sat up and stared at me, stared in shock.
“You don’t like it? It came to me because you feel so good, smooth and soft and all firm and strong underneath. And because your calf twitches.” I explained my association.
She looked at the ripple of the muscles in her calf. “Horse.” She shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”
That wasn’t how she usually was. Usually she was absolutely single-minded, whether in agreement or disagreement. Faced with her look of shock, I had been ready to take it all back if necessary, blame myself, and apologize. But now I tried to reconcile her to the horse. “I could call you Cheval or Pony or Little Equus. When I think of horses, I don’t think horse’s teeth or horse face or whatever it is that worries you, I think of something good, warm, soft, strong. You’re not a bunny or a kitten, and whatever there is in a tiger—that evil something—that’s not you either.”
She lay down on her back, arms behind her head. Now it was me who sat up to look at her. She was staring into space. After a while she turned her face to me. Her expression was curiously naked. “Yes, I like it when you call me Horse or those other horse names—can you explain them to me?”
Once we went to the theater in the next town to see Schiller’s Intrigues and Love. It was the first time Hanna had been to the theater, and she loved all of it, from the performance to the champagne at intermission. I put my arm around her waist, and didn’t care what people might think of us as a couple, and I was proud that I didn’t care. At the same time, I knew that in the theater in our hometown I would care. Did she know that too?
She knew that my life that summer no longer revolved around her, and school, and my studies. More and more, when I came to her in the late afternoon, I came from the swimming pool. That was where our class got together, did our homework, played soccer and volleyball and skat, and flirted. That was where our class socialized, and it meant a lot to me to be part of it and to belong. The fact that I came later than the others or left earlier, depending on Hanna’s schedule, didn’t hurt my reputation, but made me interesting. I knew that. I also knew that I wasn’t missing anything, and yet I often had the feeling that absolutely everything could be happening while I wasn’t there. There was a long stretch when I did not dare ask myself whether I would rather be at the swimming pool or with Hanna. But on my birthday in July, there was a party for me at the pool, and it was hard to tear myself away from it when they didn’t want me to go, and then an exhausted Hanna received me in a bad mood. She didn’t know it was my birthday. When I had asked her about hers, and she had told me it was the twenty-first of October, she hadn’t asked me when mine was. She was also no more bad-tempered than she always was when she was exhausted. But I was annoyed by her bad temper, and I wanted to be somewhere else, at the pool, away with my classmates, swept up in the exuberance of our talk, our banter, our games, and our flirtations. Then when I proceeded to get bad-tempered myself and we started a fight and Hanna treated me like a nonentity, the fear of losing her returned and I humbled myself and begged her pardon until she took me back. But I was filled with resentment.
No comments:
Post a Comment