Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  “You do it for me,” I said. “You let me take everything off. You strip naked for me whenever I tell you to.”

  “Yes, but that’s different.”

  “Why?”

  Another long glance at Gunther, then hack to me: “Because I like for you to see me.”

  “When you haven’t got anything on? When you’re naked?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like you.” She paused briefly. “And I like the way you look at me, too.”

  The guile of woman, the infinite guile which for five thousand years has transformed her weakness into strength and sent her spinning eons ahead of us in the long race for survival!

  “You like Gunther too, don’t you?”

  “I like him but not enough to let him see me without my clothes on.”

  Is it any wonder that my heart melted? Is it any wonder that I said, “All right, you don’t have to take everything off, just hold your skirts up so he can see.”

  There was another pause. She looked once more at poor Gunther, and then again, most lingeringly this time, at me.

  “You won’t let him touch me, will you?”

  Gunther shot me a look of such wild entreaty that for one staggering moment—for one small instant in passing time—I realized that my power over him was as great or greater than my power over her.

  “No,” I said, “I won’t let him touch you.”

  He: eyebrows arched, and for a moment I felt that she had cocked her head to one side.

  “Then tell him.”

  I could feel the blood pounding at my temples. She was casting a charm, weaving a spell, invoking a mystery so strange in its promise, so exciting in the infinite range of its possibilities that when I turned to address Gunther I had to gulp for breath before the words came.

  “You can’t touch her,” I said, “You can look at her but you can’t touch her.”

  His voice, when he found it, came forth as a croak of despair.

  “Why not?”

  I turned back to Inge. She remained perfectly still, perfectly straight, her eyes flaunting promises I had never before even dared to imagine.

  “Because I got her first. Do you think a girl undresses for you just because you ask her to? Well, she doesn’t. You have to make her do it. Whether she wants to or not. There isn’t a girl in this world who won’t find herself someday with some boy who’ll make her take her clothes off and let him do everything with her he wants to.” I turned to Inge. “Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then pull your dress up. Not all the way. Just to below your belly-button. He doesn’t need to see the rest.”

  Inge said, “He didn’t promise not to touch me. All he said was ‘Why not?’”

  What was she doing to me? Why did she deliberately raise this raging storm in my heart, this fury of desire, this wild impulse to seize her and strip her and throw her on the ground and fill her with excrement?

  “He doesn’t have to promise, he knows he can’t touch you anywhere, not even your little toe, unless I let him! I’ll touch you so he can see all the places, but he won’t touch you at all. Now pull your skirts up!”

  Her voice, when it came, sounded far away and forlorn: “Why do I have to let him look at me when I don’t want him to?”

  “Because he’s my friend and he’s never seen what a girl really looks like!”

  “Why does the girl always have to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Let people look at her when she’s undressed?”

  “Because a girl’s different. You know that. She’s different between her legs and when a boy wants to see her, she has to let him. Every woman too. You know that. Don’t you think your father makes your mother take her clothes off whenever he wants to see her naked?”

  “No! I don’t believe it at all!”

  “All right!” I said. “I was trying to be fair. If you’d pulled up your skirts like I told you to it would be all over by now. But you didn’t do it, so now you have to take everything off. Right down to your birthday suit.”

  She looked at me for a moment, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. In something close to a wail she said, “Do I really have to?”

  I could scarcely breathe. I would suffocate if it went on like this any longer. The shame in her eyes, their meekness, their look of begging, of sorrow, of despair: Do I have to? Of course you have to! But that isn’t what my voice said when finally I found it. She had gone too far. She had driven us into other and wilder latitudes from which now there could be no retreat.

  “Of course you have to. And when they’re all off I’m going to let Gunther touch you.”

  “Anywhere he wants to?”

  I looked at Gunther, who was staring at her as if she were somehow sacred, a true religious apparition. Then I turned back to Inge and nodded.

