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1

The needle on the gas gauge suddenly dipped toward empty, and the young driver of the sports car declared that it was maddening how much gas the car guzzled. “See that we don’t run out of gas again,” protested the girl (about twenty-two), and she reminded the driver of several places where this had already happened to them. The young man replied that he wasn’t worried, because whatever he went through with her had the charm of adventure for him. The girl objected; whenever they had run out of gas on the highway it had, she said, always been an adventure only for her. The young man had hidden, and she had had to make ill use of her charms by thumbing a ride and letting herself be driven to the nearest gas station, then thumbing a ride back with a can of gas. The young man asked the girl whether the drivers who had given her a ride had been unpleasant, since she spoke as if her task had been a hardship. She replied (with awkward flirtatiousness) that sometimes they had been very pleasant, but that it hadn’t done her any good as she had been burdened with the can and had had to leave them before she could get anything going. “Sex fiend,” said the young man. The girl protested that it was he who was the sex fiend. God knows how many girls stopped him on the highway when he was driving the car alone! Still driving, the young man put his arm around the girl’s shoulders and kissed her gently on the forehead. He knew that she loved him and that she was jealous. Jealousy isn’t a pleasant trait, but if it isn’t overdone (and if it’s combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there’s even something touching about it. At least that’s what the young man thought.

Because he was only twenty-eight, it seemed to him that he was old and knew everything that a man could know about women. In the girl sitting beside him he valued precisely what, until now, he had encountered least in women: purity.

The needle was already on empty when, to the right, the young man caught sight of a sign announcing that a gas station was five hundred meters ahead. The girl hardly had time to say how relieved she was before the young man was signaling left and driving into a space in front of the pumps. However, he had to stop a little way off, because beside the pumps was a huge gasoline truck with a large metal tank and a bulky hose, which was refilling the pumps. “We’ll have to wait,” said the young man to the girl, and he got out of the car. “How long will it take?” he shouted to the man in overalls. “Only a moment,” replied the attendant, and the young man said:

“I’ve heard that one before.” He wanted to go back and sit in the car, but he saw that the girl had gotten out the other side. “I’ll take a little walk in the meantime,” she said. “Where to?” the young man asked on purpose, wanting to see the girl’s embarrassment. He had known her for a year now, but she would still blush in front of him. He enjoyed her moments of modesty, partly because they distinguished her from the women he’d met before, partly because he was aware of the law of universal transience, which made even his girl’s modesty a precious thing to him.

2

The girl really didn’t like it when during a trip (the young man would drive for several hours without stopping) she had to ask him to stop for a moment somewhere near a clump of trees. She always got angry when, with feigned surprise, he asked her why he should stop. She knew that her modesty was ridiculous and old-fashioned. Many times at work she had noticed that they laughed at her on account of it and deliberately provoked her. She always blushed in advance at the idea that she was going to blush. She often longed to feel free and easy about her body, the way most of the women around her did. She had even invented a special course in self-persuasion: she would repeat to herself that at birth every human being received one out of the millions of available bodies, as one would receive an allotted room out of the millions of rooms in an enormous hotel; that consequently the body was fortuitous and impersonal, only a ready-made, borrowed thing. She would repeat this to herself in different ways, but she could never manage to feel it. This mind-body dualism was alien to her. She was too much at one with her body; that is why she always felt such anxiety about it.

She experienced this same anxiety even in her relations with the young man, whom she had known for a year and with whom she was happy, perhaps because he never separated her body from her soul, and she could live with him wholly. In this unity there was happiness, but it is not far from happiness to suspicion, and the girl was full of suspicions. For instance, it often occurred to her that other women (those who weren’t anxious) were more attractive and more seductive, and that the young man, who did not conceal the fact that he knew this kind of woman well, would someday leave her for a woman like that. (True, the young man declared that he’d had enough of them to last his whole life, but she knew that he was still much younger than he thought.) She wanted him to be completely hers and herself to be completely his, but it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something: the very thing that a light and superficial love or a flirtation gives a person. It worried her that she was not able to combine seriousness with lightheartedness.

