Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett
Manon Uphoff (1962–). Born in Utrecht in the Netherlands, Uphoff was the ninth of a family of thirteen children living in a modest apartment. As a young woman, she had a fractious relationship with formal education, and misbehaviour and truancy led to her being sent away to school. She dropped out at sixteen, though some years later, in 1987, she enrolled in university to study literature. Her childhood and adolescence are an important influence on her early writings. Her first collection of short stories, Desire, published in 1995, was nominated for prestigious the AKO Literature Prize. Since then, she has published a number of collections of stories and several novels. In 2002 she received the first C.C.S. Crone Award for her literary work.
The winter was cold, with frost on the pane. The chill forced its way in through cracked window frames. The girl, quiet by nature, had just turned fifteen. A lot was happening to her that winter. Sometimes she sat in the bus and picked at her cuticles till the skin tore. Then she stared at the slowly welling, thickening drop of blood as it trickled down at an angle.
She liked fairy tales, but not the ones with happy endings. The Little Mermaid dissolving into foam amid the waves, the Snow Queen who kissed a child’s heart to ice, and the Red Shoes, which forced Karen to dance upon her mother’s grave—these interested her.
But that winter she read no fairy tales. In her older brother’s room—where it was warmer than anywhere else in the house—she pored over a book called The Geisha. The cover had a charcoal drawing of two young women: Lucille and Amaryllis. The writer wanted to make love to both of them, preferably at the same time. Lucille and Amaryllis weren’t upset by this. The girl was sure she’d think that was terrible—you can only surrender yourself to one person.
*
On a Saturday night in January, at the club where they only let her in because she’d made herself look years older, an Oriental-looking man bought her a drink. She’d been standing under the disco ball for hours, in a white blouse and tight jeans, but he had just come in. He was much older than she was. His hair shone, and the girl thought his narrow eyes were mysterious. The way he gave her the drink, his hand momentarily brushing the back of hers, frightened her. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
A little later, when she saw his nails, gleaming dimly like the inside of a shell, she knew she would go with him.
At two o’clock they left the club. Cars drove off honking and girls collapsed giggling into their boyfriends’ arms. The doorman tapped his gold-braided hat and watched as they turned the corner.
The strange man and the girl walked through the center of town without a word. With each step her curiosity grew: not so much about this man, but about herself.
They crossed a bridge and walked out onto a lawn. The air was cold. It’s not true that someone else can burn you with their heat, but the touch of his soft palm against hers burned anyway. In the grass, wet from melted patches of snow, they lay down. Up close, her nose buried in the worsted of his coat, she tried to find her way past all his strange smells to a smell she knew. Water was soaking through her clothes. Her teeth started chattering and the blood drained out of her face. She worried that her lipstick would dry and her mascara would run, and he’d think she was a child.
“It’s too cold here,” the man said. He helped her to her feet. Her hair was wet. There was grass on her coat and jeans.
He asked her to go home with him, and she said “yes,” following the same urge that drove her to tug at the translucent skin around her nails in the bus and watch the lines of welling blood. The excitement grew in her. She felt she was swelling and drawing the darkness of night up into her, like a flower does sweet water. On the town square she imagined she was no longer in any normal city—she was in a world of glass and stone, where she and the man were the only two warm animals. The thrum of distant cars sounded like bumblebees. Drops of rain began rolling slowly over her cheeks, down her neck, and the walk went on and on and on.
“Have you been in Holland long?” the girl asked at last.
“No,” the man said. “Only two years. And I don’t know if I’m going to stay.”
They turned down a side street. The girl thought about her parents’ house, her brother’s room with the book about the geisha lying on the bed. How there, in that room, you could hear her mother’s breathing. About her little sister, who would be asleep now, thumb moistly in her mouth—and the Barbies and the horse on the floor.
“Do you live by yourself?” she asked.
“No.” A smile crossed the man’s face. “Here we are.” They stopped in front of a blue door and he pulled a key ring out of his pocket. There were colored cords of silk hanging on it.
“I don’t live by myself. There are a lot of people upstairs—we’ll have to be quiet.”
