Anthony Burgess - Tremor of Intent

'With the heaviest of your sex-books.'

'_Seriously__.' She tamped with excitement. 'What are _you__ going to hit him with?'

'With his gun.'

'Oh.' The proscenium arch had come down. The maniac on the stage had leapt into the audience. 'I hadn't thought he'd be carrying a gun.'

'These men will not be village bobbies. I won't hit him too hard, just enough to give him an injection of PSTX. That produces an effect of great intoxication. If he's already out he'll probably stay out. Splendid. He came in drunk and undressed and then you clonked him with a stiletto heel – do that, you must do that – and then-'

'Then I bundled his clothes out of the porthole to make things more difficult for him. Including the gun.' She was ashine with eagerness to get down to the job of luring a strange man in.

'You're a beautiful and desirable and clever and brave girl,' said Hillier gravely, 'and I love you. And in jail or labour-camp or salt-mine I shall go on loving you. And even when the bullet bites I shall love you.' It all sounded preposterous, like love itself.

'But you'll be coming back. You will come back, won't you?'

Before he could answer, the door opened. Alan came in, very hangdog. 'No luck,' he mumbled. 'Nobody wanted to buy a camera. So I tried a Parker pen, and they didn't want that either. Nor some shirts. Not even my dinner-suit.'

'I don't think,' said Clara, 'young boys wear dinner-suits in Russia.'

'I did my best,' said Alan defiantly. 'I'm not much good at this sort of thing. I'm sorry.'

'Never mind,' said Hillier, kindly, in love. 'It stands to reason that you still have a lot to learn. Let Clara and me take over now.'

'I think I'll go ashore,' said Alan. 'There's this big coach waiting at the dock-gates.' He paused, waiting in vain to be told to be careful. 'I'll be careful,' he said, doubtfully.

'Act Two,' announced Hillier. 'A change of venue, but not really of scene. I'll throw those sex-books of yours through your porthole,' he told Clara. 'We don't want anybody to say you encouraged him.'

There was time for Hillier to make delicate love to Clara's cabin, an extension of herself. First, though, he put out his tongue at the sex-books, bundled them, struggling to be free, in his arms, and then hurled them out into the starboard night. The illiterate sea took them as indifferently as a Nazi bonfire. Then he padded round with tiny steps, stroking hairbrushes against his hands and face (prickly male kisses, but proxies of hers), sniffing her unguents and pancake make-up and too-mature perfume. There were stockings on the chair, of a gunmetal colour, and he tried to strangle himself with them, at the same time chewing the dampish feet. She took size nine. He hesitated about burying his face in the underwear in the drawer or taking a drink of tap-water from a shoe that poked out from beneath the bed (size four). The calm of an army was the anger of a people. Love, for the moment, must be the purpose blazoned on a war-poster, not the tremor of the trigger-finger. It was time to be getting into that wardrobe. He had to crouch in it, among her dresses. These, being the external or public she, could not excite him as much as what had lain against or soothed or scented or stimulated her skin. But he kissed the hems of her invisible garments and prayed, not at all to his surprise, less to the goddess who manifested herself to the world in them, so many discardable bodies, than to that devil Miss Devi who had racked his nerves with lust and left them weakened and exposed (flagellated into sainthood) to more spiritual influences. Through the chink of the infinitesimally ajar wardrobe door he saw just such a bunk as that on which he had suffered and enjoyed Dravidian transports. He set Miss Devi upon it in the lotus position, multibrachiate, and prayed his thanks for those fires of purgatory through which he had been permitted to pass to reach the beatrical vision. Then he wiped her out before she became human again and lay on the coverlet, waiting for him.

Time passed, and he wondered whether he had done right to expose this shining one, Clara, to even the playacting of whoredom. But it would not be the postures of professional seduction that would excite so much as the evident innocence of their unhandy imitation. The man she would bring in here would be a bad man, no doubt of it, and would deserve what he was going to get. Then he thought about love and wondered whether any woman who was loved at all realised how excruciating were those intensities of devotion. The troubadours and con-men had debased the language, and the physical act reduced one to a paradigm of animality. Seek to possess the body of the loved one and you might as well be in a brothel. The act could not be ennobled into a sacrament in the way that bread could be transubstantiated. You could cram bread into your mouth at breakfast, spitting out crumbs as you talked about the sermon, but before that you had taken an insipid wafer, no nutriment in it, and muttered 'My Lord and my God'. And you believed you were heard. With love you had to take breakfast and sacrament together and could not, at the moment of revelation, cry 'My lady and my goddess'. Or if you could, you knew that there would be nobody to hear you.

Hillier suffered from cramp, crammed in among the odorous dresses. He opened the wardrobe door and prepared to loosen up his limbs, and then he heard footsteps approaching. He crammed himself in again, a mouthful of bread, and literally heard his heart hammer, out of phase with the footsteps. The cabin-door opened, my Lord and my God, she had bloody well done it. He saw drab police-uniform, the dull shine of a holster, riding-boots, and, refracted to thirty or more slivers by the intermittency of his view, her silver lamé dress. How much could he bear? That belt and holster had to come off, but would she be unflustered enough to get him to unbuckle it now before those hard police-fingers mauled and probed? What Hillier saw he saw in slices, but he heard clearly enough the hoarse one Russian word: 'Razdyevay -razdyevay-' He widened the chink and saw too much – the rip of the dress at the shoulder, a Slav rape of the West, the fat red neck and the coarse stubble above it, the rank of the man (by God, she had done well, his brain coldly noted, noting insignia he had forgotten how to interpret but knew were above the badge of a lieutenancy, noting too, as he saw the blunt face in profile, a couple of rows of medal-ribbons and despising the man for this deflection from purpose but also loving him for being human enough to be deflected and then hating him for that lust that was all too human and was grunting and grinning in gold and stained ivory towards the one intolerable desecration). Clara, very fearful, already dishevelled as after a whole night's forced abandon, looked across the bearing-down shoulder towards her salvation in the wardrobe. Hillier looked out at her an instant, pointing desperately towards the holster. She at once began to try to loosen the man's tunic and he, grinning 'Da, ya dolzhen razdyevat'sya', rose from her, unbuckled his belt and threw it to the floor, then started to unbutton clumsily. To Clara he said, as before: 'Razdye- vay – razdyevay-' The verb _to undress__, in its intransitive and reflexive forms, was one she ought to remember, thought Hillier madly, crouching hidden again. Now, in his shirt, the man made for her with fingers spread as for wrestling, and Hillier took his chance.

'Khorosho,' he said, pointing the gun (it was a heavy police Tigr, one of the new issue) and thumbing open the stiffish safety-catch. 'Vstavayetye, svinyah.' It was back to that afternoon with the Westdeutsche Teufel, though in a more satisfactory language. The shirted man addressed as pig was slow in standing up; he seemed even desirous of clinging to Clara for protection. But now, in a genuine officer-voice, Hillier called him a leching bitch-get, and told him to come over to the _gardyerob__, he himself arcing away from it, and to stand with his fat pig-guts and lavatory-face facing it. The man obeyed, rumbling and spitting, though, disquietingly, his rather fine brown eyes looked with some warmth on Hillier: it was as though it were a pleasant capitalist relaxation – like drinking Scotch or listening to jazz – to be caught in a mere boudoir predicament. 'This,' said Hillier in kind Russian, 'will not hurt much.' He cracked the gun-butt on the man's stubbled occiput. To his surprise, there was no response. He cracked harder. The man, with mammy-singer's arms, tried to embrace the wardrobe and then, the skirr of eight finger-nails drawing old-time music-staves on the two wooden sides as he went down, he went down.