Filiad

By Danilo Peshikan

Michel Besovsky does not like children and never did. He worships experience and disdains young girls of his age or younger. They remind him of his own fiasco as a child. The fatal grudge against youth is soon to be put to trial by arterial fire, when Blanche gives her father a good-night kiss that goes astray… The life-shattering experience repeats nightly for nine months and on three continents. Michel grows a Lolita-like obsession with his prepubescent daughter. He approaches a mystery of not only tender physical, but of fast metaphysical depths. Choosing a direction is superfluous. The question is not and has never been, the old fogey's What has he done, but the true revolutionary one, What to do next.
Could he still desist and turn everything into a joke? Or is he going to?

"Peshikan writes with incomparable penetration on the most delicate and difficult of subject matters. This marvelous, thought-provoking, daring novel depicts the besiegement not of the Homeric walls of Troy, but of the tender walls of a willfully capricious daughter.
Verdict: a gorgeously written, complex work of deluded love."
Literary Fiction Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Danilo Peshikan
• Release date: Jan 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311305480

Danilo Peshikan

Danilo Peshikan is the author of a novel and short stories. His books are a reflection of his Weltanschauung on themes about the philosophy of life, freedom, our existence, the human psyche. They are about the author's hopes, his human experience, feelings, philosophy etc.–themes that have rarely been spoken about by one human to another.

Book preview

Filiad

Book One

By Danilo Peshikan

Text copyright © 2010 Danilo Peshikan

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction and the subject matter treated radically. The novel is considered unsuitable for young readers 17 and under, and may be unacceptable to some readers of all ages. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Synopsis

Wandering between Paris, Harare and Sydney Michel Besovsky, an academic in his forties, is disgusted with the outcome of a childhood romance he had with his maman and dislikes children. He neglects his daughter and devotes himself to experienced lovers. The child’s every effort to win her father’s heart is foredoomed to failure. In the aftermath of an uneventful African fête, Blanche gives her father a good-night kiss that goes astray and shatters their life. Michel gets obsessed with his 11-year-old daughter and what malignantly sprung from a neglected love, swells monstrous all the time but the narrator calls it nothing but—love.

Table of Contents

Title Page

CopyrightSynopsis

Part One

Part Two

About the Author

 Part One

Ha-ha-hah-ah! O gods.

I

I have always been an aloof father to Blanche. When she was about four she tried to monopolise my masculine interest by displaying samples of an admirable feminine curiosity about the world. She would open her puckered fist and show me a dead leaf, a live moth, a piece of Parisian dirt--"Tiens! Tiens!"--until I yelled for help and Olya came to lead away the pouting child with her treasure.

Thus resisting her courtship, I used the same tactic later when my opinions were sought on homework, pastels, pets, paths in life, etc. I yelled for help. The melancholy fact is (after entire whirlwind) that I don’t like children. I never did! The child I was had loved his socialite mother with the anticipated exigent and doomed love. But the man I was to become had simultaneously indulged the fancies of my English and piano teacher since the glorious age of ten. My Inge, as I look back on it, was what nowadays is clumsily and, I believe, callously--when the molester is a fair heterosexual and the child male--called a child molester. I often pondered over her cryptic words: You’ll be a man before your mother. She was a passionate, unselfish girl who had no one in the shrivelled German world and the transporting power of a philharmonic in a single pair of hands: long-fingered, thinning down to the sophisticated trembling tips, with a nervous virtuoso grip and a hot sheltering palm. I obeyed all their teachings gladly. Inge’s hands! They were fated to exert their remote influence upon my defunct fatherhood story, just as her shaky grasp of the sublime lingo has left its mark on this transfiguration of it. For except herself and her chaotic grammar, Inge gave me, too late in life perhaps, the tantalising hope that some day soon I would be promoted from my teacher’s pet to my mother’s lover.

I tried my luck under the gathering clouds of a Trinity Sunday, in a Titian-and-sap-green morning when dear Maman was dozing before lunch in her stately canopied bed. And the timing was about right as I slunk through the rich shadows. Just after my cold bath and subsequent to a recent lower-boy high-jump athletic feat of mine she admired, in the aftermath of a squabble we had, I and he, in the garden, in the course of which I had called the hypochondriac a Fascist (my father strained at the leash but our dogs Berdiaev and Bakunin held him).

Some tumult was dying in her wistful face when Maman opened her arms for me to crawl in. (I was only in my shorts but held a diversionary photograph of our school team—to keep the great blue eyes occupied.) That reminded me of Inge, flushed and haloed after a fit of mauling frenzy, a beast of tenderness purring on the studio-couch before rearing up again to pick me clean. My plan had two obvious stages; first, I wished to smite my mother’s lightly gowned ample heart with a Bronzino-inspired kiss.

