Chapter 1
My name is Saul. There is nothing in my history nor in my family's history which would justify the name, a significantly biblical one, and in all these years I have been able to discover no shred of reason for the appellation. So be it. I am not one to look for reasons. I prefer the lightning thrust of intuition. The name is like any other and it appears on my birth certificate.
From the beginning I was a kind of stranger. What is that? Ha! Baudelaire came near to expressing it: "Your friends?"
"You use a word that I have never to this day been able to understand."
"Your country?"
"I know not on what latitude it lies."...."Well, then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?"
"I love the clouds ... passing clouds ... over yonder ... the wondrous clouds!"
There is no fact which does not appear to me to be at bottom absurd. My father was drowned at sea. He lived "at sea" also. My mother died shortly afterwards of some obscure internal complaint. She always complained and she was always obscure about the origin of her complaints. Thus, from my early years, I was an orphan.
Shortly after what the local parson-a man of certainties-called "this double catastrophe," I was sent to America, where, until the death of my uncle, I grew up. Something which my aunts called "grave" happened there. Aunt Jenny in particular was of the opinion that I was "marked" for life. I have no personal opinion on the matter. And she, surprisingly, didn't know....
Aunt Jenny was a goldfish.
Aunt Lutetia was a bluebell.
Uncle Harris was over sixty with long hollows in his cheeks and long grey pants and he was always nervous about something.
Aunt Lutetia was a bluebell because her hat was like a bell drawn tightly over the flat yellow shoots of her hair. It was a blue hat she bought at a Christmas sale and she never went without it.
The reason for Aunt Jenny's being a goldfish was less obvious. She smelled of old lavender and always gave the impression of being powdered with gold dust. Then there was her way of saying "oh" as a fish does, her thin lips circular and her blue eyes round and vacuous. And her skirt sloped inwards as far down as her ankles so that she might have been a mermaid if she had been younger and more beautiful. As it was, she was a goldfish.
Uncle Harris was an American as he was never tired of telling people, especially other Americans. When Uncle Harris stepped into the buggy he swung one long grey ranging leg after the other in a manner which suggested he was aware of his movements. When Uncle Harris died it was because he swallowed a dose of rat poison thinking it was something else.
The trees in the park were elms, very green, and so tall and stately that Uncle Harris swore they were planted before white man set foot in America.
They were part of an unspeakable past, prehistoric, because savages, Uncle Harris said, were not in history, and, for the tribes of Indians who roamed there, all time was present. That was the difference between a tribe and a society, he said. A society was change-conscious. Its lifeblood was an ideal. It learned its lessons from the past and looked to the future. A tribe was not like that. It was static, and such progress as there was, was unconscious.
When Elmer Lewis said one evening that modern Americans were perhaps not quite as conscious as they thought, Uncle Harris was very angry. The elms represented an old order. Uncle Harris owned them.
Elmer Lewis was one of our neighbors. He lived in a fine old house of the colonial style which had belonged to his family since the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was not married and on his death the house and the lands would pass into the hands of a cousin in Boston. He was a cripple, and perhaps that was the reason he never married and that he spent most of his time in the library or experimenting with his orchids. He came to visit Uncle Harris twice a week to play chess. During the game Uncle Harris would allow no one to disturb them. He took his chess almost as seriously as his politics.
I remember the lake and the evergreens, the clear white winters when snow covered everything. And I remember the tiny clearing in the copse where I saw Anna of the white thighs give herself to the man.
Anna was not an American, not yet anyway, and in Uncle Harris' eyes she never would be. She was a Jew. The Jews were not a nation and so there was no question of their changing nationality. They were a race whose racial atavism prevented them from being integrated into any nation-a tribe. People knew this, Uncle Harris said knowledgeably, and that was why they called a female Jew a "Jewess." An American woman was an American. Any fool could see the difference.
Aunt Jenny and Aunt Lutetia believed with Uncle Harris, although, believing in one God who was a Democrat, they would never have admitted it. The excess of their kindness to Anna was a kind of penance they did for being so comfortably gentile.
