“What is it? You don’t expect me to swim alone?”
Somewhere a frog was croaking. His fingers fumbled with his shirt, a task made unexpectedly difficult by a sudden nervous trembling and his reluctance to tear his eyes from her. She seemed almost unfamiliar to him now, her short hair grown longer since the night she first came to him, her skin pink and pale, one arm pressed modestly across her chest. Unlike his awkward movements, she seemed utterly adroit, somehow preserving a sense of propriety despite her nakedness. It was as if alongside the pious little nurse, the gun-draped forager of mushrooms, he now found himself in the presence of a third person, younger, playful, who laughed now as she shimmied from her drawers and disappeared beyond the willow’s leaves.
Nearly stumbling out of his trousers, he followed, out into the sun, the dew-wet mustard brushing against his thighs. He followed the path that she had broken in the high grass to where a short bank descended to the boulders. There he saw her disappear between the rocks and heard a splash. He followed. He had to turn slightly sideways to pass through the portal, and coming out onto the short beach, he found her already neck-deep in a dark pool of water. He stopped, taken by the vision of the familiar face above the water, the shimmering white form beneath.
The cold water licked his feet. She was staring at him, smiling. He was attempting to be modest, not anticipating that she would catch him so exposed.
“You’re scared!” She laughed.
“Not scared. It’s cold.”
“It’s June!”
“Early June. Very early June,” he said.
“You’re stalling.” She took a backstroke away from him, a breast breaking the surface of the water. “If you don’t come in, perhaps we should be heading back.”
Wait! he wanted to shout. The cold was hardly the greatest shock. She began to swim away from him, only a half-dozen strokes, but enough to prove herself a strong swimmer. This too a detail, a secret offered about the life she wouldn’t reveal.
He dove. His skin burned with the cold, but he stayed under, savoring the overpowering sensation, taking swift frog-strokes until he couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He came to the surface, spluttering. Around him, sunlight flickered through the branches of an alder, and wisps of cotton spun in an eddy of the pool. She swam to him. He felt her hand touch his forearm. His toes dug into the pebbles of the riverbed; she treaded water. “It’s too deep for my feet to touch the bottom,” she said, as he felt her limbs close around his back.
The cold water had made her flesh taut and goose-bumped, and his hands were so cold they seemed not to be his own.
“Come,” she said, after she had kissed him. “Your lips are blue already; the bank is warm.”
They lay on one of the blankets in the high grass in the lee of the willow tree, sheltered by the swaying ranks of mustard.
Now out of the water, they both found themselves beset by sudden modesty. He didn’t know what to say. It occurred to him that he had never seen a woman completely naked who wasn’t on an autopsy slab, but decided this was a thought best kept to himself. A breeze came; he shivered, debated asking for a shirt. The ground was stonier than they had expected, and the army blanket itched. Pollen from the pines swept through, and he fell into a fit of sneezing. A scuttling startled them: but it was only a sparrow! Then an invisible sand fly raised pink, vampirish welts upon their necks.
At first this mattered, then it didn’t matter very much.
After, they found they had rolled far from the blanket. Laughing, they crawled back. She wrapped the second blanket around her torso and drew out the bread she’d brought along. It crumbled as she broke it open and spread crushed currants with her knife. She took a bite and then a second, before passing it to him. Her hands, despite their swim, still smelled of mushrooms and soil. Neither spoke.
The only questions that he could think of now were questions that seemed too great to ask her. How long she had felt like this. If she’d imagined this would happen. What was next.
He thought of the roads leading away from the hospital, which led to thoughts of distant hospitals, which led to thoughts of Horváth. Against the summer forest, he saw the snow, the evacuation lorry disappearing on the winter road. I do not deserve this kind of happiness, he thought.
Then he shivered. She had touched his back. The winter vanished, the hills burst forth in green. They kissed, then parted. Her lips tasting of currant, her chin dusted with the flour from the bread.
On his shoulder, his skin was bruised where earlier she had bitten him. Was it a specialty of the nurses of Saint Catherine? he almost asked, feeling giddy again. But he had no interest in reminding her of broken vows. Instead, he lay beside her and ran his fingers tentatively up her dirt-flecked calf. He stopped at her knee, now shy again. A katydid trundled across the blanket, below the double arch of her knees. He waited, watching. He broke a blade of grass and ran it along her ankle. She slapped it away. He felt bold, flirtatious. Again, he tickled her. “The Louse,” he whispered.
“Lucius!”
“Oh, no! The Louse!”
She dug her fingers into the earth and threw a clod at him.
A moment later she was picking through his hair. “I’m sorry! Your poor face! Oh, your eyes!”
She licked a finger and wiped dirt from an eyelid, brushed his lashes gently, kissed him. “There. You’re clean.”
But really, he shouldn’t joke like that.
He lay back, looked up where he could see her neck and shoulder silhouetted against the sky.
It seemed impossible, not simply the circumstances, but the change she’d undergone. A month before, he had never seen her ears, would have apologized for having bumped against her in the narrow aisles of the ward. Yet his first impressions of strangeness—the shock of her kiss, the vision of her folded habit beneath the willow, the foreign feeling of her cold, wet limbs—slowly, these had retreated, leaving the sense of something familiar. In the boldness bordering on incaution, in the appetite, even in the ease of her movements, the same physical confidence he had seen on their walks and at the operating table, the same sense that the world was something to be seized and held.
He touched his cheek briefly against her hip and secretly inhaled the scent of the wet blankets and her skin. Again, and deeply, as if it was something he was about to lose.
She shifted to let his head rest on her thigh. He felt the sunlight on his eyelids and let his gaze run down her legs. Bits of grass stuck to the thin down on her calves. Her toes pale, brushed with sand. Above him, her belly rumbled, a little. He closed his eyes.
It was she who broke the silence, with the words that he’d been dreading. “They’ll be waiting.”
He didn’t answer. Looking up he saw there was a slight rose to her shoulders, as if she had already begun to burn.
“Lucius.”
“Of course.”
They bathed separately before dressing and gathering up their belongings, and started back down the trail. A silence fell. Twice, they stopped; both times he kissed her, but now it seemed a little more that she was letting him, that she was impatient to return.
Scattered clouds drifted down the valley, gained and overtook them. His wristwatch showed close to two; they had scarcely been gone four hours, yet it felt as if they were returning from a different world. He recalled the summers in Vienna, the boulevards, the lovers walking hand in hand. But she was always slightly out of reach, and as they walked, he felt a distance open again between them. He fought this feeling, forced his thoughts back to her floating in the water, calling him. But he knew that she was thinking of something she wouldn’t share.