Of course I was half dead with fear or alive only in so far as I lived in dread of rejection. Yet my misgivings proved premature: she, dear old Maman, was returning the kiss all right. Her large moist mouth was growing larger and moister, a mildly irritating phenomenon affecting females I was already familiar with from my dealings with Inge. Eventually she withdrew her face to reveal a broadening smile; the still heavy eyes fell with a little frown of curiosity on my left hand that was working its way up her chest; and I froze on the spot. Why, you are quite affectionate today, my dearest. Wait, let me give you a proper kiss, breathed out my mother, her long lanky hand making a pleasure trip to my midriff. The latter was more or less what Inge would whisper before heaping her worst outrages of foaming illicit tenderness on my exulting young person. Patience, I said to myself, clearly they all do it the same way!

But ten-year-olds have bakers’ hands. Even as I was bracing myself for an assault on my most childish secrets my only motion was of impatience and underage haste, my whole being bent on overwhelming the larger body with every bit of my new marvels at once. She, my poor young mother, unaware of how far advanced things were between us, was pursing her lips for the noisy kiss she aimed at my face when I heard her gasp. There was a long, rustling, hope-churning, fearful, fateful, endless pause with sundry sounds of a distant struggle dying away. It was a cloud-ploughing, sky-bursting pause, I will say now, since rather than going on and on this fissure in time (it was to rend my life in two) went up and up till even the gods of Iliad took notice and stopped laughing, and suddenly my mother looked much younger than her twenty-eight years, almost like a girl of Blanche’s blushing age, as I sometimes see her in the creased velvet and moaning blow-ups of dreams.

Then, as her wonder-struck bared belly retreated in white panic to the brink of the mammoth bed, I suffered an unmitigated adult blow in the face, the first in my life—but not the last one of this nature (a pregnant word in any context). It was more of a slap that blow, the voluminous slap of fate; it sealed mine. Little did I imagine in that tear-hot farcical moment with its silk still rustling in my ears—as she, now open-hearted, soothed me with gushes of hot remorseful Russian (I sobbed guardedly under her hand), and petted me on the swimming head—for what a lengthy sentence I was balled and chained in my short and easy stroll through life.

In the afternoon I complained to my teacher with the tears and laments of three great languages though it was strictly an English lesson I had.

But no child is born a poet. So only by repeating the crudest gestures of reality could I paint to Inge my love’s fiasco. And soon she grew bored with the even cruder gestures of the unfinished caress she was comforting me with. Refusing to admit defeat, my Inge took me to her digs in a seedy part of Hamburg, an hour drive by taxi. In a small clean room full of woollen monsters, elves, wizards and such, among which I recognised at least three of the Grimm Brothers’ grisly characters, my childhood’s witch took off her clothes in front of me for the first time and started changing her shape.

She appeared as my wet nurse Natalia, an unforgettable mellow-eyed madonna of the milk, and my mouth got swollen and painful. In turn, she became a tight glove of hot purple silk for all my ten clawing fingers, then a banquet table with the richest dishes a feasting child had ever uncovered. Finally, in a crowning achievement, like the succubus she was, Inge changed into my mother of the red-green morning scene (who had, unaccountably, assumed a birth-giving position as if after my submergence in that feast I had to be born again). And though Inge’s stature was shorter and her bed narrow, almost a beggar’s cot, she was my good mother to me for once as we re-enacted faithfully the haste and the hurt, the farce and the folly of that frightful tryst—bringing it to a sudden, pungent and unimaginable end. I did not know yet that from that day onward I would covet and subsequently pursue ripe women alone, unpredictable creatures of fascinating whims and skilful or punishing hands. And I would do so religiously for most of my Parisian youth with rare exceptions--of which one was my wife Olya, only three years and a month my senior.

The corollary of all this was that I worshipped experience, disdained young girls of my age, and could not stand children. They reminded me of my own fiasco. Vulnerable youth indeed! I gave no credence to the idea unless when applied to a few borderline cases I could count on the fingers of my right hand--Keats, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath might have had vulnerable childhoods!--those very fingers that had known her, or went at least half the way to fully know her, before my adult mother even realised she was under attack. But most of all I hated what is termed l’enfantillage by the French, its champions. I mean the childish demeanour such as counterfeited by an adult lover, and the untimely facial expression--as if lit up by some divine Geist!--that went with it. One would think the better half of the Requiem had descended upon that Mozart-child’s brow and suffused it with heavenly lumens just as she and I, her petit chouchou of one hour standing, were about to engage in the most beastly behaviour handed down from dumb animal to man. Later of course I apostatised with younger women, but only when my own seeding age made it easier to avoid greenhorns under thirty, or, say, buds under twenty-eight. However, the young and the very young continued to get on my nerves. So on that May night in 1993 which fate was rolling nearer, the night of the blue blast, I felt nothing of the universal shiver you fathers know so well, nor did the sweetness of her breath upon my stubble lure the blood away from my ticking brain, as I carried my sleeping offspring from car’s back seat to child’s bedroom, the Princess of the ball.

Now what was I doing living with my family in this sleepy African city thirty-one long years after those cataclysmic events?

