Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  Thereafter no summer night found me absent from Herr Kulig’s garden. I prowled those enchanted premises like a regnant tomcat. Sometimes Inge came to me, and sometimes she did not. Some nights she yielded while others found her coy, negative, maddeningly perverse. Then came a night when she appeared clad in nightgown, bathrobe, and slippers, her whole personality stiff with righteousness. She was not going to meet me again. I was nasty. All I wanted to do was watch her make water and look at her nakedness and touch her where nice people never touched. She was not going to meet me again in the garden or anywhere else. She had been wrong not to cry cut when I first spied on her. Now she was through with it altogether. I was not to touch her, she had only come out to tell me.

  She listened to my shocked objections with disdain, head shaking firmly, eyes bright with malice, mockery dancing in each curve of those smiling lips. Even worse, she kept a wary distance between us, sidestepping or retreating as I advanced, so that I hadn’t even the chance to seize her wrist. I realized with something close to panic that she meant every word she spoke. Our enchantment had been shattered as abruptly as it had begun. Persuasion failing, I lunged for her, missed, and turned to blackmail.

  “All right,” I said, “then I’ll tell.”

  “Tell what?”

  “How you come out here in the garden at night. What you do.”

  “Nobody’ll believe you. I’ll say it isn’t true.”

  “I’ll tell how you let me look at you and touch you. I’ll tell your sisters. I’ll tell your father.”

  “I’ll just say you’re lying.”

  “I’ll tell about your birthmarks. They’ll know I’m not lying then.”

  She caught her breath for a moment. The triumph in her eyes turned cloudy at the first approach of fear, but she still clung to her position.

  “You could have heard my sisters talking on the sleeping porch. Sometimes they make jokes about my birthmarks. Nobody would believe you.”

  “I’ll tell how the birthmarks feel different than the rest of your skin. How they’re rougher than the rest. How they’re almost like little swellings. The only way I’d know that’s by feeling them.”

  Gone now the mockery, gone the malice, gone the arrogance—all the proud certainties of resolution brought down in crashing ruins. Fear stood forth in every line of her face.

  “You wouldn’t do it!”

  “I will too. I’ll tell everybody.”

  “That isn’t fair!”

  “I’ll not just tell them how the birthmarks feel, I’ll tell them where you let me put my fingers and where sometimes I make you kiss me and where…”

  I didn’t trouble to finish the sentence, for already my palm lay softly where it willed.

  From that time forward Inge was altogether mine. We met each night in Herr Kulig’s garden, and in the daytime I took her to hidden nooks, forgotten attic corners, secret caves where I slipped off her clothes and held her in my arms and fondled her to our hearts’ exhaustion. Face to face we surrendered ourselves to embraces passionately felt but only dimly comprehended. She was as various in her moods as a harem, sometimes ardent, sometimes filled with purling laughter, sometimes frightened and tearful, begging me to let her go. I would not do it. I could not do it. Her tears had no effect on me. When you have discovered and captured a mystery, a new world, an entirely different mode of existence, when you have made it your own and become its lord and master, tears are a wine to get drunk on.

  ♦ 7 ♦

  For love of Gunther Blobel I am cast like Lucifer from Paradise

  I knew this happy state of affairs could not last forever. Summer would end, the Kulig girls would move inside for warmth, and my nocturnal observation post would become useless. There was, of course, the extremely remote possibility of encountering Inge in circumstances favorable to my purposes, but the possibility was so remote as to border on the ridiculous. The truth is, I had so often studied the construction of six pairs of long-armed, long-legged Kulig-girl winter underwear, which seven months out of twelve each Monday festooned their backyard clothesline, that I’m sure I knew the odds far better than Herr Kulig himself.

  The arms reached to the wrist, and the bodice braided itself around the top of the collar bone. No provision at all was made for the future or even immediate accommodation of budding breasts. A small, button-up window at the rear was so precisely measured to its purpose that a flat hand could scarcely have been inserted between the soft flesh of her buttocks and the remarkably small seat of her drawers without causing the fabric to rip at one point or another.

  There was, of course, another way, which might be called the frontal attack, but the disadvantages here were at least as great as with the other. The buttons at the front of he: underwear began at the sternum and marched in a straight line like soldiers down to a point barely three inches above the navel. To proceed farther, even with a certain amount of cooperation, required the persistence of a monomaniac and the skill of a first-rate contortionist. This meant that from mid-October until late March all of Inge’s wilder charms remained encapsulated in a winter chrysalis quite impossible to breach.

  The end of our idyl, however, was accomplished by events fundamentally much more esoteric than woolen underwear or the winter’s chill. It ended because of my friend Gunther Blobel, who was to become my closest comrade-in-arms during the war, my oldest friend and—despite the tragic contradictions of his death—my dearest.

  It was characteristic of Gunther that although every girl in Forchheim fell in love with him at one time or another, he himself remained totally unaware of their attraction to him. Indeed, it was my desire to make him understand the mysteries which surround every female that caused my final rift with Inge.

