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I could stripnaked in front of him, he wouldn’t even notice. That can’t be normal. I wonder what his game is. I go downstairs and put on a clean blouse. While I’m downstairs, I hear him go to the toilet, and flush twice. Ideally, I wouldn’t go back upstairs. We’re in closer touch when we’re apart, when we only hear each other.
    We drank a lot of wine with dinner, a whole bottle. When we kissed good-bye, he suddenly started whispering it’s not fair, and he stopped. Now I’m lying in my bed, and I can’t sleep. He’s directly above me, just a few yards away. I spread my legs and imagine him on top of me, doing it to me. He’s pinning my arms, the way he does when he kisses me. He’s grabbing my hair, pulling it, slapping my face. I throw my legs around him. He’s kissing me hungrily. We’re sweating. There’s silence, all I can hear is him breathing, his breath in my loosened hair. I stretch out my arms to him. Come, I whisper to him, come! Come! He’s so close, I can almost feel him.

A Foreign Body
    C HRISTOPH SWITCHED THE light off and the group fell silent. After a few seconds of darkness, there was disquiet, chairs creaked, someone cleared his throat, there were other sounds that were hard to trace. As the first whispers began, Christoph switched on the microphone, and the sudden element of amplification made the space appear still bigger and the darkness still more intense. If he’d been very concentrated and managed to focus his attention on the group, then surely it would be possible to get by without slides, and finally even without words, and just be in the dark and allow time to elapse for an hour or two.
    For hundreds of thousands of years no light, no smell,no life, no sounds but for the dripping of water, the plinking and flowing of water penetrating through cracks in the rock, collecting in trickles, widening cracks, forming courses, small streams by now, one or ten or hundred thousands of years later, a cavern or system of caverns. Christoph switched the projector on, and the Water Dome was there, a domed arch lit by several flashbeams, its upper reaches lost in the darkness. The first image was the most important, that had to captivate the audience straightaway. He had chosen it carefully, and let it stand for a long time, without saying a word. He felt it would be a good evening.
    After that first shot, there were others, less spectacular, the barred entrance to the cave, the first few hundred yards, paved paths and wire balustrades, the odd stalactite taken from somewhere on the inside and put out near the entrance for the trippers to see. The group relaxed and listened as Christoph talked about the discovery of the cave, the early expeditions into the interior, the technical difficulties of living under the earth’s surface. One of the slides showed a map of the passages that had been explored thus far, a tangled web of lines in different colors.
    Just over a hundred miles have been explored and charted, but we have to assume that’s just a fraction of the whole.
    The shot of a staircase going steeply down, and coming to a sudden unexpected stop in a pile of scree. The adventure is beginning, said Christoph, and showed pictures that needed no explaining. Difficult terrain, narrow couloirs, crevasses, meanders, faults. In some of the photos you could see cave explorers in dirty orange coveralls with carbide lamps on their foreheads crawling through narrow passageways or rappelling down seemingly bottomless gullies. Amazing the kind of places a man is able to slip through, Christoph commented.
    Then there was a shot of the bivouac, and for the first time there was the whole group sitting over fondue and wine at camp tables. You could almost forget you were in a cave, said Christoph, but if you need to answer the call of nature, then you remember. If the torch fails, if the light goes out, then you lose orientation in a matter of seconds. He showed pictures of the group in sleeping bags