His eyebrows, she said to herself. And that could have been one explanation. Because their eyebrows were indeed as similar as if they had been siblings.
And she was thinking about this with her tongue while spreading and pressing herself over him and licking the beads of sweat dripping off his brow, because what she tasted was very different from what she’d anticipated from the smell of his sweat. Which, translated into normal human language, meant that she probably didn’t understand or misunderstood the other person after all, and was again chasing an illusion of her desires. And the ceiling was arching over her more imperiously than ever, which brought on another thought association — the ceiling’s little cracks and ominous reflections of light.
A fine time for the ceiling of her rotten little room to come crashing down; let it, let the whole rotten room fall apart. It would too, if she let it, if she didn’t cheer herself up, find an antidote. Every little interior movement was a protest. A place she couldn’t break out of; they wouldn’t let her. Because she’s not happy, because she ruins everything.
She was pushing it, stretching it; let her room crack wide open, its walls have always been too confining and have always chafed her skin. If only the old woman would drop dead soon, she could put in a request for the whole apartment.
She sank a little, and then rose a bit, all right, let it be, the way he wants it, all right; she yielded to the man again.
It will never end.
But she couldn’t tell where her glances, thoughts, furtive looks, her very countenance roamed; where, on which level of sights or sensations, she was with those fractions of words and sentences. She was floating in the glittering water murky with mud, and was sitting in the dusty courtyard, sitting where they dumped her, and she could hardly breathe.
It was almost completely dark.
She didn’t know where she was.
She had been looking for this place or this sensation. Now she couldn’t see any cracks in the ceiling. I’ve always been looking for them, she thought, though she had no idea what she was referring to. Surely not to the man. Strangely enough this man no longer interested her. A moment just after twilight yet before evening descended, and the man had become part of that moment. Perhaps with her countenance she had brought something to a halt, thus lighting up for herself an otherwise invisible landscape.
I love you: she would have loved to shout that into the landscape. Though she didn’t know to whom. As if for a moment everyone who had ever been inside her made an appearance. To keep the night from crashing down on her, she would have to stop the earth from spinning. She could not return to the person who was filling her up.
She didn’t know who he was.
She still didn’t know.
Like the mouth of her womb, the little room grew gigantic from this loud desire, as if to devour the entire apartment with all its odds and ends.
Rhythmically, they breathed into each other’s mouth.
The man concentrated on her cautious movements, guided by the rhythms of two mouths breathing into each other and not by sensations and certainly not by her feelings. He had an inner countenance with which he saw her. He saw that the relatively long vagina’s angle of inflection and that of his cock, shortened and thickened by excitement, were in virtual opposition. The vagina arced upward while the cock, as if pulled downward by the mass and weight of its blood-filled head, bowed willfully.
They were wedged into each other sternly and stubbornly. With his every thrust forward and every retreat, they mutually increased the tension in each other.
He was managing things economically. Such a tiny movement mustn’t make a noise that could be heard through the wall. Another reason to be on the alert. As if he were controlling two worlds at once. And they were not equally elastic. He knew where he was, and what he had to do if he did not want to injure the real world. He saw how far he had penetrated, the road behind him and the stretch that was still ahead. He could not give in to the woman, who, if he did, would writhe under him in spasmodically interrupted, hysterical rhythms that would not match his. She would pretend dutifully to demonstrate how good it was for her, and with that it’s impossible to get anywhere.
Their hips collided several times, almost unpleasantly. Actually, it was the first thing he had noticed at the swimming pool, the woman’s hips.
How her torso became elongated when she came out of the pool and drops of water rolled down, sticking to her cold brown skin, around the hip bone. Now the pain claimed his attention. Although he could see with his eyes, he was seeing better with his skin and cock; his body no longer had a separate bulk, independent parts, limbs of its own; and with their parts and limbs thus shared, they could not separate and their mutual sensations could not become independent.
White was the strongest.
He should have pulled his cock out of her at least for a moment, to see it, to delight in it; he missed his sense of ownership. Pain is darkness. The white pillowcase illumined all his senses, its sunken wrinkles and shadows almost irritatingly bright around the expanding and contracting face. Lips opening to the sound of breathing; flaring, finely opening and closing nostrils; a barely audible, painful whistling in his ear.
And she is still doing it.
She’s always doing it, he thought, exasperated. As if she’d been trying to convince him. Or herself. And the enlightening decision was right at hand. I won’t let her. He no longer felt skin, only the heat filtering through it, and he didn’t feel the flesh under the skin either. This was the only remaining task, which was somehow familiar from somewhere. He entered into darkness, into the pervasive odor of the cunt, with its sloshing sounds at every little movement. He must face the task, or at least find appropriate means to deal with it, if he had failed until now. To outwit the woman.
He also saw the white stones sticking or popping out of and falling back into the ground bubbling under him. The water was boiling, producing bubbles on its surface, which was exactly like the sensation of crumbling under his body. He was watching her as the other boys had watched him through the swirling steam. He had to watch his every move to counter the woman’s simulations, to find a small crack. But he felt this more as a challenge to break through to something. He even thought, I should break through to her because alone she cannot free herself or take care of herself.
The probability of succeeding in this was very low.
Or at least someone might call down from the third floor, in an unfamiliar voice, before he’d topple over. You know what I mean. Of course he knew, because the dried-up shrubs he could hold on to only moments earlier were now bending away and disappearing, one after the other, in the depths. Now he couldn’t cling to anything.
When his father left him there alone, the first thing the school principal said was that this area was very lovely, sans doute, but he shouldn’t let it dazzle him, because it wasn’t without dangers, therefore he should never, not in winter or summer, not during the day or at night, take a single step by himself.
And he had understood this.
There was only the ground that was going to swallow him now as it caved in and crumbled. How could he have understood, what could he understand if he had never before seen a landslide or avalanche. He was thinking what enviable images a child has of danger. He did not ask where he wanted to arrive at, where he would like to go or how he would like to go back home from here. Now I’ll be home, he thought when the earth moved under him, even though he couldn’t have understood why it moved. Whenever he’s in trouble, his mind rears in fright but his body acts calmly. He grasped a pillow, but the incredible sensation of crumbling stayed in his hand.