Döhring couldn’t understand why the people lying on the shore paid no attention to these two.
The shout reverberated a long time over the water.
Why was he the only Peeping Tom.
At the same time, the female athlete turned to her side on the pink towel, showing off her intrusively strong body and fiery red pubic hair. As though she hadn’t done any of this, she calmly closed her book, used both her hands to take off her glasses and place them on the book.
Because she has had enough, time’s come for action. She was obviously preparing to do something. Her eyes captured and held Döhring’s uncurbed glances, without grinning at him unpleasantly.
Döhring was sure she was a shot-putter; he could see her stretching herself long as she threw a discus or javelin. Maybe she’s a coach and the Ethiopian girl is a short-distance runner. It seemed as if he could clearly see the two women’s intertwined lives on the sports field.
Then he was rebuking himself, my God, where have I got to.
His whining stepmother talked like this. Döhring had to call her Mother and he did not hate her less or have less contempt for her than for his father.
No, he couldn’t possibly have anything to do with people like that.
And that sounded like a paternal prohibition.
No matter how much he hated them, he still talked to himself in their voices. But maybe the country boy who had lost his way was talking now, the one who didn’t know what to do with so many strangers around him, could not make sense of so many strange gestures and movements popping up everywhere, could not even understand his own impressions.
Yet it did not occur to him that he should get up and go somewhere else; nobody was forcing him to grumble or be upset.
To soothe his agitated conscience, he told himself that although he was seeing these peculiar beings, and all their terrible doings were clear to him, he was not one of them. He was merely observing them from a respectable distance, did nothing more than peep at them, and therefore his parents had nothing to worry about. He was behaving properly.
But peeping was also forbidden.
And suddenly he realized that his conscience was not his own.
He was enthralled by these naked people who pretended to be indifferent to one another. He was discovering a part of the world he had been familiar with for a long time, yet he did not reckon with its reality and proximity. At last he was being allowed to peek behind a familiar picture that purported to be compulsively innocent and harmless, where every gesture seemed crude, coarse, nay, disgusting; yet for now he had nothing with which to oppose these crude forces except his own pretenses. For the first time in his life, he discovered in himself the eternal, incurable, and hateful deceiver, whom he despised in his parents and because of whom he had harbored so much resentment against them that he could not even talk to them anymore.
Because of whom he had to escape, no matter how much it hurt not ever to have had a home, and not ever to have hoped to have one. And here he was now, sitting inside the painting, forced to face the dread of nothingness.
But this dread could not frighten him away from his indecent gaping; on the contrary, inside, he was jumping with joy.
At last here it was, he had found it, the world does have such an indecent place, and it must be his place too. This is where everybody brings their deceptions and this is where they show them to one another.
Take the white giant, for example, who whooshed down the slope like a storm, and what Döhring saw and experienced from that moment on contained not one whit of deception or pretense.
In a way this giant seemed to be a man from whose every pore oozed kindness, cheerfulness, and goodwill. As though he was in a constant state of embarrassment, would toy with anything he came upon, would feel he had to apologize continuously for his strength, yet being aware of all this wanted to play with this trait of his, make it into a plaything too.
As if he did not take himself quite seriously.
Not because he was bright or wise enough to fathom his own attributes, but because he was not evil. With his constant playfulness he blunted every unpleasant edge, softened every aggressive rigidity. His skin, covered with ruddy blond down, shone brightly on the green lawn. Döhring saw only his back, his enormous shoulders, thick nape, huge skull with reddish hair shorn to mere stubble, and his childlike profile flashing a few times.
It was hard to understand how so much innocence and tenderness had grown to this size, and why those bundles of muscles. It would have been easier to believe all sorts of infamy of his friend, who was vain and touchy.
The way he slapped the soles of his feet on the surface of the water was also like playing a game; he did not wade in, he did something between treading and stamping on the water. And the way he approached his friend from behind, his arms wide open and pouncing on him from behind like a predator, engulfing him and gobbling him up, that too was a game. Döhring would have liked to be the friend of this naked giant so much that he wouldn’t have minded forgetting about the Ethiopian girl. He imagined himself in the place of the brittle dark man as he vanished in his friend’s embrace.
He suddenly realized that the sportswoman had addressed him and was talking to him.
A not too loud female voice somehow reached him after a short delay.
The woman addressed him in a voice filled with empathy, asking him if he had hurt his leg badly.
He didn’t quite understand her question at first, and why or what she could possibly have to do with his injury.
It was as if she were exposing his feelings, his passionate longing for a friend, and deliberately taking his mind off them. He thought the intervention was improper, offensive, as if he were being accused of something. In the water, now, under the weight of a huge white animal, the light body of a shiny black animal was thrashing about. The female athlete spoke quickly, her voice was pleasant, and with her voice she moved closer to Döhring. In a way, she spoke forward in time; she knew why she was doing what she was doing and therefore did not have to bother separately with the words.
Döhring tried to remain courteous; he said it was still bleeding a little. It was all because of his clumsiness.
And to demonstrate how insignificant the whole matter was, he rolled his pants down to cover his ankle.
Of course, the movement could be interpreted as a rejection of the other person’s interest.
In the meantime the enormous arms literally folded, packed up, and tucked in the body of the floundering man, and both men seemed to enjoy their struggle.
He’s had injuries more serious than this one, Döhring said.
The rolled-up body flew quite a distance before it splash-landed like a helpless heavy sack, only to surface immediately like a big fish. Stretched to his full length, the enormous white giant hurled himself after the dark one, who dodged him cleverly and skipped about gracefully. Maybe the giant caught one of his feet, because they both sank below the water surface and their tussle continued there; for long seconds one could see only limbs, splashing hands, tops of heads, mouths gasping for air, and hear calls for help, laughter, and the sound of bubbles.