Rebecca’s been carrying on an argument with Vanya, half flirting, Vanya trying to keep it all in intellectual code, but the Jewess reverting, time and again, to the bodily… so sensual: the insides of her thighs, just above the knee, smooth as oil, the tenseness of all her muscles, the alert face, the Judenschnautze feinting, pushing, the flashes of tongue against thick lips… what would it be like, to be taken to bed by her? To do it not just with another woman, but with a Jewess… . Their animal darkness… sweating hindquarters, pushing aggressively toward her face, black hairs darkening in fine crescent around each buttock from the crevice… the face turned over a shoulder smiling in coarse delight… all by surprise, really, during a moment’s refuge in a pale yellow room, while the men wandered the halls outside with drugged smiles… “No, not that hard. Be gentle. I’ll tell you when to do it harder… .” Leni’s fair skin, her look of innocence, and the Jewess’s darker coloring, her rawness, contrasting with Leni’s delicacy of structure and skin, pelvic bones stretching cobwebs smoothly down groins and around belly, the two women sliding, snarling, gasping… I know there’s coming together… and Leni waking alone—the Jewess out already in some other room of the place—never having known the instant at which she fell into her true infant sleep, a soft change of state that just didn’t happen with Franz… . So she brushed and batted with fingertips her hair to show something of how she felt about the night’s clientele and strolled down to the baths, stripped without caring what eyes were on her and slid into the body-warmth, the conventional perfume of it… . All at once, through a shouting and humidity that might have made it hard to concentrate, she saw, there, up on one of the ledges, looking down at her… Yes he was Richard Hirsch, from the Mausigstrasse, so many years ago… she knew immediately that her face had never looked more vulnerable—she could see it in his eyes… .

All around them the others splashed, made love, carried on comic monologues, perhaps they were friends of his—yes wasn’t that Siggi frog-kicking by, we called him “the Troll,” he hasn’t grown a centimeter since then… since we ran home along the canal, tripped and fell on the hardest cobblestones in the world, and woke in the mornings to see snow on the spokes of the wagon wheels, steam out the old horse’s nose… . “Leni. Leni.” Richard’s hair pushed all the way back, his body golden, leaning to lift her from the cloudy bath, to sit beside him.

“You’re supposed to be…” she’s flustered, doesn’t know how to put this. “Someone told me you hadn’t come back from France… .” She stares at her knees.

“Not even the French girls could have kept me in France.” He’s still there: she feels him trying to look in her eyes: and he speaks so simply, he’s so alive, sure that French girls must be more coercive than English machine guns… she knows, filled with crying for his innocence, that he can’t have been with anyone there, that French girls still are to him beautiful and remote agents of Love… .