One ash-gray afternoon I was out looking for amber amid the thick gravel on the beach by Bunyans Walk. I could see little more than the stones beneath my feet. The mist was blowing around me in tatters. In the distance I saw a phantom approaching, a tenuous, shivering pillar. Slowly it changed into a human, into Selwyn with the family dog, once they came close enough. But without the friendliness. I had noticed it in the canteen recently as well, something was weighing on him. And it had to do with me. Out of sight now, the German shepherd sniffed and growled.
‘Kaiser!’ Selwyn shouted.
The dog appeared from the mist. It jumped up against me and left sandy footprints on my trousers and coat.
‘So are you going to tell me about it?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘About what’s up.’
He peered into the fog. Then he said I should come to his house at three. I stared at his back until he dissolved.
A little later I climbed the path to Kings Ness. The field to my right had been recently plowed, the soil was gleaming. Further up the fog turned thin and yellowy, above it at last the sun was shining. I heard the jubilant song of a lark, but the pounding in my chest was produced by a sense of impending calamity.
I arrived at three o’clock sharp. Selwyn led me into the TV room. He pointed to a chair. From beneath his jumper he then pulled out a videotape, without the box. He slid the tape into the recorder, the television jumped of its own accord to AV.
‘This is what I want to show you,’ he said with his back to me. ‘My brother came home with it.’
A metallic-sounding jingle, the logo of a film company, warnings concerning the unauthorized screening and reproduction of the material, then the first images. A landscape somewhere in Southeast Asia, the camera panned over a bay by morning, canoes being poled along by standing fishermen in reed hats, then across a beach to the patio of a villa on a green hill. A company of Caucasians, colonial and bored. The camera’s eye rested on the individual players. This was where the cast of characters was pointed out, who mattered and who would remain unimportant. It zoomed in on a young woman holding a cigarette between her long fingers. She exhaled a thin stream of smoke. The smoke curled into the title of the film, LILITH, then the letters faded into butterflies and hummingbirds that flew off screen one by one. We were back at the beautiful young woman — in whom by then I had recognized my mother. Or rather, a woman who resembled her to a tee, an extremely young version of her. She was Lilith. I edged up to the TV to get a closer look, but behind me Selwyn had pressed the fast-forward button and events were rushing past at a baffling speed. Men, women, intrigues and searching looks, the villa amid the dark green hills, a swimming pool and a hairy-chested man in a loincloth. .
‘Stop the film!’ I shrieked.
And there she was again, at the edge of the pool, resting languorously on a divan. I knew that body, it had figured in my erotic fantasies. Now there it was beside a swimming pool in god-knows-where, and that guy with the loincloth was up to something — you could see his cock plainly behind the fabric. She didn’t react, only lay there challenging the gods stoically, a pair of large black sunglasses on the bridge of her nose. He said something to her about the temperature of the pool. She said there was nothing wrong with it. Things began picking up a bit after that, when the man said, ‘Now that you’ve gone to bed with Richard. .’
‘Oh, Henry, please. It didn’t mean a thing.’
‘You’re a slut. And you know what we do with sluts.’
‘Oh?’ the woman said ironically.
He dropped the loincloth, the camera zoomed in on his organ, a big one with thick veins. I looked around in desperation. Selwyn was leaning against the wall, the remote in his hand.
‘What is this?’ I exclaimed.
‘What do you think?’ he said tersely.
She had her slender fingers around the penis and pulled back the foreskin. Her gaze was ironic as ever. He straddled, oh horror, the divan and pressed his cock to her mouth. It disappeared into it almost completely. Slowly, he fucked her like that. She sniffed and gagged. Spittle was forced from the corner of her mouth. I vomited on the carpet. I clenched my teeth but it shot out my nose and from behind my molars; I held my hand in front of my mouth and ran for the toilet. For a moment the immediacy of vomiting displaced the flashes in my head, the knowledge that it was my mother, my young mother, being fucked in the mouth. Something came to a close there, at that moment. Nothing would ever be the same. Because it was her. No doubt about it. Not just the face. The hands. My mother’s hands.
I hung over the pot, everything swirled, the world a washer drum. Sweat dripped from my forehead. I remained kneeling there, because I didn’t know what else to do. There was nowhere for me to go. I knew of no better place than the toilet floor. The veils had been ripped away, I had seen what had been concealed from my eyes. It wasn’t a lie, it was worse than that. I had been blind and deaf, this had been hidden from me behind continually shifting backdrops — new pieces of decor had been slid between me and the truth, again and again. Who knew about this? Had they all been whispering about it behind my back for years?
Selwyn was down on his knees; a tub of steaming water beside him, he was scrubbing the contents of my stomach out of the carpet.
‘So it is her,’ he said to the carpet.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ I said.
‘You didn’t know about it?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘No.’
The screen behind him was dark. I turned on the TV again. Selwyn stood up.
‘What are you doing?’
There she was again, the mother-from-the-girlish-photos, naked now, with a camera’s eye between her legs, zooming in on little curls of pubic hair and a pouting cunt in between, nothing I hadn’t already seen in hundreds of other pictures — except this was my mother into whom the man was wedging his way.
‘Christ, Ludwig, turn that off!’
But I wanted to see what there was to be seen. This was the time and the place for it, another opportunity would not soon present itself. My head in my hands, I watched the stranger mating with my mother, but without the sound on, sound was too much to bear. Selwyn was standing beside the door, nervous, perhaps listening for the sound of his parents coming home. Minuscule drops of sweat on her upper lip, the irony had now made way for an expression of all-consuming pleasure. She had her hands clasped behind his little buttocks and was drawing him in deeper. I ran the tape forward. The events followed each other at a lightning pace. It was about the rivalry between two men, and it involved four women: a lady meant to represent the upper classes; an Asian beauty with little breasts; a blonde, nondescript girl; and then my mother, the star of the film, who emanated a certain unassailability. At the end she was taken by both men at the same time, who seemed in this way to have laid aside their conflict. It was raw, no-holds-barred porno, in garish, heavy color. It was hideous, every erotic tingle was snuffed out by shame and confusion. My heart pounded wildly in my chest. I fast-forwarded to the credits, then hit play. The names rolled down the screen, hers first.
LILITH — EVE LESAGE
I stood up too quickly, a flash of dizziness almost knocked me to the ground. I waited until the snowy interference went away, then walked out of the room without a word to Selwyn. I went outside like a narcotized man — the son of. The earth might open up and swallow me, I would be grateful. Eve LeSage. Marthe Unger. Porn star. My history was in need of rewriting. All my life I had been walking down the street with a bell around my neck. I bore the brand of shame. The rumors would seep through the walls like moisture, they would whisper behind my back, the suffering would have a name.