Zinka came to an end. From his canine position, Haffner looked up at her, expectantly.
— Now you wipe, said Zinka.
Haffner tended to Zinka. He unrolled a small section of paper, then folded it into the most luxurious, downiest towel. He wanted to do the job with elegance: no one could ever accuse Haffner of not being a good sport.
— No. First with your mouth, she said. Your tongue.
It was for only a brief moment that Haffner paused in a qualm of indecision, before he bent his neck, uncomfortably, deliriously, and licked at Zinka's ferrous crotch. To his surprised disappointment, only a trace of her pale urine was detectable to Haffner's tongue: a sweetly sour herbaceous perfume.
— Now OK you stop, said Zinka.
Then he pushed the paper against her labia. He refolded. Pushed it again, a little harder. He dropped the paper between her legs, into the toilet bowl.
— So, said Zinka. We go through.
And Haffner followed her to the raised stage of his bed, where — earnest, dedicated — Zinka squatted over Haffner's face.
Zinka was hairless between the legs. Where the hair should have been, there was a brief tattoo: a mermaid easing herself against an invisible wave: sinuous, like Venus rising from her shell — a vision in dark green. And Haffner inhaled her.
Canine, Bacchic, Haffner thrived on the lower thrills: the women with their marine and sour aroma, the rotting rich smell of powdered roe, the ammonia rinds of cheeses. The spread of molecules in the still air was one of Haffner's most intense delights. They wafted and they drifted and they delighted him. He was undisgustable.
— You must not move, said Zinka. You move, I punish you.
Haffner wondered if this was serious. No one had ever said this to him before. Haffner had to admit that although he believed that Zinka possessed a charm he had never known in any other woman, it was true that he hardly knew her. He adored her, but she was unknown. He adored her because she was unknown. Unknown, and also young.
— Is this serious? asked Haffner, gaily.
In answer, Zinka pinched the twin wings of his nose together — their burst red cartilage poignant through the skin, like the surface of a butter bean — then pushed herself down on to his mouth. She was everywhere inside Haffner. His eyes goggled back at her, as she looked down, between her breasts.
— We do this how I like, no? said Zinka.
Haffner nodded. And she relaxed her grip on Haffner, flooding him with her delicate smell, a refined sweating bouquet.
Maybe it was better like this, thought Haffner. He began to accustom himself to the absolute relinquishment of choice. Who needed to see Haffner holding in his stomach? Or his almost hollow shins — a veteran Roman legionary, the skin rubbed to a sheen? In this relinquishment, Haffner found his revolution.
His life had been shadowed by the counter-culture, the underground — and however much he disapproved of their childish politics, he admired the chutzpah of the protestors and the fighters, the uprisers and the deserters. Once, in New York, Haffner had helped a kid into the foyer of Chase Manhattan to extricate himself from the riot police, with their bright Lego helmets. Most orderly in his life, most savage in his imaginings, Haffner read with indulgence about the European anarchists, with their colourful cryptic names: the Black Bloc, the Tute Bianche. The Yippies in particular had gladdened Haffner's heart — especially the day they strode into the New York Stock Exchange, quietened the black security men into meek submission with raucous accusations of anti-Semitism, then stood in the public gallery and rained down dollar bills on the dealers in their braces, their visors, their pinstriped bespoke suits. He felt less attached to the Parisian revolutionaries, whom Haffner had watched on the BBC — the students in the lofts of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, attaching posters to washing lines with clothes pegs, so they could dry in time to be glued all over the city: the garish fonts and pointing hands — Hypocrite reader! My double! My brother! — proclaiming their escape from all the bourgeois normality, their new creation of an idyllic island, a utopia.
And now Haffner was stranded on this island, in this utopia.
Zinka, without explaining to Haffner, skipped off him and ordered him to undress. And this, thought Haffner happily, might be the moment, the reward for all his courage. In his exuberance he undressed, ignoring his habitual neatness, letting the bunched pair of his socks roll anywhere, his shirt remain in its pool on the floor.
He didn't care what form his utopia might take. Any revolution would do. If he had to be, Haffner would be the Saint-Just of the hypermarket, Guevara of the guava. And if in fact his utopia were here, in a hotel bedroom in a spa town, then Haffner would not resist. No, thought Haffner, if this was it, then he would take his place.
Leaning over the side of the bed, Zinka picked up the tracksuit trousers, and sloppily drew them up, like a snake charmer, along with the pool of his T-shirt. The trousers served to tie up one of Haffner's hands behind him, to the bedhead; the T-shirt served for his other. And Haffner was tied to the bed.
Stoical in his pursuit of pleasure, the true classical epicure, it wasn't the first time Haffner had been involved in the bedbound business of knots. It had been a habit of Barbra, his American secretary, to need to be tied to the bed, before being smacked with a book, struck with a cane, spanked until her buttocks turned a chaste and virginal pink. She liked to lose control, in the most controlled way possible. In her apartment in Chelsea, Haffner employed his ingenuity — even, in a moment of inspiration, lassoing a rope that had been stashed in a canvas bag left behind by her hearty and mountaineering brother over an exposed joist, so that Barbra could be tied there, standing naked, her arms above her head, her breasts raised with the tension — breasts which Haffner struck lightly but woundingly with the edge of his belt. When her breasts were raised like this you could see the mole which was usually a deft stowaway underneath the left. No, Haffner never minded these contrivances: but they were not for him. Not even medicinally. In the Russian Bath House in New York, he never understood why Morton so enjoyed being whipped with switches, beaten with birch rods.
Here in Central Europe, however, the position was reversed. Haffner was the one who was tied. Lightly, it was true: with garish sportswear. But his power had still gone.
Haffner had abdicated.
Slowly, Zinka lowered her mouth to Haffner's chest. With her teeth she tugged at a nipple — its blunt miniature nub. To Haffner, this action still felt within the limits of the normal, or the possible. It hadn't yet gone beyond the border of the pleasurable. Then she continued to bite. And Haffner began to revise his definitions of pleasure. He wondered how far he could take this before she might draw blood. Nevertheless, he thought, nevertheless. His body took over — with its strange routes to enjoyment. Zinka began to bite the other nipple. As she did so, she dragged the sharp nails of her fingers over Haffner's delicate skin. Wildly, he felt his penis stir. She held his penis, tightly, painfully. It tried to stir some more.
Then Zinka began her game of teasing.
Stupendous, haughty, grand, the diminutive form of Zinka began its travails down the length of Haffner's body. She struck him; she bit him. Soon, he knew, his old body would become a palette of bruises — the yellows and browns of a landscape from the nineteenth-century French countryside, with cows, and sheep, and a misshapen cypress. She told him to close his eyes. He could feel her hover over him — her warmth and smell. With a calm hand, she rubbed her wetness on his eyelids, on his nose: a pensive Impressionist. And then she moved further down until she reached his penis, where she waited.