Elmer Lewis avoided the subject whenever possible, but it was difficult for it was one of Uncle Harris' favorite topics of conversation. Together with what was decadent, what was Jewish was un-American.
Anna came to America from Odessa in the Ukraine. Her first memories were of black cargo ships and foreign seamen, Greeks, Turks, Armenians. Her father had been shot by soldiers of the Czar. She herself had escaped from a batch of women seized for a military brothel. That was her mother's fate. She did not know where the rest of her family were.
She learned English quickly and by the time she came to us she was almost fluent. I was ten years old at the time and my aunts, seeing how well-behaved I became in her presence, decided to use her almost as a governess instead of a maid. She was given a room next to mine in the old wing of the house and if Uncle Harris disapproved of her presence there and of her influence on me, he kept silent about it. As I was to discover, he had his reasons: she was for him too, perhaps, Anna of the white thighs....
The goldfish and the bluebell told all the neighbors that Anna's father had been murdered by "the red devils." My poor aunts were confused about many things.
Anna became very fond of me. When I was not at school, I was with her all the time. She played with me as though she had been a child of my own age-I think she was twenty-two or twenty-three then. We pretended we were Apache Indians and we tracked each other all over the grounds. Our favorite hiding place was the little clearing in the middle of the copse. It was utterly secluded and no one from the house ever came there. It belonged to us. If, for one reason or another, one of us was detained in the house, we met there, two Apaches who had escaped from the reservation.
After the first summer, my whole world revolved about Anna. Anna was young and full of life. She laughed at me and kissed me. It was she who wakened me in the morning and put me to bed at night. During the day I held her hand and allowed her to decide what we should do. If she stopped to talk to one of the stablemen I became madly jealous and pulled at her skirt to drag her away until she laughed and said to whomever it was who was trying to make a date with her, "It's no use, sir! You see, I'm beholden already!"
Anna was not anything. She was not a goldfish and she was not a bluebell nor anything else. I could not find anything to call her which would have fixed in my mind the smoothness of her olive skin, the way she blinked her dark, heavily lashed eyes, the tilt of her breasts and her wonderfully soft movements.
I would have died for her.
She was all the more wonderful for me as a child because, at the beginning at least, I could only guess at the limber body which moved supplely, with a suggestion of cloying rhythm, under her dress of washed cotton.
One day towards the end of that first summer we were alone together in the middle of the copse. I was lying on my back looking at the wide blue sky and Anna was sitting cross-legged beside me.
"Anna," I said, "do you like America?"
"Yes," she said, "I like it very much."
"Better than Russia?"
"Russia I love too," she said. "There are things in Russia that I miss."
"And do you like Americans?"
"I like some Americans," she said. "I like you."
I laughed. "Oh, I'm not really an American! And I'm an orphan like you. But do you like Americans better than Russians?"
Anna laughed too, then.
"It is you I like," she said. "It is not Russians or Americans. It is you, you silly boy!"
After that we did not speak for some minutes. I was going to school in a few days' time, east, away from her. The thought of leaving her made me more frightened than I had ever been before.
"Anna, what will you do while I'm away?"
"You will soon be back."
"And you'll wait for me?"
"Yes," she said, gazing through the bushes, "I wait for you."
"But I mean longer, Anna!"
"What is it you mean?"
"I mean until I grow up so that we can be married."
She looked at me and laughed merrily, and then, sensing that I was in earnest, she raised her wonderful eyebrows and drew me close to her.
"Yes, my little darling, that is what I mean!" And she kissed me on the mouth with her soft red dangerous lips.
But almost immediately she stood up.
"Come, my lad," she said-that was what Uncle Harris always called me-"we carve our initials on a tree. That makes it true, doesn't it?"
We chose the tallest elm halfway up the front driveway. Anna took the penknife that used to be my father's and with her thin strong hand she cut our initials deeply and indelibly into the bark.
That pledge was the beginning....