Teaching—my contract with the University of Zimbabwe said self-consciously. Running away from old cold Europe and a precocious mid-life crisis, would be my diary’s—if I had had one—chosen words. Laughing my head off, however, would be a more inclusive answer. Laughing as I sunned myself by the university swimming pool in the company of other expatriate lecturers without a care in the world. Laughing at the epileptic fits of murderous rage thrown by the ruddy Rhodies as they replayed the lost war on the Harare shooting range I shared with them twice a week. Laughing in the ruddy faces of my local faculty colleagues when one after another they felt compelled on solemn celebratory occasions to stand up and raise a toast, beady eyes glazed, long lips snarling, to the President Mugabe, that Martin Luther King of Africa.

But in the third year of my exhilarating African adventure I was laughing less and less. A shadow of smoke-thin whispering like the chimes of the plague bell followed me at every step. … screen test… perhaps Jo’burg… studio audition… or why not try a fashion agency… even Hollywood is only an airfare away… Truth is, everywhere Dr. Besovsky showed up, on an expat’s veranda or at a full-blown lawn party, women’s ritualised chats that were too feeble to ford the air currents of dusk or jump over the sun fountains of noon, would all at once blow luminous jets of excitement across a somnolent Harare veranda, or over a awakening lawn party, and every word was about his daughter’s beauty, the saleable beauty of the eleven-year-old Russian, the lily-skinned, pansy-eyed, pony-blonde Blanche Besovskaya. All this had become so exasperating that I refused to take the sulking child anywhere with me; today the academic celebration of Africa’s Day was one such occasion.

At first blush, Africa’s Day appeared as unremarkable as its sky.

If my fatal grudge against youth was soon to be put to trial by arterial fire, the sky showed no rally of cawing ravens or gathering of grumbling gods, no gam of killer clouds frolicked about, no poetic thunder-head swelled with Shakespearian curses.

In the morning I made a rare long-distance call to my estranged mother--it happened to be her birthday--and was told everything about her mysterious new condition (as of last evening): spontaneous gasps due to lack of breath, and hot flushes due to perhaps (she conceded) cherezvychaino zharkoe vremja (pod vecher)--most unusual weather for Paris in May.

Later in the morning, I paid visit to Dr. Bourdillon, a fellow-shooter and a dog-breeder who taught some subject or other in our department; I had come with a request: my daughter wanted an older second dog since Shumba the Boy (the incumbent), she said, wore her out with play and was rudely indifferent to her afterwards. My host told me it would cost me and led me through a walled private rain forest, an eerie place, to a kennel at the back of his caserne-like house, where the reformed colonialist asked me what manner of dog that would be. A cocker spaniel, I replied as instructed. That’s what he will be. Because, my daughter had said, they were the only breed—oh God!—"that die of grief when you abandon them, odna dusha da ushi."

My next encounter in the ashes of the eleven-o’clock sun proved even less prophetic. I accepted Dr. Zaikov’s sombre warning, anent associating with Prof. Raikov, that ex-KGB-colonel in the spirit it was given. We stared at each other from under straw hats bought from poor hawkers in the city (he had driven the price of his panama down to zero), the Bulgarian’s goatee, salt and pepper and food remains. (I am letting the man have some page space here and elsewhere just as you would watch a cute brown bug crawling on a white symphonic score sheet.)

I had a tutorial and tutored while my students tittered. I tittered too because I was touched, twice--in the Senior Common Room over a beer, and at the university swimming pool--by a tall 30-year-old Kenyan from the maths department. Willowy Mercy, whom I was pursuing with a year-long humourless grin, was the most timid gazelle to have ever crossed man’s hunting ground; she had a shaven avocado-shaped head and a high body profile, especially the prominent midsection that was dogged by every male gaze on the campus. So coy was she that at some party last summer she had won my wife’s suspicions. But all I had had from her was the standard rolling of the eyes when she met me in her room, and the special baritone chuckle she produced as she wriggled away. And all of a sudden this same Mercy gave my thigh a squeeze at tea-time and later, by the pool, cupped and caressed my hairy knee! What had changed? Was I no longer the great white ape, the ancient danger? She laughed heartily at my surprise, slapping her long hips with abandon. Touching me? Squeezing me? No, I was no threat to her, she boomed out, or to any other woman she knew.

In the afternoon, I made it up with Olya; the night before, for the sheer perverse fun of saying it, I had told my wife I was going to leave her; Blanche had witnessed the row, flushed ears pricked up, glowing face bent over a book. I apologised at once, said I did not mean it, and was reassuring tearful Olya when Blanche slammed shut her book and fled the room banging the door after her. That was yesterday; now, in our great little rented house under the jacaranda trees, behind a hedge of jasmine and a ten-minute drive from the bush of Academe, I took my old girl in my unworthy arms. I swore that I would never, never leave her (and this handy patch of paradise for the uncertainty of tenure in shoddy Durban or Papeete), no matter how I had threatened her with setting off for an even simpler life on some celestial Pacific atoll, all a lido and a school, without her to hamper my association with local luminaries, expat lady-lecturers, or the ubiquitous Bulgarians.

