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I yelled, 'Then why'd he ask you to do it?'
'He just asked me to put my head in his lap.'
'So what did he want us to think?'
'Think what you want to think,' she said.
Jesus! It serves him right - the way he threw up the children so often to Edith, as if they were sacred objects she didn't adequately worship. His idea of love was always tangled with his idea of guilt.
In the car, he said stonily, 'I think the children are all right. But of course I worry about them, I always worry about them.' The dashboard glowed again; the red tongue of the speedometer shrank.
'I just asked because I knew that at first you hadn't wanted to go on this weekend - you didn't want to leave the children,' I said. 'And I wondered, provided they're OK - and I'm sure they are - if you'd feel better about doing this kind of thing more often now? I mean, I think it's good to get away. It's been a great weekend, don't you think?' Edith and Utch didn't say a word, and Severin must have already known about the new laws - or his new version of the same old laws that he would lay down to Edith as soon as they were alone. He must have been already rehearsing it. That he didn't want her spending time with me unless he was spending equal time with Utch simultaneously. And that we would always arrange ahead of time - so that he could be 'prepared' for it (he didn't like surprises). And that being away from the children for such an extended time wasn't an experience he cared to repeat. Without the children we lacked a certain perspective, as he liked to call it. But what was he afraid of? Oh, I know: the children. But what else?
He drove Edith from Vienna to Greece in a 1954 Zorn-Witwer, crossing the Yugoslavian border at Jerzersko because, he told her, the name of the place appealed to him and he wanted to see it. No other reason; I've looked at a map, and Jerzersko certainly isn't the best pl
ace to cross if you're en route to Greece. The point is, he didn't always need to plan out everything in advance. When they went to Greece, they just went.
I have tried to visualize them as young lovers, and, of course, Edith has told me a lot about their romance, but Winter's car eludes me. A 1954 Zorn-Witwer? Edith said the gearshift slid in and out of the dashboard like a plumber's helper. I've never heard of such a thing. There were places where the floor was rusted away and you could see the road running beneath you. It was some sort of primitive convertible; it had a roll-back canvas roof which leaked. The last year the car was ever made was 1954. Severin has told me that Zorn was a military manufacturing company which turned to farm and road construction machinery after the war. Witwer, he claims, was a failed motorcycle firm. They made unicycles on the side, no doubt. Can anyone believe anyone else? Who the hell ever heard of a Zorn-Witwer? Edith knew nothing about cars. Severin Winter went too far; they drove to Greece in some mythical car.
The weather grew warmer. Winter had a nose for water; he knew where to turn off the main road and find a lake. He found villages the instant they were hungry. When they got to talking about folk art, he would find them a room with an engraved wardrobe and a great feather bed - one with farm animals embroidered on the quilts and pillowcases. In a tiny pension in Thrace, he showed Edith a rare folk toilet: the flush handle was a perfectly carved penis.
They discovered sex in the cradle of democracy. They kept track of the different beds. For a while, Edith favored the bed in Ljubljana, but Severin liked the one in Piraeus - it was so warm there, and they were in sight and sound of the harbor; all night they heard the boats flapping on the water 'like thighs slapping together', Severin told Utch. In the morning a fish market opened below their window. Edith lay in bed and heard the fish knives hacking and slitting, the bartering tongues. The suction sound of removing the innards seemed magnified; the garrulous haggle rose and fell. She knew the fishmongers like to behead a fish at the exact moment they were making a point about the price. Thok! for emphasis. After that, who could argue?
They made love in the morning, sometimes twice, before getting up. They went to bed soon after the evening meal, and if making love made them too wide-awake, which it often did, they would get up, go out again and eat another supper. Then they'd make love again. In the country, they'd often 'find some water' in the middle of the day. Apparently that was a euphemism they liked.
Edith's first short story was a thinly disguised version of leaving Piraeus for a drive in the country. (This was before they went island-hopping.)
The story begins with the fish market in Piraeus.
I knew when I first heard them cutting the fish that they'd be sold out and gone by the time I'd see the cobblestones. I made love in the morning and got up late. The fishmongers had packed up, but the hotel's man with the hose hadn't rinsed the cobblestones, which were wet with fish-blood and slime, phosphorescent with scales, flecked blue with intestines. It wouldn't do, our head waiter told us, to leave the mess until evening when potential guests might be alarmed at the gore and think that this slop was the remains of some unfortunate suicide from the fourth floor, or the ritual slaying of a wronged lover caught and ripped apart at the scene of his indiscretion.
