The soldier pulls me down next to him on the rock. Now and then I throw a quick glance at his half-naked body in the hope that his flies will have closed again. ‘Jerome,’ I hear him say. ‘Sun. Is nice, is good.’
He yawns, stretches and slaps himself on the chest with the flat of his hand, hollow, resounding slaps. I feel relieved when he sits up. His legs dangle down from the rocks and his feet have disappeared in the water. His back is a smooth, unblemished curve with a pronounced hollow down the middle. The unevenness of the rock has left white impressions on his skin and some sand and pieces of dirt have stuck to his shoulders. He makes splashing sounds with a foot in the water, but every so often, as if to take me by surprise, he turns his head towards me; trapped, I quickly avert my gaze. From out of the corner of my eye, I see him get down and stand in the water, one hand on his hip and whistling a tune between his teeth. A jet squirts straight and hard from his body into the water making a frothing patch of little bubbles and foam in the waves. Before he sits down again, he walks up to the fencing and looks over it, searchingly.
The water has a salty tang. A small white fish drifts about between the rocks, staring up with a dull, sunken eye as it continually collides with the dark volcanic rock. Casually the soldier taps a slow rhythm out on his thighs. Spread over the edge of the rock, his upper body moves about jerkily, and he hums softly to himself. Above us two gulls hover on motionless, outstretched wings, their heads turned inquisitively towards us as they keep us under close scrutiny.
Suddenly he stretches his arms and makes flying movements, uttering screeching noises in the direction of the birds. I make an attempt to laugh. The gulls slip away, but keep their heads turned suspiciously towards us. The soldier stands up, then squats down by a small pile of clothes and lights a cigarette. I lay my hands on his trail of wet footprints on the rocks. It suddenly seems important to me to do this and I want to memorise the contact: the foot of a liberator I have touched, have felt with my fingers.
The soldier leans against the sea wall, puffing hard at his cigarette and smiling at me. From further away he seems less overwhelming, the feeling of oppression he gives me and the memory of what he did with me have begun to fade.
He sits down beside me and puts a cigarette between my lips; by way of demonstration he takes in a deep breath, but the smoke has already reached my throat so that I splutter and cough.
He lies back again and blows smoke rings in the air that float away leaving a sweetish smell behind. The more I try to hold back my nervous coughing the more violent it grows, as if about to choke me. He takes my wrist and brings it hesitatingly to his face, watching my reactions intently. He blows smoke teasingly at me, his lower lip stuck far out, while I try convulsively to stifle a cough.
He bites softly into my fingertips and licks my palm; I clench my fist and he laughs. Then my hand is led to his throat, and I feel a swallowing sound transmitted to my fingers. He guides my hand across his chest, an uneven and mobile surface radiating warmth. Under the skin, where little hairs curl under my fingers like crawling insects, I feel a heavy, hidden heart-beat, a booming that tells me that I am not alone, another life, real and throbbing, next to my own. My hand travels across the small hills of his ribs, then over an even stretch, across a little hollow into which my fingers sink and where they remain: I am a blind man being helped from place to place, standing still, waiting, going back. The soldier is taking me on a guided tour of his body, inch by inch. I am his doll, a plaything with which he does as he pleases.
I look at the sky, a vivid blue flag over the circling gulls. Why is this happening to me, why has my life changed so suddenly, so utterly? I feel his stomach, smooth and flat. When he presses my hand down, there is scarcely any resistance. But when he inhales smoke, the surface hardens, remains taut for a few moments until he blows the smoke out again, when it all gives and goes soft again.
Bouncy little sand heaps, that’s what it feels like. In Amsterdam we used to jump on the pumped-out sand at the building site until the ground turned elastic under our feet and the water would come up. We would jump and jump until our shoes sank down in the mud. Then we would go home with wet socks: Mummy would be furious…
Unexpectedly my fingers encounter the edge of his pants, which he raises and pushes my hand inside. I pull my arm back and sit up straight. Silence. The soldier looks at me sideways. He fumbles with his pants and his fingers manoeuvre a floppy brown shape out through the flies, a curved defenceless thing. He lays his hand over it protectively, pulls me towards him and presses his mouth to my cheek. His voice is soft and soothing. What is he saying, what is going to happen now?
My ear grows warm and wet and a slopping sound seeps into my head, stupefying me. I pull my shoulders up and goose-pimples shoot in sudden shivers down my back and up my arms. He is licking the inside of my ears, I think, and they’re filthy, when did I last wash them? I am filled with shame, not because of the tongue licking my ear, but because of the yellow that sometimes comes out of my ears on to the towel and which he is probably touching with his tongue right now.
He lifts his hand from the thing and starts to turn it around slowly. It falls between his legs, then rolls across his stomach and comes to a standstill between the folds of khaki. As he rolls it around I can see it grow larger and stiffer. It seems to be stretching itself like a living creature, a snail slipping out of its shell. My dazed eyes are glued to this transformation, this silent, powerful expansion taking place so naturally and so easily.
‘When you grow up, you’ll get hair on your willy,’ the boys at school used to say. I had had a vision of some misshapen, hairy caterpillar, and I had hoped that they were wrong or else that I would never grow up.
The thing is now sticking up at a slant from the soldier’s body. There are no hairs growing on it, though I can see some tufts through his open pants. He makes a yawning sound, lazy and relaxed, as if the way he is lying there were the most natural thing in the world.
‘Is good, Jerome,’ he says, ‘no problem. Okay?’
The thing has a split eye which stares at me. I try not to look at it, but my own eyes seem riveted to that one spot. It is a clenched fist, large and coarse, raised at me. The soldier grasps it roughly and a drop of liquid seeps out from the split eye in the pink tip.
My own prick and Jan’s are small and thin, slender, fragile branches of our bodies. When the soldier lays my hand against his belly, the lurking thing suddenly springs up higher still, flushed out of its lair by the touch.
Under the rocks the sea surges to and fro, eddying and making gargling noises. Suddenly I can see my little room in Amsterdam quite clearly, the books placed in orderly array on the ledge of the fold-away bed, the framed prints on the wall and the place where I like to sit, under the window, out of sight from the neighbours. The sun falls across the rough surface of the coir mat where I have put a toy donkey out to grass. The voices of children can be heard outside playing by the canal. It is after school and I can smell food and feel the summer languor in my stomach.
It is far away, almost forgotten, a steady way of life that often seemed boring, a monotonous stringing together of days.
Mummy, I think, where are you?
The soldier presses himself closer to me. I can smell his nearness. Like a blanket, his smell spreads over me, protective and threatening all at once. His quick breathing unsettles me and he pants as if he were in full flight. But I am the one who should be running, running away…