But now she wasn’t worrying, and any such thoughts were far from her mind. She felt good. It was the first day of their vacation (of their two-week vacation, which she had been dreaming about for a whole year), the sky was blue (the whole year she had been worrying about whether the sky would really be blue), and he was beside her. At his “Where to?” she blushed, and she left the car without a word. She walked around the gas station, which was situated beside the highway in total isolation, surrounded by fields. About a hundred meters away (in the direction in which they were traveling), a wood began. She set off for it, vanished behind a little bush, and gave herself up to her good mood. (In solitude it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment from the presence of the man she loved. If his presence had been continuous, it would have kept on disappearing. Only when she was alone was she able to hold on to it.) When she came out of the wood onto the highway, the gas station was visible. The large gasoline truck was already pulling out, and the sports car moved forward toward the red column of the pump. The girl walked on along the highway and only at times looked back to see if the sports car was coming. At last she caught sight of it. She stopped and began to signal at it like a hitchhiker signaling at a stranger’s car. The sports car slowed down and stopped close to the girl. The young man leaned toward the window, rolled it down, smiled, and asked: “Where are you headed, miss?” “Are you going to Bystrica?” asked the girl, smiling flirtatiously at him. “Yes, please get in,” said the young man, opening the door. The girl got in, and the car took off.

3

The young man was always glad when his girlfriend was in a good mood. This didn’t happen too often; she had quite a tiresome job in an unpleasant environment, many hours of overtime without compensatory leisure, and, at home, a sick mother. So she often felt tired. She didn’t have either particularly good nerves or self-confidence, and she fell easily into a state of anxiety and fear. For this reason he welcomed every manifestation of her gaiety with the tender solicitude of an older brother. He smiled at her and said: “I’m lucky today. I’ve been driving for five years, but I’ve never given a ride to such a pretty hitchhiker.”

The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth, and so she said: “You’re very good at lying.”

“Do I look like a liar?”

“You look like you enjoy lying to women,” said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.

The girl’s jealousy often irritated the young man, but this time he could easily overlook it for, after all, her words didn’t apply to him but to an unknown driver. And so he merely asked an ordinary question: “Does it bother you?”

“If I were going out with you, then it would bother me,” said the girl and her words contained a subtle, instructive message for the young man; but the end of her sentence applied only to the unknown driver: “but I don’t know you, so it doesn’t bother me.”

“Things about her own man always bother a woman more than things about a stranger” (this was now the young man’s subtle, instructive message to the girl), “so seeing that we are strangers, we could get along well together.”

The girl pretended not to understand the implied meaning of his message, and so she now addressed the unknown driver exclusively: “What does it matter, since we’ll part company in a little while?”

“Why?” asked the young man.

“Well, I’m getting out at Bystrica.”

“And what if I get out with you?”

At these words the girl looked up at him and found that he looked exactly as she imagined him in her most agonizing hours of jealousy. She was alarmed at how he was flattering her and flirting with her (an unknown hitchhiker), and how seductive he was. Therefore she responded with defiant provocativeness: “What would you do with me, I wonder?”

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick.

She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The young man looked at the girl. Her defiant face appeared to him to be completely convulsed.

He felt sorry for her and longed for her usual, familiar expression (which he considered childish and simple). He leaned toward her, put his arm around her shoulders, and softly spoke the nickname he often used and with which he now wanted to stop the game.

But the girl released herself and said: “You’re going a bit too fast!”

At this rebuff the young man said: “Excuse me, miss,” and looked silently in front of him at the highway.

4

The girl’s pitiful jealousy, however, left her as quickly as it had come over her. After all, she was sensible and knew perfectly well that all this was merely a game; now it even struck her as a little ridiculous that she had repulsed her man out of jealous rage; it wouldn’t be pleasant for her if he found out why she had done it. Fortunately she had the miraculous ability to change the meaning of her actions after the event. Using this ability, she decided that she had repulsed him not out of anger but so that she could go on with the game, which, with its whimsicality, so well suited the first day of their vacation.

So again she was the hitchhiker who had just repulsed the overeager driver, but only so as to slow down his conquest and make it more exciting. She half turned toward the young man and said caressingly: “I didn’t mean to offend you, mister!”

“Excuse me, I won’t touch you again,” said the young man.

He was furious with the girl for not listening to him and refusing to be herself when that was what he wanted. And since the girl insisted on continuing in her role, he transferred his anger to the unknown hitchhiker whom she was portraying. And all at once he discovered the character of his own role: he stopped making the gallant remarks with which he had wanted to flatter his girl in a roundabout way, and began to play the tough guy who treats women to the coarser aspects of his masculinity: willfulness, sarcasm, self-assurance.

