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before Clara had finished dressing. I found it painful to follow the
two events, Clara’s toilet and Eugen’s conversation, realizing that they would run
parallel to each other until Clara went out into the shop or they came together in
the back room like trains in a film racing madly toward each other, about to crash
or speed past depending on whether a mysterious hand intervenes to shunt one of them
onto a siding at the last moment. Meanwhile, the conversation kept on its course and
Clara kept powdering her face.
    I tried to help fate by pushing my knees close to the table, but to reach it I would
have had to perch at the very edge of the sofa—an awkward position or, at the
very least, comic. I had the feeling that Clara was looking at me in the mirror and
smiling.
    Shortly thereafter she finished rounding her lips with lipstick and gave her cheeks a
final dab of powder. The perfume floating through the room made me dizzy with desire
and despair. It was when she walked past me that the thing I least expected took
place: she rubbed against my knees as she did every other day (or perhaps even a bit
more, though surely that was only my imagination) with an air of indifference
implying there was nothing between us.
    Vice involves a complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication.
It suffuses the body instantaneously like an inner melody, completely
transmogrifying mind, flesh, and blood. In the fraction of a second that Clara’s
legs touched mine, vast new hopes, vast new expectations were born in me.
    With Clara I understood it all from the first day, the
first instant. She was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. It was an
adventure full of torments and misery, fears and the gnashing of teeth, yet it could
have come close to love had it not also been a long, painful bout with impatience.
Clara was as calm and capricious as I was bold and impulsive. She had a violent way
of provoking me and took a sordid joy in watching me suffer, a joy that always
preceded the sexual act and was part of it.
    The first time the thing I had so long awaited came to pass, the provocation was of a
simplicity so elementary (brutal almost) that the words she used—especially
the anonymous verb—retain much of the virulence they had then. All I need do
is think back on them and my present indifference is eaten away as if by acid.
    Eugen was away on errands. The two of us were alone and
silent. Clara—in her afternoon dress, her legs crossed, her back to the shop
window—was knitting away at something. Several weeks had passed since the
back-room adventure, which had immediately created an icy atmosphere between us, and
the ensuing tension found expression in utter indifference on her part. We would sit
facing each other without exchanging a word for hours, yet hovering above the
silence was a secret accord, a perfect understanding threatening to explode. All
that was wanting was the mysterious word to break through the cloak of convention.
At night I would make dozens of plans, and the next day they would come up against
the most basic obstacles: she had to finish her knitting, the light was wrong, the
shop too quiet, the set-up of the sewing machines too important to be disturbed,
even for motives of sentiment. I kept my jaws clenched the whole time: the silence
was terrible, a silence that for me had all the force and shape of a scream.
    It was Clara who broke it. Speaking in what was nearly a whisper and never lifting
her eyes from her knitting, she said, “If you had come earlier today, we could have
done it
. Eugen left right after lunch.”
    Until that point there had been no trace of sexual allusion between us, and from
those few words a sudden new reality burst forth. It was as extraordinary, as
miraculous as if a marble statue had sprung up out of the floor in the midst of the
sewing machines.
    I was at her in a flash. I grabbed her hand and stroked it violently, kissed it. She
pulled it away. “Let