  “Anywhere he wants to,” I said. Then, to make sure she understood, “Especially where the hair’s beginning to grow.”

  Inge turned fiery red, and Gunther, babbling like a ventriloquist’s dummy, said “Hair? Hair?”

  I nodded. “It’s beginning to grow between her legs,” I said. “It’s like silk. It’s the softest hair you ever felt.”

  Inge said nothing. She simply stared at me, shaking her head as if at a wonder hitherto undiscovered, unrecognized and not yet fully comprehended. She stood before us, silent and immobile as a statue. Her eyes pivoted for a calculating instant to Gunther, who twitched and trembled like an old man, returned for a moment to me, and then wandered back again to Gunther.

  “He’s going to make me undress,” she said, “because he thinks you want to see me that way. If you could only tell him that you don’t want him to make me undress or—or let you touch me the way he said—then I won’t have to. Don’t you see, Gunther? I won’t have to at all.”

  For a long moment Gunther stared from Inge to me and then back again to Inge. He opened his mouth three times before the words he was fighting not to say found utterance.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I…I’d like to see you that way…anybody would…but I”—he shook his head—“not if it makes you…I mean”—his words gathered speed as he fought his way toward the end of an answer he was already hating himself for—“I mean if that’s the way you want it, I don’t want to look at you or touch you any way except…except the way you want me to. Except the way you are right now.”

  She turned triumphantly back to me. She really thought she’d won. “You see?” she said, “He doesn’t even want to see me!”

  “He wants to all right,” I said, “he’s just afraid to say so. Well, I want to and I’m going to. Then we’ll see what Gunther looks at. Now take off your clothes or I’ll do it for you!”

  “I’ll do it,” she said.

  She bent low to pull her skirt off over her head, her hands fluttering for its beruffled hem.

  I didn’t see the rock at her feet, nor the hand that grasped it, nor the arm that threw it. For me there was only an explosion, a burst of starlight, a slow fall, and silence. Then, through a haze of blood, I saw Inge flickering like a moth through the forest and Gunther beside me, semaphoring with her underwear and yelling insanely.

  “You forgot your underpants! Come back! You haven’t got any pants on!”

  That, of course, was the end.

  ♦ 8 ♦

  I visit Forchheim en route to Nuremberg and the shadow of Inge darkens my beer

  Being the beneficiary of my crime rather than its executor, Gunther got off lightly: a flogging, a written apology to the Kuligs, and the temporary loss of certain privileges.

  For me it was an altogether different story. I had never before realized how greatly parents detest the peculiar beauty which makes their daughters female, or how madly determined they are to keep it hidden. Herr Kulig called on my father. My mother called on Frau Kulig. Herr Kulig conferred with Herr Blobel. Herr Blobel conferred with my father. Frau Blobel paid her
respects to Frau Kulig. I was made to apologize to Herr and Frau Blobel for involving their son in so nasty an enterprise, and promise never to do it again. I was forced to make an appearance in the Kulig parlor for personal apologies (sound of soft sneaking footsteps upstairs, rustling skirts, vindictive titters) first to Herr Kulig, and then, as she entered the parlor, dressed in black, sniffling gently and dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief, to pink-eyed Frau Kulig herself. My regrets were sternly but reluctantly acknowledged, after which Herr Kulig indulged himself in what seemed to me a rather too detailed description of the atrocities a second attempt against their daughter’s virtue would bring down upon my head.

  I confessed to Monsignor Schenkel, who denounced my indecencies with a passion I had rarely heard from his pulpit, and imposed on me, as penance, the task of cleaning the toilets of St. Boniface thrice daily for the next six months. During this unwholesome period of my life I discovered that one can learn a great deal more than sanitation from such work if he keeps his eyes open and knows something about normal below-the-belt realities.

