Therefore, a frigid woman (“fat-witted” Alicja Lesniak) could never make a true and unbowed revolutionary, in Freda’s view, any more than a timid leafleteer (“that idiotic Pole” again) could prove to be convincing in the sack. You had to feel it big to give it big, in other words.
So then she had decided, by the time her Lix’s shaking hand had got the key into the lock, that their lovemaking would be a little reassuring drama of a sort, two comrades pumping courage into each other once they had pumped some courage into the world. Her usual mantra, then? “I am in charge.” She knew exactly what she wanted from her comrade on the far side of the door. He must not change his clothes, undress, when they got into the room, for a start. He must not take his kerchief off. She’d break his fingers if he tried to loosen it. The jaunty knot was part of what she wanted from the man. Nor must he slip into some open-throated bourgeois sentimentality, dutifully whispering sweet platitudes, proclaiming love instead of solidarity. She wanted camaraderie of spirit, not romance of the soul. Romance was for life. Romance was too soft and feeble to truly satisfy. She wanted the drama of the streets relocated in between the sheets. They’d be two partisans and they’d be making love between the detonation and the bomb. It didn’t matter what he wanted out of her. She was in charge. This was her needy afternoon.
His room was tidier than she remembered it, a disappointment of a sort. The sort of tidiness to mark a mother’s visit or an inspection by the concierge. The bed was made up like a dormitory bed. Lix tried to put the light on, but Freda held his hand. “We have to hurry up,” she said. “Come on.” She fantasized the clatter of militia boots, fast running up the stairs. “I want you now.” The you was not quite Lix and not quite nobody. The Czech was trapped between her legs, wild-haired and beautiful. She straddled him, and pushed his shoulders back onto the bed and pushed his shirt up onto his shoulders, and kissed the bare and perfect rack of ribs, her lips as urgent as a Russian gun.
She was too fast for him. He held her head and tried to kiss her on the lips. She turned away. Too intimate. It was not intimacy that she required. The opposite. She wanted urgency and alienation, the meeting of two strangers united only by a single cause. For once his instant penetration was required, allowed, demanded. She put her hand between his legs and felt through the cloth for that part of him that could convey the whole of him. “No kissing, Comrade Lix. It’s counterrevolutionary.” A joke of sorts, of course, but one intended to inform her lover what her desires truly were. He was quick to understand. He was an actor, after all, well versed and trained in improvisation and picking up on what a partner hinted at with her ad-libs. He said, “The Rebel and the Mutineer,” the title of a film he’d long admired. “Too insubordinate to kiss.”
He tried to pull her coat off her arms but she shoved back his hands. “Today,” she said, “the woman is in charge.”
Again, he let her be in charge.
WHERE HAD IT all gone wrong, this briefest love affair? It had gone wrong that afternoon. He knew that much. Marin Scholla flew with it to Rome. General Jaruzelski gunned it down. It couldn’t last beyond that afternoon. It was as if that afternoon had been the only destination for their love. Thereafter, they were in decline.
Lix often spooled it through his memory, that hour in that little room. He could not identify the point of separation. Nor specify his guilt. He’d let her be in charge, despite his fantasies. He’d let her hurry him. He had not tried to hurry her — for he well knew that Freda was a young woman who dismissed that underpinning law of physics, that an action of any energy or force should only result in a reaction of equal energy or force. Anything mildly unwelcome, the breeziest of pressures, she would greet with the fury of the seven spinster winds. So, certainly, she would not tolerate an overzealous lover, too keen to dominate her on a bed, too eager to have his way. She’d called the shots, the modern woman making up for all quiescent females in the past. There’d been benefits in that for him, of course. Uncomplicated penetration for a start, though under her and not on top. She’d been audacious and abandoned because the politics and history said she could.
In fact he had been glad, aroused, that she had pushed him back and held his wrists. Like that, he was too trapped and too engrossed by her urgent passion to make his own mistakes. As she hovered over him, directing him — how would he ever come with her on top demanding that he come? — he had not seen much evidence of romantic love in Freda, nor in her sudden interest in his ribs, his kerchief, and his shirt. She hadn’t spoken his name. Or even looked him in the eye. Yet her passion was all too evidently real. Passion’s something that truly can’t be faked, not even on the stage or in the films. An actor never quite captures the randomness, the disarray. So there can be nothing more honest and reassuring — in the short term — than a partner’s lust. These are the moments in your life that are sincere. You mean it, absolutely mean it, until the moment’s absolutely gone.
Lix absolutely meant it, too. Some cultures claim that when lovemaking has reached perfection, the earth has moved, or the yolk has separated from the albumen, or the clocks have chimed in unison, or the lovers’ bodies have dissolved. Here we say “the bed grew roots.” The bed grew roots that afternoon for Lix.
The universe was suddenly minute: its all-consuming detail pressed against his face, snagged at his toes, the linen and her skin almost impossible to tell apart. If anything or anybody but this long-necked girl, her breasts and earrings swinging like a hypnotist’s watch, had crossed his mind that snowy evening, then it was only briefly and diffusely. A car horn from the street below, perhaps. The tock of high heels on the wooden stairs, as someone else came home. The clink of cups and bottles from the sidewalk cafe below. And possibly, but only for an instant, the aging memory of that little information clerk, their bruising minutes at the kitchen windowsill — and then her tears illuminated by the cruel and sudden timer lights as she, that troubled stranger, fled. And now, the rattle of his bedroom window frames as what was forecast — wind and snow — announced itself across the city in gusts of frozen air.
WE LEAVE THEM lying on his bed, intimately awake, relieved from their desires, engaging with the calm that only sated fervor can provide, and looking forward to some time alone. Not quite tranquillity, but self-possession. The farce of MeisterCorps had ended without too much embarrassment, without too many tears or bruises. They could forget it easily or portray their happy failure as something heroic. Nobody from RoCoCo had been shot or dragged away. Nobody had been compromised. They were the victims only of bad luck and bad timing. Finally, though, they’d got it right: exactly as they’d hoped and planned, Lix and Freda had honed and blunted all the sexual edges of their day. Now was the time to disengage. Withdraw.
Let’s not forget, though, that this bed on Cargo Street was cursed. This narrow student’s cot with its new sheets and its cheap coverlet had played its ancient trick on Fredalix. The roots it had grown were tougher, deeper, than they’d bargained for. Some mischievous coincidence had made this little room high above the wharfside district dangerously fertile, an efficacious city version of the Vacuum Cave in fairy tales where couples spent the night to guarantee a pregnancy (and risk pneumonia). Lix had already produced a child in it, a girl — and now that he’d been mad enough to take a second woman there, another child had been implied, a son, a George, an heir.