  When boys of the age we then were truly complement each other, when each learns freely to share with his chum every trait or quirk or quality of personality which the other lacks in his own, there grows between them a bond, an affinity, a union almost mystical, an affair of the blood which draws them closer to each other in the relationship of boy and boy than is possible in that other relationship between boy and girl, which is more in the nature of a game anyhow.

  The reason is not hard to find. Boys, youths, even men, are invariably more comfortable with each other than they can ever hope to be with members of the more charming sex. Each makes fewer demands upon the other, and the emotional feeling between them is more profound because the tensions of sexual differences do not intervene to trouble their relationship. Their interests being the same, their functions, their desires, their dreams, and their goals provoke not the deceits of jealous rivalry, but the open honesty of friendly, manly competition.

  Because of this they can impose, each upon the other, a relationship based upon perfect faith, which is altogether impossible to achieve in the context of male-female demands and gratifications. There is a heartiness, a manliness, a roughness of speech and gesture which conceals even from God’s relatively perceptive eye the true nature of such comradeship, its depth, its constancy, its delicacy, its generous brooding urgency to share.

  That, of course, was my dilemma vis-à-vis Gunther Blobel, my closest chum, and Inge Kulig, my little prisoner of love. I knew from endless hours of mutually shared speculations and declared intentions concerning the other sex that Gunther had never seen a girl as I had seen Inge, much less possessed or touched or been touched by one. Thus, even though I knew the vastness of his curiosity and the poignancy of his yearning, still I had told him nothing about the one thing he yearned for most. I had locked Inge up in my mind as a secret to he known only by me, I had hoarded her away from Gunther as a glutton hoards food while others starve. And yet…

  The secrets of the human heart are unfathomable, as every crazed and cliché-ridden philosopher has taken pains to repeat, and as I, too, was shortly to learn. If one possesses an object whose enchantments are beautiful beyond the power of words to describe, does one hide it in a cellar, seal it off in a vault, lock it away in the s
ecret darkness of one’s most private room? Is it not the obligation of him who possesses beauty to show it? Is not the true purpose of beauty to he seen?—its only purpose?

  I do not know. The old certainties have passed, and the new ones have changed from answers to questions. Perhaps those who bombed the Hofkirche of Chiaveri in Dresden are prepared to give us a lecture on the uses to which beauty should be put. The Bruehl Terrace, the Zwinger, the Georgenschloss in all its loveliness, its frescoed walls and vaulted ceilings—what are they now but rubble? Rubble and dust. Walk through that rubble, bestir that dust ever so gently and if the light is right you will see, here and there, a fleck of color no larger than the point of your pencil. Respect it, for it is something more than a micron of accidentally tinted dust, it is pigment from the brush of Carracci or Reni, of Rembrandt or Poussin. Nothing is left of all the beauty they created but this.

  The English always knew what to do with beauty, didn’t they? If you can’t seize it openly, steal it. If you can’t transport it whole, pack it off bit by bit. If there is no way at all to make off with it, then destroy it. Among simpler, less civilized folk there is found, almost without exception—and this has always been a matter of great perplexity to the British—a genuinely human desire to share it.

  In any event, the decision I made was my own and I must live with it. My mother packed a picnic lunch, which I had correctly told her was for Gunther, Inge, and me. We walked into the summer woods and sat beside a small stream and ate our fill. Then we rested. I can see us there now as clearly as I saw us then over sixty-five years ago. Gunther lay full length on the ground at my left, his hands clasped behind his head, lifting it slightly so that his brooding, sun-smitten eyes could watch Inge, who sat on the ground at my right, her back propped against the log on which I sat between them. Eyes narrowed against the sun, she was counting with her forefinger the number of butterflies that had taken refuge from the afternoon heat beneath the leaves of a wild elderberry bush.

  “…eleven…twelve…thirteen…”

  As I watched her sprawled so innocently beside me, her attention so completely absorbed in numbering butterflies, her young girl’s body so indecently suffocated beneath untold layers of cotton swathing (I counted them in my mind because I knew what each of them was and the purpose it served), I could not—indeed I didn’t even try to—prevent my mind from turning to thoughts of my power over her, and from there to the proof of that power through the testing of it, and from there to the actual use of a power that has already been tested and proved—the sheer excitement of using it any way I wished, from the gentle caress of a palm on her cheek to the unexpected cruelties of shame and undeserved humiliations.

  I think the key word here is “unexpected” rather than “undeserved.” Undeserved punishment is so common that almost everyone suffers from it in one way or another almost every day of his life. But unexpected punishment or humiliation is so rare—or so it seems to me, at least—that it falls into a special category of injustice and cruelty. Knowing this, feeling it in my heart to be true, nonetheless as we lazed there in the summer sun—three friends who had no reason to hurt each other—the special delight of testing my power over Inge by unexpectedly inflicting upon her the greatest humiliation I could imagine took form in my mind, at first no more than an abstract idea, a vagrant thought which insidiously turned to desire and then surprised even me by ending in passionate resolution.