I was discreet myself and made him drive me into the country, because though our stone room was cool in the daytime, the hotel maids would listen outside our door. At night and in the morning it was fine to use the room, but by midday we were on the road. It was apparently an underpowered car. We were often stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle - even horse-drawn carts - because it didn't have the necessary kick. The roads were curvy, his arms and the back of his neck were very brown. We were driving toward the ferry crossing at Patras. Where there was a ferry, we knew there was water, and we were looking for water. Though I read somewhere that a girl was rushed to the hospital with severe cramps from making love underwater - an air bubble in one of her Fallopian tubes. Is that even possible? I didn't believe it.
It seemed that wherever we drove in Greece, we drove into the sun. He had his shirt off, I had unbuttoned my blouse and rolled it up under my breasts and tied it in a knot. My breasts were small but they stayed up; my stomach was very brown. It was an old-fashioned, unslanted, glass windshield, which magnified everything a little. In the back, on the floor behind my seat where there was some shade, we kept a watermelon cool in a bucket of water which had been icy cold when we'd filled it; it was turning tepid now. I would slice pieces of watermelon in my lap; the melon was cool and wet and felt lovely against my stomach. I sprinkled water on his shoulders as if I were baptizing him. It was watermelon country; in the villages and on the roadside stands, melons and eggplants competed. He said the watermelons were the winning size, but the eggplants won the color prize.
In an unappealing, dry-looking landscape with short hills spiked with olive trees, we discussed how far away the sea was, and whether we would smell it before we saw it, when we came up on a large, swaying truck full of watermelons. We had to slow down fast. In the back of the truck a teenage Greek boy sat on a mound of melons with a grin on his face which suggested that his mental age was four. From his vantage point, my breasts and bare belly must have looked wonderful to him, and when we pulled out to pass, he didn't want to lose his view. He leaped up and poised an enormous melon over his head; if our wretched car tried to pass, the boy's demented grin implied, we would regret it.
For thirty-four kilometers, until the ferry at Patras, that boy on the pile of watermelons sat displaying himself to me. There was nothing we could do. Except for his disturbed face, he was interesting to look at. I sliced more watermelon. We talked about stopping and letting the truck pull ahead, but I confessed that I wanted to see what the boy would do.
Just before the road widened to four lanes to handle the ferry traffic, the boy fell moaning on his back on the watermelon pile and lay writhing among the green globes until he ejaculated into the air. His stuff struck our rigid windshield like bird-dribble, a thick whap! against the glass on the passenger side. My head snapped back as if I'd been slapped.
Then the road widened, the road ahead was free, and we pulled out to pass. The boy didn't even try to threaten us; he slumped sulkishly on his pile of melons and didn't even bother to watch us pass. I had expected him at least to spit. I turned my head and saw the truck's driver: an old man with the same shocking face as the boy's, grinning obscenely at me, twisting in the driver's seat, trying to raise his lap to window level to show me his.'
'Like father, like son,' I said, but my driver's arms were hard-flexed, his fingers white around the steering wheel, his face withdrawn, as if he'd suddenly seen such an appalling hunger in the world that he felt ashamed to reflect it.
He didn't feel like swimming. For something to do, we took the ferry back and forth across the Gulf of Corinth, standing on deck together, leaning over the rail, imagining history and civilization. I told him it excited me, but he said he felt as alone at that moment as he felt whenever he masturbated. I have never understood why men have such trouble with that.
For the first time in my life, I was shocked at myself. I knew I could make love anywhere. We glided back and forth across the Gulf of Corinth. My desire was excruciating; I touched him as much as he would let me and whispered that when we got back to the hotel, I would make him come before he was inside me.
Eventually, of course, he snapped out of it. He came around.
I'll bet! He always did. He used to sulk when the four of us were together, trying to make Edith and me feel guilty, trying to provoke Utch into calling a halt to the whole thing. Utch would beg him to tell her what he wanted. All right, she'd tell him sometimes, we'll stop if that's what you want, but you have to say something. But he'd be a stone and she knew what she'd have to do to bring him out of it. Of course; that's what he wanted her to do! Why didn't she see? I don't know how he managed to make self-pity so alluring.
'When he's in one of his moods,' Utch said, 'the only thing I can do is fuck him out of it.'
I complained to Edith, but she said, 'What's wrong with that? You can't worry about what's right until you know what works.' But sex is only a temporary cure.
We were an hour from home, both of the women asleep, when Severin stopped because he had to pee. Utch woke up when he got out and dashed into the short dark trees clumped along the roadside like soldiers. We were alone on the road now; it was as if no one else was returning from a weekend, as if around here they didn't take weekends off. I don't know exactly where we were.
