My Enemy's Cradle Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn't realize it until you met him."
    I frowned at her.
    "Oh, all right," she sighed. "But really, it's natural, and you only have to do what your body's urging you to do. Have you felt it, that urge?"
    Yes, I said, I had felt the urge to make love.
    "No. I mean have you touched each other, stroked each other and kissed until you felt it in your body, between your legs, like electricity. The urge to pull him inside you—a heat."
    No, I admitted, not yet.
    "Well, that's the first, then. Once you feel that, you can let go."
    I raised my eyebrows at her, waiting.
    "Cyrla, honestly, don't you know?" She paused again, remembering, I supposed, that I hadn't gone to school for a long time. Since the days of Napoleon, all the cities in the Netherlands had recorded each birth, death, and marriage in their registers, with duplicates at The Hague. Though I had papers, I wouldn't be in those civil registers, so my aunt had decided that until the Germans left I shouldn't risk going to school. For the same reason, I worked only in my uncle's shop. My closest friend had moved from Scheidam after the bombings, and so I'd had almost no contact at all with other girls for a year and a half.
    "All right," she said. "Here it is. Kiss him. His tongue is his soul. Pull it into you, give yourself into his mouth. Breathe his breath. Hold him, touch him. Learn his face, his chest, his belly ... lower. Be gentle when you stroke him; it will make him want to be in you. And that's it. Truly. The rest will be natural, as if you couldn't possibly do anything else. It will feel as if ... it will feel as if with every movement you're saying to yourselves, 'I know you! I know you!' And afterward ... afterward, the world will be singing in your ears."
    "Thank you, Anneke." This was what Isaak never saw in my cousin, and what I often forgot: how generous she was. Once I had confided in her my dream to become a poet. "Well, but you already are," she'd said. "It's in the way you choose your words, in the way you see things and the way you show them to me."
    Until then, I had only read poetry, and never written it. Lines had come to me—often senseless—and I would find myself jotting them down, but I had never followed them deeper to shape them into form and meaning. That night I had found the courage to write my first poem: four lines about grace.
    I
was the selfish one, so glad she wasn't leaving me now.
    "So? Aren't you going to tell me who it is? I'm sorry—I was so wrapped up in Karl, I guess I wasn't asking about you."
    "It's Isaak, of course!"
    "Isaak? Oh."
    "Oh, what?"
    "Nothing. I just didn't know. That's wonderful. For both of you." She turned out the lamp between our beds. "Wait," she said in the darkness. "There's something. You should prepare yourself before. Otherwise it might be difficult and hurt and you won't enjoy it the first time."
    I waited for her to explain.
    "Your hymen. You can break it yourself; it's not hard. Gera told me; her aunt told her, and she knows these things. Use something smooth and rounded, not too big. Gera's aunt says some cultures carved little goddesses from stone or wood to do it, and it was a sacred ritual. But anything will do; a spoon is fine. Clean."
    "What did you use?" I asked.
    Anneke laughed and even in the darkness I could sense her rolling her eyes—for just that second she was back, her old self. "Jan Wegerif!"
    I sat up. "Jan Wegerif? I didn't know you ever went out with him!"
    "I didn't. We just sneaked onto his grandfather's houseboat one time. It was terrible. That's why I'm telling you to use something first. And Cyrla, one more thing."
    "Yes?"
    "Don't get pregnant."

SIX
    My uncle didn't soften. For the next two days, he glared his disgust at Anneke and ignored me. He was hardly ever there though—either he was too angry to come home for lunch, or he was too busy. The shipment of wool he had received was for an order from the German army for six hundred blankets.
    This made me uneasy. My uncle