  Watching Inge there, still counting butterflies, soaking up life from the earth and the air and the sun, as careless of the moment as any other creature of the forest, secure from hurt or harm, I thought: “Lying there without a thought in your mind, and certainly without the slightest sense of fear, you haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going to happen to you in a few minutes, have you? Or what you’re going to do because I tell you to do it? You may cry a little at first, but you’ll get used to it. In two minutes, maybe three, it will begin to happen. In five minutes it will already be happening. Against your will. Without your consent. Without warning of any kind. Once begun, it will happen so very slowly that the pleasure of each second’s revelation will linger on into the next. And the next, and the next, and the next, and the next. One by one your petals will drop to the ground until there is nothing left to touch your skin but summer air and my wandering hand. Here in the sunlight, stripped of everything but modesty and perhaps a few tears, you will perform the ultimate act of submission, so beautiful, so lovely, so bewildered, so sad, so sweetly compliant. Yet right now, counting butterflies on a summer day, the idea of doing what so surely you are going to do would seem, even if I told you, as unreal as any other fantasy that begins with the end of things and ends with their beginnings.”

  “…nineteen…twenty…twenty-one…twenty…”

  I looked at Gunther, his eyes dreaming on her, and I thought, “You don’t know what’s going to happen either. Can you imagine her standing here before you without anything on, shy and naked and obedient and so close you have only to lift your hand to touch her skin? You can’t imagine it, can you? Of course not. I’m the only one who can imagine it because I’m the only one who can make her do it.”

  I said, “Gunther.”

  His dreaming eyes turned from Inge to me.

  “Yah?”

  I said, “Would you like to see Inge without any clothes on?”

  Inge stopped on twenty-eight. Her body tensed, but my right hand already encircled her wrist. Gunther’s eyes, suddenly grown wide with bewilderment, turned from me to Inge and then back to me again. All he could say was “What?”

  I said, “Because if you want to look at her, I’ll let you.”

  “No!”

  Inge was already on her feet, struggling like a cat to free her arm from my grasp.

  “Let me go! I won’t let him look at me! I won’t let him see me!”

  Her struggle and the urgency of her pleas told Gunther more clearly than I could possibly have explained in words that the favor I offered him was not the product of fantasy or even of sudden impulse; that it was at the least a practical possibility and at the best a likelihood.

  I said, “Well, do you want to see her or don’t you?”

  He tried to say yes but his voice failed him. He could only nod and stare wildly at both of us and nod again.

  Inge said, “Let me go!” and I said, “Not till you take your clothes off!” and she said, “I won’t do it!” and I said, “Then I’ll take them off for you!” and she said, “I won’t let you!” and I said, “Then I’ll give you a spanking!” and she said, “You wouldn’t dare!”

  She was eleven, I was thirteen; she was a girl, I was a boy. It was nothing to toss her belly-down across my knees and then, even though her legs kicked back at me furiously, to thrust her skirts upward, pull her underwear down, and vigorously spank what up to then I had only caressed. She began to cry and say “Ouch!” and “You’re hurting me!” and “Please don’t!”

  Gunther was on his feet and beside me by now. Although his eyes were wild with desire, he said something that told me in a flash he would never do well with women.

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said.

  “I’m not hurting her, I’m only spanking her to teach her a lesson.”

  Then came Inge’s voice, choked now, edged with panic.

  “Ludwig—please don’t spank me any more, please don’t!”

  I stopped. Her use of the word “spank” for the first time in conjunction with my name demonstrated her recognition of a fact which hitherto she had been unwilling to admit. All I could see of her was the back of her head and what remained visible of crossed arms that pillowed her brow against the log’s rough bark.

  “Will you be good?”

  The back of her head bobbed up and down: “Yes.”

  “Will you do what I tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, just a minute.”

  While Gunther stared down, eager as one fledgling vulture for the other’s prey, I began
to take her underpants off.

  “You see,” I explained, as an experienced man must to a tyro, “her underpants are already half off so we may as well take them all the way off.”

  He nodded eagerly. I slipped the underpants over the curve of her calves to her ankles. Inge remained perfectly still, perfectly silent, limber as a fresh-caught fish.

  “Her garter-belt and stockings can wait till I take off her dress and her petticoats and her underwaist.”

  Gunther nodded again. I stretched her underpants over the bulge of her shoes, drew them free, tossed them onto the log beside me, and turned to her head at the other extremity of that limp body.

  “You can get up now.”

  She rose to her elbows, snuffling a little, rolled off my lap, and came to her feet. As she reached her full height I took the precaution of encircling her wrist again. She stood for a moment, her eyes on the ground. Her free hand, doubled into a fist, ground the remainder of tears from them. I released her other hand, which descended immediately to smooth the disarray of her skirt. She knew I could outrun her, and on this day of days most certainly would. Also it gave me more pleasure to see her standing free, for if she did what I wished her to do without compulsion, the act of submission I hoped for would surrender not only her body into my keeping but her spirit as well. When her skirt was smoothed she lifted her face to us, fixed her eyes on Gunther for a moment, then turned to me.

  “Don’t make me take my clothes off,” she said, “please don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it isn’t fair.”

  “What isn’t fair?”

  “For Gunther to see me again. He already saw when you spanked me.”

  “Yes, but he didn’t see everything.”

  “I don’t want him to see everything! It isn’t nice! Please don’t make me!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ll be ashamed.”