Genesis by Jim Crace

Author:Jim Crace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

WHERE HAD IT all gone wrong, this briefest love affair? It had gone wrong that afternoon. He knew that much. Marin Scholla flew with it to Rome. General Jaruzelski gunned it down. It couldn’t last beyond that afternoon. It was as if that afternoon had been the only destination for their love. Thereafter, they were in decline.

Lix often spooled it through his memory, that hour in that little room. He could not identify the point of separation. Nor specify his guilt. He’d let her be in charge, despite his fantasies. He’d let her hurry him. He had not tried to hurry her—for he well knew that Freda was a young woman who dismissed that underpinning law of physics, that an action of any energy or force should only result in a reaction of equal energy or force. Anything mildly unwelcome, the breeziest of pressures, she would greet with the fury of the seven spinster winds. So, certainly, she would not tolerate an overzealous lover, too keen to dominate her on a bed, too eager to have his way. She’d called the shots, the modern woman making up for all quiescent females in the past. There’d been benefits in that for him, of course. Uncomplicated penetration for a start, though under her and not on top. She’d been audacious and abandoned because the politics and history said she could.

In fact he had been glad, aroused, that she had pushed him back and held his wrists. Like that, he was too trapped and too engrossed by her urgent passion to make his own mistakes. As she hovered over him, directing him—how would he ever come with her on top demanding that he come?—he had not seen much evidence of romantic love in Freda, nor in her sudden interest in his ribs, his kerchief, and his shirt. She hadn’t spoken his name. Or even looked him in the eye. Yet her passion was all too evidently real. Passion’s something that truly can’t be faked, not even on the stage or in the films. An actor never quite captures the randomness, the disarray. So there can be nothing more honest and reassuring—in the short term—than a partner’s lust. These are the moments in your life that are sincere. You mean it, absolutely mean it, until the moment’s absolutely gone.

Lix absolutely meant it, too. Some cultures claim that when lovemaking has reached perfection, the earth has moved, or the yolk has separated from the albumen, or the clocks have chimed in unison, or the lovers’ bodies have dissolved. Here we say “the bed grew roots.” The bed grew roots that afternoon for Lix.

The universe was suddenly minute: its all-consuming detail pressed against his face, snagged at his toes, the linen and her skin almost impossible to tell apart. If anything or anybody but this long-necked girl, her breasts and earrings swinging like a hypnotist’s watch, had crossed his mind that snowy evening, then it was only briefly and diffusely. A car horn from the street below, perhaps.

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