Back on the campus, I gave a joke of a lecture in my jocular English: a standing joke among the students. With the poorest joke of all I sailed against the tide of my tormenters’ titters. As long as they got the general meaning, their lecturer in informatics scowled, that Information was the good spirit and Chaos was the bad, bad bogey, my mission was fulfilled, my fluency had proved adequate. Neither did I intend nor did my life warrant writing an English novel!

Later that afternoon: as my car baked in the school parking lot, a strapping ruddy schoolboy strutted up to me with a message. Though Bee, he meant Blantch, was given a demerit she was not guilty of a-anything, sir--a hint of synthetic stutter--of anything at all! I waited. Becoming more suffused with red (presumably his blushes), the six-former stammered that my daughter had to stay after classes. I dozed off as I waited. When I woke up minutes later, my car was alone in the cooling oven, the sun’s rage was an African memory, and, covetously, two kids of the walking classes craned their necks toward the school bike shed and passed by, charcoaled on the blank sky; I was alone. Beyond the expanse of the sports ground, the squat edifice of scholarship was screened by tranquil greenery: no imported yellow yelled or imported red rioted. From that unassuming bush-green background a slim figure in blue separated itself.

When my daughter in a uniform tunic of evening blue settled herself in the back seat--the child’s place--my second-time reader would almost see me gnash my teeth and turn to her: Now what did you get a demerit for, you limb of Satan? And yes, I did turn. Then, Oh doesn’t matter. And indeed it didn’t. She said she had an A in biology, adding, as her habit was: By a fluke—with the self-depreciation of the youngest pupil in the class, I imagined.

She said she was hot. Had a physical education period. A brilliant cloak of mane covered her haunches. How do you play sports with this long hair? Complain to Mum. I’m the mere custodian.She was of course a chillingly thin and already tall little beauty. But it was only today that I was struck by the formidable sight of the child’s sweetness. The soft sun-licked line from chin to temple that a hungry sun in the rear window had steeped in honey made me swallow a lump of pure delectation when I muttered: Not easy to be the prettiest girl at school is it? With boys making fools of themselves and what not? It amused me to see her surprise light up the mirror. Sometimes you remind me of the young Romy Schneider. But the longer I look at you, h’m… the more I see Marina Vladi, yes, the loveliest… was once my favourite.She had never heard of those old French actresses. But when I pulled up in the leaky jacaranda shade of a market to buy myself a newspaper, I found her, upon my return, in the front seat cautiously giggling her sweetest giggle. I let her stay.

Presently thin laughing fingers chattered to the dashboard, took off the lighter for inspection, tap-danced on my driving hand, switched the radio on and off, and on again to something rattly and teary, as young laughing eyes tickled a dour adult face. Grave dour glances admonished bright laughing knees for their fresh bruises. Singing in her lap, that day’s delirious sunlight beat in time with the tune of love and loss her laughing fingertips were drumming, or with the swishing breaches in the canopy of jacarandas above us, or with the gods’ gusts of Homeric laughter. Leaning back, Blanche blew a hypothetical fleck off my shoulder. She declared that she had no homework to do. She wound down the window. She dived both her hands into my satchel. Fishing out the student handout I had been cobbling up, she immersed herself in its dull subject matter, slapping its dithering pages from time to time and letting out a dimpled laugh, which apparently delighted the gloomy undeserving thing.

Then I announced that she was coming with me to the party--to the ball as she rechristened it promptly. We had been travelling for less than ten minutes; to that rapt interval haunted by my despair I keep going back in search for fatal clues. This was the last time I was to see Blanche as the actual child she must have been then, not as she would soon appear to be--much more of a child than she ever was and at the same time, in the same measure, a woman; the fallacy of the assumed extremes, I call it.

Now, with the exception of one fantastic detail, the party on the campus was a great bore to me. The members of our department had gathered on the slope fronting the Vice-Chancellery, near a ghostly white marquee, where the Africa Day’s night was rubicund with gin-lit faces and earthworms were set aglow by a brief hot shower. A herd of wives neighed at Blanche already. I stood alone; the husbands, the one-armed Blair (our war hero), lame van der Merwe, deaf van der Merwe (no known relation), Bourdillon and our Chairman the cardiganed Cummings had built a wall of backs. Damn you, Dean Hungwe! Where are you sending me? Out of the chorus of confabs nearby rose the harsh cry of van der Merwe the Deaf, who was drunkenly bemoaning his demotion to the desolate Bulawayo department. With no white woman in the whole damn caboodle! In that last moment--before I was to be thunderstruck as never before in my life--I turned and saw that the little doe was now surrounded by the pack of Bulgarians; doubtless she was within earshot. Suddenly the marquee balloons under a spectral gust of wind as with a wild curling howl van der Merwe lurches out into the open, his big head narrowly missing my stomach.

While every blessed night… he-e-eppy Mitch here, bellows the drunken clown, "will fling himself into the arms of his beautiful dochter!"

