Free Leavetaking by Peter Weiss Page A

something like recognition arose in me, nothing was so surprising and exotic that it did not find an understanding echo somewhere within me. My reading was not selective. I was attracted or repelled according to hidden laws. Countless books I merely skimmed through, I had scarcely thumbed through their pages before I knew that they were nothing for me, many that were later to be of value to mepassed meaningless through my hand. Others captivated me with a single word.
The Possessed, The Insulted and Injured, The House of the Dead, The Devil’s Elixir, Black Flags, Inferno
—these were the titles that suddenly flared up in front of me and lit up something within me. There was something magical about these titles, they went straight to my heart. Reading them, the fumbling and searching that I had experienced in front of the door with the red and blue panes and upstairs in the loft matured. My whole life was a fumbling and searching. I penetrated into music, into the architecture of fugues, into the tortuous labyrinths of symphonies, into the hard structure of jazz, into Oriental chimes, nothing was unfamiliar to me. I understood the wailing of Chinese flutes and the solemnity of medieval songs, I was filled to bursting with music, when I moved it was as if a veil of sound jingled within me, my steps evoked throbbing drumbeats, interior instruments played continuously. At home I lived like someone besieged. My room was like a fortress. I had filled its walls with pictures of masks and demons, and with my own drawings whose shrieking figures frightened off the intruder. I felt the explosive force within me and knew that I had to devote my life to the expression of this explosive force, but at home my attempts were regarded as aberrations of which one did not have to take serious account. Driven by imperious inner urge I left my room at night, naked and in nameless excitement. I heard the mattresses creaking under my parents’ bodies, heard their heavy breathing, perhaps they were lying sleeplessly, thinkingof my misery. I, however, crept naked into the room where my sister Margit lay. She saw me come in, sat up in bed, a street lamp projected the broken image of the window and the filigree work of the pattern on the curtains, across the wall and ceiling. Noiselessly I came to Margit’s bed, sat next to her, and noiselessly we explored each other with bated breath, and Margit too stripped off her nightdress and my hands glided over the small swellings of her breasts, passed over her soft but slowly hardening nipples, spread over her belly and the childlike smoothness of her genitals, and then we lay side by side, pressed ourselves close to one another and my penis stiffened and pressed itself against the warm part between her thighs, and so we lay, mouth to mouth, while our parents in their bedroom breathed and groaned. On other evenings, when our parents had gone out, I approached Elfriede, who had been hired by our parents to take care of us. In my room we practiced something we called gymnastic exercises. Gymnastics is useful and strengthens the muscles, gymnastics refreshes the mind, no one can object to it if we place ourselves side by side and bend backward and forward or if we lean back to back with our arms linked and hoist each other into the air. That is sport. That I only wore a towel about my hips was to allow the body to breathe more freely. And Elfriede took off her dress only in order that it should not get rumpled in the course of our exertions. If we placed our hands on each other’s belly or thigh, this was only for support, and if Elfriede stripped off her slip and rolled down her stockings shedid so only for the sake of greater freedom of movement. She was still decently dressed, in brassiere and panties. Kissing was out of the question, I was not allowed to touch her breasts, though she felt my chest to test the beating of my heart. Once when I was bending over backward my loincloth came loose and Elfriede