The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

70 Skin Song 1944

The travelling woman left solitude behind her. Marek continued to teach me Polish in the evenings, with varying degrees of success, but showed no signs of flirtation. I was infuriated by him. What a scandal. Here were two young specimens in the glorious prime of their youth, isolated from all of society’s restrictions, and we couldn’t even come up with a kiss. After two bright June weeks in that forested paradise, I was beside myself with desire. It wasn’t love, of course, but just the demand that he pay me a minimum of respect. I wasn’t a piece of wood, was I?

His muteness certainly didn’t help the situation. In order to be able to be quiet together, people have to speak the same language. I frequently felt the urge to lock my arms around him out of sheer boredom, so that our tongues could speak a language of their own.

In the end I decided to follow the Pole into the woods. Keeping a good distance. He wandered unusually far that day, and to be honest, I was afraid of losing the trail back to the cabin. But then he reached a small lake on a high clearing, put his axe down, and started to undress. The birds expressed my appreciation of this sight, echoing across the woods. I drew closer. His back was turned to me, and he had removed all his clothes except for his underpants, which were soon thrown on the leafy bank of the lake. My reaction to this unexpected vision was strange. All of a sudden I was possessed by the certainty that I would die before the height of summer and was absolutely determined to get a taste of Adam’s apple before it was all over. Full of death-given courage, I stepped forward and called out, ‘Marek!’

He turned and covered his member, petrified. I walked over to him, in all my smallness, with my soft cheeks and rock-hard determination. ‘Marek.’

I tiptoed across the stones like a forest creature the other animals had never seen before. All the way over to him. Breathless.

‘Marek.’

He was a bundle of nerves with startled eyes, as he stood there naked with a hand over his crotch like Munch’s painting of puberty. I touched his shoulder. The weather was warm, so he wasn’t at all cold, but his lower lip nevertheless started to quiver. I gently stroked his chest and smiled up at him; he was a head taller than I was. He was trying to smile back, I could tell, but nothing reached his flesh, skin, lips. I stretched up towards his face, half shut my eyes, and kissed, but only reached his chin. I kissed a chin. He was still so bewildered, so stunned, so totally confused, that he couldn’t move. Not until with a smile I stroked his lower arm and loosened the grip over his groin.

There he was again, my friend Penis. Not as big as the British pilot’s jewel, but just as beautiful and surrounded by black bushes. I allowed my hand to slide down his stomach, as taut as a drum skin. His consternation now reached all the way down to his bladder, but I allowed myself to continue. His bush was as stiff and dry as steel wool, causing a moment’s hesitation, but my fingers trod lightly along the path. I looked up at him again, but he stared beyond me, at the leaves around him, as if he missed their protection. I ignored it and with my hand started to make his skin sing (an expression I owe to Bæring). I had never received any training in these hand movements, never seen any films or read any booklets about them, and no authors had ever instructed me on how to handle the tool of life. But my studies in the art of pleasuring at the School of Life in Copenhagen now came in handy. I followed what my tender instincts had taught me, and the uprising soon started. Then I took a step back and started to unbutton my childhood. He stood there dumbfounded and watched, but still seemed like the most famous lover in the world, patiently waiting for mistress number 4013 to make herself ready.

A caw was heard from a corner in the woods: a crow laughing on a high branch.

Finally I was free of my clothes and naked for the first time since 1941, when I’d climbed into a bathtub by the North Sea. But there was no mirror here. I could only see my nudity reflected in the eyes of this man, and it was obvious how magical I appeared. Beauty like this hadn’t been seen in the Nieder-something woods for over two thousand years. I was a flower that had blossomed in chains and was now all the more beautiful for being able to break free, because its beauty was virginal. I read all these things in his Polish eyes. They had never seen anything like this.

I took a step towards him, on a lichen-covered stone, and pressed my skin against his; we embraced and kissed. My first kiss in the adult world. Sure, I’d been slobbered teeth-to-teeth by a murky boy in an underground shelter, and tongued by a postman on a train one Easter night, but this was a kiss. We kissed voraciously, like two famished animals that had never been fondled in their lives.

My breasts in his hands, my hands on his flesh: we were one naked animal, one four-legged beast of love. By a lake in a Polish forest. And all of a sudden the gnarl between my legs had turned into a moist sponge. That had started to sing. Like a small transistor radio it emitted a distant humid sound, a bewitching voice accompanied by a gypsy orchestra. I led the Pole’s hand to the right place and the singing suddenly stopped, as if the speaker had been plugged out and the singing now came out of my mouth instead. I started to pant to the music, which was now starting to lose its rhythm. Although his fingers were Polish, they were no Chopin hands, and started to hammer out a raw modern piece that couldn’t stick to a melody but turned out to be extremely interesting nonetheless.

Life said hi.

I led him into the cool lake. We changed into little children playing in the still water with splashes and spurts. But in the middle of these water sports, his eyes caught sight of the drawing Heike had carved into my arm. All of a sudden, his laughter sank to the bottom and his smile disappeared. I tried to explain, but he rushed onto the bank and got dressed. Then he walked home, making sure he was always ten yards ahead of me. As I hurried after him, breathless and sweating, I remembered him describing how the Nazis had killed his parents and two sisters. And here I was, running back to him, back to the hut, with a swastika on my upper arm… Why didn’t I escape?