Rolling down the night’s pleasant slope… Glowing in the back seat, a disarray of pale limbs and bright hair, Blanche sleeps untroubled by ill omens, unsuspecting of our winding personal journey. I remember the dress she had worn at the ball, some apricoty silk thing strewn with white cherries. I remember her awakening weight. And the warmth of her limbs—a long African day’s accumulation of it—as I carried her in my arms.

Olya was asleep in bed, acknowledging my return with a drowsy You won’t … you won’t? Sleep, I wouldn’t. Must have undressed myself by the light of the bed lamp, against the diffused dark of the window. Unusually for me, I was half mindful of oddly energised little things; I listened to the gulps of water the parched toilet cistern guzzled thirstily after my daughter’s quick visit and withdrawal; as I brushed my teeth I noticed the iron bathtub showed me a loyal dry tinge after serving me in the morning. Sprawled on the bed-table, a book exposed a soft crevice between two mounds of rounded whiteness. Above the bed, pale Corona Australis was the window’s only catch. Outside, the wail for the dead was drifting from a world afar fogging a third night in a row, soaking the moon in a blue halo.

Until a distant red light flashed ahead (my destiny taking a wrong turn), I remember only glimmers of the rutted roads and the black hinterland making that night. Up to the dim point of no return my account might be just a faint reconstruction, or rather a cross-section of an amorphous heap of cosy darkness: the similar shadows of many preceding evenings and their darknesses crushing together. There I still strive to steer away the habitual from the incandescent, to separate the guileless motions of that long carefree summer from the predestined notions of the steep and fateful Night One.

In a collage of nightly scenes, my little daughter and her big embroidered pillow would alight on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. First the pillow, then she beside it. (All this is very jerky and watery in my memory.) Anyway, there she was at the door, hugging the pillow and its pensive ducks, the duckling Blanche on the eve of a fabulous metamorphosis. Some conventional plot developing upon her tee-shirt was caught in a moment of wild-life cuteness: a sea, a tree, a bear’s muzzle. A pair of boyish hips stuck out of the scenery; two girlish shoulders sprouted wings over the featureless sea. The child’s impatient stare was all healthy bodily magic. She lifted up her left foot, slapped her bare heel high against the wall, cocked a knee, parked the flock of ducks on her head to indicate urgency.

A wispy crotch whistled a white semiquaver, disappeared, peered, re-appeared, took a curtain call. Her insteps were narrow, long, relaxed. No troubling ghosts populated her clear hollows still out of bounds to the sieges and forays of grown-up fancy. Seeing my eventual nod of admittance—recent memories of the ball and her success had interfered with my immediate consent--she pulled the pillow over her grin, and darted in, mouth agape, forehead bent forward, strides loud and storkish; I could hear the clipped wings tear some last strings of dark air. She nearly took off upon plunging, and certainly crash-landed as my daughter launched herself into the parental bed; undismayed by Olya’s hisses the unceremonious pointy bottom waged a fierce little war for territory and wriggling rights.

We had a simple discussion, don’t fidget, stop turning my pages, in which Olya took no part, presumed asleep, nor, consciously, did I. Grabbing a pocket-size atlas from the bed-table the little impersonator planted her parodic sulks next to my reading frowns. We read for awhile. Only once did she break her silence, the young silence that was to carry us a world away from most human maps. Wanted to know what Not none said nothing. Yes. meant. Should you peep into a book for adults, Alice? About midnight (in crime’s standard time) as I turned off the light my returning hand must have dallied with the little one’s waist—but nowhere near that no-parent’s-land (latitudinally speaking) to the right of her slumbering mother’s rear and to the left of her father’s awakening front. The position usually allowed the nuzzling tip of my nose to claim a tight hollow between the child’s giggling arm and her grudging chest. On this as on other occasions in the swell of that African season of comfort the undertow of her closeness against my skin was bound to make me unbend my, say, right leg at the knee; but as if a sociopathic cop had pulled two gangling kids to the ground under his beastly bulk, each time her sticky limbs would shake and jerk and implore till I withdrew my leg, heft, hoof, and hair. My nose however was still digging itself in in the puerile armpit when with a chuckle the child surrendered the whole hot crevice and stretched a glassy arm to let my head recline heavily on her shoulder. Olya might have contributed a moan. Lying like that in a mock mother-and-son embrace should be the natural end of a non-event, but then it could be the beginning of a tumultuous crusade, the unsteadying motherly element dawning on a world in balance. Semi-flexed--only what warm water can do to some men, no more than that!--I must have said to myself, let me see, as every father does sooner or late… well, that this was becoming… no, not improper, but awkward… what with our daughter’s presumptuous age, my position of advantage, and my wife’s point of vantage. Then, whether because the little mother had browsed through a summary of my thoughts (there was a witch scare yet to come) or it was simply time, Blanche’s pre-sleep toothpaste-smelling sigh broke our embrace. I knew she would soon be curling on her side, and with her sharp searching bottom dipping in and giving a stir to my receding midriff, she would, I knew too, be sound asleep in seconds.

