Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(17)

“You fool, kiss my mouth,” she said. He didn’t want to approach that bitter mouth. He dove toward her neck and put his arms around her waist, but that seemed to lead nowhere particularly.

“You’re abashed by the open space in front of the old altar,” she said at last. “I suppose I can understand. Come, we’ll climb to where the choristers used to sing. We can disrobe there and lie down.”

She found the door to the choir loft and led him by the hand. His heart was racing. The stair-hall was dark, the steps dotted with mouse turds. The thick dust made him sneeze.

In the loft she spread out some moth-eaten vestments on a pew and sat down. She lowered her blouse just as he had hoped she would. She took off her wooden shoes; her bare, callused feet looked like swedes. Hannelore’s face seemed bright and sad in the gloom. “Well, come on, I have just so long,” she said, and lay back upon the pew with an arm over her eyes.

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.