By the time I was twelve years old my infatuation with Anna had reached an intense pitch. I nursed it like a seed, something nurtured in the dark, out of other people's ken. Its growth was uncontrollable, but only in the sense that, after a time, I lost the power voluntarily to make it abate, and not in the sense that I was unable to control it in its overt manifestations.
I learned that craft early.
I learned to indulge myself and derive my satisfactions without either awakening the suspicions of my aunts or causing Anna to turn against me. She was sometimes impatient with me, perhaps bored, for she was already mature and longing as any young woman of her age for the experiences of a male, and that, unfortunately, I was unable to provide for her. But there were other things I could do.
I was quick to note that she liked to be stroked, although the type of caress that I was able to bestow on her was not dangerous enough to be wholly satisfying to her. Obviously, in spite of the fact that I had a strange curiosity to do so, I could not feel her under her skirts without raising all sorts of resistance in her. I tried once, pretending to pinch her knee while we were lying in the copse. Her knee mocked me with its smooth perfection. I would like to have kissed it. When I pinched it, it moved upwards in a kind of reflex movement, revealing a few inches of her dusky white thighs, but, as the formless sensation of hunger rose within me, her hand grasped mine and she said: "Don't touch me there! It's not nice!"
I had to be careful.
No. My knowledge that she liked to be caressed was derived from the fact that she always allowed me to brush her hair. She would allow me to do this for hours on end.
I said a moment ago that I had to be careful. I don't mean that I had to be careful to avoid all sex; just that any sexual gesture on my part had to be cloaked; it had to be made under a smoke screen of innocence, or better, under the interpenetrating smoke screens of innocence and utility.
Take the brushing of her hair. No possible guilt there. And also, her hair had to be brushed. I believe I could have put my mouth to her sex if I could have brought to such an act enough innocence, run through by even a vague utility. For my darling Anna was hot and it was my passionate desire to be the priest of her deliverance.
And so I began by brushing her hair.
A barber does not only brush hair. It occurred to me very soon that none of the normal acts of the barber was forbidden to me. I could massage her scalp, or gently behind her ears, my small fingers drooping at her neck, clinging like a little bee to sticky pollen. I could even stroke her cheek and I was able to put a world of sensuality into that simple action. And when the barber had outrun his limit, I became a masseur.
For that game to begin, I had only to take her gently by the scruff of the neck as I pretended to make the motion of raising her hair. Her head would immediately droop forward and she would usually exclaim: "Oh, my neck muscles are so tired!"
"Yes, Madam," I would say, aping the barber. "If you will just step through into the other room...."
And she would do so, not literally, but making a motion with her shoulders to signify her consent.
With warm oil I would massage her neck and the gently moulded muscles of her shoulders-this especially when, on warm sunny days, we lay together in the clearing in the copse. She allowed me to push her blouse up as far as her neck. And then I would massage her smooth back, the heels of my thumbs pressing at her spine. It was only when the tips of my fingers slid under the elastic of her knickers and pressed on the heavy buttock muscles that she made a little movement of resistance to signify that I was moving beyond the limits of innocence. And yet she would have liked me to go on. I knew that because of her heavy breathing, because of the relaxed thrust of her thighs under the cotton skirt.
Subtle as a spider, I would reverse motions, alternately teasing and retreating, teasing and retreating, until her breath came urgently and her pores seemed to emanate a growing smell of woman. At such times, I would lean as close as possible to her, with my head a few inches above her back, and breathe in the smell of her fresh sweat. She was a mine of beautiful sensations. I am not sure she realized how entirely such experience of her dominated my horizon.
It was only in the copse that she would ever allow me to touch her legs, out there, screened from the rest of the world, under a warm sun which made everything languorous. But even then, I could only touch at the calves, and perhaps two inches above the knees if she pretended to doze. From there on the territory was sacred and I crossed the border at my peril. I think that when I did so her annoyance stemmed not so much from her moral indignation as from the anger arising from a strongly felt necessity to order me to stop, and even to punish me by prohibiting me to continue with any form of caress.
But I soon learned a trick of getting around this too. It was difficult to teach her, but after all I was simply offering to be the instrument of her own desire.
