He did not keep on looking at his leg because he was worried or in pain; he was only putting on a little show for the woman who had noticed his faltering with his bike and who, with her large strong teeth, had had a good laugh on his account. He also wanted to avoid looking at all those naked bodies, somehow to curb his uncontrollable curiosity, which might have taken him in who knows how many different directions.
From behind her glasses at the tip of her nose, the woman steadily kept on looking at him, sizing him up, every part of him, as if touching his skull, his shoulder, reaching into the hollow of his open legs, grabbing his feet, and she kept on steadfastly grinning at him. Which was difficult to understand exactly, because the person she belonged to was lying right next to her. And there was no doubt about that. The most interesting thing was that the moment he laid eyes on them he knew everything about them. He was no more than ten meters away. This large woman was lying on her stomach, on a pink terry-cloth towel, her chin propped on her fists, an open book before her, her strong breasts pressed down and facing in two directions under her heavy upper body. The slope with its shining, thick grass was so steep she had to find support for her velvet-smooth sandy limbs; she pulled her thigh a little under her, which made her huge buttocks push upward, her crack open. Döhring had never seen so much indecency in one place.
Once a long time ago, however, he had been close to it, on vacation at the seashore when, unsuspecting, he found himself at the edge of a cliff, and down below him, like thick sausages clinging to one another on a grill, naked people were toasting themselves in the sun; his father had pulled him away, shouting that this was dangerous, it’s forbidden, never, never again, he must promise him, this was a sandbank that might cave in anytime; but Döhring sensed the danger had to do with something quite different from the sandbank, and the incident had remained in his memory as a secret excitement that he should look into sometime.
And now he took a closer look at the injury to his leg.
It was interesting that on his shinbone, along the edge of the scraped-off skin, blood, and a clear watery fluid sat in separate drops. He looked at these drops for a long time and then smoothed them carefully with his finger as though it would be better to combine the two. Having to pay attention simultaneously to several things, he instinctively aimed his performance in different directions. In one corner of his eye, he could see an older man who stood on the slope with spread legs, from whom he had to avert his eyes at all costs, given that the standing man was following his every move eagerly and arrogantly, and probably wanted to attract his attention with some barely concealed public indecency. He did not look in his direction, wouldn’t risk it, absolutely not, though the man was doing everything to make him look. It seemed incredible what this older man was doing to and with himself in the safety of pretense. Yet he could not gain Döhring’s undivided attention, because right next to the pink terry-cloth towel, on an equally large turquoise-blue towel, lay the coffee-brown girl who belonged to the bespectacled woman, whom Döhring dared look at only in stolen glances.
He had to defend himself from her. His breath quickened because of her; no matter how stealthy and hurried his glimpses, the large-bodied bony and ugly sportswoman, her wild red hair gathered in a bun yet with many of its oily strands hanging loose, would see, understand, and jealously follow them, thus keeping him from making any free, natural moves. But he had to risk it. The girl was probably Ethiopian, still a child practically, her limbs tender and delicate like finely carved small rods. Everything around the two women was chaotic: hastily strewn clothes and shoes, a box torn in half from which crackers had spilled on the grass, a large paper bag from which fruit had rolled out on the towels, a few peaches, a pulpy pear, grapes scattered everywhere. And their positions were no less amazing than the girl’s beauty or the two women’s visible relationship; the coffee-brown girl slept sweetly on the downy towel in this blood-red late summer twilight on the lawn whose green was darkening into black. Leistikow also mixed green with lots of black, here and there with steel blue, ocher, a bit of brick red; from this combination, one could see that in only a few hours, along with the impending night, autumn would arrive.
Sunshine was still glowing at the top of the pines’ loose branches; dark twilight covered the tall trunks. The forest breathed cool air and exuded warmth; the valley trapped the powerful scent of resin. Curled into herself, she slept on her side like an embryo turned woman. Her lips were like a languid purple moth, her hair a black dense forest of rings and curls. Her fingernails all but glowed. Her temple rested on her clasped hands, her tightly clamped bony knees were pulled all the way to her bosom and her thin arms pressed her small, firm, aggressive, and pointed breasts together so that one large nipple spilled out over her arm: raw pink, raw clotted purple on the bluish-brown skin.
He dared to graze these places with his eyes only twice, but he had to return to them; he wanted to return a third time. One more time, the last time, as if making a vow to the bespectacled woman and to himself.
He felt grateful, very grateful that he could sit here, because from here, from this higher place, he could see directly into the shady warmth of the Ethiopian girl’s dark lap, and her labia were open. And nobody gave him permission for this, for something like this there is no permission anywhere in the world. For some reason, the entire vision was like a forgotten summer afternoon to which, against his own wish, he would like to return.
He imagined seeing the luxuriant pubic hair.
Then all at once many things began to happen, frustrating Döhring’s anticipations and making it impossible to keep track of them.
The older man, who was bald and muscular but already tending to pudginess, and whose entire body was covered with graying hair, was stroking himself with ostentatious indifference, as though his hand had merely gone astray, or as if he were scratching himself lazily while impassively staring out into the great wide world. As if he were not trying to charm Döhring, but was merely looking over and past his head to where an extremely interesting occurrence was attracting his attention. He started his activity on his chest muscles, a spot to which he regularly returned. He kept filling himself with air, literally inflating his hairy chest, and then tried to stretch and elongate his thickset body.
At any rate, he tried to look like something other than what his natural endowments allowed him to be.
He had some kind of image of himself and he hoped to share his self-adoration with someone.
He was enacting how voluptuous it must feel to run one’s fingers over and squeeze a lean bundle of muscles such as his. Only this bundle of muscle was no longer so lean, in fact it was rather fatty. He pinched his nipples, shuddered, which must not have been very pleasant though the little nipping movement was very sensual. Then slowly down to his waist, following the inner rim of the hip bone along his pulled-in abdominal wall, just barely brushing the loins, the length of the thighs, then suddenly in, between the thighs, and with his hands, after they met, lifting his testicles. He did this too as if by accident; he wouldn’t mind airing them out a bit, and it would only be a physical necessity that along with the testicles his semi-erect prick would also rise.
He let it go, let it fall back, showing off its weight and size, let it appear prettier, larger, and stronger than it was.
And while he was obviously offering up himself, or his services, or one really couldn’t tell what he was offering or to whom, it became clearly visible that he did not care about anyone, that he was alone in this entire universe.
His hands in parallel motion, he was working on various parts of his body, demonstrating that pleasure was determined by the sensitive pads of the fingers. He was like a butcher sampling his own flesh who could not have enough of the first-rate merchandise, and was offering it rather nervously because it was very perishable and he should mete it out as soon as possible and as much of it as possible, to anyone. Just then, the crouching white giant shoved something, maybe a camera, back into the red bag already stuffed with all kinds of odds and ends, towels and clothing. He sprang up as if launched by his own feet and at the same time let out a kind of war cry that sounded something like just you wait, you’ll be sorry, which made his friend with the delicate body look back at him from the water.