Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 36

Egg

Jacques’ mother was aided in her haphazard profession by her flair for raising chickens. When hens grew broody, clucking and pecking when Mme. Melville went to collect the eggs and gave off plaintive cries, avian Rachels weeping for their children, she would swat at them with her apron, quite unmoved. She could spot the onset of a henhouse pox and nip it in the bud, knew the signs of and sure cure for worms in their gizzards. As a result of her knack with hens, she developed a secondary gift for cooking eggs in a great variety of forms: omelettes, eggs poached in red wine, eggs with tripe, a dish she called croque madame—a croque monsieur topped with a fried egg—although the lodgers sometimes grumbled, “Call it what you like, it’s eggs again.”

Sala pointed out to those who muttered, “Eggs again!” that many in this hard world could only dream of such bounty. Why, when her parents had been in exile in Siberia, they had spent a week in the dead of winter with nothing to eat but bread and salt and stewed prunes. Sala knew a better world was in birth. It made no sense to call the 1905 revolution in Russia a failure—after all, one hardly expected a child to be born after a single contraction of the maternal uterus.

Many more such pangs would be felt by the great body of history before it was delivered of its plump and long-awaited offspring: the Revolution. These metaphors about parturition came easily to her, as she was training to be a medical doctor. Those in the Party knew full well that the majority of sympathetic physicians—along with professors and engineers—would, when faced with the rigors of post-revolutionary life, abandon their erstwhile allies. There would be a great need for those like Sala, well-trained, at the ready, and without illusions.

Sixteen-year-old Jacques gazed longingly at this woman. With her simian brow, the material ghost of our animal ancestors made visible, and her declarations about the imminent earthly paradise, she seemed to reconcile in her person the quandary of how we can both be descended from the apes and aspiring to the angels. He thought of himself as a boy, unappealing and timorous. But like the ugly duckling of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale he had turned, as his childhood came to an end, into a being both handsome and graceful. Little imagining that one such as Sala would take any notice of him, he did not hide his infatuation with her. He was shocked when one day, encountering him on the back stairs, instead of moving out of his way—she was on the step above him—she planted herself firmly in his path and refused to let him pass, saying, “I think you have something I want.”

“W-w-what’s that?” Hearing himself stutter, he feared he might be developing his father’s affliction, and blushed vividly.

Sala, who had misjudged his shyness as chilly sophistication, now misread his discomfort as disdain.

“This,” she said, planting her hands on his shoulders, and giving him a kiss, not of the tender, almost breezy caress of lips one imagines as one’s first experience of a kiss, but a full bore attack, her tongue slipping into his surprised mouth, where it wriggled about with his own, rather like two Sumo wrestlers grappling. He moaned with both shock and pleasure, and she thrust her hips against his, with each jut of her pelvis thinking, “There, that will teach him not to trifle with a free woman like myself…There…I’ll teach that stuck-up princeling a lesson.” It would be difficult to say which of the two was more startled by what next ensued: a gush of fluid covered the front of Jacques’ trousers, and the words “I love you” blurted from his mouth.

But despite his declaration on the stairs, this initial encounter did not immediately blossom into a love affair. Jacques had been amazed to discover that he aroused desire. Like the youth who has only been served wine at the dinner table in tiny quantities doled out by the paternal hand, but who discovers in taverns that spirits can intoxicate as well as soothe, he found himself quite drunk on his own erotic power. He flirted shamelessly with Sala’s comrades, and made a fool out of a shopgirl employed at the local tobacconist. What he needed was someone older, a brother, if he had had one, or an uncle, halfway between his father’s generation and his own, to guide him.

It was practical Sala who took on this role. Her first task was to remove the caul of mystery in which bourgeois society had cloaked sexual matters. She showed him the pages in her medical textbooks which contained anatomical drawings of male and female copulatory apparatuses, both internal and external, labeled with their Latinate names. He learned that the functioning of the reproductive parts was a matter of hydraulics, hormonal and sanguinary. She warmed to the topic at hand, lending him copies of Krafft-Ebbing’s encyclopedic tome on the varieties of sexual perversion and Darwin’s The Origin of Species, explaining to him that it was a strange quirk of natural selection that our sexual desires and pleasures had evolved as they had. It was perfectly possible to imagine, under slightly different circumstances, that the acts of coitus necessary for the perpetuation of the race might have operated out of pure necessity and with as little enjoyment as defecation and micturition. What a happy fluke for humanity was pleasure—the desire and longing which preceded it were perhaps not such happy accidents. Having inculcated that lesson in him, she moved on to the next, instructing him in the ethical manner in which male-female relations should be carried out. The tobacconist’s girl, for instance, might find herself ruined through her dalliance with him; he should take care not to abuse his social inferiors.

Later, after they were married and marital relations had grown stale, when Jacques suggested they sample some of the practices described by Krafft-Ebbing, Sala was quite willing to go along for the sake of marital harmony—as long as they could be indulged in hygienically. If a critique were to be offered of her approach to the carnal side of marriage, it might be that she was a trifle too athletic about the whole matter, and seemed to regard it as a salubrious necessity, rather like cleaning one’s teeth and taking a brisk Sunday walk, the duties one owed the body so that it would be well-regulated and do as the mind commanded.

Her hearty approach toward Jacques belied the fact that she loved him. But she was determined to be the master of her emotions, rather than have them master her. She was jealous, often crying herself to sleep in pain over his flirtations with other women. At the same time, she was proud of keeping these difficulties to herself. The sensation was not dissimilar to the one she experienced in gross anatomy, face-to-face with a cadaver. The reek of formaldehyde made her queasy, the rubberiness of dead flesh chilled her, the sight of the corpse’s mottled flesh and wrinkled skin filled her with a sense of dread. Let one of the young men faint—she was certainly not going to do so and give them the excuse of her being a frail female to boot her out. Like gross anatomy, Jacques was a tough subject she was determined to master.

Their relationship continued in this manner for several years: between Jacques’ affairs with various young women he would return to Sala as a ship returns to its home port.