  I was also obliged to confess separately to Father Grimalden, whose sponsorship of the Blessed Servants of Saint Veronica, which was only one of his many duties, placed the welfare of Inge’s soul under his direct supervision. He was a tall, thin man in his early thirties with enormously bulging blue eyes and a prehensile right forefinger that dredged his nostrils almost to the second knuckle.

  The more I confessed the wrongs I had perpetrated on Inge the more wrongs he wanted me to confess, explaining that Inge was, after all, a Blessed Servant of Saint Veronica, and hence represented to him a graver moral responsibility than most. Was it indeed true that I had forced her into this ghastly situation? I had spanked her? Where? Oh God forgive you, not on the poor child’s bare skin? Had she cried? Had I truly threatened to undress her? Would I have done so but for the rock that rendered me unconscious? Was it true that I had undressed her or seen her undressed prior to the afternoon in question? Approximately how many times? When? Where? What did she say or do? What did she look like?

  When I began to suspect that Father Grimalden was getting as much sheer animal joy out of the situation as I had, that he was in short enjoying for nothing pleasures for which I would be forced to endure the most brutal penance, I began to embroider my confession with attractive little lies which I hoped would not only add to his pleasure but also diminish in some degree whatever penance he might have it in mind to inflict on me.

  The sort of sin to which I had just confessed, I told him, was not something peculiar only to the relationship between Inge and me, it was happening more often than either of us suspected, and to some of the prettiest girls in town at that. I could almost hear the increased rapidity of his breath through the thin black curtain that separated us. What girls? he asked. What were their names? Didn’t they object? Didn’t they think of going to their parents for help? Or to him, their priest, for guidance and moral strength? And the boys? What were their names? Didn’t they realize they were endangering their immortal souls for a few moments of fleshly delight?

  I agreed with everything he said, nodding my head so vigorously that by the end of my confession, which must have been one of the longest in the history of St. Boniface, my neck was actually sore. My penance, however, made the whole ordeal worthwhile: one hundred Hail Marys for one hundred days running, plus a promise that I would send to Father Grimalden for confession and moral salvation every girl I knew whose underpants were being misused or removed by acquaintances who perhaps did not understand the damnable consequences of the sins they were committing. I swore to do so in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, received Father Grimalden’s “blessings on you, son,” and took my departure.

  In addition to the social and religious penalties imposed on me, there were quite separate familial reactions. For three nights running my father took me out onto the back porch and flogged me soundly before thrusting me into my bed. I envisioned Inge’s vengeful smile as she listened to those powerful blows and my occasional reactions to them. My allowance was suspended for three months, my household privileges for six. I was assigned to extra and always backbreaking tasks: I cut wood, I shoveled coal, I moved dirt, I cleaned chicken run. horse yard, and garbage dump. I stacked and moved and piled and heaped and carried away and brought back again. The whole while I could feel Inge’s mocking eyes secretly following every step of my loathsome routine, celebrating her triumph, dreaming of further torments to come. Each morning, from the beginning of that long ordeal to its end, found me asking myself was it worth it? and each evening found me answering yes.

  Looking back now at the guilt and innocence of that first and tenderest love affair, I perceive that although my behavior was completely adoring, it failed somewhat in gallantry. On the other hand, Inge suffered no harm, since at thirteen I was still incapable of carrying my project through to its logical conclusion. For all my intentions, she still remained intactus.

  Beyond that, I am not at all convinced her eagerness to be rid of me was as deeply felt as she pretended. In the very nature of woman from cradle to coffin there exists a deep yearning, even a necessity, for male compulsion when the most intimate secrets of her being are to be disclosed. Innate modesty prevents her from drawing aside with her own hands a veil that is more appropriately rent by those of a man. She shrinks from the responsibility of giving at the very instant when she wishes most to give; her nature calls out to force, it yearns for an assault so fierce, so relentless, so savage, so utterly without pity or remorse that all her defenses collapse through sheer exhaustion. Thus the portal is forced and the palace ravaged without consent. Only then can she taste without guilt the sweets of surrender; only then can she sense the ravishing joy of the conquered in final conquest of her conqueror.