That night instead of pyjamas, she wore her favourite printed tee-shirt The Bear Is My Best Buddy; a blue-tailed moon rolled into the crowd of evergreens, sleepless birds had a family row in a tree, dark Mashonaland wailed in the window, and Blanche held up her face for a good-night kiss. My explosive smack, of the popular sort a sweet child has raining on her at all times of the day, was doomed to be Father’s last affront of the kind. It more or less missed its target. As reconstructions go, I was already turning away, my fate queuing in the everyday lane, when Man’s predilection for novel or fantastic situations--or could it be that accursed masculine mechanism incapable of rest that has brought us the Renaissance, Modernity and Beyond-It and is about to pull them all down?--made me turn back and wait for her mouth as it was, with all the reliability of the moment, pursuing and pressing against mine! I even paused in mid-retreat—to justify to myself the genuineness of the retreat and the length of the pause. A standard clash of perceptions no parent should be above resolving. And still ominously carefree, still at my seigneurial ease, I--in simple terms--let the little brat glue her large mouth to mine till she tightly enveloped it with hers, a fantastic situation indeed!

A bird swore. Corona Australis shed a jewel. The moon got blue in the face. Your preadolescent daughter’s mouth is a blurry word--weak like mist and a sense of duty, lifeless like the zodiac beasts in the sky, it appears in flesh and its natural colours only at the dentist’s; and now this had fully engulfed and subdued my adult mouth! Against the wailing well of the window I could see Blanche’s sober eyes freeze, then blanch, turning dull white as they probed into my state of helpless comfort. No withering scowls were shooting from Father’s eye, nor were shouts of protest forthcoming from his muzzled mouth either. So the paraplegia of authority dumbfounded her perhaps even more than me, lying there in my pedagogic stoicism and luxurious stupor. Mistaking those for a response, my daughter let out a clearly experimental sigh, the rash mouth briefly released me as she stretched supine and now from a drastically decreased distance, with nothing to separate us but the hot curse of kinship, drooling confidently, the diligent child re-applied her hot leeches, and so smothered my first (and last) breath of dissent—which was not coming anyway, as if had I resisted Blanche’s courtship again I would have betrayed an initial nausea I was not feeling anymore, and offended her horribly. Of course, I still had time to yell for Olya’s help but somehow the idea never brushed my mind.

Only to stop some wild, perverted notion of what the adult kiss should be from invading my daughter’s head did I open my mouth. Had to open it wide, by golly, to match the unbridled girlish expectations; and with that the riches of her young saliva flooded in, short-circuiting the gene migration and reversing eons of evolution by obliterating speech.

For a minute we skirted the mythopoeic commons of the young. Then we drifted into the private metaphysics of Blanche the Sequestered Dreamer. Suddenly all movements were suspended. Breathing was banned. Thought anathemised. You may but live. But leave you may not. In a limbo of awe we (I’m enjoying the we enormously), we waited for the miracle of touch that was to carry us into some nebulous sensory heaven and indeed make us freeze over forever, if the cold white stars of her stare was anything to go by. Withered were the oranges or strawberries of her toothpaste; our shared inner air grew murky with dark myrrh and dim with sparkling malqueridas. The distended pupil of my dread caught her white eye’s ice-fire: Think of yourself as her big pillow! Just that. But the wretched pillow was aware of having more external man than ever before in its existence. We were having une affaire! And I would like to say—I can say nothing right now—the technical crudeness was so mind-boggling that I wanted to guffaw, but I did not, the obliging devil. To lighten the solemnity of the moment I blew into the dreaming mouth a little--and had her in a dead palsy for a moist eternity! She laughed in the end, my quick ostracised young daughter laughed, with me, at me, inside me--and our passionate kiss, or what she imagined it to be, went on and on--five minutes, ten minutes, as I just lay there, already contemplating a colossal heart vs. humanity conflict of classical impasse and deploring my excitable gender’s impossible mimicry--you know, the things you do when your little angel makes love to you--tasting her sweet caprice for perhaps half an hour, more!--anyway, an all-time record as far as I was concerned--until little Blanche’s face began to droop, and vital functions were permitted again. Then, Good ni-ight! chanted the romp and before I could detach everything mine—of which there was a ghastly lot—she drew back, and this time the moment she turned on her side and the bread-hot taut nates scorched my midriff I heard her new breathing, regular, rhymed.

 II

Stricter parents will laugh at me if I say I did not sleep that interesting night. True, I thought and thought, and thought about--nothing!

