Rituals by Cees Nooteboom

His whole life had to come out. Secret substances that for years had lodged resentfully in his feet, his legs, his brains, screamed to be set free. The whole huge crowd of memories and humiliations, his stupid loneliness — everything had to be thrown into that dark hole of a garden, disappear, become invisible. It had to be chucked away like so much sour, malevolent matter. It had to be cast outside where it would dissolve forever and so would he. He did not want to exist any longer. For the first time in his life this thought became a possibility, simply by being thought.
    He heard the door open behind him and knew it was she. Bare feet, he thought, she is in her bare feet. The feet, harbingers of bliss, brought her close behind him. It must be something very thin she was wearing. She crossed her arms over his chest and rocked him gently back and forth as if she knew what he had just been thinking. Without shoes she was scarcely taller than he. A few more times his body convulsed. Then she said softly, "Ssh, ssh."
    Not until some time later did she lead him to the washstand, make him dry his tears, blow his nose, clean his teeth, drink. Then she undressed him, put him to bed, turned the light off, and lay down beside him.
    The night that had seemed so dark while the lamp was on, now appeared to grow lighter and lighter and began to drive the darkness out of the room. Light or dark, neither could win the battle, and it ended in a still, grey twilight from which they began to loom up to each other. They caressed and kissed, and he saw her slowly changing, too. It was as if her face disappeared and another came in its place, wilder and at the same time remoter. The person that held him and was held by him was very close to him and yet at the same time somewhere else. For the first time he saw that he could bring this about. He found her with his hand, and suddenly she was crouched on her hands and knees, grunting and sighing. Detached she was, far away. It was ominous. A force was breaking loose in her, enabling her to do all the things he would never be able to do — forget her name, this house, this room, and him. And yet it was him she grabbed by the loins, made roll over on top of her, and pulled inside her. Melancholy, desolation, lust, they toiled together in the big bed, sweating and groaning as if in a fight, and all the time it was as if she were in terrible pain, as if she wanted to be released from her body — she, too — as if she wanted at the same time to cling to him and shake him off.
    When it was all over, she lay very still, staring at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. He kept looking at her and saw the shadows of her ordinary face slowly resuming their usual places, chasing away the other, more mysterious face that now faded and fled into the vanishing night, among the first sounds of the birds, where it belonged.
    "Ah you," she said, slowly sitting up. And all of a sudden changes were taking place inside her as well. Doors were slamming, names returning. Mockery radiated out of her eyes again, and she laughed and said, "There, that makes two mortal sins in one day."
    And later, when they were both sitting with their backs leaning against the wall, smoking cigarettes (Golden Fiction, her brand), she put her hands between his legs and laughed, "That big feller of yours has gone small again." And then, with surprise: "But you've got no nozzle. Why is that?"
    "I have been circumcised," he said.
    "Just like Our Lord?"
    "That's right."
    She shrieked with laughter.
    "When you were a baby?"
    "No. Last year."
    Time for deep silence.
    "Why?"
    "Because it hurt when I went to bed with anyone. It was too narrow down there."
    "Ooooh." She bent over and looked. He stroked her hair.
    "But you're not a Jew, are you?"
    "No. That has nothing to do with it."
    She sat up straight and pondered about something. Finally she said it.
    "You've got sad eyes and devil's eyes. Jewish eyes."
    *       *
    His circumcision. A