But this was not the only unfavorable adventure possible. All kinds of things could go wrong in the back room . . .

As long as Clara was still at her toilet, I kept an ear out for the faintest of noises, an eye out for the slightest of movements. Eugen might give a cough, for instance, and, swallowing a bit of saliva, announce that he was off to the café for a pastry. A trifle like that, a single cough, could herald the monstrous calamity of a wasted afternoon. Indeed, the whole day would have gone to waste, and that night in bed, instead of turning over leisurely in my mind (and pausing over each detail to “see” and savor it as it deserved) the moment when my knees touched Clara’s stocking, instead of delving, molding, and caressing the thought, I would toss and turn feverishly in the bedclothes, unable to sleep and impatiently awaiting daybreak.

One day something totally out of the ordinary occurred. The adventure presaged disaster at first, but had a surprise ending, one so sudden and dependent on such a minor incident that the pleasure it subsequently gave me was like a construction made of incongruous objects that only a prestidigitator could hold together. In one fell swoop Clara radically altered the tenor of my visits, gave them a new meaning and new titillations. It was rather like the famous chemistry experiment in which a crystal dropped into a red liquid instantly transforms it to a bright green.

I was sitting on the sofa in the usual place, waiting with my usual impatience, when the door to the shop opened and in came a customer. Eugen immediately left the back room. All appeared to be lost. Clara proceeded with her impassive toilet while the conversation in the shop dragged on interminably. The question was whether Eugen would return before Clara had finished dressing. I found it painful to follow the two events, Clara’s toilet and Eugen’s conversation, realizing that they would run parallel to each other until Clara went out into the shop or they came together in the back room like trains in a film racing madly toward each other, about to crash or speed past depending on whether a mysterious hand intervenes to shunt one of them onto a siding at the last moment. Meanwhile, the conversation kept on its course and Clara kept powdering her face.

I tried to help fate by pushing my knees close to the table, but to reach it I would have had to perch at the very edge of the sofa—an awkward position or, at the very least, comic. I had the feeling that Clara was looking at me in the mirror and smiling.

Shortly thereafter she finished rounding her lips with lipstick and gave her cheeks a final dab of powder. The perfume floating through the room made me dizzy with desire and despair. It was when she walked past me that the thing I least expected took place: she rubbed against my knees as she did every other day (or perhaps even a bit more, though surely that was only my imagination) with an air of indifference implying there was nothing between us.

Vice involves a complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication. It suffuses the body instantaneously like an inner melody, completely transmogrifying mind, flesh, and blood. In the fraction of a second that Clara’s legs touched mine, vast new hopes, vast new expectations were born in me.

With Clara I understood it all from the first day, the first instant. She was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. It was an adventure full of torments and misery, fears and the gnashing of teeth, yet it could have come close to love had it not also been a long, painful bout with impatience. Clara was as calm and capricious as I was bold and impulsive. She had a violent way of provoking me and took a sordid joy in watching me suffer, a joy that always preceded the sexual act and was part of it.

The first time the thing I had so long awaited came to pass, the provocation was of a simplicity so elementary (brutal almost) that the words she used—especially the anonymous verb—retain much of the virulence they had then. All I need do is think back on them and my present indifference is eaten away as if by acid.

Eugen was away on errands. The two of us were alone and silent. Clara—in her afternoon dress, her legs crossed, her back to the shop window—was knitting away at something. Several weeks had passed since the back-room adventure, which had immediately created an icy atmosphere between us, and the ensuing tension found expression in utter indifference on her part. We would sit facing each other without exchanging a word for hours, yet hovering above the silence was a secret accord, a perfect understanding threatening to explode. All that was wanting was the mysterious word to break through the cloak of convention. At night I would make dozens of plans, and the next day they would come up against the most basic obstacles: she had to finish her knitting, the light was wrong, the shop too quiet, the set-up of the sewing machines too important to be disturbed, even for motives of sentiment. I kept my jaws clenched the whole time: the silence was terrible, a silence that for me had all the force and shape of a scream.

It was Clara who broke it.