I was innocent. Let me point categorically in a direction that must be obvious by now. No, no—away from the school playground or the nursery sandpit. Here—I liked my women older. No astigmatic fata morganas had ever weakened this atheist to tears over the first dewy green sprout in the thirsty desert of Oriental believes. No sweet immortal African sin for this rather prim and quiet matroniser. When Inge’s magnificent lust over-spoiled (despoiled, some dupes will say) my chaste filial ambitions, she was barely twenty-three but take the morning, pearl and patina, after I left that waterfront bar in Hamburg, when a quick-eyed barmaid scored the formidable age of thirty-eight against me, not yet sixteen. I longed for sweet rot and ultimate nurture, not for green driblets from hard crab-apples. The snake venom taken at one deadly draught—not a long lasting sour taste and an upset tum. As for overstepping the taboo, well, didn’t enjoy it, I swear; I almost sneaked into the bathroom to brush my teeth. Significantly, though Blanche would soon be in life’s every answer horror was out of the question. I repeat, my flames, my flirts, ma femme, all were cautiously plucked from the higher grades, classes, or forms of girlhood and womanhood. My passionate childhood had admired the calm and experienced look, my insatiable adolescence—to pick a polished symbol for a sordid epoch—rubbed itself against the Rubens’ ripe madonnas and other mature models as seen in the nude and lewd galleries of the Louvre and elsewhere. And all through my youth I had clamoured for a sinuous display, preferred a no-nonsense foreplay, demanded fair play, and taken delight in a non-athletic play proper. Was I not tenderly but truly in love with my poor mother? How could I not intensely disrelish children and chits’ charms!

After a whole drippy but bright day of insulting myself in Slavic profusion, my printable final decision--Never again, old sod!--was as rock-hard as a hard rock can be and my past of passionate paedophobia made the firm foundation of that rock. Need I say my decision came to less than nought in the evening. In a mirror image of the car scene from the day before, it all degenerated to some disgraceful fumbling I did with the radio-set by the bedside just as a lull between two kisses had lingered ominously longer than a breather’s numbered moments—and I did that to show cool: meaning modern savoir-faire and self-possession!

Things had looked better, though, earlier in the day, under the limelight of that atmospheric May Tuesday. I also remember some of its aroused sun, hysterical showers, the winking blue moon (clearly the show’s regular) and an early plotting Venus. I was collecting her from school but as if we had a date and I was the less enthusiastic party, I came late to the desolate Pomona parking lot. Whistling confidently, elbow in the air stream, soft Parisian shirt ballooning, I drove to where my Biche was sitting alone on the vast concrete between her swollen school-bag and a foetus-shaped oil stain. Perkily she subsided on the front seat as if it was a public extension of my conquered heart or, perhaps, lap; and as soon as we reached Mount Pleasant my schoolgirl demanded that I pulled up--another unheard-of challenge of routine. We walked the wall-clad streets that here and there lifted their hems to show a burst of unreal efflorescence like school-uniform blue, woman-scarlet, toilet-paper pink, honeyed-lint yellow, seed-tainted white, or tripped over their long skirts and fell into a sudden cul de sac, flashing a grove of fine-feathered tamarinds and the black lace of a gate behind which savage dogs nosed us out and thickly courted her through the locked latticework. Twice she slipped her hot hand into my cold one and once withdrew it in the lotted hush of this privatised bushland where we seemed the only unfenced creatures of free will--we and the great grey birds that flew with harsh curses over walls and walls and whatever those walls really walled--from a tastelessly hoarded dark rain-forest to (as if I could care less) the wild life of a topiary paradise. Presently, with a standard twitch of youthful disgust on her apple-chaste features, she cancelled our walk pleading boredom—that life-sapping intercourse with a fabulous giant who has all the teenage girls of the Western world in his strident seraglio. But my Blanche was no teenager yet. She was giving me that both serious and stagy look I could not figure out for a while. Then I saw my new sweetheart’s chapped and pathetically bruised lips (little Lucrece must have bitten them hard for her show). Pleased that I had at last noticed, she drew herself up into a subtle exclamation mark of girlish triumph, and took my hand, and averted her silly eyes, to let me look my fill just as I failed to smother entirely an amused snort of derision--and on our trip home after that I was all whistling and she all sulks.

Well, the afternoon had started out all right. Despite the odds, I had put on an air of authority. Fine, I may not be an authority on good morals, but neither should the rubbing of my nose in it be done in bad taste. That would teach her! And there was the main lesson yet to come.

Unlike the night before the child and her chaste pillow appeared early, while Olya was downstairs busying herself in the kitchen. We read together again; so conceited was I that I felt I could delay the moment of mortification. On that occasion my act began with breaking the intrigued look she affected as she peeped into my book; rudely I turned page after page, without waiting for her, or myself either: my mind could not follow the convolutions of its own void, let alone admire those of another’s. Unlike the Mysterious father (my act) the little daughter acted one of her own selves, the frisky and frank one. She was lambent-browed, frank-eyed Blanche for once, in fact twice as frank-eyed as I would have half liked her to be. Lift your noddle! the child commanded sweetly. Thrusting a match-stick of an arm under my stiffening neck. Head coming close, closer—a manoeuvre that in an instant put our two disparate qualms in unsafe apposition.

Such a jest… I quickly quoted, misquoted, from my pre-prepared Suggest our little romance’s over cold-blanket speech when with a wild swing of her free hand she landed me one on the nose, then Ouch! Bee commented simply while I was quailing, stung by the treacherous blow.

What’s the matter?

A mosquito! She was furiously scratching a bare spot below her collar bone. "Please get it, Daddy! Cherche-le!" Meaning, I had to get up and hunt it and destroy it or by the morning my wine-blooded Blanche would be tasted all over by the tiny beastly connoisseur. Et je pris du temps à trouver cette bête.

