Dirk had never had the coarseness—or courage—to peer at lovemaking in the men’s dormitory: how a man might lie with a woman. For a country boy, he was rather vague on the mechanics of sex. The old woman and the old man had kept a single pig and a cow and some chickens, and despite all his years in the pulpit, Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht had never lectured on methods of human intercourse. Dirk knew he was to lie with Hannelore, though there was hardly room on the pew. If he lay right upon her he might squash those lovely breasts, which now were rolling to each side as if they’d prefer to be set on the floor with the shoes and wait till this business was concluded.
“Come on, then; have I to teach you what your candle is for?” asked the girl.
Gingerly, trying not to settle his full weight upon her, he suspended himself like a plank above her. He used his hands to take some of the weight off her torso, but she arched her hips and battered his midriff with hers as if to get his attention. “Are you entirely made?” she asked, beginning to work at his buttons.
“Oh, my,” he said. He hadn’t fully considered his own nakedness; he’d thought it was just hers that mattered. She managed to push his shirt back off his shoulders and mostly expose his chest, which to him looked silly and unadorned, dull above her more baroque design. She ran one hand through his hair, which made his scalp tingle. She lightly danced her touch up his sleeves to his biceps, and where her fingers came near to his underarms he got ticklish and began to laugh and he collapsed upon her.
“You are a novice,” she said, with some disappointment, he thought. He wondered what he could do to pretend otherwise when the door below them flung open. Light off the grass swam into the chapel. Scraping noises, a dragged chair, some thumps, a few expressive sighs.
Then Dirk heard the first declaration, and realized that Felix had escaped his other diversions and come to rehearse the Bach ’cello pieces again.
“Shit,” whispered Hannelore, though her expression was mean and gleeful.
Dirk had drawn back, though Felix wasn’t positioned far enough forward in the aisle to be able to see them even if he should glance up.
Dirk pulled his shirt more or less back to rights and sat up very softly.
“Coward.” Hannelore didn’t speak out loud, but he could see the word her mouth was making. She sat up softly, too. As the ’cello piece grew louder, she stood and beckoned to Dirk to follow her. Leaving her blouse and shoes where they were, she tiptoed back to the staircase. He hadn’t noticed that the stairs continued beyond the loft. Up they went, out of the gloom and into the stone bell tower that was open to the winds on four sides.
“Someone will notice us!” he protested.
“No one is around at this time of the day, and who would think to look up and see if someone had crept into the tower of this abandoned outbuilding?” She dropped her skirt and stepped forward over pigeon droppings and rotting coils of rope. She was entirely naked but for the mask of ferocity and charity upon her face. He froze as she removed his shirt and then dropped his leggings. “Do you want to do this or not?” she said. “I’m not persuaded. You have to persuade me.”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know how.”
“Is that so? I’d never have guessed; I thought you were Casanova’s cousin.”
The wind sweeping up the lake played a tenderness upon the skin of his torso, his buttocks, his legs and forearms, it was a different attention than that which Hannelore was showing him. The effects were at odds; she was rough with him and the wind gentle, coercing; he couldn’t seem to decipher the moods of which, the needs and suggestions of either. The music, though distant, mounted to an urgent encouragement.
“Is it that we are in an old church? Is that it?” said Hannelore in a dusky voice. She was handling him as if he were ingredients for an impromptu supper, hurriedly. “Are you afraid of some ancient threat of blasphemy? Copulation in the holy sanctuary?”
He had no words anymore. A ratcheting itchiness inside nearly hurt, and he didn’t know how to relieve it. She was being kind and troublesome. Below Felix was making love to the ’cello with the assurance of a maestro. Dirk hated himself and wished he were anywhere else.
“Don’t you believe in Christ?” she said, and rising on her toes, began to settle herself upon his prick. She was soft and annihilating, a damp wondrousness affording a new aspect of mystery. The surprise he felt was both elation and terror. That the world could turn itself inside out, pull itself through itself like a thread through a needle.
He never answered her question, and she drew away from him, or he from her; he couldn’t tell even which muscles belonged to whom. “I can’t be bothered,” she said at last. “The miller’s son won’t strike me if he finds out, for your appetite and your fork are not at the same table.”
She left him there, but not without kissing him first. She taught him how to kiss on the mouth. Perhaps if she had started there, things would have been different. He waited, naked, in the stone tower, slowly growing chilly, his penis clocking downward. He watched her hurry across the grass. Her blouse and her skirt were proper enough. She carried her shoes in her hand. She didn’t look back to see if he was watching her. She never spoke to him again.
That night he wondered if he had some sort of obligation to find the miller’s son and kill him. Was that how it was done? But honor was a hard sum to do in one’s head when one has had no lessons in it, and he wasn’t sure whose honor had been besmirched. Perhaps it was his own.
22.
The summer had begun with a bear vandalizing a chapel associated with an obscure Protestant confession. It reached its apotheosis in a thunderstorm that rattled the windows in their casements and raged over the roof-beams of the schloss.
The lightning was so insistent that Dirk in his cot thought to raise himself on one elbow and look across the taut forms of three restless laborers. In the final bed, high-lit with electrostatic flares as from giant lucifer matches, the farmhand and the seamstress were at it, roused to greater lust by the drama in the atmosphere. Oh, is that what is meant by making love, thought Dirk, and probably blushed.
The lightning became more frequent. The thunder seemed to stop directly above the house. No stranger to summer storms, Dirk found this one too close, nearly taunting. Despite the activities across the room, he finally sat up in bed, found his clothes, adjusted his eye-patch, and left.
He went down one staircase and felt safer. He went down the next and arrived in the kitchens. A light was on. He entered anyway.
The ’cello player was foraging for bread and mustard and a bit of sausage. Dirk had never seen a member of the family or their guests in the kitchen, but Felix in his nightshirt and bare calves seemed unperturbed by the situation. “Are you underfed or over-excited?” he asked, holding up bread in one hand and some wurst in the other.
Dirk shrugged. He accepted a hunk of bread and a heel of the sausage. They sat down together at a table.
“These last days of summer, they always supply their strongest storms at night,” said Felix.
Thinking of the aggressive coupling under the eaves, Dirk nodded.
“Are you returning to Munich with the family? If so, perhaps I shall see you when next I come down from Wittenberg with Kurt. We leave tomorrow, you know.”