This role was a complete contradiction of the young man’s habitually solicitous approach to the girl. True, before he had met her he had in fact behaved roughly rather than gently toward women. But he had never resembled a heartless tough guy, because he had never demonstrated either a particularly strong will or ruthlessness. However, if he did not resemble such a man, nonetheless he had longed to at one time. Of course it was a quite naive desire, but there it was.

Childish desires withstand all the snares of the adult mind and often survive into ripe old age. And this childish desire quickly took advantage of the opportunity to embody itself in the proffered role.

The young man’s sarcastic reserve suited the girl very well—it freed her from herself. For she herself was, above all, the epitome of jealousy. The moment she stopped seeing the gallantly seductive young man beside her and saw only his inaccessible face, her jealousy subsided. The girl could forget herself and give herself up to her role.

Her role? What was her role? It was a role out of trashy literature. The hitchhiker stopped the car not to get a ride, but to seduce the man who was driving the car. She was an artful seductress, cleverly knowing how to use her charms. The girl slipped into this silly, romantic part with an ease that astonished her and held her spellbound.

5

There was nothing the young man missed in his life more than lightheartedness. The main road of his life was drawn with implacable precision: his job didn’t use up merely eight hours a day, it also infiltrated the remaining time with the compulsory boredom of meetings and home study, and, by means of the attentiveness of his countless male and female colleagues, it infiltrated the wretchedly little time he had left for his private life as well; this private life never remained secret and sometimes even became the subject of gossip and public discussion. Even a two-week vacation didn’t give him a feeling of liberation and adventure; the gray shadow of precise planning lay even here. The scarcity of summer accommodations in our country had compelled him to book a room in the Tatras six months in advance, and since for that he needed a recommendation from his office, its omnipresent brain thus did not cease knowing about him for even an instant.

He had become reconciled to all this, yet all the same from time to time the terrible thought of the straight road would overcome him—a road along which he was being pursued, where he was visible to everyone, and from which he could not turn aside. At this moment that thought returned to him. Through an odd and brief conjunction of ideas the figurative road became identified with the real highway along which he was driving—and this led him suddenly to do a crazy thing.

“Where did you say you wanted to go?” he asked the girl.

“To Bystrica,” she replied.

“And what are you going to do there?”

“I have a date there.”

“Who with?”

“With a certain gentleman.”

The car was just coming to a large crossroads. The driver slowed down so as to read the road signs, then turned off to the right.

“What will happen if you don’t turn up for that date?”

“I would be your fault, and you would have to take care of me.”

“You obviously didn’t notice that I turned off in the direction of Nove Zamky.”

“Is that true? You’ve gone crazy!”

“Don’t worry! I’ll take care of you,” said the young man.

The game all at once went into a higher gear. The sports car was moving away not only from the imaginary goal of Bystrica, but also from the real goal, toward which it had been heading in the morning: the Tatras and the room that had been reserved. Fiction was suddenly making an assault on real life. The young man was moving away from himself and from the implacable straight road, from which he had never strayed until now.

“But you said you were going to the Tatras!” The girl was surprised.

“I’m going, miss, wherever I feel like going. I’m a free man, and I do what I want and what it pleases me to do.”

6

When they drove into Nove Zamky it was already getting dark.

The young man had never been here before, and it took him a while to orient himself. Several times he stopped the car and asked the passersby directions to the hotel. Several streets had been dug up, so that the drive to the hotel, even though it was quite close by (as all those who had been asked asserted), necessitated so many detours and roundabout routes that it was almost a quarter of an hour before they finally stopped in front of it. The hotel looked unprepossessing, but it was the only one in town and the young man didn’t feel like driving on. So he said to the girl: “Wait here,” and he got out of the car.

Out of the car he was, of course, himself again. And it was upsetting for him to find himself in the evening somewhere completely different from his intended destination—the more so because no one had forced him to do it and as a matter of fact he hadn’t even really wanted to. He blamed himself for this piece of folly, but then became reconciled to it. The room in the Tatras could wait until tomorrow, and it wouldn’t do any harm if they celebrated the first day of their vacation with something unexpected.

He walked through the restaurant—smoky, noisy, and crowded—and asked for the reception desk. They sent him to the back of the lobby near the staircase, where behind a glass panel a superannuated blonde was sitting beneath a board full of keys. With difficulty, he obtained the key to the only room left.