I rose to my knees, she jumped to her feet; we both chased the creature. She inspected the ceiling but lost her balance with a cheerful squeak and, blindly fumbling for the support of my bare neck and throat, regained part of it. Then pushing me aside my filly knelt quickly, crouched forward and peered under the bed. And suddenly the mesmeric nakedness of two racer’s hips bolted loose from the childhood’s stable while I drew in a Blanche or two of atmosphere--anyway, quite a flowery volume--but dared not breathe out or with any other emanation of mine near the miracle. Next moment she was on her feet again, stomping back and forth on the bed with a young trooper’s alacrity. No, wrong analogy; the fugitive figures her thin limbs described as she lurched and staggered on the brink of a fall now appear to me like the sacred dance moves of the child-priestesses in the Siam of old, a spectacle reserved for the eyes of a sovereign and valued more than the thousand-and-one ropy-slow pleasures of the royal harem. As if realising what thundering depths I was traversing in order to surface and join her at her game, she showed herself to be a remarkably helpful girl. The mosquito had taken drunken refuge on the lampshade where fate finally felled it. By the time of its death her whole lower half, skittish softenings and innocent stretches, had smoothly inched into my arms. But gone was some of the aura that guarded her, the smirchy fluff and the sticky peachiness that used to gauze her childhood against my masculine stare. The mosquito chase had infected her cheeks with crimson flush that showed a playful resemblance to the rash of passion. A poor seer at the best of times, I was only happy to level my gaze at that cub’s muzzle on her shirt front. Back under the warm blanket: daddy, daughter and daughter’s latest pencil drawing, a moody lop-eared bear-brat with a fly (or a mosquito) hanging from its olive-nose. "Tiens! Tiens! I praised the masterpiece coolly. Perhaps [making a manly effort to sound casual] Biche should go to her bed now." How strange: saying those words drained me. As if I myself had carried the fairy princess across thrice nine kingdoms into the thrice-tenth realm, the enchanted one, from where she would never find the way back to me. The tart smell of some shrubbery she had waded through in two periods of Home Economics that morning and the faint effluvia from Shumba the dog that would daily rub off on her hung on to my nose. But the last light was gone, all of a sudden it was late; she was fidgeting in the trustful darkness by my heart side…

As I flinched under her approaching mouth--an undignified flutter it was, across the whole fatherly frame--I suddenly found my position was not actually armed with one firm resolve but together with other pedagogic heroes or at least their voices I was hiding behind splendid panoply of vanishing or irrelevant decisions. Why not immerse ourselves in this phenomenon, little mother? - ventured someone in my contemporary whisper. C’mon man, penetrate the mystery! proposed a heavy basso with aplomb, an ideal, bolder me. The hell with it, Homeric straightforwardness is what we need, declaimed another, wiser me, a year or so ahead of my narratorial I. Let’s break the spell and release the princess, what?--this was the smallest of all, the voice of my resolve. She’ll make glove to you, a perfect fit. Your first glove! said a winsome voice from my dreams, unidentified but recognisably Freudian. Then someone very young, or chronologically old, shouted fiercely: Show her a photo of the team! Of the faculty then! And everyone obligingly dissipated in Michel Besovsky’s rarefying will-space. It imploded anyway as my position crumbled under the first push of the Blanche Kiss.

 III

Look, honey, Kathy Cummings and the others at the children’s table are playing Monopoly.

Please let me stay! I don’t feel like playing with those children.

A new era with its own calendar had begun for me. Night Four, Five… I moved with the wind, dashing ahead of myself, a gigantic step further away from my own past (a past relevant yet unrequited, and twice removed), and hurtling toward some future source of malignant abundance of brightness.

It was Saturday of the same week, when just to say something to her, I broached the subject of Australia, known as the land Down Under, Blanche, and its jovial, hospitable people called Punters. On house-cleaning weekends Olya was home-bound, so I we went alone to Cummings’s garden party. In a green flounced dress that left her arms, knees and necklaced throat bare, Blanche sat with the young Cummings, Johan and Johanna van der Merwe (relation not known) and a few others on the veranda, and ate from a plate in her emerald lap, but would smile only at me, and played croquet with me, and strolled with me among the jail population of trees, otherwise known as the Cummings ancestral park. She would skip, as smaller children do, twice on her left foot to get back in step.

She spoke only to me. Things that you whisper on tiptoe with your hand around the mouth in the shadow of an elder not yet gone to seed. We were approaching a glade of sorts, or rather a prison courtyard where a convict palm and three immigrant conifers mixed uneasily, when we were accosted by the tall Amazon Thrush Dauter (Systems Analysis and C programming) wearing a bikini--in her case worthless as a guiding sign but with pinpoint precision as a cover.

Oh a gorgeous little thing! Gorgeous! Is she yours and why are you hiding her?

A woman’s self-inflicted near-nakedness, I could have retorted, was a suspect claim to male