Dragosani’s sexual problem – rather, the mental block which had until now checked his psychological development in this area – had been implanted in puberty, at a time when other boys went on to steal their first kisses and explore their first soft bodies with hot, groping, inexperienced fingers. It had happened during his third year in Bucharest while he was boarding at the college there.
He had been thirteen and looking forward to the summer break. Then his step-father’s letter had arrived telling him not to come home. There was disease on the farm; the animals were being slaughtered; visitors were forbidden and even Boris would not be allowed on to the estate. The fever was virulent; people could easily spread it about on their feet, their shoes; the entire area for twenty miles around was under quarantine.
A disaster, apparently – but it need not prove to be one for Boris. He had an ‘aunt’ in Bucharest, his stepfather’s younger sister, and could stay at her house for the break. It was better than nothing; at least he would have somewhere to go and not be stuck in an outbuilding of the old college, cooking his own food on a tiny stove.
His Aunt Hildegard was a young widow with two daughters only a year or so older than Boris himself, Anna and Katrina, and they lived in a large, rambling wooden house on the Budesti road. Oddly, they had never been much mentioned at home and Boris had only ever met them on their very infrequent visits to the Romanian countryside. He had always found his aunt very affectionate, perhaps too much so – and his cousins a little sickly and giggly in the way of young girls, except that there were also undercurrents of a sly sensuality beyond their years – but hardly darkly suspicious or especially odd. Yet he gained the impression from his step-father’s attitude towards them that his aunt was something of a black sheep, or at least a lady with a terrible secret.
In the three weeks he lived with her and her precocious daughters, when the college closed down for the summer break, Boris had discovered all he believed he needed to know of her ‘oddness’, of sex and the perverse ways of females, and his experiences had turned him off for all the years in between – until now. For the simple fact of the matter had been that his aunt was a nymphomaniac. Recently set free by the death of her husband, she had allowed her sexual obsession to get out of hand; and her daughters, apparently, were cut of pretty much the same cloth. Even when her ailing husband had been alive she had been notorious for her lovers. Word of her affairs had often got back to her brother in the country, so bringing about his aloofness, his disapproval. He was no prude himself, but he considered her little more than a whore.
Just how far she had carried her excesses was beyond her brother’s power to know, especially now that he had broken off almost all contact with her. If he had known, then he would have made other arrangements for the youth; but his adopted son was, after all, barely a boy; he would surely stand exempt from the woman’s vices.
Boris had known none of this but was to find out about it soon enough.
To begin with, there had been no locks on any of the interior doors in his aunt’s house. Neither the bedrooms nor the bathroom had locks, not even the toilets. Aunt Hildegard had explained that there were no secret places here – nowhere for the performance of secret deeds -and that secret things in general were not tolerated. Which made it hard for Boris to understand the secretive or mischievously furtive looks which often passed between mother and daughters when he was present.
As for privacy: there was likewise absolutely no need for privacy in a place where nothing was forbidden, nothing frowned upon. Enquiring as to his aunt’s philosophy, Boris had been told that this was ‘a house of Nature’, where the human body and its functions were things of Nature given us to ‘explore, discover, understand and enjoy to their full, without conventional restrictions’. Provided that he respect the house and property of his hostess, there was nothing he could not do here and welcome; but he must similarly respect the ‘natural’ behaviour of the resident females of the house, whose ways he would find entirely open and unrestricted. As for philosophy as such: there was too little love in the world and too much hatred; if the lusts of the body and fires of the spirit could be quenched, sated in the pleasurable violence of embraces instead of war, then surely it would be a better place. Perhaps Boris would not understand immediately, but his aunt was sure that he would in a little while . . .