The girl, when she found herself alone, also threw off her role. She didn’t feel ill-humored, though, at finding herself in an unexpected town. She was so devoted to the young man that she never had doubts about anything he did, and confidently entrusted every moment of her life to him. On the other hand the idea once again popped into her mind that perhaps—just as she was now doing—other women had waited for her man in his car, those women he met on business trips.

But surprisingly enough this idea didn’t upset her at all now; in fact, she smiled at the thought of how nice it was that today she was this other woman, this irresponsible, indecent other woman, one of those women of whom she was so jealous; it seemed to her that she was cutting them all out, that she had learned how to use their weapons; how to give the young man what until now she had not known how to give him: light-heartedness, shamelessness, and dissoluteness; a curious feeling of satisfaction filled her, because she alone had the ability to be all women and in this way (she alone) could completely captivate her lover and hold his interest.

The young man opened the car door and led the girl into the restaurant. Amid the din, the dirt, and the smoke he found a single unoccupied table in a corner.

7

“So how are you going to take care of me now?” asked the girl provocatively.

“What would you like for an aperitif?”

The girl wasn’t too fond of alcohol, still she drank a little wine and liked vermouth fairly well. Now, however, she purposely said: “Vodka.”

“Fine,” said the young man. “I hope you won’t get drunk on me.”

“And if I do?” said the girl.

The young man did not reply but called over a waiter and ordered two vodkas and two steak dinners. In a moment the waiter brought a tray with two small glasses and placed it in front of them.

The man raised his glass, “To you!”

“Can’t you think of a wittier toast?” Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl’s game; now sitting face-to-face with her, he realized that it wasn’t just the words that were turning her into a stranger, but that she had completely changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled a type of woman he knew all too well and inspired some aversion in him.

And so (holding his glass in his raised hand), he corrected his toast: “Okay, then I won’t drink to you, but to your kind, in which are combined so successfully the better qualities of the animal and the worse aspects of the human being.”

“By ‘kind’ do you mean all women?” asked the girl.

“No, I mean only those who are like you.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t seem very witty to me to compare a woman to an animal.”

“Okay,” the young man was still holding his glass aloft, “then I won’t drink to your kind, but to your soul. Agreed? To your soul, which lights up when it descends from your head into your belly, and which goes out when it rises back up to your head.”

The girl raised her glass. “Okay, to my soul, which descends into my belly.”

“I’ll correct myself once more,” said the young man. “To your belly, into which your soul descends.”

“To my belly,” said the girl, and her belly (now that they had named it specifically) seemed to respond to the call; she could feel every bit of its skin.

Then the waiter brought their steaks, and the young man ordered them another vodka and some soda water (this time they drank to the girl’s breasts), and the conversation continued in this peculiar, frivolous tone. It irritated the young man more and more to see how well his girlfriend knew how to behave like a loose woman; if she was able to do it so well, he thought, it meant that she really was like that; after all, no alien soul had entered into her from somewhere in space; what she was acting now was she herself; perhaps it was that part of her being that had formerly been locked up and that the pretext of the game had let out of its cage. Perhaps the girl supposed that by means of the game she was disowning herself, but wasn’t it the other way around? Wasn’t she becoming herself only through the game? Wasn’t she freeing herself through the game? No, sitting opposite him was not a strange woman in his girl’s body; it was his girl, herself, no one else. He looked at her and felt growing aversion toward her.

However, it was not only aversion. The more the girl withdrew from him psychically, the more he longed for her physically; the alienation of her soul drew attention to her body; yes it turned her body into a body; as if until now it had been hidden from the young man within clouds of compassion, tenderness, concern, love, and emotion, as if it had been lost in these clouds (yes, as if this body had been lost!). It seemed to the young man that today he was seeing his girl’s body for the first time.

After her third vodka and soda the girl got up and said flirtatiously: “Excuse me.”

The young man said, “May I ask you where you are going, miss?”

“To piss, if you’ll permit me,” said the girl, and she walked off between the tables back toward the plush curtain.

8

She was pleased with the way she had astounded the young man with this word, which—in spite of all its innocence—he had never heard from her; nothing seemed to her truer to the character of the woman she was playing than this flirtatious emphasis placed on the word in question; yes, she was pleased, she was in the best of moods; the game captivated her. It allowed her to what she had not felt until now: a feeling of happy-go-lucky irresponsibility.