She followed him cautiously up the dark stairs.
The cloth of coats scraped against her cold cheeks. The man put a key in the lock.
The girl stood behind him. Over his shoulder she looked into the room and the light. Rows of metal beds stood left and right, with men sitting on all of them, except one. There was laughter and mumbling, and faces turned toward her. With narrow eyes they looked at her.
“Welcome!” one of them said. His skin was yellowish and dry. He had a magazine in one hand. On the glossy cover lay a naked woman, legs spread, eyes closed in ecstasy.
He read from right to left and slapped the page teasingly as she walked past.
The man held her hand and led her into the far corner of the room. In front of his bed was a black curtain attached to metal rails—like in a hospital.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, pushing the curtain aside carefully. Little tufts of grass fell from her coat onto the gray blanket. He closed the curtains and fastened them with a safety pin. The laughter from the room grew louder.
“They won’t do anything,” the man said as she sat on the bed and counted the beats of her heart. He played calmly with her fingers.
“Before long they’ll sleep and leave us alone. Women almost never come here.”
*
They waited until it was quiet and they could hear the soft snoring of people in peaceful sleep. A little lamp was burning. It was so low that the shadows it cast on the wall were large and wide.
“How old are you?” he asked. “Fourteen? Fifteen?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’ve made yourself look older than you are.”
She felt his lips approach her throat, and then a sudden hard bite that made her list sideways, like a boat after a hard gust.
“Girl,” he said. His hand was a fish gliding up under the cloth, across her skin. He pulled the blouse up over her head, his nails ticking against her nipples. His mouth searched for hers and his tongue slid in like an oyster. The saliva in his mouth tasted sweet and warm.
He pushed her under the blankets and pulled on the zipper of her pants, which jammed until he broke it.
“I’ll do it,” the girl whispered. In a panic, she pulled the stiff material down as fast as she could.
“Soft,” he whispered. He held a little fold of her belly in his mouth, rolling it between his sharp teeth.
“I don’t know him,” the girl thought. “He’s a stranger. I don’t know him.”
*
A few times that winter, in the warm city bus to school, she had pushed the stop button too early, on purpose. One time she’d been with her father. When the doors opened with a hiss, he made her get out—because the driver would expect her to.
That’s just how it would be with this man.
*
“You’re soft, still. A real girl.” He petted her breasts, almost in surprise. “I think it’s lovely that you’re white.”
She was white. When she looked down, his head was like a black stone between her legs. His lips were pressing against her pubic hair and his tongue slid in slowly. She wanted to stop him. A stranger … but a warm and dark glow made her belly heavy, her legs heavy, and she closed her eyes—following the path of the heat.
“Don’t stop,” she said, startled at her sudden desire, her craving to hold onto this heat. “Just keep doing that.” Her pelvis pushed up and she ran her hands through his stiff dark hair, forcing his head down harder, as if she were a nut with a hard shell, and now that the shell was cracked, power and rage came pouring out, and a wanting, a wanting that frightened her.
The heavy strands of his hair fell across her fingers.
“Keep doing that,” she said again, but he stopped. She heard the crackling of paper, a rustling. His elbow jabbed her suddenly and sharply in the side.
“I’m going in you,” he said, bending over her, enveloping her. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t yell or scream.”
She saw his shoulders where the muscles bunched together, and the pounding of the vein in his neck. The mouth with the full red lips. She tensed her own muscles, but he was faster than she’d thought. A flaming white pain and a sharpness between her legs. With all her might she tried to pull back, but his mouth bore down on hers and his back and limber hips arched over her like a net.
“Don’t fight,” he said. “Don’t fight.”
But the pain, which stabbed harder now that she had tensed all her muscles in panic and pushed up her pelvis to force him off, made her stronger. She bucked so hard that he shot out of her. Hipbone cracked against hipbone.
“Don’t!” he said. “What are you doing? It’s going to happen anyway!”
“No!” the girl said, feeling a sudden powerful rage. “You have to fight too!”
He grabbed her by the waist and pushed her back on the sheet.
