The History of Bestiality by Jens Bjørneboe

Author:Jens Bjørneboe [Bjørneboe, Jens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-10T15:08:56+00:00

LACROIX

Prairial 24, the year 176

In the morning, while I was busy tying up the tomato stalks in the garden, I heard faint, almost soundless footsteps behind me. I turned to find the little nurse Christine standing there barefoot, with slender brown feet, and wearing a short, thin blue dress.

She was smiling because I hadn’t realized that she’d been standing there watching me for quite awhile. In her hand she had a shopping bag.

I walked forward between the plants and kissed her. She stroked me over my thick black hair.

Then she put the shopping bag down on the stone table, which stood cool and airy in the shade. Out of it she took two bottles of Alsace wine, carefully chilled and wrapped in wet newspaper—and then two hunks of cheese, a couple of smoked fillets of trout, and a loaf of fresh white bread—the long, thin kind.

“This is for you,” she said, “but I have time to help eat it up. It’s a thank-you for yesterday—and now I have my lunch hour at the clinic.”

Then she took my hand, and with her naked big toe she drew two letters on the ground. They were my initials.

The wine was of a considerably more expensive sort than I usually have here myself. She must have gone down to the village to buy it.

I went down to the brook and rinsed my face and hands and feet in the fresh water. Then we sat down.

“You said yourself that I could come again,” she said. “But I’ll only come if you want me to.”

We had both gotten up early, and were hungry and thirsty. It was very still now, just before the noon hour, and the sun was of gold and fire and the sky was golden. I don’t remember what we talked about. Maybe we hardly talked at all, but I was terribly unshaven, and my beard is almost com­pletely white now—even if my hair is just as black as before. Christine is nearly thirty years younger than I am. “It looks as if you’re on a visit to your grandfather,” I said, “chez ton grand­père.”

She laughed. Then she broke off a piece of bread and laid one of the trout fillets on it She put it into my hand, and we went on eating.

“We must drink the wine before it warms up,” she said. “Drink, it’s supposed to be cold.”

When we’d eaten, and had only half a bottle left, she looked at her watch. “I have to be up at the clinic at twelve thirty,” she said, “but there was something 1 wanted to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“May I look at your picture first?”

“What picture?”

“The one of the man—the man who isn’t afraid to die.”

“Ah!” I said. “The Yugoslav partisan!”

We went into the house, and she bent over my desk and stood for a long time studying the picture of the young man with the wire around his neck and his hands clenched above his head. She stood utterly motionless, staring at it.

Then she straightened up, turned around, and held her hands over her eyes for a few seconds.

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