She who was always uneasy in advance about her every next step, suddenly felt completely relaxed. The alien life in which she had become involved was a life without shame, without biographical specifications, without past or future, without obligations; it was a life that was extraordinarily free. The girl, as a hitchhiker, could do anything: Everything was permitted her; she could say, do, and feel whatever she liked.

She walked through the room and was aware that people were watching her from all the tables; it was also a new sensation, one she didn’t recognize: indecent joy caused by her body. Until now she had never been able to get rid of the fourteen-year-old girl within herself who was ashamed of her breasts and had the disagreeable feeling that she was indecent, because they stuck out from her body and were visible. Even though she was proud of being pretty and having a good figure, this feeling of pride was always immediately curtailed by shame; she rightly suspected that feminine beauty functioned above all as sexual provocation, and she found this distasteful; she longed for her body to relate only to the man she loved; when men stared at her breasts in the street it seemed to her that they were invading a piece of her most secret privacy that should belong only to herself and her lover. But now she was the hitchhiker, the woman without a destiny. In this role she was relieved of the tender bonds of her love and began to be intensely aware of her body; and her body became more aroused the more alien the eyes watching it.

She was walking past the last table when an intoxicated man, wanting to show off his worldliness, addressed her in French: “Combien, mademoiselle?”

The girl understood. She thrust out her breasts and fully experienced every movement of her hips, then disappeared behind the curtain.

9

It was a peculiar game. This peculiarity was evidenced, for example, by the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting; he saw his girl seducing a strange man, and he had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him); he had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.

This was all the worse because he worshiped rather than loved her; it had always seemed that the girl had reality only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn’t exist; beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. When he now saw her crossing this horrifying boundary with nonchalant elegance, he was filled with anger.

The girl came back from the rest room and complained: “A guy over there asked me: “Combien, mademoiselle?”

“Don’t be surprised!” said the young man. “You look like a whore.”

“Do you know that it doesn’t bother me in the least?”

“Then you should go with the gentleman!”

“But I have you.”

“You can join him later. Go and work out something with him.”

“I don’t find him attractive.”

“But in principle you have nothing against it, having several men in one night.”

“Why not? If they’re good-looking.”

“Do you prefer them one after the other or at the same time?”

“Either way,” said the girl.

The conversation was proceeding to still greater enormities; it shocked the girl slightly, but she couldn’t protest. Even in a game there lurks a lack of freedom; even a game is a trap for the players. If this had not been a game and they had really been two strangers, the hitchhiker could long ago have taken offense and left; but there’s no escape from a game. A team cannot flee before the end of the match, chess pieces cannot desert the chessboard, the boundaries of the playing field are impassable. The girl knew that she had to accept whatever form the game might take, just because it was a game. She knew that the more extreme the game became, the more it would be a game and the more obediently she would have to play it. And it was futile to evoke good sense and warn her dazed soul that she must keep her distance from the game and not take it seriously. Just because it was only a game her soul was not afraid, did not oppose the game, and sank deeper into it as if drugged.

The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: “We’re going.”

“Where to?” The girl feigned surprise.

“Don’t ask, just come on,” said the young man.

“Is that any way to talk to me?”

“It’s the way I talk to whores.”

10

They went up the badly lit staircase. On the landing below the second floor a group of intoxicated men was standing near the rest room. The young man caught hold of the girl from behind so that he was holding her breast with his hand. The men by the rest room saw this and began to call out. The girl wanted to break away, but the young man yelled at her: “Keep still!” The men greeted this with general ribaldry and addressed several dirty remarks to the girl. The young man and the girl reached the second floor. He opened the door of their room and switched on the light.

It was a narrow room with two beds, a small table, a chair, and a washbasin. The young man locked the door and turned to the girl. She was standing facing him in a defiant pose with insolent sensuality in her eyes. He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other.

These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject—namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous. He hated her.

“What are you waiting for? Strip!” he said.

The girl flirtatiously bent her head and said: “Is it necessary?”

The tone in which she said this seemed to him very familiar; it seemed to him that once long ago some other woman had said this to him, only he no longer knew which one. He longed to humiliate her. Not the hitchhiker, but his own girl. The game merged with life. The game of humiliating the hitchhiker became only a pretext for humiliating his girl. The young man had forgotten that he was playing a game. He simply hated the woman standing in front of him. He stared at her and drew a fifty-crown bill from his wallet. He offered it to the girl. “Is that enough?”

The girl took the fifty crowns and said: “You don’t think I’m worth much.”

The young man said: “You aren’t worth more.”