“You’re scared,” he said. “But don’t be scared.” With a hard lunge he went back in her and grabbed her buttocks hard with his fingertips.
“It hurts!”
She dug her nails into his back and pulled down hard. The skin began swelling under her fingers right away, and she saw his eyes pinch shut in pain. She pushed her mouth against his and bit into his lower lip. Lukewarm blood dripped into her mouth. He looked at her with dark gleaming eyes. There were beads of sweat on his forehead.
“You have to fight too.”
There was squeezing, growling and thrusting. His hands and hers were everywhere, and everywhere her nails left clawing stripes that filled with red, but he didn’t remove himself from her, and the flaming feeling between her legs remained. Even though she bucked her hips and hissed words she’d never used before.
Slowly the burning ebbed away and the heaviness disappeared. He was still in her. She had braced herself for new pain, but he moved only slightly, or not at all. Very calmly. Obliquely. Suddenly she heard her own moaning, and she gushed out like water on a stone floor. He went on, moving in her like a young animal.
“Woman,” he whispered in her ear. “Now you’re a woman.”
*
The girl took her hands off his back and looked. The man’s blood was deep under her nails and he was swathed in an odor she’d never smelled before. There was sweat on his shoulders and his stomach moved up and down. His lower lip was thick and swollen where she’d bitten it.
To her own surprise, she wasn’t tired. The pain was gone and she didn’t know whether she was happy or frightened, furious or proud.
He lay down beside her, sighing.
“I’m not tired,” the girl thought, pulling the white sheet up over herself. “I’m not tired.”
The stripes on his back were white and his hand reached for hers across the sheet, but she pulled her hand back and looked. At his shiny hair. The darkness of night. The rips in the curtain fastened with a safety pin. At the little lines of clotted blood. His cock lying limp across his thigh, which she dared look at only now. The condom leaking out slowly on the sheet.
And when he was rested and went into her again, her fingertips pushed hard against his ass, setting the rhythm for him to go in. She bit his throat, sniffing up his smells, and cupped his neck in her hand, as though she was holding a kitten.
The next morning they hardly spoke. He woke up, kissed her, went to sit on the edge of the bed, and quickly and silently put his clothes on. The light from outside was struggling through the window.
“Where are you going?” she asked, feeling around between the sheets for her underwear.
“Work,” he said. “I have to go to work. What are you going to do? Will I see you again tonight? Will you come to me tonight?”
“No,” the girl said. “I won’t come back here anymore.”
“You’re a woman now,” he said. “I’d like it if you came here tonight.”
But she shook her head.
Ten minutes after he went away, she left the room. The men were sleeping in their beds, breathing quietly, their backs hunched under the gray blankets. The magazines were lying open on the floor.
Outside it was chilly, but the sun was already shining weakly. She searched her coat for a bus ticket. She found one and waited for the bus that would take her home.
*
At the house, her mother was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. The lady from next door across from her.
“Well? Did you have fun at your girlfriend’s?” she asked. “Did the two of you go out dancing?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It was kind of late. We didn’t really feel like it.”
*
She left the room and climbed the stairs. The door to her brother’s room was open a crack. He hadn’t come home. The book about the geisha, with the picture of Amaryllis and Lucille on the cover, was still lying on his bed. Their firm breasts with nipples touching. The girl closed the door and turned the key in the lock. She pulled her torn jeans and panties down carefully over her shaking legs. There wasn’t much blood, just a little dark spot. The sheet in his room had been worse. She looked at the spot on the cotton and at her pubic hair curling up. She thought about the Little Mermaid, who had traded her beautiful singing voice for real human legs. The pain that had cut into her at every step—and how she had turned to foam on the sea.
She thought about the Ice Queen in the solitude of her cold palace, where every human heart froze at once. She thought about the angel Gabriel, standing before the doors of the church with a flaming sword, waiting—for the little girl who danced and danced, her feet in red shoes, across her mother’s grave, and on and on and on. Until her feet were cut off, and she found rest. But didn’t get the shoes back.
*
“At least I fought,” the girl said out loud to herself, pulling up her panties and jeans. The zipper’s copper-colored teeth stuck out crookedly.