I engaged in a brief struggle with myself as to whether to stay or follow, which I promptly lost in favour of the latter. She parted the branches before us and held them so they wouldn’t rebound in my face. She was a head taller, although she couldn’t have been much older. I was fourteen, and she – fifteen?
“Isn’t it nice here?” she asked when we reached our destination. The stiffness in my throat was slowly turning into a full-blown anxiety. I knew how cool the shade on the wall was. The top of the concrete mass, too, was delightfully cold as I stretched out on my stomach. She stretched out next to me; the wall was just wide enough for two. Our breathing seemed a little fast for the amount of energy put into our effort to negotiate the short distance.
“Now we’re hidden,” she said. “No one can see us, right?”
Suddenly, almost interrupting herself, she exclaimed, “What’s that?” And she pressed her forefinger hard at my ribs, right at the centre of my large birthmark.
“Just a wart,” I said, jerking away; she was pressing so hard that it hurt.
“Are you ticklish?”
“No!” I said firmly.
“Let me try,” she became curious, and she started to tickle the soles of my feet which swayed in the air next to her. My reaction, not unpredictable, delighted her.
“You see!” she shrieked with delight. “And what about here?”
Before I could get away she began to tickle my ribs, the most ticklish part of my body. The involuntary laughter that erupted from my throat sounded much too wild for the way I felt generally. I twisted and tried to push away the exploring fingers of her soft hands, but to no avail. As the muscles of my belly began to hurt from excessive laughter I tried to get hold of her fingers to immobilise them. But she snatched them away every time with great skill, tickling me with a delight which soon began to resemble a desire to torture.
In the end I had to resort to begging. “No more, please, no more!”
She stopped. My head was spinning. I was no longer sure where I was. But the initial distrust had been broken, I ceased to feel her presence as a threat, we sat up and looked at each other relaxed, like very close friends. I could almost feel the joy surging up from my depths, and all the feelings of stiffness had dissipated.
We lay down again, next to each other. Although I’m not a great talker even now, and was even less so at the age of fourteen, I suddenly blossomed into a real babbler. But she had much more to say even so. She talked at length about the adventures of her Grandpa Dominic, a sea captain who had retired to the village of his birth, and with whom she was spending her holidays so that he wouldn’t be alone all the time. She boasted that in the city, where she lived with her parents, more things happened in a day than in my village in a year. The village, she said, was a terrible bore.
I talked about the school, and how I felt out of place there, as if condemned to spend years among a tribe of savages, and especially about Father, my hero, who was engaged in conducting far-reaching scientific experiments in the basement. In a year or two, I said, he would allow me to join him, and eventually I, too, would become a doctor.
“Good,” she said, “then you’ll be allowed to examine me, like your father.”
I could not hide my surprise. “My Father examined you?”
She nodded.
“Where?” I asked in a broken voice.
“Here,” she said, putting her hand between her legs. She parted them slightly, so that she could cover the triangle of her bikini pants with the palm of her hand.
“Why?” I insisted hoarsely.
“Because it hurt,” she said, somewhat surprised. “You never hurt?”
“Not there.”
“Well, I do. Women are different,” she announced, as if being one already.
“And what did my Father ...” I failed to complete the question.
“My goodness,” she expressed surprise at the fact that I seemed to know so little about these things. “He rubbed ointment into it. White ointment. He pushed it deep inside and spread it all around.”
“Inside?” my voice broke again.
“Yes, with two fingers,” she extended her middle finger and fore finger. “He did a very good job. Took him more than ten minutes. Now it doesn’t hurt any more.”
Just as I was about to ask if Nurse Mary was present during the treatment, two little girls came running along the upper wall of the dam. They paused, pointing at something in the water and arguing, then carried on and disappeared.
“They were naked,” breathed Eve and fell silent.
I wasn’t shocked by the fact that the two little girls had nothing on. I was shocked by Eve’s use of the word. She seemed to have invested it with a disturbing weight. After some time she asked, and her voice, too, had become slightly hoarse:
“Would you dare to bathe naked?”
It must have been the word dare that helped my vanity to surface above the turbulence of my feelings.
“Of course,” I said, as if throwing the words away. “Wouldn’t you?”
“If no one saw me.”
“Why only then?” my courage grew.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I’d be embarrassed, I suppose.”
“But you aren’t in front of my Father.”
“He’s a doctor.”
I felt that a reversal of roles had taken place and that my fear had moved into her, which made me almost burst with self-assurance.
“I wouldn’t be embarrassed,” I said. “Why should I be?”
“Because someone might see what you have.”
“Everybody’s got that. Including my father. And your grandpa.”
I could feel a slight tremor in my voice, but I did manage, half in despair, to put the decisive question. “Would you be embarrassed if someone saw what you have?”
Promptly, as if she had waited for it, she replied, “I wouldn’t mind showing it to someone who showed it to me.”
She fell silent and I could feel her body tensing up. The ball was now in my court. The anxiety, mixed with uncontrollable expectation, was almost too much to bear. My throat muscles worked as if I was about to start yodelling. But when I finally uttered the words they sounded quite normal.
“If you wouldn’t tell anybody,” I set a condition.
“Don’t be a dummy,” she said. “Of course I wouldn’t. And neither should you.”
A brief silence followed, with each of us waiting for the other to speak.
“Who’ll be first?” she breathed, and looked my straight in the eyes.
Quickly, I averted mine, swallowed an excessive amount of saliva and stared at the upper end of the wall.
“Tell you what,” she came up with an idea. “One of us lies on the back without moving, eyes closed. The other pulls off his pants and looks at the thing. Then he puts his hand on it and holds it there for, say, a minute. The other can keep his eyes closed. Shall we?”
I nodded and she agreed to be first.
She removed her bra and stretched out on her back. It was not difficult to pull off her bikini pants; she lifted and twisted her pelvis to help me. She kept her eyes closed. But mine were open wider than ever. Seeing her naked, the first naked girl I had seen lying before me, was like being hit on the head by a soft, yet powerful hammer. Her body was slim, smooth and tanned. I remembered a sentence from one of the books habitually read by Mother: