Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

The wagon came from the main slaughterhouse on Eldenaerstrasse.

The coachman could not have been more than twenty, just slightly older than the two girls, and hadn't yet lost the adolescent resilience that long years of hard physical labor would surely rob him of; his tanned skin had a healthy sheen, his hair was so black it seemed to glitter, and a profusion of wild, dark chest hair curled out of his always unbuttoned shirt; the three women looked even more alike on such occasions, because they all wore bloodstained smocks over their dresses.

As the young man strode to the back of the wagon, he gave each of the women, the mother included, a gentle slap on the face; they had been waiting for this, anticipating the pleasurable warmth of the rough hand on their cheeks, and now fell in behind him, giggling, touching, pinching one another as they went, as if to share among themselves what each of them had just received from the young man; he opened the wagon door and, throwing a large blood-spattered sheet over his shoulder, began to unload the shipment of meat.

The women carried the smaller pieces, shank, ribs cut in long strips, heads split in half, and haslets — livers, hearts, kidneys, and the like — in blue enamel dishes, while the coachman, with an exaggerated ease meant to impress the women, lifted and carried down into the cellar pigs cut in half and whole sides of beef; well, this is where the real plot of my story would begin, for they were apparently all working attentively, efficiently, at a nice even pace, yet they kept finding opportunities to touch one another, push, jostle, and bump into one another; moreover, under the pretext of assisting him, the women managed to touch the bare skin of the coachman's chest, neck, arm, and hand, and when they did, they relayed their pleasure in the touch, as if they were parts of a chain— sometimes they'd cling adroitly to his body for a while — but it was clear that, no matter how slyly or eagerly they did all this touching, this was not the object of the game, which, once accomplished, would satisfy them, but rather as if it was just an introduction to a more complete, purer form of contact, a more elaborate game they had to prepare gradually; but I was not given a chance to see this next phase, because they'd often disappear inside the basement shop for long periods, sometimes as much as half an hour, leaving the wagon full of merchandise open and unattended; occasionally dogs with bristling hair and cats dazed with hunger would appear on the scene, sniffing at the spilled blood and shreds of meat, but oddly enough they never risked climbing up or jumping into the wagon; there I stood, behind the drawn curtains, in the twilight dimness of my room, waiting patiently, and if the four of them did not appear for a long time, then in my imagination somehow the basement opened up, its walls fell away, and they, shedding their bloody clothes, stripping down to bare skin, reached that Arcadian meadow — I don't know how, or I should say

I do, of course I do! I pictured a subterranean passage that led them under the city and out into the open, where the two images simply merged, observation slipped into imagination; they were pure, innocent, and natural, and this is the point where my story of that coarsely beautiful man and the three women really becomes involved.

One reason I didn't like Frau Hübner barging into my room without knocking was that while observing the Tuesday and Friday twilight tableaux, or while concentrating on my fantasies about its absence, I experienced such a powerful arousal that to calm myself, and also intensify my solitary pleasure, I had to reach inside my trousers and touch myself; I would not move away from the drawn-back curtain; letting the fear of being discovered increase the tension, I stayed put and gently wrapped five fingers around my hard member pressing against my robe, doing it, of course, like a discriminating connoisseur, simultaneously cupping the soft testes and the blood-stiffened shaft in my warm palm, as if seizing at its source, at its root, what would soon erupt, and at the same time, with a certain amount of cunning self-control, I continued to pay strict attention to the events of the street, then to the silence, the absence of any action, and now and then to the unsuspecting passersby; I wasn't interested in quick gratification; delaying it kept me on the edge between the real spectacle and creative fantasy; the sudden rush of shuddering ecstasy, the convulsing spurt of semen would have deprived me of the very thing that, with the help of endless and timeless fantasies of pleasure, had nourished the body's delight in itself; delaying bliss is the way to prolong it; by touching my own body I could feel the pleasure of other bodies; I'd say that in this way my hour of shame had become the hour of communion with humanity, the hour of creation; consequently, it would have been most unpleasant if at such a moment Frau Hübner had entered my room; and it wasn't just the street I saw, I was there with them in the cellar, I was the man and I was also the three women, in my own body I felt their intimate contacts, and my imagination shifted the scene of their ever more serious game to that particular clearing, for that was where they belonged, the coachman became Pan, mother and daughters turned into nymphs; and there was nothing high-handedly false about this, because I had no doubt that this lovely meadow was very familiar to me; my imagination wasn't leading me to an unknown place; it merely took me back in time to a place that lived in my memory as one of the scenes in our summers at Heiligendamm.

My antique mural could only vaguely remind me of this realer-than-real place.

If you let yourself down the side of the embankment, constantly slipping on the loose rocks, and then followed a well-trodden trail, shielding yourself with your arm to keep the sharp-edged sedge from poking you in the eye, and then waded through the marsh, you came to a tiny bay where, as I've already mentioned, I had once surprised my childhood playmate, the young Count Stollberg, lying on the soggy grass, playing with his tool; he was lying on his back, with his pants pulled down to his knees, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, and his mouth open; the rhythmic movement must have made his beribboned sailor's cap slide off his head and it was caught in a clump of grass, its blue ribbons dangling in the water; he raised his hips in a gentle arch and spread his thighs as far as his pants, stuck over his knees, allowed; with rapid jerks of his fingers he kept yanking the foreskin of his little penis — everything about him was small and well-shaped; pulling back and releasing his skin, he seemed to have a tiny red-headed animal appearing and disappearing in his hand; his tense face was riveted to the sky, and I had the impression that with his arched torso, open mouth, and tightly shut lids, he was having some sort of discourse with the heavens, while with bated breath he was most deeply engrossed in himself; when indignantly, shocked by my own agitated reaction, I asked him about it, he very willingly and in his charmingly affable way proceeded to initiate me into the pleasant ways of squeezing pleasure out of one's own body; nothing bad had happened, he said, no reason for me to be angry, and in fact I should join him, and further, we should look at each other while doing it, that would make it even more enjoyable; at any rate, as I was saying, after a ten-minute walk on this trail you could reach the clearing, still breathless from the stifling silent air of the marsh, where suddenly the landscape would open up, and in the distance you could see the forest that bore the quaint name of the Great Wilderness and where, had I ever succeeded in writing my story, I would have taken my four characters, using clear concise sentences as their guide.