The girl nestled up against the young man. “You can’t get around me like that. You have to be nicer. You have to make an effort!”

She put her arms around him and moved her mouth toward his. He put his fingers on her mouth and gently pushed her away. He said: “I only kiss women I love.”

“And you don’t love me?”

“No.”

“Who do you love?”

“What’s that got to do with you? Strip!”

11

She had never undressed like this before. The shyness, the feeling of inner panic, the dizziness, all that she had always felt when undressing in front of the young man (and she couldn’t hide in the darkness), all this was gone. She was standing in front of him self-confident, insolent, bathed in light, and astonished at her sudden discovery of the gestures, heretofore unknown to her, of a slow, provocative striptease. She took in his glances, slipping off each piece of clothing with a caressing movement and enjoying each individual stage of this exposure.

But then suddenly she was standing in front of him completely naked, and at this moment it flashed through her head that now the whole game would end, that since she had stripped off her clothes, she had also stripped away her dissimulation, and that being naked meant that she was now herself and the young man ought to come up to her now and make a gesture with which he would wipe out everything and after which would follow only their most intimate lovemaking. So she stood naked in front of the young man and at that moment stopped playing the game. She felt embarrassed, and on her face appeared the smile that really belonged to her: a shy and confused smile.

But the young man didn’t come to her and didn’t end the game. He didn’t notice the familiar smile; he saw before him only the beautiful, alien body of his own girl, whom he hated. Hatred cleansed his sensuality of any sentimental coating. She wanted to come to him, but he said: “Stay where you are, I want to have a good look at you.” Now he longed only to treat her as a whore. But the young man had never had a whore, and the ideas he had about them came from literature and hearsay. So he turned to these ideas and the first thing he recalled was the image of a woman in black underwear (and black stockings) dancing on the shiny top of a piano. In the little hotel room there was no piano, there was only a small table, covered with a linen cloth, leaning against the wall. He ordered the girl to climb up on it. The girl made a pleading gesture, but the young man said: “You’ve been paid.”

When she saw the look of unshakable obsession in the young man’s eyes, she tried to go on with the game, even though she no longer could and no longer knew how. With tears in her eyes she climbed onto the table. The top was scarcely a yard square and one leg was a little bit shorter than the others, so that standing on it the girl felt unsteady.

But the young man was pleased with the naked figure now towering above him, and the girl’s ashamed uncertainty merely inflamed his imperiousness. He wanted to see her body in all positions and from all sides, as he imagined other men had seen it and would see it. He was vulgar and lascivious. He used words she had never heard from him before. She wanted to refuse, she wanted to be released from the game. She called him by his first name, but he immediately yelled at her that she had no right to address him so intimately. And so eventually in confusion and on the verge of tears, she obeyed, she bent forward and crouched according to the young man’s wishes, gave a military salute, and then wiggled her hips as she did the twist for him; during a slightly more violent movement, when the cloth slipped beneath her feet and she nearly fell, the young man caught her and dragged her to the bed.

He had intercourse with her. She was glad that at least now finally the unfortunate game would end and they would again be the two people they had been before and would love each other.

She wanted to press her mouth against his. But the young man pushed her head away and repeated that he only kissed women he loved. She burst into loud sobs. But she wasn’t even allowed to cry, because the young man’s furious passion gradually won over her body, which then silenced the complaint of her soul. On the bed there were soon two bodies in perfect harmony, two sensual bodies alien to each other. This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love.

She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment—beyond that boundary.

12

Then it was all over. The young man got up off the girl and, reaching out for the long cord hanging over the bed, switched off the light. He didn’t want to see the girl’s face. He knew that the game was over, but he didn’t feel like returning to their customary relationship; he feared this return. He lay beside the girl in the dark in such a way that their bodies would not touch.

After a moment he heard her sobbing quietly; the girl’s hand diffidently, childishly touched his; it touched, withdrew, then touched again, and then a pleading, sobbing voice broke the silence, calling him by his name and saying “I’m me, I’m me. …”

The young man was silent, he didn’t move, and he was aware of the sad emptiness of the girl’s assertion, in which the unknown was defined by the same unknown. And the girl soon passed from sobbing to loud crying and went on endlessly repeating this pitiful tautology: “I’m me, I’m me, I’m me….”

The young man began to call compassion to his aid (he had to call it from afar, because it was nowhere near at hand), so as to be able to calm the girl. There were still thirteen days of vacation before them.