“Her eyes so warm . . .”
Yes, but . . .
“。 . . and her breasts, both of them so warm—so full.”
To keep his breath even, Dirk had to harness every scrap of intention in his human form. It was too late to draw the blanket back up to his waist. His nightshirt clung to his thighs and, rucked beneath his bottom, was pulled tightly across his groin, which was responding to the whispery seduction.
“She must drop her shawl when the summer evenings are warm, and anoint herself with perfumed attar of roses here, and there, and there.” Felix’s voice was the haunt of a ’cello, and as his voice grew ever fainter, he leaned nearer and nearer to Dirk’s ear. “It must be hard to resist her. You must be hardened to her—you are hardened.” And so he was. If one could blush in the midnight, Dirk would be blushing. Though concealed, his cock was slantwise to the roof-beam, held and articulated by the fabric of his shirt tucked under his hip. Felix, to judge by the location of his hushed voice, must be on an elbow, looking down upon Dirk. It was unbearable. Felix meant to talk Dirk into somnolent ejaculation, and watch all the while. Whatever did they teach at university?
“If she were to bend down and kiss you—to take you into her Oriental mouth—”
Dirk rose one shoulder into the air in a pretense of nocturnal stretching, and rolled on his side, back to Felix. His shirt had slid up a little, exposing most of his rump, but at least his cock was now hidden from view. Aching like a pistol readied for the duel, he bore it with such dignity as he had reclaimed for himself. He was shivering not from cold but the shock of such impertinence. Felix flung the red silk cape over them both, and their legs touched once or twice, Felix’s knee indenting into the back of Dirk’s knee, trying to slip between his thighs, but Dirk twitched himself away with as much naturalness as he could. He endured the exhausting moments until Felix, finally, seemed to fall into a genuine sleep.
All the while the nutcracker and the knife of Pan stood watch over Dirk, the one a protector in roughed-out form, the other a leering lecher. The distant screams continued for a while, every now and then, until they stopped or Dirk fell asleep, or both.
61.
In the morning the two young men dressed in haste without speaking to one another. The cows were desperate to be milked but this morning they seemed spooked by Dirk and wouldn’t let him near. Felix grabbed Dirk’s knife and sawed off a small tendril of wool from an inattentive ewe, and pocketed the scrap. “You’ll see why,” he said.
The farmer met them crossing the snowy yard to the house. He had a hank of bread smeared with butter for each of them.
Dirk didn’t dare speak, but Felix mumbled through a mouthful of breakfast, “Did she make it?”
“She did,” said the farmer. “Both of them, daughter and mother. A bit battered this morning, and sleeping the effort away.”
“Can we see them?”
“Felix!” said Dirk.
“Room looks like a surgery on the verges of Waterloo, but sure, if you’re quiet,” replied the farmer. This wasn’t his first child, Dirk remembered.
The midwife was folding blankets and beginning to rinse rags in water boiled over the hearth. “You’ll not take those gentlemen up the stairs!”
“Your job was done last night, mine starts this morning,” replied the farmer, and up the stairs they tramped, as quietly as possible.
The mother lay in damp sheets pulled up to her chin. Her hair was mostly pinned to her head and a night-cap with untied straps had come awry. Next to her on the bed in a wicker basket, swaddled in greyish toweling, a morsel of a face was puckering and squinching. It looked like a bloated, hairless mouse, a raw pink radish. “Isn’t she lovely?” asked the farmer.
“Where did she come from?” asked Dirk. A question he had asked before in his life, he seemed to imagine.
“If you don’t know that, your friend can instruct you on the way back to town,” said the farmer, ushering them out. “The weather has broken and the snow was light, for all that wind; you’ll have no trouble keeping to the path.”
Dirk turned and looked once more before descending the stairs. The mother looked like an angel that had been shot out of the sky with an arrow. He could no longer see the baby over the sides of the basket, but he could feel its presence like a radiant chord, a sweetness of otherness.
62.
They stopped for a lunch at a tavern just above Meersburg, open to a view of the great lake, blue and brown and green with the mountain steeps reflected in it. They hadn’t spoken too much on the trip. “Not a very restful night,” Felix had groused as a kind of excuse for his silence. Dirk had not offered an opinion.
Yet at table on a sunny terrace—for the day was returning to one of those shocking seasonal warmths that the mountains can sometimes boast at autumn noontimes—they each downed a beer and finished a cheese and a half, and four sausages and a pickled onion between them. Felix called for a second tankard. Dirk settled for some sliced apples in honey. Then he picked up his carving and sat in the sun, struggling with the chin.
“You have a little skill at this,” said Felix.
“The wood is working with me,” said Dirk. “I think it wants to be a nutcracker.”
“I know, wood confides in you. How will you stop the chin from dropping out?”
“Look, I’m trying to keep a pin of wood in each jaw. When someone works this handle, which looks like the back end of a bird, its tail-feathers, maybe, or the drape of an overlong coat, the chin will go up and down, pivoting on these pegs.”
“Won’t it break?”
“I’m using this awl I found in the barn last night to gouge out what I can, so the jaw and its handle are detached from the rest of the fellow. Two pieces of interlocking wood carved from the same block. It’s a tricky business but the wood is strong, and the knife is talented.”
“Your hands are not instruments?”
Dirk looked up. “Only midwives, I think.” And he smiled. “If one of the pins snap, I could replace it with a nail and it would still move like a hinge. But the jaw will be stronger if I can keep the pieces separate and interlocking.”
“Your lady love will adore it.” Felix’s voice was uncharacteristically small. “She will hold it in her lap.” He put his finger in the pot of honey and smeared the lower lip of the carven figure. Then he pulled the twist of wool from his pocket and pressed it until it adhered. “There. The beard will hide the lack of a heart.”
“Is it a flaw to be heartless?” asked Dirk, pointedly.
A small brown bird came down in the silence and stood on a gatepost at the edge of the terrace. “Hey, where are your mates?” asked Dirk of the bird. “Aren’t you off to Africa or the Levant with them?”
“She’ll never give you what you want, you know.” Felix seemed in quiet, business-like despair. “Will it be enough, to have made her a present? Will that see you through?”
“See me through what, Felix? I’ve never been able to imagine three days ahead of myself my whole life. I don’t know any more of life than that infant in the basket does. I’m just doing what I can from day to day. Handholds and landfalls and anything to grasp onto. Nothing gives much purchase, does it?”