One day I said to her: "Just to prove I want to be obedient, Anna, I want you to punish me if I'm bad."
"I will. You don't have to tell me that!"
She had missed the point.
"I mean just as Uncle Harris does."
"How?"
"I want you to slap me."
"I don't want to hurt you."
"No," I said hesitantly, "but it doesn't really hurt on the bottom, not for long anyway."
I saw the faint signal of comprehension in her eyes. That was surely very moral. Punishment, discipline: it was praiseworthy on my part to demand it of her!
The first time, she did it with my trousers on. That was not really satisfactory. We were both aware of the problem. We had to find some good reason for taking my trousers down, one which would not only agree with the positive aspect of morality, but one which, by overshadowing the sexual implications of slapping another person's bare bottom, would be compatible with its prudent aspect. This was not easy. I pointed out to her many times that it would hurt more if she took my trousers down and that therefore it would be a more effective punishment. She agreed but hesitated all the same. It was not until I pointed out to her that sometimes she hurt her hands on my trouser buttons that she finally capitulated.
I remember that first time very well, when, my trousers pushed down about my ankles, I leaned over her thighs, feeling their warmth through the faded cotton dress at my crotch, exhibiting my pink bottom to the wide gaze of the sky. She slapped hard, hard enough to convince herself it was a punishment she was meting out and not a pleasure she derived. But strangely, the more it was obviously a punishment, the more pleasure my beautiful Anna appeared to reap from the ceremony. Towards the end she would not stop until she had brought real tears to my eyes. I always took a long time adjusting myself comfortably across her thighs, and when she had struck two or three blows I would ease my legs apart so that the tender insides of my thighs would feel the sharp shock of her fingers. And so, if after having caressed her for some time I felt her tiring-in the end it is fatiguing to be continually excited without deriving complete satisfaction-I would immediately cross a forbidden border. The more flagrant the offense, the more fierce would be the subsequent punishment. Thus I had to gauge what I wanted to bear. On the first occasion upon which my fingers brushed her short hairs, she made a great sexual effort and lost her temper. That was magnificent!
But even while I suffered the extremest anguish, as her hand rose and fell viciously on my tender buttocks, even as I eased open my thighs to the extent of baring my small testicles to possible damage, my mind was working overtime on the problem of how to capitalize on the great sorrow she would experience at having hurt me so badly. At last I screamed, the pleasure of the scream drowning for an instant the pleasure I took in the beautiful solution I had found to the problem of making this a Pyrrhic victory for her moral fervor. And then, all at once, she was contrite. My face streaming tears, I threw my head against her breasts, forcing with my face and mouth until I had broken a button on her blouse and thrust the already loose brassiere down far enough for me to take her nipple in my mouth.
After her first shock, she gave way. Could she punish me again? A moment later, her arms moved round to cradle my head where it lay. "My baby! My baby!" I heard her whisper.
For a while things progressed by themselves without more effort on my part. The second time I touched her pubic hairs, this time brushing the wet lips themselves with my fingers, the second time she was able to lose her temper, the second time I threw myself shuddering to her breast, I found to my delight that she was wearing no brassiere. And so I realized that Anna had become my accomplice. The rubbery tit was sweet and good in my mouth. My hands closed around the breast and crushed it to squeeze every last drop of imaginary juice. This time she allowed herself to fall backwards on the ground, holding my head firmly in place between her hands. The sun was falling and the copse was partly in shadow and there was the warm buzz of insects and I remember a clump of dandelions not far away. After a while one of her hands slipped away from my head and out of my sight. Her breath was coming in spasms. I felt her torso become involved in minute undulations and I knew she was feeling herself. But when I tried to move down with one of my hands, she stiffened, pushed me away from her, got up, and walked away without saying a word. This time I had really gone too far. She was willing to do anything, but it was my job to find the smoke screens, to find the ethical drugs with which she could put her conscience to sleep. I had not done so. The wall of righteousness was not to be penetrated without stratagem.
It was some time before I was able to take the final, nun-like vows....