Klára very much needed this strong cosseting, though at heart she did not appreciate that it referred to her body. But there was no word to express what made her happy, it also being the source of her unhappiness. Or the other way around. Why would her happiness, of all things, stop her from relinquishing her unhappiness. There were no common, useful expressions for this feeling, and the most frequently used ones disgusted her. Why call her sweet; she was not sweet, or darling. She was not an angel; she was everything but an angel, even as a little girl she had never wanted to be an enchanting fairy. She was nobody’s little squirrel or ladybug, and most definitely nobody’s better half.
It is possible that the man’s gaunt, lean, powerful, and almost pathologically bony body did not impress her. Or men’s ungainly bodies in general. She would cautiously check which sensation belonged to which particular body part. As if she were indifferent only to those parts of the body that aroused her and made her feel passion. But she did not consciously recognize this; it was as if she diverted her attention, as it were, from certain parts of the body. The man’s sharp critical intellect, his microscopically focused attention which enabled him to retain the smallest details, that was all right, as were his rough manners, swearing, vulnerability, and brutality, which one could not take very seriously, all of his cheap proletarian mentality, his prudery, garrulousness, and even occasional physical violence, which she endured with a certain spiritual enjoyment as part of her rebellion; but no less than these, his openness, bluntness, analytic power, and tactical sense deeply excited her. She had no objection to his indecent jockeying for position, his intrigues, his elbowing aside of competition; not only did these traits fail to blur the overall picture, but she positively liked the man’s fighting spirit. Even his fist excited her. Love was stronger than physical pain; it was also capable of evoking humiliation or, put another way, it showed her what life without humiliation might be like. They broke up several times because of his seriously beating her; she would not live with a man who beat her, but she could not manage without him. She was lost. The objects of the world stared senselessly at her.
She could go to bed with other men only when she had the chance, beforehand and afterward, to make love to Simon; and she had to know in advance that there was a before and there would be an afterward.
She increased and later released with him the tension of her experiences with others, because she was in love with him and not with the others.
As if ephemeral physical pain were the price of constancy.
But she did not take the mental humiliation concealed in their physical fights lying down, and she avenged it many times over. At such times the man justified himself by claiming she had provoked him simply so that she could avenge herself. He banished his sober or drunken rages by pummeling her. And she did love his fists, oh, how she loved them, she kept biting them; she especially loved his hands, adored the strong pads on the palms of his hands. She was not the only one Simon beat up; he roughed up others even worse, men, and it was good for Klára to know all the little details of these beatings. Where he’d let them have it, what the fuck he’d knocked them against, how noisily they rammed into a wall or door. She preferred this open free life with him; she definitely did not want the kind of life her wretched mother or the tamed females in her circle had had, complete with fastidious good manners and compulsive mimicry.
She had no desire to repeat that kind of life, ever.
If Simon hit her, she hit him back; without complaining, she went at him. If Simon, partly justified, laughed at this, she laughed also or cried in her anger and threw every object she could lay her hands on at him, or she broke the objects.
She had to take her life into her own hands, and, his eyes widening, the man enjoyed seeing how brave she was.
They could not have managed without the detailed physical pampering that covered every inch of her body.
Physical fights did not seem to be enough, though; they seemed, indeed, to increase their secretive silences.
Sometimes she would hit back with the first object that came to hand, without thinking where the blow would land, crash it into his face, tearing his skin. They might well have feared eventual police involvement, because with this sort of fighting they were bound to need medical help.
Simon had more reason to fear Klára than the other way around.
But regardless of who secretly initiated these fights, their unruliness became so childish that they didn’t have to fear each other or anything.
Simon could not count on Klára’s relieving his brutality with bouts of tenderness. He knew his way around her better than she did hers around him, and this particularly annoyed her. The man was always surprising her. Whereas Klára remained almost completely predictable for him. He did not let any manifestation of her life go by without commentary; that was his gratification.
He wanted to be there even when she was on the toilet.
You take me for a little girl, a baby.
They would fight at the door of the toilet because he kept going after her to let him in so they could have a conversation. But she thought this was an impossibility, even if a rather nice one. She wanted a few minutes of quiet in the fucking apartment.
Couldn’t we do it some other time. You want to have a conversation while I’m peeing.
She wanted a little rest from him.
Then Simon would plant himself by the door because, naturally, it wasn’t a conversation he wanted. He wanted to hear her little moans, wanted her little smells, her squeezes and tiny farts as the gas began to work or thrust the feces out of her.
Are you making poo, my dove, he asked from outside.
I’m taking a shit, you animal.
In the meantime she carefully pressed down the door handle because she also wanted to surprise the man with something, and in her excitement she let out a fart, just a short, sharp little fart, like a nun’s, but she kicked the toilet door at him, it banged into his stupid head.
That must have hurt him, but they laughed as they fought on, Simon yelling that that marquise was really doing it now, until Klára peed in her underpants, which she had just pulled back up into place.
Now I peed in my pants because of you, you hairy animal.
But Simon especially adored her for this; now finally the marquise had peed in her pants.
To say nothing of his cultic adulation, offered up individually, of her lips, teeth, and nipples, and the ecstatic admiration for the nacreous-pink crimps of her vagina. Of course he wanted to see how and where urine and feces issued from her. And once he had experienced something, he instantly fitted it into one of his idiotic global theories. Simon thought constantly and passionately about everything. They thought aloud to each other; every day brought at least one epochal discovery, each one increasing their hope that no unexplored area or secret thought would remain in either of them. Simon wanted to know everything about her, to be reassured of everything he already knew, yet he remained gravely bashful with his own body and bodily functions.
He would not show himself naked to anyone.
If he could, he would have hidden from Klára his body’s manifestations and their possible irregularities. And with good reason too, since he suffered from sluggish bowel movements and digestive disorders, but he would never mention these. He would have rather died of an intestinal obstruction than break wind in his wife’s presence. Deadly earnest, in full awareness of his responsibility, he would hold back as though their family happiness depended on it. Occasionally, he had to use his fingers to pry out the hard cork of his stool.