The White Body of Evening Read Online Free PDF Page B

him.
    “Have you ever desired a man?” the doctor asked.
    “No,”Albert replied.
    “Do you associate sexual pleasure with violence?”
    “No,” he replied again.
    “But you have visited prostitutes?”
    He didn’t answer, feeling as if he had been backed into a corner. He tried to explain to himself what exactly had happened on the night of his wedding. They had only talked, but Angelique’s voice lingered with him more powerfully than any physical sensation he’d known.
    “You are aware that syphilis is a disease that can be brought back and spread through the home?” Winton looked into his eyes accusingly.
    Albert sat silently, trying to avoid the doctor’s stare as if he were a criminal awaiting judgement.
    “Your wife is a beautiful woman, Albert,” Winton said. “Any man would desire her.”
    Albert already hated him. Winton seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in articulating his diagnosis and explaining the necessity of self-restraint. “Instinctual deviation.” The phrase filled Albert with guilt.
    And then there was that incident in the street, when Winton had almost let things slip in front of Anna. He might have to kill the doctor, Albert thought. He could wring his neck or crush his forehead, or beat him to a pulp with his own gold-handled walking cane.
    In such thoughts he found a perpetual nightmare weaving through the monotony of his daily life. Lying in bed, thinking about what Winton had said to him, Albert was afraid of his own rage, his own propensity for violence, the secret life seething within him. For a long time he couldn’t close his eyes. He felt sullied by the doctor’s verdict, accused by the strangeness he felt beside his pregnant wife. He listened to the rhythm of her breathing, sensed the darkness and the creaking of the house descend upon him. For hours they pressed closer and closer and he retreated further and further into himself until, finally, he slipped away into an abyss where the burdens of consciousness and guilt faded, and the darkness came alive with the wanton voices of the fallen and the lost. Every night he returned to this prehistoric dung-pit, a wilderness of bones and seashells and gaunt skeletal bodies languishing outside the city walls. This was his home, his resting place. He was an outcast, a stranger, a shadow.
    In May 1892, Anna gave birth to a son. To see such raw, helpless life convinced Albert that his place was out in the world fulfilling his function as a breadwinner, and for a moment it seemed as if the mantle of responsibility had fallen so squarely on his shoulders that there was no time for anything else. For the first few weeks after the birth he doggedly went off to the city offices of Citizen’s Insurance in the morning and returned promptly at 5.30 p.m. to take care of the household chores. The simple realities of the situation had a gravity about them that he found comforting and distracting.
    Slowly Anna’s body resumed its usual litheness and her breasts became softer. But by then there was Paul to compete for her attention as well. In the evening Albert sat on the couch and read the
Bulletin
or the
Boomerang,
trying to distract himself, while Anna nursed the baby and chanted endearments in childish German. The sound of the language rankled.
    He noticed that Anna was speaking more German than English, and began to feel marginalised by the bond, codified in another tongue, between the mother and the baby. He wondered what she was saying about him, wondered whether he was being betrayed by the words he couldn’t understand. Exacerbating this was the constant presence in the house of Hamish McDermott, the child from next door. Since the day Anna had bandaged his hand and called him
Liebchen,
the child had developed a fascination with her that now, as he was old enough to walk about himself, had him constantly appearing at the front door or sitting attentively on the living room floor while Anna breastfed Paul. With both his parents often