  That the loss was clearly mine in Inge’s case by no means meant the victory was hers. Others would pick up the bright banner which I had been compelled by youth and fate to abandon, and one of them, especially beloved of God, would harvest the fruits of a conquest I had merely begun. Twenty years and more were to pass before I saw with my own eyes how triumphantly she had survived the frenzies of a summer, which then she may have thought her time of trouble.

  Our movement, after a decade of bitter struggle and savage losses, had stormed the summits of power and held them against all comers for three exhilarating years. The Red Front and its allies had been driven from the streets; the trade unions had been taught the lesson of patriotism and their properties nationalized; the Reichstag had been purified first of Communists, then of Social Democrats, and finally of Hugenberg; the Party itself had been cleansed and consolidated only weeks before by the purge of Roehm and his crew of homosexual adventurers, and only the eternal Jew remained. “Oremus pro perfidis Judaeis.” But why? And particularly why on Good Friday?

  The whole Party, in short, was caught up in one of those healthy periods of reorganization that always presage great enterprises to come, and I, as a result, found myself driving the autobahn from Munich to Nuremberg, having been temporarily detached from my unit for special duty at the headquarters of Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia, publisher of Der Stuermer, and chairman of the Central Committee for Defense against Jewish Horror and Boycott. The Gauleiter at that time was felt to he enforcing certain of the new racial measures (they had not yet been systematically codified as later they would be in the Decrees of Nuremberg) with too large an excess of enthusiasm over discretion. It is one thing to control and even sequester potential enemies of the state, hut quite another to publish such vivid details of the action as openly to confirm what the Foreign Ministry has denied before the whole world as a typical example of international Jewish propaganda against the German state and people.

  As I approached the outskirts of Erlangen, something in the quality of the older houses—their look of solid bourgeois comfort, their steeply timbered roofs, their flowering windowsills—filled me with memories of youth so poignant
that when I reached a point in the business section where a sign still announces the turn-off leading through Forchheim to Bamberg, sheer nostalgia compelled me to take it. It was less than an hour’s detour each way; I’d have time for a beer and still reach Nuremberg by sundown.

  It was summer again, and market day in the town square. The housewives of Forchheim moved through the sun in slow processional, passing from stall to shaded stall as their market bags swelled fatter and fatter—stuffed cornucopias in gentle sway against the solid flesh of peasant madonnas out of Breughel. As I sat there alone, dreaming into the pure topaz of a Loewenbrau shot through with shafts of gold and dappled pools of sunlight, a shadow fell across my table, abruptly changing the gold of the brew to brown. In that same moment, even before the shadow passed and the topaz flashed fire, the air turned redolent of woman and of little girls on hot summer afternoons.

  I sat perfectly still, transfixed by the spreading glow in my blood, by the swift erections of papillae which traced the course of my spine, savoring a distillation of flesh and skin and thigh and loin so pungent, so sultry, so acid-sweet, so urgently demanding that no man who had ever known the spell of its languor could doubt its source or forget it.

  I lifted my eyes as the shadow slid from table to cobblestones and slowly retreated toward the market stalls beyond. She wore a low-necked sleeveless cotton frock printed with arsenic leaves against a field of crimson roses. She had gathered her flaxen hair in a knot at the base of her neck, but not all of it. Wisps escaped everywhere. To eyes narrowed against the slanting sun they formed a nimbus, a glow announcing the beautification of contented flesh. The powerful spread of her buttocks sang hymns to the triumph of culinary art over a bounteously groaning pantry. They rose and fell against each other like handsome fresh-killed hams, setting up a tumult among the roses, which seemed to cluster in that place more thickly than anywhere else: they huddled together and then dispersed, they minced and bowed and swayed like a community of overrouged coquettes caught in the passing eye of a summer whirlwind.