Geerte had a good mind to slap her.
Teeth flashing wetly in the mouth are precursors of a bite. She handed over her blouse, and then quickly slipped out of the camisole too.
I did the talking, she said, I always talk too much, and now here I stand before you completely ignorant and defenseless.
But with this reckless little coquetry she was unable to shake the other woman’s seriousness.
Geerte von Groot took the blouse from her and then the camisole, carefully folded one into the other, lifted the mildly starched batiste and the slippery silk, and attentively, slowly, buried her peculiar, flat nose in them as if to seek Erna’s fragrance. Or to kiss the wet spots left by the seeping milk. In the intermingled odors, it was the milk’s fatty bouquet she could not resist.
Not only was it clear what she was looking for but also what boundaries they had crossed.
What are you doing, Geerte, for god’s sake, moaned Erna reproachfully, beseechingly, her modesty deeply insulted; what are you doing, please don’t, yet her entire body, with shuddering waves of hot and cold, showed its approval.
Indignation, beseeching, and reproach emanated from the same pleasure.
In truth she had fallen into another world, and measured against the enormity of this event, the signs she gave of how she was shrieking inside, while everything was ripping, creaking, breaking up around her, were far too faint. Feeble groans and whimpers came from her. As a saw when stuck in knotty wood. She wanted to flee, to protest that what had to happen should not happen, and quite involuntarily her hands flew in front of her breasts.
From the garments raised to her lips, Geerte looked up at her, actually rather surprised. She seemed paler than usual. The curls of her freed, unruly hair were aflame around her gleaming white forehead. Her face turned coarse, grew demanding, aggressive and somber. When she raised her head and began to speak, forcing the sounds up from her chest, when evil appeared in her features — hate, raw terror, a profound desire for revenge — Erna should have turned away; she should have run for her life.
I’d so much like to help you, I can’t tell you, she moaned. I want so much not to hurt you, not in any way.
But I don’t have anything besides my body, nothing, believe me. In what way could I help. I also know so little, nothing really.
And then, in her own language, she screamed.
Oh, nothing, nothing.
The scream, somehow, remained very controlled.
Her face was no longer suffused with the quiet intimacy of a Dutch painting.
Silenced reigned between them.
She saw that this woman was really a criminal. As if the tenderness and kindness she had forced on her had another, hitherto unknown side. This woman is capable of anything. Nevertheless, her desperate scream became stifled in the absolute silence of the house.
She saw the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War on her features. To restrain her, to frighten her away, or to keep her from coming close to her, to steer all events in a different direction, she should have dressed very quickly. Too late, and she knew it. Horses were trotting with her under the elm trees of Jászhanta. Everything is plotted, written in advance. Nothing you can do about it. And none of her things were to hand. She felt cold, her arms and shoulders had goose bumps, her nipples twitched, and she trembled more and more violently.
Why haven’t I noticed how hungry she was. And I’m so starved for her.
No, there was nothing close by she could throw on herself. She was standing in a large cool space; no help anywhere.
There was no god to whom she could pray. A little help came only — at least for a brief moment — from the ability to see herself from the outside, as she stood in this strange, cool, and austerely furnished hall, caught in this truly absurd situation.
And suddenly she hears the baby cooing quietly and contentedly in the adjacent room.
The only object within reach was a wet cloth, lying on a plain silver tray at the edge of a small table. She bent down for it. To use this movement, for lack of anything else, to cover herself. Immediately the hope that she still had a chance to leave this scene gave her some strength. As if an invisible tentacle were reaching over from the adjacent room, a secret power, the binding umbilical cord; then what Geerte had claimed and what Erna had never felt before was true after all.
Her baby was indeed binding her to itself and would hold her back.
I think, she said moaning and stammering and feeling a little stronger, I think it would be best if first I pumped this breast, it’s so full. But she could already tell by her own voice she was no longer master of herself or of anything else; neither did the cooing bind her. Her baby could not hold her back.
And if this was so, if she was going to betray everything and everyone, then she had better not see what she was doing; she closed her eyes.
But she would not give up, could not accept that there was no way back. When she spoke again, the voice coming from her throat was unpleasant, meant to be used with a disobedient servant.
Geerte, would you mind bringing the pump from the other room.
Their hands met on the wet cloth, and the silver tray rattled slightly at the sudden touch.
Geerte had meant to put the folded garments there because she wanted to free her arms and hands as quickly as she could.
She clasped her arms around Erna’s hips, though she did not immediately draw her close. Her swollen lips, which seemed so strange and out of place in the white face, were quivering.
Please, let me go, said Erna, gasping, feebly.
Her protest would not have been laughable if a man was forcing himself on her. But this was a woman, which made her feel she had no place to run to, no way to escape. Seeing Geerte’s approaching lips, she quickly turned her head aside lest the lips reach her mouth.
As if saying to herself, this won’t do. Which meant that anything was possible.
Something was really breaking through and opening up.
She was standing in such a small space, she had no room to back away. The baby was cooing and perhaps not entirely innocently. She tensed with elemental resistance, but the moment Geerte’s lips touched the skin below her cheekbone, her body went limp. There was no external sign of protest. But it wasn’t the contact of the lips that loosened her — it only turned the feverish shudder into shivering heat and back again — but, rather, feeling each other’s pubic bone strain and pulse through the fabric of their clothes.
But it could not disturb what one might call inner sensation or sober thinking.
She thought she saw more clearly than ever.
From a distance, she heard the baby cooing, the dim thud of horses’ hooves on the tree-lined path, her carriage flying between patches of light and shadow. One protuberance registered on the throbbing other as if it were within its own rhythmic beating; that was why each felt the other’s body pulsing through their clothes. The earth in Jászhanta is dark, heavy sand that becomes clumpy in the spring rains and condenses in the summer heat. Luckily I haven’t lost my mind yet, she thought to herself. She found some comfort in her alertness. Perhaps it was Geerte’s heartbeat, or her own, that she heard as thudding hoofbeats on the sand.
For the first time they felt each other in a way that was inseparable from their feelings for each other. As though she were observing from afar and would not dare experience her own findings, while the other person could no longer see out of herself. That was the difference between them. Or as though it wasn’t she who was feeling the other woman inside her but her husband, of whom she was constantly and not baselessly jealous. As if in contact with the other woman’s pubic bone she’d have to feel her own, yet as if not she but a man were thrusting against her.